I have never owned a whip, so I have no idea of the marks, the enjoyment or the art of using one. I am quite adept with other tools though, and while I have a preference for my special bamboo, leather-handled cane, my sub has a preference for anything other than that one.

The beauty of flogging, caning and spanking comes only in part from my subs pleasure. The other half, or more comes from mine. There are two points to my pleasure, aside from my subs: the position and the result.

I love art and beauty and nothing turns me on more than the position of my sub during a punishment or penalty scenario. I am in awe of tableaux and my earliest memory of it was practising sex with a boyfriend in grade three. We had nothing to go on for sex other than the statues around his mother’s apartment. It continues to be a bit of a fetish for me to position my partners in carved out positions of my choosing and imagination.

At my age of twelve or thirteen VHS became available and I was intoxicated by the movies Cabaret, All That Jazz and Sweet Charity that my mother brought home, all of which were Bob Fosse productions. Those movies did it for me, and I have been a sucker for tableaux ever since – the awkward and erotic still positions of models and dancers, like a work of alternative art, burlesque and eroti, but ever changing and again always of my choosing.

The second thing I love is the visual appeal of the lines. I love the cane because it leaves marks that are so precise, determined and controlled. Each line is like a mathematical equation of art rendered on an ass. The crop creates a similar effect for me, but there’s a lack of the symmetrical in favour of blobs of marks, and the flogger, while much more gentle is too uncontrolled looking in the end.

When I spank, cane, paddle, crop or even flog, it’s a feeling of an artist creating something semi-permanent, and in the end it really only matters if the artist is happy, that the lines, colours and textures are perfect since the canvass never gets to view the creativity, but rather only the pleasure of my paint.