Thoughtcrimes

Sex is the ultimate revolutionary act

Once upon a time, a studious schoolboy with a busy mind read a book about Love, and Power, and Truth.

Our minds evolved long before literature. Stories are a mighty magic, capable of hijacking the cognitive machinery through which we understand the world. Hence the uncanny feeling that every novel is a true account of real people, experiencing events that actually happened.

We sat side by side on the scruffy sofa that occupied much of the remaining floor of my cramped student bedsit. In our hands, we each held a tatty copy of the same hallowed book.

For this special occasion we’d dressed almost identically in matching drab boiler suits. Cheap cotton outfits I’d bought online, discounted for a pair. They were intended for decorators, throwaway garments to keep off the paint and the grime, but to us they were more erotic than the laciest lingerie.

The only difference between our proletarian uniforms was she wore a bright scarlet sash around her waist. She resembled a gift haphazardly wrapped, even though the girdling fabric was really a symbolic chastity belt. She had gathered her hair into a short ponytail that was intentionally functional rather than styled to be pretty. Her utilitarian outfit concealed her femininity, but I still found her androgynous tomboy look achingly alluring.

“Chapter 3, page one-nineteen?” I asked.

It was agreed with a silent mutual nod. We read this section regularly. It was our favourite part of this particular love story. We had highlighted the passages we would speak, in places alternating rapidly between sentences, the narrative pinging between us like returns in a tennis rally.

“Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls…” I began, as if introducing a new speaker to the stage.

A short swish from a lurid yellow highlighter pen marked my cue on the page. The line beneath was unembellished in my copy, but highlighted in her favourite fluorescent green in hers.

“Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” she interjected, uttering her complaint with just the right level of petty exasperation.

I loved hearing her say that, imagining her lying in her bunk, annoyed by the ambient tittering whilst longing to sniff the masculine musk of muscular men. But I couldn’t daydream, my cue followed immediately, which I hit without missing a beat: “... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.”

When I first read this paragraph, computers were slow and dumb, and the thought of machines writing books seemed fanciful nonsense. Now it seemed eerily prescient. Dystopia truly would be dawning when human beings began to relinquish the creation of art.

It was her turn to continue: “She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was ‘not clever’, but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery.”

“She could describe the whole process of composing a novel,” I continued, “from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she wasn’t interested in the finished product.”

“I don’t much care for reading,” she chipped in, with a sigh.

“Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces,” I added.

She began her own biography: “She had no memories of anything before the early Sixties, and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight.”

And I continued it: “At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League.”

Then back to her: “She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it.”

“There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls’ School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.”

This was not just highlighted in my book, but carefully underlined too. It was a landmark passage. I’d first picked up this book as an impressionable schoolboy, expecting a cautionary tale of totalitarian fascism, only in that sentence to discover the existence of spanking pornography instead. Everything I thought I knew about literature changed in the space of a paragraph. It was the most mind-blowing book I had ever encountered.

I’d often lie awake, imagining what lurid tales might exist within those publications. In my mind, Spanking Stories published cautionary parables of mischief and punishment. Naughty girls and boys thinking they were oh so clever, as they embarked on their silly conspiratorial schemes. They’d always be caught, of course, and the third act of the story would be their well-deserved bottom smacking, and the chastely described aftermath as they sat on their soreness writing earnest confessions. There would be no mention of the arousing sensations the spankings produced, readers would imagine that themselves.

My young naive mind would wonder why the Party permitted titillating stories about spanking in particular. It wasn’t until I was more experienced that I realised those in charge were likely inherently sadomasochistic, and such a rigidly controlled society would be bound to eroticise naughtiness.

Besides, a publication about fucking sounded much too bourgeois. Accounts of making love were the kind of erotica intellectualist pseuds would read. Spanking Stories would be full of tales of strict rules, transgression, and punishment. What better way to glorify submission than make it the sole sexual outlet of the masses? Carefully crafted disciplinary stories would train the libido of the proles to yearn for the sting of the cane.

