Earlier in the project, Paul asked what Inez of the Upper IV “is.” What is its spine?
It is, all at once, a boarding school story, a Cold War tale, a feminist experiment, an alternate history, a digital humanities book project, a satire, a family saga, and maybe a spy novel in disguise. A weird mash-up, the stories are all of these and none of them. Also, in some cases, spanking stories, though there seems far too little of that content. The truer answer is that it is an imagined archive, a deliberately constructed collection of documents about fictional women whose lives, had they existed, would rarely have appeared in the memoirs or state papers of their time.
As I wrote my response to Paul, explaining what the project had become and what I thought held it together, something unexpected happened. The letter that follows, from Anastasia de Vries-Kavanagh, a former Head Girl arguing against the digitisation of the Blue Prefect Study’s archive, came out of my fingers and onto the keyboard as though it had always existed. I hadn’t planned to write it. I hadn’t even known Anastasia had something to say about the matter until she began saying it.
The project began with a book, the marvellous Terms and Conditions by Ysenda M. Graham, a collection of interviews with “old girls” from the “pre-duvet” era. That was followed by a bit of school detention play at TASSP in June 2025. Taken together with my own girls’ school background, these left me with a question:
Where, in the historical record, do the lives of intelligent, socially literate women survive, whatever their class, particularly before 1960?
Having spent the past thirty years (yes, Virginia, I am that old) doing archival work in women’s social histories, I knew where we were unlikely to find them. Not in the public speeches of male leaders. Rarely in intelligence files, written largely by and for men, or in official correspondence. Not often in published memoirs, which can erase trouble as easily as triumph.
So where should we look? In the world I’m imagining, Saint Clare, traces survive in:
School reports
Punishment books
Household ledgers
Student and alumnae letters
Journals and diaries
Marginalia
Staff memoranda
Errant drafts and fragments never intended for any archive
These are the places where we can begin to reconstruct how women learned, negotiated, exercised, and sometimes resisted power.
The project treats my imagined 1955 girls’ boarding school, Saint Clare School for Girls in Wales, as the smallest unit of a late-stage imperial nation-state: a social hierarchy, a training ground, a crucible for discipline and performance. The micro-politics of Saint Clare mirror the macro-politics of mid-century Britain, where the “Old Boys” still imagined themselves firmly in charge even as events exposed the limits of their knowledge and authority. Meanwhile, the “Old Girls,” their wives, daughters, sisters, and colleagues, exercised forms of influence that rarely appeared in official accounts, sometimes sustaining the established order, sometimes challenging it, and occasionally doing both at once.
At the centre of the project is a fictional matrilineal braid, an exploration of how knowledge, caution, courage, and strategy pass from grandmother to mother to daughter, often through observation, discipline, and silence. The women in this world, Inez, Gwen, Margaret, Lillian, Anne, Clarissa, and Gladys, exercise power within and around the institutions that shape their lives. They protect one another, misunderstand one another, make mistakes, preserve traditions, and sometimes discover that the traditions they have inherited deserve challenging.
The men, meanwhile, do what history records: some with honour, some with insight, some with catastrophic blindness, and a few with corrosive corruption. Their authority is real. So are the limits of what they know.
The imagined documents come from many places, but the project’s symbolic centre is the Blue Prefect Study, a room within Saint Clare School for Girls, protected by layers of walls, physical and otherwise. It is simultaneously central and unseen, intimate and institutional, powerful and quiet.
Most importantly, the Study remains a working room, and its archive belongs to the current Head Girl and prefects. Only they possess the keys and the right of access, a privilege they surrender when they leave office. Each generation inherits the records and the responsibility for them, adds its own contributions, and passes them to the next. Even the Old Girls who deposited documents there have no automatic right to return and consult them.
The collection remains decidedly undigitised, unindexed, and largely uncatalogued except through the working knowledge of its custodians. Its authority rests partly in its exclusion of men,[1] but equally in its refusal to become part of the searchable, extractable, easily misinterpreted, or cancelled public record.
Its preservation is not simply a matter of keeping old papers. It is a continuing practice through which girls exercise authority over their own history, and learn that keeping another person’s confidence carries responsibilities that do not end when the original circumstances have passed.
If Inez is about anything, therefore, it is about who keeps this history, who decides what deserves remembering, and why the abundant traces women left behind so rarely found their way into the histories written about them.
