One of the longest running events on the British kink scene is Night of the Cane. While there is what you might call a more fanciful history of it to be found here, it has been happening as a genuine event for a good 20 years. To be fair, caning contests along with other sex-related contests and competitions have been happening since, well, the beginning of socialisation- there seems to be reasonably credible evidence of human-pony racing dating back to the Roman Empire, for instance. A more lightly fictionalised version of NOTC’s caning competition did make it into a novel set loosely in the fetish scene in earlier days (which I am not going to link to as the author is a bellend who doesn’t like me). Last year, obviously, plague conditions meant it couldn’t happen as usual, but with creditable determination to keep the chain unbroken, The Firm moved the heart of the event, the caning competition, online – and allowed me to be one of the judges. Watching the video entries was fun, sure, though not quite as delightful as being out with fellow enthusiasts, joining in the applause for a particularly stylish six-of-the-best and hoping for the opportunity to dish out a few swats of one’s own later on.
This year, though, we can all go and do it again for real. Caning and corporal punishment often seemed to appeal to mainly a subset of the overall kinky subculture, but events like Night of the Cane frequently introduced more people to the joys of ‘traditional discipline’ done for sexy thrills between fully consenting adults.
This little video gives something of a flavour of what to expect, along with instructions on how to get yourself a ticket. I am certainly going to go along myself, and I believe I will be teaching a class of some description. After all, I have been known to threaten naughty authors that I will teach them the finer points of English punctuation at cane point…