The world exists in three dimensions, but we see it in two, albeit with the slight depth perception afforded by the slight offset of our two eyes. But the third dimension is what gives us the choice between the subtle variations of viewing angle that are my subject today.
Let’s begin with the classical perfection of what you might call a four-square view of a spanking, for which our initial illustration is a misty moment in the French movie La Fille de 14 Juillet (2013):
For those who are interested, that’s Charlotte (Marie-Lorna Vaconsin) getting some ‘fatherly’ treatment from Pator (Vincent Macaigne). And my telling you that implies one of the limitations of this otherwise generally pleasing angle: we get a very good view of most aspects of the spanking, but potentially at the cost of anonymizing one of the two parties involved.
When a girl is over the knee, the thing she’s most likely to be looking at is the floor.
Even when the focal point of the shot isn’t her bottom, the position tends to cut her out of effective human interaction, putting her into a situation where for the time being her primary sensory experience is what’s happening further down herself. Look at the disconnect between their two faces here:
(I’m afraid I don’t know what that’s from; it looks like a TV show, but may not be, and he resembles the American comic actor George Lopez, but also may not be. if anyone can identify it, please say!)
So the four-square angle can bring out the fact that, despite the intimacy of being over a man’s knee, there is something potentially isolating about being spanked. We can reinforce the point with examples from a 1970s Kung Fu movie, a 1960s comic-book superhero wrestler from Mexico and a 1950s US high school candid:
It is possible to get a bit more character into a four-square scene by showing more of her face, but that’s easier for an illustrator than a photographer,
because the pen and the paintbrush can manipulate the human body into poses that seem more natural than they may actually be.
Getting the girl’s face out of profile in a four-square shot involves positioning her neck in a way that wouldn’t be comfortably sustainable in reality,
which is why models and actresses sometimes need a bit of help in photographs:
So with that in mind, let’s change the viewing angle, with assistance from a birthday spanking of 2005.
Favoring the front end can open up the girl’s expressive reaction to a remarkable degree.
It only needs a very slight shift away from four square to make a big difference to our sense of the participants as distinct personalities in the scene,
which means, in theory, that she can make a more meaningful contribution to it as a scene, rather than remaining fundamentally passive.
Of course, there are always exceptions where the girl is still shut into her private world of posterior discomfort, sometimes hidden behind her disordered hair,
or else self-isolated by the simple act of closing her eyes.
That last one illustrates another distinctive feature of the ‘forward angle’, which may be a good or a bad thing depending on your inclination. You can see it again in this birthday spanking candid, but you’ll have to look deep into the picture, well beyond her expressive face in the foreground:
What you don’t see with this angle is even more obvious in these two examples from newspaper strips of 1941 and 1967,
where the jutting hemlines make it pretty clear that each girl is being spanked on the seat of her panties, without in any way compromising the standards of a family publication in the middle of the last century.
Keep that in mind as once again we change the angle, this time with the help of multiple iterations of the same extended spanking from the Mexican comic book Memin Pinguin, as first drawn in 1969 and later redrawn for the cover of a reprint in 1983:
And round the back we go:
Some films and publications aren’t burdened by the limitations of the American press, and simply enjoy the view.
Picking up the other theme, this is obviously an angle that tends to favor the spanker far more than the spanked.
The girl will often be sidelined, reduced to just a bottom to be spanked,
albeit sometimes an attractively packaged bottom:
It takes a lot more neck-craning for her to get into the picture:
But there are some rear-favoring shooting angles that would take an Exorcist-style demonic head-swivel for an actress to make herself seen. Here are instances from a Czech costume drama of 1938 and a French spy thriller of 1964:
Then there’s the moment when the sassy sharpshooter Lucha (Lucha Moreno) is spanked in the Mexican musical Western No Soy Monedita de Oro (I’m Not a Gold Coin; 1959). Gallantry compels us to take a look at her face first,
because the cinematographer, Enrique Wallace, opts to get right down to what you might call the core essence of the spanking, with the frame zoomed in as close as it can feasibly go:
We’re not completely done with viewing angles, but there’s more to shooting a spanking than that, and at this point, we must address another issue that has been creeping up on us, and will come into plain sight next week.
Our survey of the spanking dribs and drabs of the silver screen now reaches the war decade, and our first task is simply to record a rumored spanking publicity still with Carole Landis for Road Show (1941), in which she plays the independent-minded carnival owner Penguin Moore.