11 October 2002
To the Board of Governors Saint Clare School for Girls
Dear Governors,
I write as a Saint Clare alumna (Class of 1990) and former Head Girl in response to last spring’s proposal to “modernise” the Blue Prefect Study and relocate its archive into a new, purpose-built digital records suite connected to, among other institutions, the British Library. I understand these plans remain under consideration and wish to register my strong and absolute objections.
As a historian working in digital library science, I understand the desire for order, accessibility, and, of course, climate control. However, other than climate control, these plans should be abandoned.
Further, the Blue Prefect Study is, by accident and design, a room where the logic of exclusion protects its history and the women who deposit their papers there. What survives there survives because the room is:
upstairs,
unlocked and accessed only with current prefects’ keys,
invisible to visitors,
inaccessible to men,
unindexed,
and undigitised.
Its very disorganisation is central to its organisation and security. The archive survives because it does not tempt institutionalisation. Only current prefects and Head Girls can access it, access we then surrender when we leave. Generations of girls grown into mothers, aunts, and grandmothers have known what university and institutional archivists do not: that women’s history is safest and most honest when kept outside of where men expect to find it.
The Blue Prefect Study is not simply a room, nor are its files simply an archive. For more than a century, it has served as the working space of Saint Clare Head Girls and prefects. It may be the single most intact historical space devoted to the independent recordkeeping of girls and young women in any comparable school. It preserves the kinds of documents that male-run archives routinely discard, or never even realise exist: the writings of girls, their correspondence, their accounts of friendship, punishment, injustice, ambition, affection, and the women they become. Generations of Old Girls, including my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother,[1] have entrusted their papers to the Study because they trust the girls who succeed them.
In the Study, you will find:
handwritten prefects’ meeting minutes dating from the 1890s;
notes from Miss Arbuthnot’s terrifying reign as Head Girl;
punishment books and disciplinary records transferred to the Study after seventy-five years;[2]
an unsigned confession dated January 1938, concerning a crime that remains prosecutable, folded into a hymn book;
letters written by my great-grandmother in the winter of 1908, pleading that her daughter not be sent down for “impertinence”;
hundreds of pages of punishment lines, signed by their authors;
an unsigned fragment from my mother Inez’s diary, dated June 1955, which I recognised from her schoolgirl handwriting;
an early draft of the 1961 Charrington Resignation memorandum, annotated by Clarissa Charrington and Lady Gwendoline de Vries;
and hundreds of other traces of lives and relationships that would otherwise have disappeared.
Many of these papers contain confidences their authors never intended to share beyond the Study. Some concern women still living, or families unaware of these secrets. Once digitised, those confidences would depend upon future administrators and changing access policies, while copies could easily circulate beyond the School’s control. Better that these papers remain unknown, or even be lost, than betray the trust that preserved them.
The Blue Prefect Study is not a museum or the School’s official archive. It is a living collection, kept by and for the girls who currently hold office. Its value lies not only in the documents but in the responsibility for them, passed from one generation to the next. Digitisation might preserve every page while destroying the very tradition that made them possible.
On behalf of my mother and grandmothers, and any daughters I may have, I ask the Governors to abandon this proposal. If the Study needs climate control, install it. Otherwise, please, leave the Blue Prefect Study where it is, as it is.
Respectfully,
Anastasia de Vries-Kavanagh
Anastasia de Vries-Kavanagh Saint Clare, Class of 1990 Head Girl, 1989–90 Research Fellow, Centre for Women’s History Durham University
[1] My great-great-grandmother also attended Saint Clare, but the enumeration of generations was becoming excessive.
[2] Punishment books remain in the Headmaster’s locked cabinet until at least seventy-five years have elapsed since the final entry.
I’ve started The Spankscuary Webring, a hand-built neighbourhood connecting independent spanking-related websites, blogs, story archives, art and history projects, forums, and other interesting corners of the web.
If you have a site that might belong in the ring, you’re invited to join. There’s no technical expertise required on your end; send me the name and address of the site and I can help with the rest.
Innovating Backwards OR Why I Built a Webring in 2026
For people who demand more than the short version: I’ve started The Spankscuary Webring, a hand-built neighbourhood connecting independent spanking-related websites, blogs, story archives, art and history projects, forums, and other interesting corners of the web. Sites with substantial spanking-related content are welcome to join. No technical expertise required: send me the site name and address, and I can help with the rest.