I came to see One Night in a Girls’ School as an allegory. The school represented the novel’s repressive society in microcosm. Everything was a metaphor: the fences and the gates, the inescapable location, the regimented timetable, and the reams of rules and regulations that existed for “your own good”. I pictured the young women as dissidents, vivacious free spirits the Party was determined to tame, alongside those banished for refusing the salacious advances of the Party elite.

The published stories would place these rebels in a pressure vessel of arbitrary restrictions, subject to strict inspections of not just their uniforms but intimate abstinence too. Rote learning was taught here, not original thought. All spankings took place in public, with bottoms bared in front of watching classmates. Discipline was enforced by the wooden ruler, the leather strap, and the rattan cane. By the time lights were snuffed out every evening, every girl would be in bed with marks on her bottom, or thinking about them.

As the title suggested, night time was when the naughtiest misdemeanours occurred. Masturbation was of course forbidden, as was fornication with fellow pupils. So a common narrative was for the protagonists to try to sneak out of view, desperate for just enough privacy to explore their own bodies, or those of one another.

Though with watching eyes everywhere, the fate of subversives was quite inevitable. The next day, those caught would find themselves in front of the whole school, bent over the spanking bench, skirts up, and panties down. The story would make the reader a vicarious witness, watching as each naughty girl was caned until her eyes were damp. The coda would describe the aftermath, with the well-spanked miscreants squirming upon hard unforgiving seats, writing essays of contrition as their monitors watched.

Readers would be aroused by the strict hand of justice, willingly masturbating to the unmistakable moral: we’ll always catch you in the end. Night after night, I’d imagine the contents of these pulp fictions in exquisite detail, wondering if Julia and Winston played spanking games in their own secret assignations. In my mind, they always did.

“What are these books like?” I enquired on behalf of Winston.

“Oh, ghastly rubbish,” she replied. “They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I’m not literary, dear - not even enough for that.”

I carried on: “He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the head of the department, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.”

“They don’t even like having married women there,” she added. “Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here’s one who isn’t, anyway…”

This was where we liked to stop, to let her admission hang in the air. To me, her words were one of the most romantic passages in the English language. Sometimes she’d deliver her final line with a coy smile. On other occasions, she’d let the sentence slither from her tongue, slathered with barely disguised lust.

I closed my dog-eared book and just stared in admiration. Even though her femininity was shrouded by her formless overalls, her eye-catching scarlet sash burned around her waist like a ring of fire.

.

---

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At its heart, 1984 was a novel about control, not just what one could think, but also what one was permitted to feel.

Schoolboy me was in awe of Julia when I first encountered her on the page. She had a sexual awareness I could only dream of, and the insight to see through the Party’s agenda of puritanism. She appreciated how sex was more than a transitory pleasure, and was even a threat to the powerful, as our love of our lovers would always shine brighter than the fake adoration the narcissistic Party depended on.

Sex offered an escape route for enslaved minds. Sex was a fire that could burn out of control, an instinct biologically hard-wired into every citizen. That’s why it had to be ruthlessly regulated wherever it expressed itself. Those in charge exploited this, they knew sexual privation induced a kind of hysteria, and that could be usefully transformed into war fever and leader worship.

As Julia had explained in the novel, making love consumes our confrontational energy. It anaesthetises us with bliss, and saps our ability to hate. The Party’s devious trick was to transmute the bottled-up sexual frustration of the masses into rancour. The performative rage was simply sex gone sour.

Winston was oblivious to the connection between chastity and political orthodoxy until Julia had explained it. I don’t think he’d ever thought of sex as something volatile, more dangerous to the Party than any explosive. Deep down, I think he just wanted to be loved.

In the novel, he saw Julia long before they first spoke to each other, and so it was with us. She’d enter the corner of my vision, and without even being consciously aware of her, I’d turn to look. There’s that girl again, the cute tomboy. I didn’t even know her name. But we shared a literature class, where she always sat behind me in the lecture theatre, amongst her own cadre of friends.

What Do We Want?

Our tutor had already written up the subject of today’s class. Now he addressed us, asking us to spend a moment thinking of a sentence from a favourite book that defined what people really wanted. We were permitted to search online if we needed the exact words. After a minute of murmuring, he picked a row, which happened to be the one I was sitting in. My fellow classmates began calling out their selections as he scribbled them onto the board.