There’s nothing remotely relevant in the film itself, and at this time Carole was trying to avoid being too much associated with cheesecake pics, which she thought incompatible with being considered a serious actress; so it’s quite possible that the alleged publicity photo is nothing more than somebody’s (understandable) wishful thinking.
i can’t be sure whether the same is true of our next case, also from 1941, because I haven’t actually seen the film, and any who have done may perhaps not have been able to follow the precise detail of the story, because it’s in Swedish. The title, Landstormens Lilla Argbigga, translates roughly as ‘The Soldier’s Little Temper Tantrum’, and no doubt refers to spoiled Marianne Norrenius (Sickan Carlsson),
who joins the army reserves, and is one of the group assigned to her neighbor and admirer Viktor (George Fant) to be taught military discipline. The whisper is that there was also some less military discipline, administered with a riding crop in the over-the-knee position, and it is indeed the right kind of scenario for that; but with no available video, no photo and nothing definite in any contemporary commentary I’ve seen, the only thing is to add the film to the watch list and hope for more and better information in due course.
In October 1941, we have a slightly more definite informant, though not necessarily a more reliable one, in a correspondent to movie journalist Louella Parsons who signed himself ‘Aggravated’. What was he aggravated about? Intrusive incidental music!
‘Why is it that emotion on the screen is inevitably accompanied by a symphony orchestra? If “Lydia” grieves over a lost lover in the privacy of her boudoir – it sounds as if Stokowski was suddenly turned loose in the background; “Tarzan” bags a tiger to the strains of Wagner; and Jimmy Stewart spanks Lana Turner to the wafting melody of the “concerto”. If life would only be as kind and turn on the music when the income tax comes due!’
Never mind Lydia and Tarzan; the third example must refer to Ziegfeld Girl, released six months earlier, in which Gilbert Young and his girlfriend Sheila Regan are played by James Stewart and Lana Turner in their only film together.
She’s head-hunted from her job as a lift attendant to appear in one of impresario Florenz Ziegfeld’s shows, and he objects when she attracts a rich admirer after the first night. Eventually she’s a kept woman and their engagement’s off – a process that does indeed involve sentimental backing music, but sadly no spanking at all. So ‘Aggravated’s letter is interesting not as a tipoff to a hitherto unknown screen spanking, but for the way he seems to have thought of it as a standard romantic scenario that might be overlaid on the actual (and different) circumstances of the picture in question.
In Emergency Landing (1941), the ultra-callipygean Carol Hughes (soon to be spanked in a publicity still for Under Fiesta Stars) plays Betty Lambert, another spoiled society girl who takes against test pilot Jerry Barton (Forrest Tucker), who is trying to get her father, an aviation tycoon, to manufacture a robot-controlled airplane. In the course of the story, Betty tries to drive to Hollywood against her father’s wishes, but lack of gas leaves her stranded at Jerry’s desert weather bureau. This means, as one early review puts it, that he ‘gets a chance to give the girl the spanking she deserves’.
Sounds promising… What actually happens is that Jerry wires Betty’s father: ‘With your permission think can teach your daughter much needed lesson. Please answer immediately…’ The answer comes back: ‘Go to it. Betty needs discipline.’ Still promising… but it turns out that the reviewer was just being metaphorical about the spanking. What literally happens is that Betty is… made to do housework! Later on, her aunt (Evelyn Brent) tells her, ‘I ought to spank your…’, breaking off before direct mention of the beauteous target area, but nothing comes of it, alas.
But there actually is a spanking in There’s One Born Every Minute (1942). Well, almost…
It’s a comedy about advertising and politics, with a layer of supernatural fantasy in the form of a ‘living’ portrait of a family ancestor, Claudius Twine (Hugh Herbert), who is a recurring presence bestowing benign advice on his descendants. These include Helen Twine, played by Peggy Moran (also spanked in a publicity still for her last film but one, Treat ‘Em Rough).
Helen’s love-life, torn between her current and former boyfriends Lester Caldwalader (Scott Jorden) and Jimmy Hanagan (Tom Brown), provides a major strand of the plot. Despite ample evidence of Helen’s present antipathy to Jimmy, Lester becomes jealous, and the conversation ends up like this:
LESTER: If you don’t stop talking, I’ll turn you over my knee. HELEN: You and who else? (She slaps his face.)
