The Rules
The Rules
1) You have to be at least 2 years older than the eldest of my kids (i.e., 30). Believe it or not, this is the rule that gives me the most trouble. You wouldn't believe how many needy 20-somethings there are out there!
2) You have to be male. If you're female, you'll have to find someone else to spank you, if for no other reason than I, myself, only enjoy being spanked by men. I was spanked by a woman once and I felt oddly detached.
3) You have to let me play with you. Tease you. Make you twist a bit. You see, one of the things I enjoy most about spanking a man is watching him become aroused. Brushing my fingers against the bulge in his jeans before slowly lowering them to his ankles. Come to think of it, feeling that bulge under my belly when lying across a man's lap to be spanked is essential to my enjoyment of that experience.
I don't want to be your mother. (See Rule 1.)
4) Your place, not mine.
5) What happens afterward is totally up to me.
It's very weird that it took me over ten years to get to a place where I was ready to "switch." And now that I have, I find myself surreptitiously checking out men's backsides. And the more aggressive, the more masculine, the more "type A" they are, the more I want to spank them.
Who knew?
Kris email
Short and sweet, so to speak, very spare and straight forward. A little too spare, really. I'm not saying the rest should be padded, but Rule 3 was the best part, when we got to see a little bit of the spice (and motive) in the speaker's play. In Rules 1 & 2, we got to see a bit of the speaker herself, but none of that in 4 & 5, which makes their impact a little uneven. And was it a typo that "I don't want to be your mother" isn't listed as its own rule? Or maybe it should be part of Rule 1?
Overall, this was a clever idea and a fun, light read, but it was uneven. This could be easily fixed by either cutting away rules and focusing on the ones that give us insight into the speaker, or rounding out the rest of the rules with mention of the speaker's experiences that helped establish those rules (i.e., Rule 4: My adult children have their own keys; they're not walking in on my cornertime!).
sarah nada email
"The Rules" feels very immediate - like a real person's real desires. It also reads like a personal ad, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I like it that the author conveys a lot of back story and fantasy in a very short piece.
Pablo email
I like the idea. There's a nice ambiguity about the form: Is it a personal ad? An exasperated rant after bad experiences? A seduction, perhaps? But this does feel a little dashed off, when, even in 500 words, there's room for something with much more scope - where perhaps what starts out as a simple list of preferences becomes something quite different by the end, as the writer disappears into some imagining, or it becomes clear that they're really talking to someone specific. I'd like to see what this could become if it was expanded and made richer.
Zille Defeu email
This is a lovely list. But it does really work as a finished piece of writing. Maybe if the author included an example (drawn from life or fictional) to go with each item on the list, that could take the place of the mundane explanation and make this more engaging.