Wednesday 9 November 2011

Maid to measure

Is that a saucepan?
Maids in fiction get a raw deal. Or in the world of spanko reality, a raw ass. Often hot, red, stripey.
She's there to get something for somebody, do something for (or to) somebody or have something done to her by somebody.
That's how it is for Robert Coover's character in 'Spanking the Maid', or how I remember it anyway. It must be more than 15 years since I read the book. StheM was first published in 1982, I had a first edition at one time and for a spanko it was a buzz.
Somewhere along the way I threw the book out, which turns out to be a mistake as I could get £50 for it at the moment on eBay. But now it turns out that the novella has been re-issued with another of Coover's short stories as a Penguin Modern Classic, so I think I'll have to re-read it.
The Guardian's review sums up how the story works: "A maid and her master are each committed to their own hard service: she, attempting to perform her simple duties without error; he, supplying punishment by rod, belt, hairbrush, whip, cane and slipper when she inevitably fails."
Coover didn't mean it to be titillating, but for a nascent spanko it was thrilling stuff. How I wanted to be that poor maid facing spanking day after day with no end in sight.
Sometimes revisiting a book or movie that you once loved is a disappointment, isn't it? StheM certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea. One Amazon reviewer asks: "How much do I want to read about the naughty maid who can't do her work properly and needs to be spanked in a variety of different ways."
How much? In my case, quite a bit.

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