He insists that she must decide between him and Jimmy, and the upshot is that she walks out on him, wanting neither of them nor indeed any man at all.
Jimmy gets into some difficulty over a dubious advertising campaign, but is ultimately justified, and Helen’s father is elected mayor despite political skulduggery by Lester’s father. So all is on course for a happy ending, with only Helen’s romantic life left unresolved. The victorious Mayor Twine tells Jimmy there’s something he needs to do, and whispers it in his ear. When Jimmy demurs, Twine says, ‘What are you, man or mouse?’ Jimmy decides he’s a man and goes off to the Twine family residence to do as has been suggested, which entails carrying Helen bodily over to the couch,
and putting her across his knee.
‘This has been coming to you for a long time,’ he tells her. But then the picture cuts to Claudius’ portrait on the wall, and we only hear 13 hard smacks before the sound fades down. Claudius observes:
‘One guy threatens to spank her and she pins a haymaker on him. The other guy actually does it and she falls in his arms.’
It is effectively the last moment of the film: he then goes off to play piano with a lady ghost and the ‘THE END’ caption comes up.
The next case is a strange one concerning The Forest Rangers (1942), ostensibly about ranger Don Stuart (Fred MacMurray) and his efforts to catch an arboreal arsonist, but actually about an ongoing catfight over him between his new wife Celia (Paulette Goddard) and his unrequitedly adoring work colleague Tana (Susan Hayward).
In a syndicated column published after the film was made but a month before it was released, Hedda Hopper wrote about male/female violence in the movies, and argued on the basis of seven examples (four from films that had not yet come out) that the ‘balance sheet’ was more or less even between the sexes. This was the case with The Forest Rangers as she described it:
‘Paulette Goddard, responding to the romantic urge, turns a fire hose on Fred MacMurray – and later he spanks her.’
But neither of these things actually happens in the film.
The role of Celia was originally intended for Madeleine Carroll, continuing her sparky pairing with MacMurray that never quite got as far as a spanking. She pulled out on medical advice to take a rest, and was replaced by Paulette Goddard, who had been originally cast as Tana, and who came to the production with two spanking scenes already on her CV (in North West Mounted Police and Reap the Wild Wind). Celia’s the usual wayward, thrill-seeking rich girl whom Don marries unconventionally early in the picture, and is advised by her father not to let her get away with anything. She becomes the usual fish out of water in the logging camp where Don is working, constantly blundering into trouble by disregarding his instructions.
What she doesn’t do is turn a fire hose on him; in fact, fire hoses barely feature before the climactic forest fire sequence. He does get soaked through her disobedience, though, in a good comedy sequence where she tries to follow him across a load of logs rolling free in the water, and he has to rescue her, but falls in himself. And he doesn’t spank her, or even manhandle her much, except when she finds her nailed boots stuck to the floor and he lifts her free.
But there is a marital quarrel towards the end of the film when she uses her father’s influence to get him what she considers to be a better job out east, so that she can take him away from Tana. In the aftermath, she is seen lying face down on her bed in the usual position of a soundly spanked girl…
which is not to say that anything of the sort has happened to her, of course. But the Hedda Hopper account is so specific about the incidents that one is compelled to wonder whether they might be deleted or alternative scenes from an earlier, superseded version of The Forest Rangers, rather than being merely the product of a gossip columnist’s overactive imagination. Such things did happen: later on there will be another example of how films developed during production, gaining and losing scenes rather than being predetermined by a script that was fixed before the cameras had begun to roll.
By the time the cameras rolled on the romantic period drama Saratoga Trunk in 1943, a spanking scene had already been eliminated. It featured the white British actress Flora Robson,
who played the black maid Angelique (in blackface make-up, which, though considered distasteful today, was a commonplace and unremarkable performance practice back then). She was due to be spanked by the hero, Clint Maroon, played by Gary Cooper. Five years earlier, he had demurred at spanking Claudette Colbert in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and had to be cajoled by Miss Colbert herself, but this time round there was a different reported reason why the scene was dropped: the main thread of the plot was Clint’s amours with Angelique’s mistress, Clio (Ingrid Bergman), and the studio, Warner Brothers, felt that this would be compromised if he were to do anything remotely romantic with the maid – and spanking could come under that heading, remember.
