Paula Meadows: 8 Questions with the Artist
Welcome back to Wednesdays with Gin. Every Wednesday I share a new post on Smiles and Spanks. This week’s post features my 8 question interview with Paula Meadows, also known as Lynn Paula Russell.
1. You worked as a model, illustrator, writer and editor, and those different roles seem to have shaped one into one another. Across all of those experiences, which one had the biggest influence on the artist you became, and how has that influence stayed with you?
None of these were influences exactly, although they were all outlets that encouraged the expression of private things I hadn’t shared before. The real influence for the new art happened before I started working for Janus. It was the decision to start modelling, and the shedding of deeply held sexual repressions, that really moved something. This launched me into a different world where I met swingers and those who were involved in acting out Story of O fantasies. I made new friends and there was a wonderful sense of openness and a complete freedom to explore our sexuality without any shame. It was this that freed up my art and set it off in a new direction.
Must say too, that having to write editorials gave me the chance to experiment with writing – something I never thought I could do. All in all, I consider myself to have been most fortunate. How many of us actually get paid to explore and express the subjects that fascinate us?
When I became involved with Janus as illustrator, I had to tune in to what was needed. Gradually I began to understand the world of cp, involving the punishment of naughty disrespectful girls. This was never a fantasy that appealed to me at all. It was quite different from the idea of a passionate woman who chooses to submit to a master figure.
The photograph on the left is the original image Paula used as the inspiration for her cover illustration of Fessée 1, published in 1989, shown here on the right.
Janus readers did not want to hear that the girl welcomed the painful treatment. They wanted her to glower and look resentful but then after the discipline she had to become genuinely contrite and tearful. Nowadays this fantasy is quite unacceptable but it can be viewed in retrospect as a masculine backlash against the rising tide of feminism.
The experience of working in this genre – from Janus to Fessée and Februs did have an impact on my life, though. There was a period when every day I was devoted to either writing about, illustrating or being involved with spanking in some way. At first I thought, ‘what a fun job I have!’ But this situation eventually led to a satiation. Whenever you do something to make a living there is a danger that it will lose its spontaneous excitement. It becomes an obsessional, repetitive activity and you start to ask yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’
2. Your drawings are remarkably good at capturing the moment just before something happens, the anticipation, uncertainty, defiance or surrender. Was that something you consciously tried to create, or did you discover over time that those moments were what interested you most?
Yes, definitely these moments were interesting to me. It is the relationship of the participants in the scene that matter, and what they are feeling. The actual spankings may be very similar but the build-up is always unique.
3. Your personal experiences inevitably found their way into your artwork, and you often imagined yourself and your friends in the pictures. How did you decide what belonged in a drawing as something real and personal, and what needed to remain entirely within the world of fantasy?
I don’t recall ever having to make this distinction when I was doing magazine illustrations. I simply tried to bring the story alive, and also remain within the guidelines laid down by the publishers.
The first edition of Histoire d’O by Pauline Réage, published in 1954. Beside it is one of Paula Meadows’ illustrations inspired by The Story of O.
When I was doing strip cartoons for publication in France there was a lot more freedom. I was able to devise my own stories and any favourite fantasies could be included. That was a really liberating job!
You ask – ‘What needed to remain entirely within the world of fantasy?’ That’s a difficult question. I think everything we fantasise about needs to be brought out in the open and acknowledged. I remember doing a set of drawings for the Story of O and realising just how extreme it was. It was these graphic expressions of female submission that finally made me question why I kept wanting to inflict physical ordeals on myself.
A bit of consensual spanking where both parties are stimulated and fulfilled is a relatively simple exchange; but our fantasy life constantly experiments with power games to achieve its ends. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this is exclusively what sexual fantasy is all about, what gives it the arousing factor – it is our exercising of power over one another.
When I used to go to spanking parties I can honestly say that I had a lot of light hearted fun and experienced a wonderful sense of camaraderie. These occasions offered a chance to indulge the exhibitionist-side of myself within a perfectly safe environment. But there was a much darker side too which still worries me to this day. Sometimes I was concerned with how some women would seek out dangerous ordeals with what seemed to me to be untrustworthy dominant men. But there was also the dominatrix who brought her slave to one of my parties and proceeded to thrash him with relentless fury, and walk on his spine wearing stiletto heals. The man made no attempt to stop it and I was alarmed by how some of the other women were aroused by this spectacle (they were alarmed too!). In the end I had to put a stop to it.
4. You once wrote about how important it was to you that Februs gave you the freedom to express your own point of view, especially at a time when readers were often suspicious of supposedly female voices in erotic magazines. What do you think has changed most for women expressing their own voices in erotic art and spanking since then?
Before the 1980s there was a fear that women’s voices might be rather dampening when it came to erotic writing… and far too emotional. It was assumed that women didn’t have erotic desires, in the same way that men did, so our real voices were never heard.
Betty Dodson with the Hitachi Magic Wand, photo circa the 1970s.
When I started doing erotic art in the early 80s it felt as if there was a new freedom in the air, and I definitely felt part of it. I remember discovering the pioneering work of American artist Betty Dodson who used to run workshops teaching women how to masturbate! This was so courageous, and so necessary. My mother’s generation would have fainted away with shock and embarrassment at the mere notion of such an outrageous thing. But really, until we can love the intimate parts of our body and understand how they work, how can we possibly know what we desire and how to express our sexuality?
‘What has changed for women expressing their own voices in erotic art and spanking in the new century?’ After Februs folded in 2004, we have seen the demise of most erotic magazines and all the spanking ones. They have all gone online or disappeared and since I don’t follow any spanking sites or blogs I don’t know what women are saying these days. I don’t see much in the way of erotic art either. The only art that emerges in mainstream is very negative and political.