“He was a man who wanted to buy the world, and found, when he had bought it, that it was a very small world indeed. Oscar Wilde. Dorian Gray.”

“What do we want? To be known, to be known as we are, and to be accepted anyway. Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness.”

“I want to be where you are, and to see what you see, and to share the very air that you breathe. E.M. Forster. A Room with a View.”

“What people want is a good story, and they don’t care much who they buy it from. Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn.”

“What people want is a little attention, and they’ll do almost anything to get it. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.”

I nodded to that one, my kind of book. Though there was an even more chilling quotation, where one of the regime justifies the sacrifice of personal liberty - “the freedom to” - as a small price to pay for the safety that only “the freedom from” could bring.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Austen. Pride and Prejudice”.

“The deep cravings of the human heart are not for wealth or power, but for freedom and peace. Tolstoy. War and Peace.”

And then it was my turn. I’d been unnerved by the guy ahead of me quoting Tolstoy, as I didn’t want to seem like I’d copied him by choosing another Russian giant. But it would’ve been even worse to have stuttered and appeared lost for words in front of my new classmates. First impressions can leave permanent stains. I blurted out my contribution with as much confidence as I could project.

“In the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say: ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us’. Dostoyevsky. The Grand Inquisitor.”

My selection won a murmur of appreciation, audible enough to make my spine tingle. But no trophies were awarded, and after several more contributions our tutor led the analysis. He began with the quote from Wilde, for whom the ultimate tragedy of human want wasn’t failing to achieve our romantic or material desires. The true disaster was succeeding, because then the race was run. Possessing the prize turned out to be nowhere near as exciting as the heady chase. It developed into a fascinating lesson.

Afterwards, as we filed out of the lecture theatre, she happened to be standing behind me in the queue for the exit. She was on the step above me so our eyes, now at the same level, literally met. She was pretty, athletic, and pragmatically dressed. Just how Winston had described Julia in their first encounter.

“Great choice of quotation,” she complimented.

I almost responded by saying “thank you”, but that would’ve been much too uppity. I hadn’t come up with those words, I was merely repeating what I’d read. Equally well, I couldn’t just remain silent, she might never say another word to me if I blanked her.

“Slavery is Freedom,” I replied with a smile.

It was a line from O’Brien’s “Priests of Power” monologue in 1984 - though its mirrored formulation was more familiar as the Party slogan. You can learn a lot about someone when they try to correct you within moments of first meeting. She had no desire to be pedantic. To her, being correct wasn’t anywhere near as important as being interesting.

“Controversial,” she smiled. “Are you going to the refectory?”

I was now.

---

That was how our group came to be lounging in one of the conversation pits, sipping tea and nibbling muffins. We talked about politics and personal liberty with the kind of naivety one has as a student, when you think you’re smart enough to know everything, but lack the life experience to know where you’re wrong.

We were not giving each other our full attention, just hanging out as classmates, and her accompanying friends had recently departed to attend other classes. Now it was just the two of us. She was scrolling on her phone when she looked up abruptly and asked: “Do you think Big Brother really is watching us?”

I took a moment to ponder her question. Was she asking if there was actually some malign authority watching us through our phones?

I looked down at my own phone, noticing the faint glint of the camera lens, just beneath the screen. It was like a candle beside the sun. The screen was the true mechanism of surveillance that really policed our lives.

I glanced at the feed I happened to be idly scrolling through. What was I doing right now, if not watching others? I was complicit in a global techno-social panopticon, rating others, determining their status, popularity, and reputation - whilst individuals from all around the world were doing exactly the same to me.

So I gave her my answer: yes, global surveillance did exist, but its genius was that it was peer-to-peer, with everyone watching each other.

We’d all installed Big Brother enthusiastically, and carried him everywhere we went. We told him all our secrets. He controlled what we wore, and who we associated with. Yet he had no police force, and no need to covertly spy on us, as we voluntarily submitted our opinions and lifestyle for his algorithmic approval every hour of every day. We acted to maximise our reputation and grow our popularity, creating an acceptable public avatar of ourselves that wasn’t even real.

