Days of the Raj Ch. 01

(Let me lead you through the sepia-toned, historic setting for this tale - colonial India - where you will experience some of the most delicious Clothed Female Naked Male fun you have ever come across. On the banks of the Ganges the senior boys' college was filled with aristocratic 18 year olds, thrillingly subject to the discipline of female English teachers mature age and young.)

The views of school disciplinarian Sarah Maitland are coming back into focus and not before time.

Born in 1881 in Surrey, England, she was a true child of the Empire. A Governess, then a teacher at second-tier public schools she was to develop a theory on the disciplining of boys that made her sought-after on three continents. But her 1939 privately-printed Raising Boys to be Gentle Men was overtaken by the advent of war and was little heard of until recently.

She was certainly an interesting woman of her times. At Nottingham University College she struck up a friendship with young D H Lawrence and lent the future novelist her diaries recording one of her disappointing love affairs. In London she apparently met and impressed George Bernard Shaw and attended the opening night of his play Misalliance in his company. She may have had an affair with H G Wells and been hurt when he moved onto his next liaison. After her experience in India she engaged in correspondence with Sigmund Freud.

Yet she had a very practical focus on discipline, wielding the cane, slipper, tawse, paddle and hairbrush as vigorously as any schoolmistress of her era. She became a cult figure among English ruling class males with a masochistic attachment to the punishments they received at female hands during their schooling. One of her former students, a member of the House of Lords, commented anonymously to The Times on her death, "Sarah had more finesse at delivering exquisite humiliation than any schoolmistress or governess ever known."

Just before World War One she left for Bombay and taught at a school for the sons of well-off Indian families. When the army summoned every available male teacher for the trenches in Europe or militia duty on India's frontiers she found herself promoted to Principal. Asserting discipline over 18 year old boys with no male staff to help proved a crucible in the development of her ideas. She was to be further tested running a school for black boys from professional families in Jamaica in the 1920s. Later she gave advice to detention facilities and prisons in the south of the US. She died in 1961.

Her answer was refined around 1914 in the college for 18 year old boys where she found herself Principal. Not spanking, not caning - at least not on their own - but a technique she called Total Clothing Deprivation was the means for bringing about a proper attitude to women. During the years of adolescent development, she concluded, there was an opportunity to "traumatize" males by exposing them totally nude to females, women older than them or their own age. From this point attitudes to women undergo a decisive change. She wrote:

"No more is it possible for them to maintain attitudes of smug superiority to the 'inferior' gender. Certainly not after they have been shamed and humiliated by being stripped of all clothing in front of a female in a disciplinary setting, perhaps where there are other female onlookers to witness his disgrace. I would add, however, that such a setting not be without tenderness and love. My experience is that boys who experience Total Clothing Deprivation at the hands of a female carer become sensitive and thoughtful men, true gentlemen."

In her book she offered abundant examples and case studies of the working of these principles, especially drawn from her times in India and Jamaica with Indian and black youth. It was brutally frank and scientific: she was candid, for example, in discussing the role of involuntary erections in shaming males. She wrote, "Absolutely unable to control the functioning of his own body the adolescent is distressed beyond measure when exposed to a female teacher, doctor or nurse in this condition; even more so an aunt, sister, mother or grandmother. Out of this trauma a more sensitive and submissive adult male will emerge. Put it this way, he will feel as if he has been left with no secrets. He will feel that females have seen the very essence of his being, his secret essence."

In fact in the book she provided a whole chapter on the treatment of involuntary erections, full of examples drawn from India and Jamaica. (That is why, in the climate of 1939 Britain, it needed to be privately printed.) She recommended the used of feigned indignation and anger when the embarrassment occurred, leaving the "offending" boy speechless and helpless. An alternative approach was to direct what she called "a scornful glance or a withering look" at the problem, making the boy feel extremely ashamed and apprehensive about what might happen next."