I can remember that it was always easier to talk about women spanking men than the other way round. Sadly, nowadays we hear so much about domestic abuse, misogyny, and the MeToo movement. Women’s discontent and long held resentment has burst out, which has led to an uneasy situation on the surface. But perhaps, when we get through this phase, men and women might at last see each other as equal. Equal, but not necessarily the same. It has been a long haul but I believe that the spanking and S&M scenes, mainly relegated to a secret world, have given us safety valves and a chance to explore those forbidden parts of our nature in a safe way.
5. Your drawings and photographs didn't just inspire new ideas and desires; for many people, seeing spanking and eroticism portrayed so openly helped them feel more comfortable with their own interests rather than shy away from them. When you were creating such an extensive body of work, did you ever imagine that people would continue to discover it and relate to it year after year for decades?
No, I certainly didn’t. There was no internet back in the 80s. Who could have foreseen how our work and the things we said would go on being available on that unimaginably huge database. Mind you this can also have unwelcome consequences… if you are trying to live down something foolish you once did or said, those things will constantly be there following you around!
My contribution was mainly limited to a small world of like-minded people and never received any accolades in the mainstream art world. I think when you are upfront and honest about what interests you, and share real thoughts about it, readers sense you are genuine… that you are not insulting them by treating them as ‘punters’ (how I hate that word).
6. In your writing about your New York experiences, you wrote about “magic” coming and going throughout your life, about searching for new things to recapture powerful moments, and about wishing you could keep that “special magic” alive when repeating something you loved. What do you think creates that magic in an experience? Is it novelty, intensity, repetition, or something else?
Ah, magic… well, that is completely unpredictable. I think it happens when you suddenly tune in to something beyond yourself. Trying to recapture it is always a mistake.
At magic times things flow along in a natural way. There is an almost mystical aspect to them, making you feel liberated and in touch with everything – fully present in the moment!
This can come with a spanking, but it can be anything that makes you wake up and step out of the everyday, humdrum world into something more intense and real. It has nothing to do with repetition. Repeating the same act time and time again may be pleasurable but it can be just acting out an old obsession, trying to recapture the fear and thrill of something that happened in the past when we were young and much more impressionable. This can send you into a sort of hypnotic trance. It can be powerful, but I wouldn’t call it magical.
7. You’ve written that the spanking scene appealed to you because it was “something new to try.” What was it about spanking that kept drawing you back and made it such an important part of your life and creative work for so many years, across so many different mediums?
Being spanked had a definite effect on me. It woke me up and made me glow. I felt relaxed and aroused – released from inhibitions. It was simply that. I never had a fantasy about having been naughty and needing to be punished.
I don’t know how this simple discovery morphed into the extreme, rather pseudo-religious, undertones of Pauline Réage’s Story of O, which seems to be about a woman’s complete negation of herself. That’s not the way I saw it at first – I just saw an opportunity to be paraded around in my leather corset and skilfully whipped by a man who could ‘master’ me. It was a sort of exquisite performance. In my imagination, these scenes were full of passionate intensity.
But once I had entered that fantasy it was difficult to extricate myself. It was as if a deep desire to submit had been set in motion. Nowadays, on reflection, I would say that this revealed a deep seated lack of belief in myself and a need to be controlled by someone else. But in reality, it was I who was literally forcing myself to be constantly punished! I must have believed I deserved it. Quite honestly, this makes me shudder now.
Nowadays I much prefer the light hearted role play depicted in most of my magazine illustrations and prefer not to dwell on the more extreme aspects I sometimes encountered. Life can go off at a tangent when you are exploring sexuality. Even so, I was very grateful for the opportunities to have these experiences. It is important to know ourselves, and sex drive is the most fundamental part of us… and the part we tend to cover up the most.
8. After everything you’ve created, experienced and written about, is there still a part of your creative life that feels unfinished? Something you’re still curious about, still want to explore, or simply haven’t quite finished saying or creating?
Yes, I feel very unfinished! At my age I no longer feel curious about what people get up to sexually, but the subject of gender is still interesting. Nowadays there is much blurring of the old certainties. The concepts of Male and Female still cause great concern, many people choosing to avoid falling into either category and preferring to live in a ‘non-binary’ world. We are so reticent to accept any labels in case it limits the way we are treated.
Over the last twenty five years I’ve been studying more esoteric subjects – like the Tarot – where the concepts of Male and Female have very clear symbolic functions. But that doesn’t mean human beings fit into two distinct camps. I rather like the fact that our gender has become so fluid and unique to our own self-expression… provided we don’t lose the basic meaning of gender, and can celebrate the different perspectives, rather then resenting them.
My artwork has lately become more focused on the symbols of the mind, and how we get in touch with our subconscious – but maybe I was always interested in that.
And on that note, I will bring this interview to an end, before I wander too far away from the central theme and wind up in deep water…
A very special thank you to Paula for taking the time to answer my questions and for sharing your experiences and thoughts with me and the readers of Smiles and Spanks!
Through the Talisman Fine Art Website, you can purchase spanking and erotic artwork by Lynn Paula Russell, as well as illustrations from her Bodyscapes and nature series, some of which are featured in the slideshow above.
And, for those interested, every issue of Janus, Februs and Fessée as well as more spanking related content is available to purchase from the Janus Spanking Website.
As always, if there's a topic you'd like me to cover in a future post, or if you'd like to inquire about a session, feel free to email me at NaturallyGin@gmail.com.
Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!
