Some have brattiness thrust upon them

I won! I won! (Just about). Thank you to all who voted to grant me the privilege of touching myself again*, now that I am free** and ungrounded. I am very grateful. Rest assured that I will be a good girl and frig myself silly (as soon as the opportunity presents itself) in dutiful compliance with your wishes. To be explicit, I am going to lock myself in the bathroom, sit on my sparklingly clean toilet, hike my skirt up to my waist, spread my legs and slip my hand into my still-up panties. And I will feel very naughty indeed.

Bratty expressions of triumph and relief aside, I’m sure you will all be glad to hear that I really have learned my lesson. Honestly, cross my heart. Being grounded for a week isn’t something that happens to me very often, and it was a genuinely humbling experience, even before I suffered the embarrassment of having my blog taken over and my naughtiness publicly exposed. It was, to use one of my favourite words, interesting: certainly intense; I would go so far as to say profound. It was a similar feeling to one I had when I was set homework tasks as punishment earlier in the year, a sort of mini-grounding I described as “a journey into an immersive state or an alternate reality.” Similar, yet more powerful, more immersive, as it was for an entire week with no let up. Day in, day out, there was no escape from the grounding routine; from Sir Daniel’s watchful eye and scolding words; from the thoughts and feelings that came from being kept under strict control.

So many emotions. Arousal, humiliation, shame, excitement, regret, pleasure, desire... all swirling around and competing for my attention. So much interplay between right and wrong... arousal at my own abjectness, and shame at my arousal. (I honestly did get my innocently white ‘school’ knickers soggy every day). And the ageplay-infused loss of status, of autonomy, and all the deeply affecting yummy/painful feelings that came with that... I felt sorry to the bottom of my stomach for being a naughty little girl; sorry for breaking a promise. And I felt at once wretched and glad that I was being punished for it. It was intense.

And, at the risk of sounding pretentious, I have to say that the grounding pushed my intellectual buttons as well as my emotional and sexual ones. It certainly resonated with one of my principal writerly concerns, namely the blurring of the boundaries between ‘fiction’ and ‘real life’ (a threshold I frequently tiptoe along with this blog). I think that playing with these things makes for an interesting reading experience and an interesting philosophical exercise (what is real? How do we construct reality around ourselves and in our own minds? What assumptions do we make about the things we call reality and fiction, and the demarcations between them?) And, speaking personally, it is always strange and exciting when things spill out of the realm of ‘make believe’ and into my own life. The Penny in Sir Daniel’s story – a fictionalised version of me – was punished in her own textual world. The Penny sitting here, typing this now, was punished in the physical world beyond that story because she was tardy in showcasing the story on her blog. Disciplined whether she wanted to be or not; treated, in fact, exactly as a misbehaving teenager in a spanking story would be. And, as I’m sure many of you know, it is very real and ‘centring’ (and, somehow, simultaneously thrilling and dull) when you are standing in the corner, bare-bottomed, listening to the slow ticking of the clock and holding your soggy panties to the wall with your nose.

I could write more, but suffice to say I enjoyed being grounded very much. And I hated it at the same time. And I’m sure you know just what I mean by that.

*And yah boo rasp to all those meanies who voted the other way. Ner! :P

Funny that the poll results only add up to 99%, though... I wonder where the other 1% went? Maybe Ana hid it. I wouldn’t put it past her. Or maybe it’s just more of that Google expertise.

**Free! Free! Next year I’ll be four. Haha.