(The film was, incidentally, completed in June 1943 but then shelved until 1946 to make room for Warner’s to release patriotic war films instead.)
There are rumors that Roy Rogers spanks Dale Evans in Utah(1945).
He doesn’t, but the possibility is mentioned, and the story might have been a whole lot simpler if he had…
Dale plays Chicago singer Dorothy Bryant, who is rehearsing for a musical, Strictly from Dixie, which has all the hallmarks of a smash hit but turns out not to have the necessary financial backing.
To raise money to put into the show, she proposes to sell the Bar X, a Utah ranch she has inherited from her grandfather. She travels out west with her fellow showgirls and tells her plans to the ranch manager, who is named as well as played by Roy Rogers. He and his associate Gabby Whittaker (Gabby Hayes) don’t care for the plan, and Gabby offers Roy some advice:
GABBY: She’s a female ain’t she? City-bred or country-bred, they’re all alike. Take her over your knee! ROY: I’ve got a picture of me taking her over my knee. She’s got spirit. You can’t outfight her, you’ve got to outsmart her.
And the burden of the plot is how the outsmarting catastrophically backfires: they switch signs to make her believe Gabby’s run-down place is her ranch; as a result she is induced to sell the real Bar X to a fraudster for far less than its true value, and Roy has a lot of trouble putting matters to rights. So he’d have been better off giving her a spanking!
Shirley Temple was spanked with a hairbrush in a set of publicity stills for Kiss and Tell (1945) and threatened with a spanking in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), but she seems to have gotten even closer to some screen action in the film she made in between, Honeymoon(1947). She plays Barbara Olmstead, who is attempting a rendezvous in Mexico City with her serviceman fiancé Phil Vaughn (Guy Madison). When he doesn’t arrive, she seeks help from the American consul David Flanner (Franchot Tone), and finds herself falling for him. According to a press report from the set:
‘To snap her out of this temporary phase, Madison is required to grab her and as she struggles, whirl her around and over his knee for a good old-fashioned spanking. But Madison, shy and obviously afraid he may hurt the tiny star, treats her like a fragile flower. “You can’t hurt me, grab me like this,” Shirley says. And before he realizes what is happening she has applied a jiu-jitsu hold and tossed him head over heels.’
Everyone found this so funny that the director decided to include the throw in the scene – but with the comeback that Phil, as a soldier, also knows jiu-jitsu,
which means that Barbara still ends up across his knee, and the spanking proceeds as originally intended.
Only not in the final release print. Watch the film and what you’ll see is quite a similar scene, only with two key differences. The first is that the man involved is David Flanner, not Phil Vaughn: he finally loses his temper after Barbara’s attentions cause him trouble with both his diplomatic superiors and his fiancée, and when she will not listen to reason, tells her,
‘Young lady, it won’t even be partial reparation for what you’ve done to me, but I’m going to do something your parents obviously neglected. I’m going to spank some sense into you.’
There follows a chase around the table, then a cutaway to Phil outside hearing her cries of distress. He bursts into the room just in time to see David taking the jiu-jitsu fall (rather than, as some will no doubt have hoped, Barbara taking the spanking); and because he’s a diplomat, not a soldier, he doesn’t have the same combat training as Phil, nor the same chance to come out on top. And that’s the second difference: no spanking. Barbara flees, Phil pursues and confronts her, and then we get what looks like an alternative option to the reported spanking scene: Barbara tries and fails to throw Phil, and he responds by lifting her over his shoulder and tossing her into the swimming pool.
‘It’s just an old American custom,’ beams David as he watches. You can imagine just the same reaction if Phil were spanking Barbara. And then the picture ends with a brief view of Barbara and Phil at the altar.
Exactly what we make of this depends fundamentally on whether we believe the press report. A pertinent factor is that it was published in June 1947, a month after the film was released and a whole year after principal photography wrapped. So was it an old eye-witness report published in good faith even though changes had subsequently been made, or a publicity taradiddle that could be easily discredited by simply buying a ticket to see the film? We have no way of knowing, but the best-case scenario is that the original ending featured Phil spanking Barbara as described, and this evolved during production – and in that connection, perhaps it’s relevant that additional (or replacement?) scenes were shot in September 1946, several months after the main shooting period.