My explanation resonated with her, and triggered a fascinating conversation. We discussed the moral of 1984, debating if it was both a disturbing premonition of a repressive police state, and also a parable about growing up in a liberal society where conformity was sacrosanct.

We found ourselves agreeing that a society doesn’t just wake up one day and think: tell you what, we should establish the Thought Police. No, systems of control started insidiously, by large groups insisting their view was the right view, and making it increasingly difficult to believe anything contradictory. Once an acceptable way of thinking became established, people muted themselves.

There were already plenty of wrong-thinks that could incur the rage of the crowd. The other tribe’s politics, racism, sexism, genderism, climate denialism. Censorship was always embraced most fervently by those who believed they had righteousness on their side. The Thought Police came later, as a final display of zealotry. Privacy itself might seem suspicious. If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear, Citizen.

She had raised a fascinating point. Do we want others to be able to think bad thoughts, or say hurtful words? We must think carefully about our answer, because once we decide to disallow an idea, we will have to police it.

I admired her argument that the price of policing acceptability was a bland, fearful dystopia. That was the secret of oppression: just train people to be afraid of how they’d be perceived. It wasn’t a fear of being seen, on the contrary, people were desperate for attention, it was a fear of disapproval - one of our greatest human aversions. Who knows what deviation might make you suddenly notorious, and afterwards you’d feel you could never show your face again.

Wasn’t that the lesson of The Conformity Experiment? That it was easier to acquiesce than speak out, that saying what was awkward and embarrassing could be a revolutionary act. Our fear of opprobrium is what really polices us. We are desperate to be looked at, but terrified of being seen.

“So yes,” I concluded, “Big Brother is indeed watching us, in a manner of speaking. But his power is weak. We can fight back…”

“How?”

“By daring to be a little different. Do you like picnics?”

She did.

---

Our first date took place on the subsequent Saturday. We met on the campus, and then walked beside the river for a while until we found a secluded spot in the rose garden of a local park. The sun was shining between the fluffy clouds so typical of an early British summer. The chonky clumps resembled the filling of a gigantic orbiting pillow that had been haphazardly scattered high above us.

We’d each brought some food and drink, and I’d brought a blanket and some cushions to allow us to lazily bask in the sunshine. We began talking about the books we’d been made to study at school, then as we relaxed, the boldness of our discussions increased. Soon the topic of conversation had escalated, and she was asking me about the most erotic scene I’d ever read.

“There is one section in 1984 that blew me away the first time I read it.”

“Is Slavery Freedom?” she wondered aloud.

“Would you like to find out? May I demonstrate with my belt?”

She looked surprised, yet was clearly intrigued. When she nodded her assent, I ran my belt out of the loops of my jeans.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to spank you with it,” I clarified.

“Shame,” she deadpanned.

In truth, I’d have loved to have spanked her, right there and then. I wanted nothing more than to tell her to get on all fours, so her skirt rode up and I could lash her on her pretty panties. But we were in the middle of a park, it was nowhere near private enough. So I merely shuffled across to where she was sitting and discreetly looped my leather belt around her ankles, then fastened it tight.

“Why did you tie me up?” she enquired. “I wasn’t going to run away.”

“I think a loss of liberty turns you on. And I want to put that theory to the test.”

She accepted my explanation with a smirk. So I continued with my preparations, bringing up the text of 1984 on my phone, then pressing the bookmark to scoot to page 119. Then I handed my device over and asked her to start reading it aloud.

She was hesitant at first, perhaps even anxious I wanted her to read some dark passage of psychological torment, but she indulged my unusual request. A few paragraphs in, as the theme of what she was reading became apparent, she got into the swing of things, and began to deliver a brilliant voice acting performance.

“Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here’s one who isn’t, anyway…” she said at last, uttering the last phrase with shattering seductiveness.

“That was outstanding,” I commended, plucking my phone from her fingers and stowing it back in my pocket.

I left my belt around her ankles, but didn’t ask her directly whether a loss of liberty had turned her on. Some questions are too profound, too intimate, and can only be answered with actions and not through words. I planned to ask her another way.

The way she kissed me with her legs bound was all the proof I needed.

---

The following Saturday was just as clement. This time, as we resumed our conversation on restrictions and liberties, a subject she seemingly couldn’t wait to talk about, she was the one who asked: “Aren’t you going to tie me up with your belt?”. So I did.