Eloquently she argued that men come into the world naked and in the care of women and there is nothing unnatural in this condition. In words that would send tremors of fear up the backbones of just about all males, she was to assert that this male nudity in front of dressed women be revived. She made a fetish of "total" clothing deprivation. Her philosophy went way beyond the traditional bared bottom: comprehensive shaming was essential to trigger mental change. And that meant youths with everything bared, and preferably before a group of women. And - to repeat a favorite point - the horror of involuntary erections being glimpsed or, better still, examined - by a nurse, teacher or governess or curious mother or sister - was a big part of the ritual humiliation.

Her personal memoir was recently located, unread, in The British Museum. It will shortly be published. In it she provides a no-holds-barred account of the things she saw and did. It is certain to feed into various strands of feminism and to galvanize the burgeoning CFNM community. It will point psychologists and educators to different ways of raising boys.

The first part of the manuscript deals with India. The war meant all her school staff were female and unmarried. They included older women, long established in India but living in all cases without male companions. They were likely to be stimulated by male nudity enforced on 18 year old boys and to support the strategy. Others were English girls, barely qualified as teachers, sent out to fill the posts vacated by the men and barely older than the boys they were to teach. For them, witnessing Total Clothing Deprivation was going to be challenging. Some would be excited by it, others afraid. All boys at the college were 18 and from upper caste backgrounds, inclined to reject female authority at first blush. As 1914 started Sarah faced real disciplinary challenges and was on the search for new approaches.

According to this unearthed memoir she then had the experience that was to shape her peculiar theory about the disciplining of young men, indeed her whole career. She was visiting the home of one of the lively Hindu families which had a senior boy at her school. Other guests were officials of the administration and Indian professionals. It was a happy celebration that began with drinks in the lounge attended by bare-footed male servants while sari-clad maids could be glimpsed in the corridors.

But not only maids. Down one corridor she saw in profile the son of the household, her 18 year old student, standing back to the wall absolutely stark naked. He was standing rigid as a sentry, hands clasped behind his back. Totally nude.

The sight astonished and, she admitted in her memoir, it also excited her. He was a tall boy with darkly burnished skin, slender and athletic. She had to look several times, incredulously, to confirm that his flanks were indeed totally uncovered - his well-shaped upper thighs seemed to swell into a muscular bottom. Her gaze confirmed too that the bundle hanging from his groin was not underwear of any kind but his exposed genitals. She had had to struggle not to stare longer and to carry on conversation with other guests.

The surreal atmosphere was confirmed by servants coming and going, by maids walking past the youth and glancing and giggling as they looked him over brazenly. But his eyes remained ahead at all times. Finally as the party rose to go to the dining room an elderly and worldly Englishman with a silver mustache lent close to Sarah and said, "Miss Maitland, as a gifted pedagogue you would understand more than most. But Indian families punish males by making them present themselves, as in that scene there, completely in the nuddy. Seen it numerous times. Up to the age of 25, would you believe? Bit disconcerting to us English folk but apparently works a treat."

He went on: "Yes, they call it 'Murgha', nudity as punishment. Runs deep in their culture. For example, there's a religious group committed to poverty. Their men go naked to make the point, but their women are allowed to wear white robes. And apparently temple caves with carvings show men naked except for pendant jewelry, the women as priestesses fully dressed looking scornfully at their buck-naked menfolk. Whole thing gives me the shivers. But I imagine if you're a woman..."

His lively eyes were enamelled with mischief and...something else.

She blushed. She remained distracted and stirred during the long dinner and later, over post-dinner drinks, noticed with disappointment the corridor was empty. But at school the next day when she glimpsed Asoka, neatly attired in his uniform, he dropped his gaze and continued head lowered.

After that her theory of punishment took shape quickly. It came to a head when the same Asoka had been the centre of a violent argument and it was not disputed he had caused it. She had him brought to her office.

It was a beautiful study with mahogany furniture, plush curtains and a lion rug and other hunting trophies. These included a large elephant tusk used on her desk as paper weight. She loved its curved elegance. She was a devotee of the Viennese Dr Sigmund Freud (she kept his works and her collection of medical and marriage guidance texts in a locked cabinet in her Principal's bungalow - also a big stock of erotic literature she had daringly bought in Naples on the voyage out.) Freud enabled her to read her own desires; she knew her fondness for the ivory tusk said a lot about her own buried longings.