Not so her male co-stars on the historical romance Forever Amber (1947), in which she played the promiscuous heroine Amber St Clair: the publicity department spun the angle that it was an accident- and illness-prone set, with Cornell Wilde catching a cold, Richard Greene getting bruised after tripping over his own sword, Glenn Langen falling off a horse and hurting his back, Gilchrist Stuart getting a broken nose. And as for Leo G. Carroll…
He plays Goodgroome, Amber’s puritanical adoptive father. According to the publicity story, he got his injury, a broken arm, ‘as he tried to reach Linda to administer a spanking’.
This pertains to the opening scene when Amber defies Goodgroome’s plans for her marital future. He sends her to her room, then tells his wife that he has had enough of her ‘vain ways’ and ‘sinful pride’: he will make her behave like his daughter, ‘if it means the skin off her back entire’. Mrs Goodgroome persuades him not to use the whip, and in the event he doesn’t even use his hand: the spanking, whether attempted or actual, didn’t make the final cut, and then Goodgroome is left behind as Amber quickly absconds to a livelier life in fashionable London.
Another uncertain anecdote from a movie set saw print in August 1947, towards the end of production on My Girl Tisa (1948), set in 1905 New York and starring Lilli Palmer (who a few years later tried and failed to launch a Broadway production of The Little Hut, in which she would have been spanked).
In the film she plays Tisa Kepes, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who has to slave at multiple low-pay jobs to support herself while waiting for the chance of getting American citizenship. One day, the story goes, she was called to rehearse by director Elliot Nugent (who previously spanked Martha Raye during the making of Never Say Die). The particular scene he wanted to work on was one in which Tisa gets spanked. Lilli asked him to wait until she had changed out of her slacks and into costume, to which he pointed out that, as it was only a rehearsal, she didn’t actually need the costume. ‘That’s what you think!’ retorted Lilli, and when she returned, added, ‘See what I mean?’ She was now in a full period gown – with bustle!
The truth is that the impoverished Tisa doesn’t wear a bustle in the film, and in any event the closest she gets to a spanking is the following from Stella Adler:
Next up is an extract from a column by Hollywood gossip Harold Heffernan, published in November 1947 and previewing a scene in Big City (1948), the exact title of which is the more minor of the two mistakes in the first sentence:
‘Deadpan Virginia O’Brien gets spanked for a scene in The Big City. This low backslapping could result in her showing some emotion on the screen – a famous “first” indeed.’
This seems to be mainly an excuse for an ungallant snark at Miss O’Brien.
The disappointing fact is that she wasn’t in Big City, and therefore couldn’t be spanked in it. (She was on the point of taking an enforced career break when MGM didn’t renew her contract.) Heffernan had misheard or misremembered that one of the Big City stars was 11-year-old Margaret O’Brien (and I don’t feel the slightest inclination to find out whether or not she was spanked).
In Hazard(1948), Paulette Goddard plays gambling addict Ellen Crane who wagers her hand in marriage and loses – but then tries to welch on the deal. MacDonald Carey is J.D. Storm, the detective who’s hired to bring her back, and the progress of his assignment is detailed in the pictorial parabola across the newspaper advert:
You may welcome a closer look at the salient part:
And a better look at the publicity still that lies behind it:
It also made the title card, reversed into right-handedness:
But of course it’s not really a spanking in the strict sense of the word, so really that’s as much of our attention as it’s going to get!
For Them That Trespass (1949) is a post-Brighton Rock slice-of-lowlife British crime melodrama in which Christy Drew (Stephen Murray), a young would-be playwright from the middle classes, feels he needs experience of the raw, rough, real world. To that end, he starts drinking in plebeian bars and falls in with a bad crowd. For our purposes, what happens to him as a result is beside the point. What matters is that he is the unwitting catalyst for a bar fight between two young women, Frankie Ketchen (Rosalyn Boulter) and Olive Mockson (Vida Hope).
Vida Hope
The outcome has more than a whiff of Zola’s L’Assommoir: Olive finds herself bent over a table, has her skirt ripped off and then…
We end on the cusp of a new decade with The Reformer and the Redhead, made in the fall of 1949 but not released until May 1950. The redhead of the title is Kathy Maguire, a role originally intended for Lana Turner but ultimately played by June Allyson,
who had spankings to look forward to in Too Young to Kiss (1951) and a publicity still for the 1957 remake of My Man Godfrey, and also had one in prospect as The Reformer and the Redhead geared up for production.
