Zille Defeu’s Fetish Fantasies

I have birch rods on my mind.

This may be because of the bouquet of birch twigs sitting in a vase in the bathroom, which I see every time I go in there. I know the birching is coming — it will be before we leave for the wedding. I hate the waiting! Although I’m not sure that I’ll still be so impatient when the day of the birching comes along…. Anyway, I can’t stop reading about the birch, of course. Which is only making my anticipation all the worse! Here’s a great link I found today. The below text and images are from it….

The birch, a bundle of twigs cut from a tree, normally the birch tree. Dried out and with twigs and leaves removed, it has been long used as a means of corporal punishment and for stimulating the skin in or after a sauna. As an instrument of chastisement its first recorded use is in 1440: “He bete hur wyth a yerde of byrke”. In the UK it was an available legal punishment until 1948, and is still retained as such by the Isle of Man, where the last judicial birching occurred in 1975, the same year as the European Court of Human Rights declared it a “cruel and unusual punishment”. The last floggings of convicts for offences against prison discipline took place as recently as the 1960s. The 1948 Criminal Justice Act abolished birching for all crimes other than certain prison offences, where those 21 and over got 18 strokes of the cat-o’-nine-tails or birch, and those under 21 got 12 strokes.

The application of the birch to children in British schools has an equally long history. It appears in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603) and in 1536 the Biblical scholar John Tindale quips that “we say of a wanton child he must be annoynted with byrchin salve”. Perhaps the most celebrated institution in which the birch was routinely used was Eton, where each part of the school had its own flogging block, a wooden step on which the victim knelt with his trousers down to receive his punishment on the naked buttocks. In that position he was attended by two ‘holders down’ whose duty it was to lift up his shirt tails and hold him in place throughout the birching. The punishments were for any number of minor offences and carried out in public. The birches used consisted of a three feet long handle and two feet of a thick bunch of birch twigs. School fees included half-a-guinea to cover the cost of birches, whether or not the boy were actually birched at all.

As for 18th and 19th century schoolgirls, they too were subjected to the birch at their high-class schools and at home by their governesses. In addition, many classified adverts appeared offering the services of experienced chastisers for parents who were too soft-hearted to birch their own female offspring. In 1869 a vociferous debate broke out in the press between those who regarded birching young females on their naked buttocks as indecent, and those who invoked the old adage of “spare the rod and spoil the child”. But as recently as 1937 a schoolgirl in Dublin received fourteen strokes of the birch on the bare from a schoolmistress for possessing “indecent” books.

Many nineteenth-century accounts of schoolboy and sexual birchings (and often the two blur into one another) dwell with lascivious enjoyment upon flaying the skin off the buttocks of the victim and the rivers of blood that run down. (See in particular The Whippingham Papers, probably by the renowned British poet A C Swinburne.) This has basis in reality, as, for example, in the description of a birching in Nell in Bridewell, where the flogging continues until two birches have been broken on the girl’s naked buttocks and the blood runs freely. Some “humorous” works exist in which the birchee (usually female) is flogged to death, while the birch is also depicted as the pinnacle of an induction into the delights of sadomasochism. It also seems to have been the implement of choice for those visiting brothels which specialised in offering stern chastisements to aristocratic and middle-class gentlemen, an impression strengthened by the inclusion of a birch rod above the bed in Hogarth’s 18th-century engraving of the prostitute.

And the relative merits of the birch and the cane? “The vicarious cane is considered by birchers of experience to be an unsatisfactory substitute for the birch rod itself.” (The Daily Chronicle, 1908 )

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