For readers under 30, and probably some older ones too, webring may mean almost nothing. Webring? Not a sex toy, but still fun. It comes from an older web, when sites routinely pointed outward and readers were encouraged to wander.
The idea is wonderfully simple: independently maintained websites link themselves in a circle, each displaying a small navigation box with Previous, Random, and Next. Keep clicking Next and eventually the path comes back around. It’s très democratic. Nobody gives up a website, moves onto a common platform, or becomes somebody else’s “content.” Each little web house remains its own, with the ring providing a path between them.
Sooo, introducing The Spankscuary Webring: a hand-built neighbourhood for spanking stories, art, history, humour, and community. Right now, a very small neighborhood, with plenty of room to grow.
Before Google Became the Map
One of the most consistently visited pages on Mija’s Room is the links page, which is interesting because a links page is basically an exit ramp. People arrive on my site and deliberately look for ways to leave. According to most contemporary ideas about engagement, that should be terrible web design. I think it’s the point.
When I teach students how to write for the web, I tell them to look at Wikipedia and link heavily. A hyperlink is a kind of digital citation: it says that an idea has a history, a person has context, information came from somewhere, and there is somewhere else to go for more.
The early web understood that instinctively. A good site didn’t try to become the whole internet; it pointed outward, and other sites pointed back. Before Google became the default map, much online discovery happened through those human-made paths: links pages, blogrolls, friends’ recommendations, one site leading to three more because someone had taken the time to collect places worth visiting.
Some links pages went much further. Wintermute’s enormous annotated links page, for example, didn’t just collect URLs. He added descriptions, recommendations, warnings, memories, and context, turning the page into a kind of map of the spanking web he knew. It wasn’t merely an index but an act of curation: I know this place. Here’s what I found there. Here’s why it might be worth a visit.
A hyperlink is a citation; an annotated links page is a recommendation; a webring turns those recommendations into a path readers can wander.
Google. It’s Always Google.
I blame Google for breaking the internet. Or at least for breaking my favorite pieces of it.
To be fair, Google solved a real problem by becoming astonishingly good at finding things. Once search became the default map of the web, many of the little paths people had built for one another began to look unnecessary. We didn’t stop making links pages, directories, blogrolls, and webrings because they stopped working. We stopped because Google could do much of the same work better, faster, and without requiring us to maintain anything ourselves.
The same pattern showed up elsewhere. In 2001, Google bought Deja News, a searchable Web archive and gateway into Usenet, and folded it into Google Groups. Usenet was a decentralized network that belonged to no company; Google Groups was a Google product. But Google increasingly presented old Usenet newsgroups and its own Web-based groups through the same service and interface, muddying the distinction between them. That created cultural confusion as well as technical confusion. Usenet communities had their own conventions, developed over many years: read the FAQ, lurk before posting, don’t top post, quote only what was needed, trim signatures, and learn the culture of a group before barging into it. People arriving through Google Groups often had no idea where they even were. Through no fault of their own, they could enter what looked like an ordinary Web discussion group not realizing they had stepped into a much older community with its own customs and memory.
Something similar happened with RSS. Blogging developed around an open standard that let readers subscribe directly to sites, but Google Reader became such a popular and convenient way to read those feeds that when Google shut it down in 2013, many ordinary users behaved as though RSS itself had disappeared. Google didn’t invent Usenet or RSS, and it didn’t own either one. It made itself an extraordinarily convenient layer between people and decentralized systems that already worked, until many of us stopped seeing the system underneath the layer.
One of the greatest pieces of internet nonsense we told ourselves early in the 21st century was that younger people were “digital natives,” as though being surrounded by digital technology were the same thing as understanding it.
At 81, my father has no interest in social media. When his neighbors tried to persuade him to join Nextdoor, his response was essentially, “Just come knock. There’s coffee.” He’s never had a Facebook account, but he’s used Excel since its DOS days and can make it do things many of my twenty-year-old students wouldn’t know how to begin.