We began discussing the cultural power of sexual shame. She made the point that throughout the centuries puritans had always found ways to stigmatise pleasure. Fun is an expression of the human spirit, difficult to control, potentially incendiary - and demagogues find all those possibilities threatening.

I agreed completely. It was alarmingly easy to devalue fun and dismiss it as frivolous. Many sneered at sports and games for being trivial and non-productive. But this same belittling could also be used to enforce sexual morality, by labelling anything erotic as self-indulgent and weird. That was how the thrilling fantasies of some came to be admonished as thoughtcrimes by others.

She argued shame exists to keep society stable, like a gravitational force that stops its individuals flying off in all directions. It was Social Darwinism: stable societies had a selection advantage, they grow faster, last longer, and each successive generation is brought up to adopt the prevailing social norms. Sexuality had always been tightly controlled, even demonised and reviled, because few aspects of human nature had such power to radicalise quiet minds, and inspire such unquenchable, dangerous passions.

It was no wonder that Orwell’s book on despotism was a romantic tragedy too. Sex is a chaotic, destabilising force, but closely choreographed societies require order to function. That’s why there are rules on public decency and nakedness, and why laws exist to regulate sexual behaviour and relationships.

She concluded her argument by asserting this was why no one really talks openly about sex, even though we intuitively know it’s quite natural, and everyone does it. Her contention provided me with the ideal opportunity for my own intimate line of questioning.

“Then let us talk openly. Have you touched yourself thinking about me since our last picnic?”

She looked at me coyly, realising the trap I’d sprung. My hunch was she’d enjoy resisting, that any protestations would be performative, and she’d love being forced to ultimately confess.

“My belt is staying around your ankles until I’m satisfied with your answer.”

That was how our first interrogation game began. By the time we left the park, she had surreptitiously slipped her sticky panties down beneath her sundress, and I had stowed them in my pocket. Later, behind closed doors, she finally got her bottom smacked.

.

---

.

1984 became our own shared escapist fantasy world. We identified with Winston and Julia, sneaking off to explore each other in secret. Our commitment to the conspiracy was total. We’d sit apart in lectures, and none of our friends knew we were an item. We’d behave differently in their company, with the briefest of glances and no displays of affection. We could have arranged our covert meetings by text, but it was much hotter to do it by passing notes, just as Julia had done in the book.

I still remember the explosion of joy I felt when I unfurled a scrap of paper that she’d deliberately folded into a square, and saw that she’d scribbled: I LOVE YOU.

We would meet in my tiny bedsit in the afternoons when neighbouring residents were out at work. Or I’d sneak into her place when she was sure her flatmates would be away. Our assignations felt authentically Orwellian. We kept our voices down as we talked, and were careful never to be too noisy. Something different unfolded on every occasion, as if we inhabited a subtly different Oceania reality during each encounter.

Sometimes we’d play colleagues in the Fiction Department, where our job was to come up with lurid new tales for Pornosec publications. We took it in turns, so one would dictate the story, and the other would write it down. It didn’t take us long to invent far more than six plots. My Julia was an expert storyteller, she would have flourished as a curator of One Night in a Girls’ School.

On occasions, we’d go back to read what we’d transcribed months ago. Sometimes we narrated the story sitting on opposite sides of a table, as if in a committee meeting, officially reviewing the text for the proper level of smuttiness. Or I’d do the reading as she was sprawled naked over the table, her bare back the lectern, the pages placed between her shoulders. I’d push in for a little extra emphasis during the most arousing parts, and pull out to spank her when punishments were described.

When it was her to read, she’d ask me to stand in front of her, and unbutton me so I dangled freely. Then she’d begin narrating, as if my cock was her microphone. Her filthy words sounded so alluring in the posh plummy accent she affected. It didn’t take long until her mic was standing to attention, and I could feel the puff of her every breath on my tip.

I kept the pages of every story she told me. Evidence for the Thought Police, for the next time we played that little game. For instance, this was how her imagination worked:

.

.