The film is partly a screwball comedy, partly a light political drama: Bringing Up Baby meets Mr Smith Goes to Washington, if you like, though it’s not nearly as good a movie as either. In Kathy’s first scene with her father Kevin Maguire (Cecil Kellaway), he asks her, ‘Will you ever learn to control that temper?’ She doesn’t: after he is fired from his job as a zookeeper because he objects to a new display of hunting trophies belonging to corrupt politician John Parker (Ray Collins), she gets into a fist-fight with his niece (Kathleen Freeman) which lands her in court. To get out of an apparently open-and-shut case, she hires as her lawyer Andrew Hale (Dick Powell), a reforming mayoral candidate, and so the romancing begins…
At the end of August, when the movie was about to go into production, the Los Angeles Times reported that in one scene Cecil Kellaway ‘is impelled … to spank his daughter soundly’. Sadly this wound up being dropped from the finished movie, in which Allyson and Kellaway have very little screen time together; there’s much more emphasis on the developing relationship between Kathy and Hale, capitalizing on the fact the actors were also a couple offscreen. Whether the spanking ever made it onto celluloid, or else was abandoned in those final pre-production weeks, is something that remains unknown.
And with that, we close the book on the 1940s, and look forward to a new decade’s worth of uncertainty and disappointment!
There was a time when privileged, and wealthy, members of the theater audience were permitted to sit on the stage to watch the play. But occasionally proximity has its perils…
Marie Dumesnil
At some time in the late 1730s or early 1740s, the great French tragic actress Marie Dumesnil (1713-1803) had an encounter with a general who became so over-excited on seeing her at such close quarters that he strode onto the stage in mid-performance, put her across his knee and spanked her – something she took as a great compliment, and thanked him after the show!
There have been other cases of audience members impulsively spanking actresses on the stage (you can read about one here), and over the centuries many more have wanted to; but audience participation more often goes the other way, and not just in vague reports of the occasional rock star giving a female fan a public spanking during a concert. For something much more systematic, we turn to The Rocky Horror Show (1973), Richard O’Brien’s rock’n’roll celebration of (and satire on) trashy American horror movies of the drive-in era, in which innocents Brad and Janet find themselves caught up in the experiments and machinations of a transvestite mad scientist and his household. There’s no spanking scene in the show, nor in the 1975 movie version – but what we’re concerned with is the phenomenon.
Rocky Horror has a large and loyal body of fans who keep coming back to see it again and again, joining in with the songs, dancing the Time Warp and dressing up as the characters in appropriately raunchy outfits.
Those going for the first time are known as ‘virgins’, and some US productions – there are hundreds running all over the world – have a long-standing tradition of ‘initiating’ them in a pre-show. There are ‘virgin games’, ‘virgin sacrifices’ and sometimes a form of initiation that clearly owes something to college sororities; it’s widely referred to as ‘spanking’, but a respect for semantic precision means that I prefer to call it paddling.
As you can see, skimpy attire is commonplace, though not obligatory.
And as you can also see, wearing a short skirt can be rather hazardous!
To be precise:
Evidently many girls really want to be whacked good and proper on their panties!
So, girls, Tip #1 is: wear your prettiest, most distinctive pair.
Tip #2: if you have to drop your pants to show ’em… so be it!
And Tip #3: simply wear panties… or you might have cause to regret it!
Unless of course that’s the way you want it, in which case, very occasionally, the stage staff may offer a helping hand.
But in any event, remember it might be painful, no matter how little you’re wearing.
So don’t bank on sitting altogether comfortably for the show itself!
In fact, the fear of ‘spanking’ has even deterred some young ladies from coming to the show, or admitting their ‘virginity’ if they do!
It’s become such a recognized part of Rocky Horror tradition that it has now extended itself beyond the confines of the stage.
And it’s used not only for saying hello but also, from time to time, goodbye.
Sammie Day as Janet
In 2017, Sammie Day, who had been playing Janet, left the show in Santa Ana, California. She already had a slight track record in helping to spank one of her fellow cast members at a party:
But on her last night, it was her turn to bend over for the whole company and the loyal audience, to get her good-girl panties spanked – long and hard!
The panties stayed white. Her bottom… didn’t!