The door closed behind her and the boy. She was about to confront him. To be truthful her heart was beating. She could not be certain he would accept her authority.

She told him - with almost panted breath - she was going to punish him as he would be at home.

He gulped. He could still remember the awful evening when she was among his parents' guests.

She told him to begin removing every stitch of his clothing. At this Asoka fell to his knees begging to be spared this humiliation. "Miss...Miss...oh, no...no, Miss..." while his brown eyes underneath his long lashes overflowed with tears.

She told him to stand up or she would call her secretary Miss Primmer and some of the maids to help her. This terrible threat worked. He hauled himself up, sniffling. His hands were immobilized, however, and she was required to unknot his tie and begin unbuttoning his shirt, even eventually to unbuckle his belt and draw his gray flannel trousers down his thighs. Finally he participated by stepping out of the shameful puddle of clothing. He was standing in his white regulation underwear and Sarah was kneeling at his feet when there was a knock at the door.

"Come in," Sarah said. Miss Plimmer entered and stood shocked. For his part Asoka started with fear like a forest deer.

Sarah thought what happened next a delicious moment and was to remember it all her life: her first experience at humiliation of a young male through Total Clothing Deprivation.

"I'm punishing a bad boy Indian-style, just as he would be at home," she explained. Miss Plimmer's jaw dropped. She stood stock still, amazed. With this explanation to her secretary, Sarah reached up and took Ashoka's underpants by the elastic waistband. She felt him freeze with anxiety - no, terror. She hesitated, just for a moment and looked up into the boy's eyes. They were pleading and desperate, swimming with fear. She did not relax her gaze.

Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she now slowly and deliberately inched downwards the last shield of his modesty...but slowly...ever so slowly. It seemed to take an age, for example, before the downward movement of underwear reached the timberline of glistening black pubic bush. When it did, her gaze was still locked onto his. She saw his eyes fill with tears and the desperate, pleading look take over his whole features. Her movement became even more tantalizingly, teasingly slow...ever so slow. A smile cruelly flitted at the corners of her lips. He saw it, his tummy turned to water and he knew he was lost.

Another age, a millenium, and the waistband continued its slow, slithering movement. It revealed the first sign of the boy's coffee-colored appendage. Her eyes remained locked into his. Slowly, slowly...inch by inch...the secret centre of his being was being exposed to two English ladies. As the elastic cleared the final puckering tip, the boy's member flopped forward. Then... she delivered a sudden whisk...and the underpants reached his feet. The young man gave a cry and covered himself with his hands. Miss Plimmer, who had seen it all, gasped, "Oh my!"

"Those hands, Asoka, behind your back! Just like you were at home!"

The trembling boy obeyed. A glance over her head told Sarah that Miss Plimmer, eyes on stalks, was feasting on Asoka's pubic region and that she had never seen the sight before. Sarah now told the Indian youth that he would spend an hour like this...only in the busy outer office, next to her secretary's desk in fact.

Miss Plimmer's gasp was audible across the room.

The boy fell to his knees again, begging and stammering, tears welling.

"Strange," said Sarah."It is what you are forced to do at home."

In a torrent of words he told her that it was a punishment he hated. That all his girl cousins and aunts had seen him in this state and he "was so deeply shamed." He said it was very "shaming" for an upper caste male, a Brahmin, to be stripped in front of low caste women like maids. And no, no, no, no - please, not in front of "white ladies - no, never, never, never English women to see me without stitches!"

Then, head hung and still on his knees, he told her there was a still more deeply shameful aspect. Sarah couldn't understand his mumbles and stutters but did pick up the word "engorgement." She had been secretly reading medical textbooks for years - for their lascivious content - and even enjoyed a cache of Victorian pornography ( again under lock and key in her Principal's bungalow ) and knew what he meant.

This was to be her introduction to the notion that forcing young men to display involuntary erections in a state of Total Clothing Deprivation was an acutely devastating part of their humiliation.