“Punishment Poses”

Every school has its own disciplinary innovations. In this one, any girls caught masturbating would be put on display in the entrance hall, in the position in which they were discovered. It didn’t matter if a girl had been found sitting, on her back, or on her front - all were posed standing up. Arm-like retort brackets, of the kind one might find in the chemistry lab, had been screwed into the hall’s brick pillars. Steel clamps extended from the fixings like grimy grasping fingers, awaiting the arrival of the naughty.

Any girl caught playing with herself was remanded into the custody of the Head Girl and her team of senior prefects. She was immediately escorted to the hall, still wet and unwiped, so her vulva was still swollen and sticky, and posed just as she’d been found.

The immediacy of punishment meant fiddlers would be dressed in whatever they were wearing at the moment they were discovered. To see a girl in her uniform suggested one who’d sneaked off to a secret nook, but hadn’t been careful enough to ensure she hadn’t been followed. Those in nighties would be ones caught playing under their bedcovers, or wiping a little too vigorously during their bathroom ablutions.

Those standing bashfully naked were almost always those who’d been caught playing in the shower. There was no doubt playing under the warm sprinkling cascade was intensely pleasurable, but with such delight came the risk of the ultimate humiliation.

The prefects were extremely adept at maximising the embarrassment of those in their care. For a girl who was still dressed, the hem of her skirt or nightie would be plucked and raised by a metal clip, high enough to expose her, front and back. If she was wearing panties, they would always be pulled down to her feet.

The process of posing involved loosening the screws of the joints that articulated the grasping limbs. The clamps around the calves were set first. Once the grasp of the metal fingers had been closed to surround the girl’s legs, the prefects tightened the screws that froze the hinges. Now rigid, the captive would no longer be able to move her feet. Her hands would be next, one wrist clamped next to her thigh, a thin rod holding her extended finger against her lips for all to see - but not quite close enough to actually touch. Her other hand might be posed cupping a breast, or suppressing her moans as it covered her mouth.

Once posed and immobile, the girl would be left to wait for the Headmistress to pass through the hall carrying her cane. That was when all bare bottoms were smacked. A girl might spend several hours frozen in position, awaiting her whacking like a living statue. One who, distracted by her approaching climax, had been surprised by a Gorgon, and been petrified by its stare.

Of course, her classmates would also be flowing through the hallway too, as they shuffled between classes. They’d demonstratively shake their heads in disapproval, though all knew this was simply a preview of what would happen to them the next time their luck ran out, when they felt the dreaded grip on their shoulder.

School rules were absolutely clear: the penalty for wanking was always the cane. Those who’d got stripes on their bottom would be powerless to prevent their curious classmates from inspecting the marks as they passed. Seeing a smacked bottom was never a deterrent. If anything, the very sight simply served to make tummies flutter and naughty places tingle. A sore pink bum merely made those who saw it even more determined to not get caught themselves.

It was funny how many would hurry from the hall with a damp wet heat between their legs, already scheming how that ache might be discreetly and safely relieved. Never noticing the prefect slyly tailing any whose pace had quickened. But that was why rulebreakers were always punished so publicly. The intention behind such explicit humiliations was never to deter misbehaviour. It was to encourage it.

.

.

I remember when she told me that story. I was blown away by how hot and inventive it was. Still in character, she’d chided my prudishness: “You think only boys have filthy minds?”

---

Her other favourite game was “Interrogations”, where we’d role-play what might happen should the Thought Police finally catch up with us.

One of us would play the Ministry of Love apparatchik, the other their prisoner, with wrists bound to the arm-rests, and ankles to the chair’s legs. The rules of our game were that each interrogation lasted exactly 30 minutes. If the captive could resist until the end without coming, they were released and could claim their reward. But if they spilled their secrets on the interrogation chair, they would go home unfucked, but with a sore bottom instead.

When it was my turn to interrogate her, I’d begin by asking a simple question.

“Do you masturbate?”

“Of course not.”

“An unsatisfactory answer, Comrade.”

With every denial, I’d undo one of her buttons, starting at her collar. This added jeopardy to her predicament, knowing she only had a finite number of denials before there was nothing between my hand and her hot defenceless cunt.

“How do you masturbate? Do you put your fingers inside? How many?”