The students I teach aren’t stupid. They’ve grown up with systems designed to hide much of how computers work. I can spend weeks getting them accustomed to consistently naming research PDFs, and I’ve had to explain shared folders, word wrap, and that word processors have a setting for double spacing. These aren’t advanced technical skills. They’re habits of digital housekeeping that software increasingly makes unnecessary.
Paul often says he learned to code and debug because computer magazines printed entire game programs, literally pages of code to type in. If everything went in correctly, there was a game at the end. Except it never all went in correctly. Sometimes the mistake was his; sometimes it was in the magazine. But he wanted to play, so he had to find the problem and fix it. In 1984, playing a computer game meant having one’s hands literally all over the code.
That kind of hands-on computing involved plenty of friction, much of it annoying. Nobody needs to return to tiny hard drives, collapsed file trees, dial-up modems, or being scolded on Usenet because a signature file wasted bandwidth. But some of the work we eliminated along with that friction also taught us how systems worked, how to maintain our own part of them, and how to fix things when they broke.
Some of it wasn’t merely friction. Some of it was participation.
Webrings work because every site maintains its tiny piece of the common path without surrendering ownership to a larger system. (Don’t make the ring a horseshoe.)
So if there’s an independent spanking-related site, blog, archive, art project, history project, forum, or other odd little corner of the web out there, come join us. I’m not interested in resurrecting obsolete technology simply because it’s old. I’m interested in what some of those old structures made possible: independent places, human recommendations, paths outward, and a little more responsibility for the web we actually want to inhabit.
On one level, that’s an easy question to answer. This past year I’ve written about ASSville and Usenet, Saint Clare, travelling to England, Wales, Ireland, Las Vegas, San Diego, and, well, lots of places with Sutti, school uniforms, gardens, old books, new books, and whatever else happened to catch my attention. Looking back over the archive, I’m also genuinely startled by how much I actually posted between my first anniversary post on June 20, 2025 and now. Because there was so much more I intended to write about.1There are, I confess, 17 drafts in various states of “written.” And a lot of other ideas. Still, there are, as of today, 110 published posts on Mija’s Room. Seventy-three of them were written during that period.
That’s about two-thirds of the blog. And that number doesn’t capture the scale of it, because some posts run well over 5,000 words. Nor does the archive show how much writing was happening when I wasn’t posting. There were months when very little appeared on the site, but I was still writing constantly. Saint Clare School, Inez especially, is an iceberg. What I’ve posted is only the smallest visible part of a much larger body of letters, diaries, reports, scenes, notes, timelines, and other material I’ve been building behind the scenes.
So the rhythm of the blog isn’t really one of writing and not writing. It’s more a matter of what rises to the surface.
Since Sutti and I first travelled to the UK and Ireland in Summer 2025, and especially since we returned to England (just England this time) in March/April 2026, a number 1Higher than four, lower than forty-two (so far anyway).of people have asked how I managed to fly with Sutti in the cabin to London.2Questions from friends and blog readers. Heck, even the travel-certificate team at Sutti’s vet’s office asked if I’d write something they could use with future clients.
Higher than four, lower than forty-two (so far anyway). ↩︎
2
Questions from friends and blog readers. Heck, even the travel-certificate team at Sutti’s vet’s office asked if I’d write something they could use with future clients.↩︎
I found this story while looking through soc.sexuality.spanking posts. I originally wrote and posted it on June 4, 20101So it’s old enough to drive here in Los Angeles! for the SSC Summer 2010, where it was entered in the genre category. The genre was science fiction.
I’ve removed the old Usenet line breaks and corrected a few obvious typographical errors, but otherwise the story appears here as it was posted in 2010.
Copyright 2010 to <mija (at) the treehouse (dot) net>. Please respect this copyright. Don’t distribute or archive this story in any way except for personal use without explicit permission. No, it’s not in the public domain. Ask first, okay? Thanks.
The Adjustment F/f by Mija
Her dog chased the tennis ball across the garden, turned, and pelted back to her. Alice watched, marveling at Dobbie’s focus.
She threw the ball harder, farther. Time slowed as she threw and Dobbie fetched, the blue sky and green grass of June wrapping them in a perfect day—
—shattered by the shout of “Alice Michelle, you get in here right now.”
Passante asked a wonderful question in reply to “Once Upon a Time in ASSville.” They began by noting how imaginative the old ASSville/SSS community looked from the outside, then asked how the stories actually got written.1I’m replying here especially meaning stories. The “community posts” that were more collective fiction happened very quickly.
