$8.95
ISBN 1903931665
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Julian Robinson
(02/16/05)
Spanking is silly to most people. To them, it's a ridiculous thing for grown men and women to do to each other. To us, it's one more reason to feel ashamed, one more thing that's wrong with us.
The speaker is Lauren, notorious 20-year-old star of a sex scandal splattered across all the tabloids, a scandal that begins when she answers an Internet personal ad placed by 40-year-old Robert whose profile has the following interests checked off: discipline, spanking, oral, and anal. A tall, handsome, well-to-do art appraiser, Robert's kinda perfect, while Lauren's definitely a fixer-upper. Having been kicked out of university for dealing pot, she's living at home with her creepy, divorced dad. A mess of a punk poseur, Lauren's sleepwalking through a string of crummy jobs and inattentive boyfriends. Adrift, at loose ends, she's not even certain who she is anymore. The one thing she knows for sure is that she's fantasized about being spanked all her life.
There you have the classic setup for a romantic domestic discipline saga, where the punishments are simultaneously agonizing, edifying, and arousing -- self-improvement by the seat of the pants with bonus après-spank sex. And Suffering the Consequences has multiple well-executed examples of both sex and corporal punishment, but what sets it apart from merely stimulating spanking porn is its insight.
Brooke Stern gets deep inside Lauren's head to explore the paradoxical dynamic of dread and desire: "Did it really have to hurt so much? Are you going to do it again?" Enduring physical punishment is portrayed as heightened reality, as sincere apology, as an exercise in will power, as a test of strength, as justice, as accountability, as catharsis:
Suddenly I'm crying. It feels so good to cry. I let out loud, gasping sobs. I suppose it's the pain that's opened me, but it feels like the despair comes from a deeper place. It's not only my despair at ever making it through the spanking, but also my despair at not making it through life itself.
Lauren's a repeat offender, requiring progressively severe correction by hand, belt, and a small pizza paddle she's sent out to acquire herself, in keeping with the genre's time-honored tropes. She's paddled in retribution for a night of drunken, meaningless sex with a stranger, triggered by her ominous father's intrusion into her life-altering affair with Robert.
These three punitive episodes and their accompanying mind-blowing sex fill the book's intimate first half, after which Suffering the Consequences opens out, becoming a something-for-everyone kaleidoscope of male dominance and female submission -- almost a story collection -- with new characters, elaborate fantasy/dream sequences, melodrama, medical scenes, institutional abuse, and plenty more exercise for Lauren's belabored bottom.
Robert takes her to a strip club, where Stern's feminist analysis transforms a hackneyed milieu:
Is this a temple of woman-worship, an altar for supplication before the great gyno-goddess of snatch? The men are in what can only be called a trance. 'The pussy trance.' Robert christens it.
There's Lauren's long fantasy about holding one of the strippers in place as Robert canes her. There's her recollection of attempting to seduce her high school principal into spanking her. There's an avuncular psychologist's interrogation, interspersed with his tale of another provocative, self-destructive patient who required a hands-on approach.
In some of these latter vignettes, like the lecherous gynecologist's recollection of the first spanking he ever gave, extorted out of a poor, rural school bus driver in her school bus, Stern's writing has the skanky, gonzo exuberance of Marco Vassi or Michael Perkins: "He thinks he's so fucking right, beating the out-of-control, histrionic girl, the one who pissed in his face and gets tied up by old men like him." This same imaginative flair is evident in Lauren's inventive forms of self-pleasuring: "Who pees her panties in her dad's bathroom with a razor sticking out of her ass and enjoys it?"
While Suffering the Consequences may be structurally challenged, Stern has grappled mightily with adult, consensual spanking's complex essence and, through Lauren's profound self-examination, reached some illuminating conclusions. It should appeal not only to those who find themselves overwhelmed by fantasies of spanking or being spanked (and to the lucky few who've realized these desires), but also to those who want to know what it all means.