I’d reward her compliance by caressing her nipples with my fingertips. A skilled interrogator knows a girl has three clits, one between her legs, and two jutting out from her chest.

“Do you fantasise about stiff men or soft women?”

She’d try to feign innocence, disavowing any sexual experiences, pretending to be a chaste virgin who’d found herself captive through some terrible bureaucratic mistake. But her repeated unconvincing denials simply cost her all her remaining buttons.

When I had peeled her overalls open to her crotch, my finger could begin to probe her wetness, which was more reliable than any lie detector.

“Do you have a lover? What’s his name? Does he put it here? Or in here?”

The only prop I used was a pillowcase, which when placed over her head increased her feeling of helplessness. No longer able to see me, only acutely aware of my fingertips probing her holes. But I was always careful to avoid her clitoris - that would have been akin to a forced confession. If she was going to come, I wanted it to be through a momentary loss of control, her wet hole suddenly clenching my finger as her mind was overwhelmed with lust.

---

When it was her turn to interrogate me, she would bind me to the chair in just the same manner. Her questioning was equally ruthless.

“Do you prefer cunts or bums, Comrade?”

I would be condemned by my first answer, as either a lothario, a sodomite, or a liar.

“Cunts,” I offered, realising after it left my lips that I’d used the plural form, and practically confessed to promiscuity.

“How many cunts have you defiled?”

Again, every answer would condemn me as either a creepy voyeuristic virgin, a liar, or a womaniser. Even my own body would betray me. I’d feel myself rising, already behaving like a sordid sex criminal, or a compulsive customer of whores.

“There’s a bulge in your overalls, Comrade,” she grasped at my crotch. “What secret are you hiding?”

I felt her hands rise to my throat, plucking open my collar button.

“We found quite the stash of spanking material when we searched your home. Do you find the thought of naughty girls getting spanked exciting?”

Was there any legitimate justification for that interest? Everything sexual sounds so weird in the cold light of day, and every further denial would cost me another button.

“Do you masturbate imagining poor girls getting their bottoms smacked?”

Once her remorseless questioning had unbuttoned me to my crotch, she’d change her tactics. Instead of looming over me, she’d sit down beside me and reach across, gripping my erection as she asked her next leading question. She’d give me a few moments to allow her lurid words to ricochet around my imagination before delivering several rough tugs on my shaft. This was weaponised masturbation, not a sensual handjob.

“Is that your dream job? To be the official spanker at the Girls’ School?”

Yes, I’d confess, I did imagine being solely responsible for dispensing punishments to every naughty girl sent with a note to the spanking room. Skirts up, panties all the way down, no exceptions. I’d perform my professional duty meticulously, and gain a reputation for being unwaveringly strict.

“When they bend over, would you make them put their fingers between their legs and rub their swollen lips before you spanked them?”

That would depend on their offence, I’d explain, which would also determine whether they were put over my knee for a bare bottom slippering, or over the caning horse for a good hard whacking. The naughtiest offenders would certainly deserve to be forced to masturbate and climax in front of me, so their bums were super-sensitised before I smacked them pink.

By now I had nothing to hide, I’d answer every question with as much salacious detail as I could muster. I’d tell her how every naughty girl who visited would leave my office with teary eyes, clutching her poor burning bum. I wouldn’t be doing my job right unless she replayed the experience as she laid on her front in bed afterwards, reaching behind to thoroughly rub where it was still tingly and tender.

It was thrilling to stop denying and let my fantasies spill out uncensored. I could tell my candour excited her too.

Sometimes, just to be a minx, she’d spend the last few minutes of the interrogation kneeling between my knees, teasing my cock with her mouth to induce the spurting that would confirm my deviancy. Of course, if she succeeded, it would cost her a fucking too, but she had a competitive streak. That was what made her so much fun to play with.

She’d run her hand up the inside of my thigh, grasping my bits in the palm of her hand.

“Who do these belong to, comrade?”

“I’m all yours.”

It wasn’t the doctrinally approved answer, as dictated by Party orthodoxy, but it was the truth. She’d clench the shaft of my stiff rebelliousness.

“And what do you intend to do with this?”