At his moment she experienced her epiphany.

This would be a ritual to which she would dedicate her life.

She coldly told Asoka to get up. She insisted again his hands stay at his sides. Then she stepped back to stand with her secretary, eyeing him appraisingly from head to toe.

She put herself in his position: a haughty, spoiled Brahmin 18 year-old in this terrible clothesless state, with two dressed women looking at his every exposed inch. Totally, totally uncovered. His every secret on display. He must be melting with shame, standing there in his "birthday suit" - oh, what a suggestive term. What else did they say? In the altogether. Stripped to the buff. In a state of nature. Each funny euphemism packed with terror, with humiliation, for a schoolboy in the presence of two female teachers.

She felt a warm inner glow, an almost chemical surge through her whole being, of fulfillment and justice. So now the tables were turned and all the humiliation she had experienced from men, all the neglect and superiority, was somehow reversed. Reversed because of how she had reduced this brown-skinned youth to shame under her cruel direction. Yes, fulfillment and justice she felt in full measure - and some other nameless emotion surged within her as well.

Feeling a welling of excitement she took by the ear and led him into the outer office.

As she arranged him in position - back to the wall, next to the secretary and her desk, within full view of passersby in the busy corridor - she wondered how long before the torture of "engorgement" would overtake the boy. In her experience in English public schools or as governess in great homes, she knew it could happen without warning, as a result of the slightest stimulation, or of none.

Asoka was to spend a total of an hour like a statue, with hands clasped at his back. He was on view - during that 60 minutes - to several maids going about their duties. Low caste women, who ogled unabashedly. Indeed word spread and maids discovered new cleaning duties in the precinct. Teachers, moving around on duty, were staggered. And they, too, seemed to find reason to linger. It was precisely half an hour into the full nude punishment - what a thrill it gave Sarah to begin thinking in these terms - that Miss Plimmer came into the Principal's office and, acutely embarrassed, asked her to please come out and look at something.

What had disturbed her was simply the arrival, not unexpected and, by Sarah, eagerly anticipated, of Asoka's "engorgement." One sari-clad maid a few feet away, on the floor cleaning, was in fact staring spellbound at the boy's rigidified penis. A smile played on her lips. A spinsterish teacher was at the door fixated, eyes bulging and excited. Asoka's eyes were welling with tears and his hands fluttering, not knowing whether he could get away with sheltering his privates or not.

Sarah's first thought was that, upright, his "organs of generation" were absolutely in proportion to his athletic frame. Yet from illustrations in her secreted medical texts she had expected the appendage to stand out at 45 degrees. Asoka's, however, rose parallel to his abdomen. Barely a gap between its upper side and his tummy. And there was a second peculiarity, she thought - color. While the stem of his organ was brown like the rest of him, the "helmet" or glans, previously covered but now on display, was a bright copper, or brown-red. Helmet was the correct term, too. Its sculpted shape made her think of the German infantry, so much in the news.

She improvised quickly. Standing close she gave him the one instruction he would not be able to complete. She watched his face contort, like someone "straining at stool." He kept it up for a moment eyes screwed shut, then looked down to check himself - only to be greeted by the copper-head still straining to point at the ceiling. Then he saw Sarah, her secretary, the teacher and the maid - all looking at the same thing. He groaned with the humiliation. And looked at his principal in pleading despair.

"Miss, I am wanting but not doing."

She repeated the instruction.

Again, he strained and clenched with eyes screwed. Then looked down checking himself. But to no avail.

Sarah swept into her study and returned with a whippet-thin cane and ordered Asoka to bend over. Moaning, he complied- he had been caned before at school and home. When he touched his toes he immediately opened for inspection the crevice of his posterior and the four women were riveted by the sight of a hairless hole, winking back at them. Oh, the total shame of this boy, they each thought! He also revealed the rear view of his black scrotum between his legs...before he corrected his posture. Then the full force of the wielded cane caught him on the middle of his bottom, almost lifted him off the ground and left a lacerating white mark. He howled and straightened himself rubbing furiously.