Inspiration is Where You Find It (2): Mind Control, Phone Boxes, Catalogues, Friends Reunited (And Another Bit of Penny's Punishments Too (From Janus)

My eyes are still a little problematic so for a while text will be a bit sparse, but as I have said in the last few posts; I will go over these posts again with updated text, labels and explanations etc once my vision settles down and will then post links to the updated pages. So for now mostly pics. First I thought I ought to post the rest of the pics from that classic photo-story, Penny's Punishments, that I scanned from Janus. I had intended to do so, partly for the sake of completeness and partially to provide some sort of pictorial content while writing was being such a strain. In so doing it occurred to me that there is another tale to tell, unwritten yet embedded within these pictures - to my mind there is a tale within a tale here if one looks deeply enough. Now that I'm thinking about it I do remember it occurring to me at the time and that it was something that fired my imagination ; as it does so still now, looking at them again through fresh eyes.

On the surface, for the time it was a fairly standard Janus spanking / caning / discipline photo story ( click on the link above or here to read more of the outline), but I like to feel that there is a more sinister undercurrent. Particularly in the pyjamas scene, but also to some extent in the following two pictures, the girl has this strangely emotionless look about her, expressionless, blank; even at the time, being relatively youthful and largely unaware of the mind control story genre, I thought she looked sort of...well, hypnotized, for want of any better description.

The impression I received was that, although not eluded to in the text, her guardians had more of a hold over her than might be explainable by the threat of a caning from time to time...Soon after, I came across the works of Victor Bruno wherein, at least in his 'private boarding ' reform school' tales, the use of hypnosis (and even brainwashing) was alluded to -although sadly, never elaborated on beyond expounding on the various benefits in keeping the hapless inmates of his various institutions under control.

And there you have it; notwithstanding one or two other influences that I will discuss at a later date, my interest in mind control, especially in the use of hypnosis, was born. What with my frustration at the lack of detail included in the Victor Bruno novels and then having later come across, first the Erotic Mind Control Story Archive ( click to visit) and then story ideas put out on various newsgroups by Acid Tony (under more than one name I think - click to read) you can, I'm sure, understand the strong element of psychological control and punishment, of various forms and levels of subtlety, that weaves its way through INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1. I have never viewed this element as any replacement for good old-fashioned corporal punishment but rather as an adjunct to it - much like Acid Tony, I see each being in support of the other.

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While on the subject of hidden meaning and inspiration here are a few scans of a couple of pages from a very mainstream 1980s fashion catalogue (below). At the time I thought of her as the perfect mistress figure, a couple of steps up from the governess so to speak, perhaps the haughty guardian of some hapless browbeaten girl. Later she was to become (as part of an amalgam of characters, along with certain other influential models and pictures) the model for the character of Lady Madison Daisy Bartlet as appears in INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1 (click to read extract on this site).

More hidden content: At one point in my life I worked as a cycle dispatch rider in the West End of London and would often throughout the day have occasion to visit a phone box or two. There were always plenty of cards advertising various 'personal services' and from time to time one would catch my eye. This example led me to search for and explore all sorts of medical fetish literature that I didn't know even existed at the time; I wanted to know just what these procedures might consist of. More importantly I wondered just how such procedures might be applied to the young ladies that by then populated the stories and fantasies that, in the absence of suitably imaginative published literature, I was beginning to concoct for my own amusement by this point. These tales existed only as bare bone fragments of ideas that this stage, but as I learnt more about this new world new storylines evolved and necessarily became more complex in order to incorporate techniques and procedures that I was learning about. All sorts of devilish torments came and went in my imaginary tableaux - the ideas that would one day grow into the INSTITUTIONALISED series were beginning to take root. Incidently, a nice collection of such cards can be viewed at Mike's Spanking Booth (click to visit).