Were most people putting them all together in one sitting, or would they write them elsewhere and transcribe them into digital text?
It’s hard to get a sense for how long things took when you only have posts and timestamps, but surely everyone wasn’t just firing off these novellas over a cup of coffee, were they?
No, though I drank an awful lot of after-hours coffee. Plenty of nights I stayed up all night coaxing an idea out of my head and onto paper or screen before it could get away. The longer answer is that the timestamp lies. Not maliciously, or even with intent. On Usenet, the timestamp tells us when something was posted to the server.2Note: that’s not the same as when it appeared to readers, which could vary depending on where on the network it was injected and when it hit a particular reader’s feed. From the writer’s perspective, the timestamp is the end.
The timestamp leaves out the actual life of the story: the first notes in a journal, words whispered to a lover, drafts sent to a friend, sections added by another writer, endings rewritten three times. It can’t show the scene that had been sitting in the most secret part of the author’s imagination since they were twelve, waiting for people who might understand it.
When I opened the group, I couldn’t see any of that unless the author explained it in the foreword.3Which a lot of us did because we were wordy like that. But other people, Lurking Dragon comes to mind, never posted anything about themselves. A story could look as if it had simply arrived, but the lived rhythm was full of delay, absence, drafting, return, and rediscovery.
Writing Without Connection
1990s hardware and connectivity shaped all of this: newsreaders, dorm-room computers, work machines, shared family computers, floppy disks, Zip disks, printed stories, and the simple fact that people did not carry the internet around with them. That deserves its own post, and I’ll come back to it. For now, the important point is simpler: writing and connection were not the same thing.
In 1997, when I left my dorm room, I left the internet too. Staying in, I’d be online for hours, reading the group, answering email, writing in PINE, drafting in BBEdit, and falling down whatever rabbit holes Usenet opened that day. But when I left for class, dinner, the library, a movie, someone else’s room, or even off-campus, I was gone. Not symbolically gone. Actually gone: no notifications, no texts, no quick checking the thread from a bus stop, no glancing at comments while waiting for coffee.
I’m replying here especially meaning stories. The “community posts” that were more collective fiction happened very quickly. ↩︎
2
Note: that’s not the same as when it appeared to readers, which could vary depending on where on the network it was injected and when it hit a particular reader’s feed. ↩︎
3
Which a lot of us did because we were wordy like that. But other people, Lurking Dragon comes to mind, never posted anything about themselves. ↩︎
Today, January JULY 11, England beat Norway in their World Cup match and are advancing still further/higher in the tournament. I watched the match here in Long Beach knowing so many of my friends and beloveds were watching with levels of interest and anxiety all over the world. It was oddly comforting to know we all doing the same thing at the same time. That made the world feel a little smaller. Hooray!
I recalled this 2011 story (and the actual spanking) because of a series of Tweets JustAnotherBoomer posted about giving a punishment spanking to his MLB1An FYI – That stands for “My Lovely Bride” not “Major League Baseball.”
When my lovely bride arrived home from breakfast with her sisters, I surprised her a bit by greeting her right at the door with a kiss, and surprised her more by then firmly taking her ear and marching her to where I’d turned out a dining chair.
The events below happened 16 and a half years ago – I was really this thoughtless and faced what were painful consequences. That didn’t happen a lot, surely not as much as I deserved, but I remember each one. I remember this one as one of the hardest I’ve ever received as a punishment. Others were more formal, planned rather than, as this one was, given in the moment. It so happened that this time my careless naughtiness coincided with my bedtime, How fortunate.
I mean, fortunate for the narrative! Not for me! Yet also, how fortunate for me too.
And how am I? Well, I miss Paul and 2011 tonight. Feeling watched over, safe, and loved. 2I know I am all of those things. But there’s nothing and no one that ever affirmed it like my beloved and that ebony brush.
Below is what I posted on The Punishment Book on January 11, 2011.
[My dad is currently out of town for a week. The plan was that I’d be spanked each night. Nice spankings though. Except, well, I got in the way of that lovely plan.]
As Paul circa 2011 reported in a not-at-all cryptic comment on Twitter:
Not meant as ooo-look-at-us, but @eltercerojo went to bed genuinely scolded and spanked tonight. Both real and surprisingly resonant.