I began my answer in a sotto voce, forcing her to lean forward, so I could whisper my filthy insubordinate thoughtcrimes right into her ear. Words so filthy someone might end up getting spanked just for thinking them. They never failed to make her drip.

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My Julia had another interpretation of 1984 that frightened me more than any secret police. That the novel was written by a dying man who understood with terminal clarity the transience of existence. Something would always catch up with us in the end, and pop our perfect bubbles of bliss, and it was more likely to be the march of time than the beat of jackboots. Our life’s purpose was not merely to keep our heads down and stay out of trouble. It was to live in a way that maximised our humanity, and find happiness in the time that fate had granted us.

A thoughtcrime was daring to think differently. It was an act of rebellion against righteousness. A contrarian protest against the drift towards everything becoming the same. Utopia wouldn’t be a paradise of consensus, its founding principles would be dignity and a tolerance of discord. Harmony required disparate notes.

In my mind’s eye, I can still see her in her Anti-Sex League uniform, her blood-red sash hugging her tight around her waspish waist. She looked so beautiful silhouetted against the incoming sunbeams, her figure resembling a gift-wrapped hourglass.

Neither of us ever wore anything beneath our overalls. She liked how I bulged when unrestricted, and how her nipples scuffed against the coarse cotton as she moved.

It was even hotter that the sash wrapped around her waist was a de facto chastity belt. She couldn’t be fucked until she pulled down her drab overalls, and that couldn’t be done until her sash was untied. That was another of the ways she loved to tease me, ungirdling her sash slowly. It was more exciting than any striptease.

Once untied, she’d drape her sash around my neck, as if offering me a choice of how to use it. I might wrap it around her eyes or her mouth, or bind her hands behind her. Sometimes, for old times’ sake, I’d tie it around her ankles.

When we embraced, the heat of her body seemed to radiate right through me. I felt pulled into her, by the magnetic allure of feminine sensuality, which would always exist, and could never be outlawed. The tighter we hugged, the more we were ready to defy the Party with our bodies.

I’d cradle her throat to keep her chin raised, feeling her elevated pulse thrum in my fingertips. My other hand would locate the collar button of her boiler suit, and begin flicking them open, until I’d exposed the low mounds of her dainty breasts. It was as if my fingers were the claws of a remorseless undressing machine, or a laser beam slowly peeling her clothing open.

Now I could glimpse her flat tummy. One button later, and I’d revealed the neatly trimmed fringe of her bush, which I teased and tickled with my fingertips. After opening the final button, I guided her arms out of her overalls, then helped them off her shoulders, and let the garment fall to her feet with a satisfying flop.

I encountered no resistance as I pushed my hand between her thighs, curling upwards to find her already soaking wet.

“Guilty of thoughtcrimes,” I pronounced, “You know the penalty, comrade.”

My sentence only made her push down further onto my intruding fingers. It’s the things we think of as forbidden that arose us the most.

“I must be spanked,” she acknowledged in a whisper.

I lifted the sash from my shoulders and used it to blindfold her, then took my seat, then reached for her hand to guide her across my lap. My favourite stance was to sit with my legs spread so I could bend her over just one of my thighs, allowing her outer leg to dangle downwards against my stiffness, whilst her inner leg jutted out horizontally behind her.

I loved how this position split her bottom and revealed every detail of her swollen folds. It allowed me to clamp her dangling leg between my own, further restricting her ability to move. I drew her arms behind her, grasping her wrists and pinning them against the small of her back. It always felt so amazing when she struggled.

As she squirmed, I pressed my free leg against the lowest part of her bum, raising it slightly until I found just the right angle for her glistening pink lips to impart a little kiss to my thigh. When I spanked her, I held her tightly in place so she couldn’t rub against me. I wanted to hold her motionless so she could feel how helpless she was against my physical strength. Yet I wasn’t squeezing her spirit out of her, it felt more like I was concentrating it.

Over a spanker’s lap, a girl learns what she really wants. She discovers being held down is more arousing than being free to do as she pleases. She realises she can see further with a blindfold. A girl with a well-spanked bottom truly appreciates why strictness is a liberation and soreness is a pleasure.

Together, we had sworn a vow.

We would never allow our renegade fires to dwindle and die.

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