That’s the short version. All of it is true. This is going to be the longer story, one maybe that will keep something like it from happening again anytime soon. As I’ve reported repeatedly in the past, most of my being in trouble and punishments happen not because of anything willful, but because I either don’t think things through or am not paying attention to what I’m doing.
When I wrote about my summer 2025 spent roaming the British Isles with faithful Sutti , I mentionedannounced whirled about in excitement, with the news for my birthday I’d finally acquired the new school uniform of my dreams and worn it to Whitby Abbey.
ChatGPT generated. This came out better than I expected.
and I said there was a reason this particular uniform mattered so much to me beyond the obvious fact that it’s exceptionally good-looking. I’ve been meaning to explain ever since, although the explanation turns out to involve nearly thirty years, the early online spanking community, two summers in Edinburgh, a long-vanished department-store tea shop, the first Saint Clare story, and one school tie that crossed the Atlantic before Paul and I had ever met.
The story of this gorgeous uniform begins in Spring 1997. Paul and I had only recently started corresponding. He was a graduate student in Edinburgh, I was beginning my MA/PhD in Los Angeles, and neither of us had yet met anyone from the online spanking community in person. Most of the people who mattered to us there existed primarily as words on a screen: names, voices, jokes, arguments, stories, opinions, and personalities, all of them vividly real and yet still somehow beyond the edges of ordinary life.
Around that time, a newsgroup couple with a Daddy/daughter relationship posted an account of a trip to Britain during which they’d gone shopping for a school uniform in Edinburgh. The “daughter” wanted a proper UK-style uniform, and together they’d visited a shop, chosen one, and taken it away with them. The completed uniform included the school’s blazer, kilt, and tie.1
An example of an ASSville community post, referred to in earlier Notes from Assville posts.
This one dates from September 1999 and comes from WACK, ASSville’s entirely fictional local television station. It was written as a bit of communal mischief: an attempt to interrupt a testy off-topic political debate, make sport of a sudden plague of trolls and sock-puppets pretending to be newsgroup regulars, and remind everyone that, really, we had so much better nonsense available to us, some of which even involved spanking.
Like many ASSville posts, it is full of inside jokes and probably makes the most sense if you lived there. It assumes a town with neighbourhoods, landmarks, celebrities, grudges, running jokes, in-jokes, out-jokes, borrowed personas, and public institutions no one had officially created but everyone somehow recognized. WACK was not real, of course, except in the way so much of ASSville was real: because enough of us wrote as though it were. And because we wanted to be there. There is a lot in this that is about seeing each other, and being seen, in the peculiar sideways fashion of the group.
Looking at it now, I’m struck by its odd relationship to the kinds of fictional documents I’ve been making almost thirty years later for the Saint Clare/Inez project: staff minutes, school records, prefect reports, letters saved when they should have been burned. The WACK guide is sillier, ruder, and much more obviously communal, but it belongs to the same impulse. It is world-building by paperwork. A fake schedule for a fake television station in a fake town that nevertheless says something true about the people who were there.
Some of the references will be opaque now. Though, to be fair, some were opaque then unless you were following exactly the right threads in exactly the right mood. But that was part of ASSville too. Like any town, it had local knowledge, local gossip, local weather, and occasional infestations.
This was one way we cleaned up the streets and tried to make each other laugh. Or groan.
FROM THE BOARDING HOUSE
Penthouse Suite (Okay, so it’s the right attic, gimme a break!)
13 September 1999
Darling,
Thanks for the *fab* job offer. It took hardly any blackmail at all to convince MollyB and Randi to accept. We’re *all* about being your new booking agents, really. Randi will, of course, continue on in her position as Director of Sarcasm and MollyB will be, as ever “working” on her novel.
And just to show you we *don’t* intend to compost and take salary in (unlike some other employees we *could* mention — though naturally won’t), last night over triple fudge sundaes we spent literally *minutes* working out a new programming guide. Not that there’s anything wrong with the old one of course. Still, there’s got to be more to life than spanking machines and sorority initiations.
Hopefully, we’ve catered to the needs of most of the town interest groups (including both sides of the animal debate ).
Ta,
Mija – la Media Diva
PS. Any problems with this line-up are entirely Randi’s fault. Of course.