You can find a lot of videos on this YouTube channel, with the caveat that (perhaps appropriately for Rocky Horror) there’s no differentiation by gender. If you only want to watch one, this is the one I’d recommend!
The spanking fetish, at least as I experience it, is a very complex thing that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand, because it is a part of the process of knowing and understanding myself. To get to the core of the complexity, I shall have to write in specifically personal terms, and I apologise if anyone finds that irritating or irksome, tedious or uncomfortable. If you merely find it weird, risible or creepy, go away. But maybe, just maybe, a few readers will in due course find something they recognize in themselves.
That is peculiar and idiosyncratic in itself, because she’s a fictional character created by another woman whom I admire, respect and like, an actress who shared exactly the same face but wasn’t the same person. But it’s a strangeness that is only incidental to my point.
This is the bottom of the woman I love.
Some people might find that disrespectful, and feel that love should stay above the neck, talking about her eyes, her smile, her personality… Anyone who thinks so will certainly not comprehend my desire to see her across a man’s knee with her skirt up, being spanked on the seat of her panties, hard, perhaps in public and definitely non-consensually. And, I repeat, this is the woman I identify as the love of my life. Yet I want to see her hurt and humiliated. It doesn’t make sense.
There is a crossed wire in my psycho-sexual make-up. I suspect this may be the case with all spankos, whatever the particulars of their individual tastes and fantasies. It makes us very easy to misunderstand, because it’s as if we are saying that black is white: the thing we like, which in my case is bound up with overwhelmingly positive feelings towards the spanked woman, is, from a straightforward, ‘uncrossed’ perspective, fundamentally a negative, hostile act, at best embodying a rebuke and, at worst, potentially abusive and definable in law as an assault.
It isn’t some kind of displacement or substitution activity, which is a common but inadequate explanation of fetishes. Jillian Keenan, who is both a mainstream author and a spanking enthusiast, once said very perceptively that, for her, being spanked is not foreplay, a prelude to the main event: the spanking itself is the main event. It’s more or less the same for me, except that it isn’t anything I myself want to participate in, just observe as a third party. I’m not altogether immune to more familiar and conventional kinds of sexual allure,
but straight sex just doesn’t do it for me, and I’m not even particularly interested in nudity: the only exposure in my favored scenario is of her thighs and (especially) her panties. If there is any sexual interest for me in seeing them pulled down, it’s limited to her embarrassed reaction. Coupled with my distaste for the signifiers of pain (tears, contorted face, realistically marked bottom), that probably gets to the heart of it: what most appeals to me about the scenario is her vulnerability.
That’s a lot easier to understand and associate with love, at least for me as I introspect, though it is still saying that white is actually some shade of gray (albeit probably not the fiftieth). But if it helps me get my head round my particular experience of the phenomenon, it is still complex enough to baffle many outsiders, and inevitably won’t satisfy the kind of censorious social critic who won’t accept all the manifold strange varieties of human sexual identity, nor the principle of live and let live. For some people, misunderstanding is always going to be an easier option.
And it’s easy for everyone, too. Just as we are misunderstood, so we may ourselves misconstrue. As an illustration of our capacity to see things differently, take a movie moment when a man bends a young woman over the hood of a car, then lifts her skirt, exposing her flower-print panties:
Is this the prelude to an exciting spanking? I’m afraid not. It’s the rape scene in Thelma and Louise (1991). Sorry.
In the same vein, what’s going on here?
I’d very much like what happens next to involve percussive contact between male hand and feminine panties, but the truth is that it’s a prank video and he’s using her in an effort to attract the attention of an uninterested man sitting just out of frame on the right.
And again, here’s a cartoon from the Turkish humor magazine Girgir:
If you don’t know Turkish, and are our way inclined, you may think he’s removing his belt to spank her with. But the speech balloon establishes that in fact he’s so enjoying her skirt-lifting tease that he simply can’t wait to get his pants off.
These are innocent, momentary misreadings of imagery taken out of context, unobjectionable and harmless so long as we don’t try to pretend that what we are seeing is, in reality, anything other than what it actually is. In other words, don’t go telling anyone that there’s a spanking scene in Thelma and Louise!
When we’re talking about ourselves and our preferences, rather than works of fiction, that means the starting-point has to be an acknowledgement of the fundamental fact that the wire is crossed, with no puzzled or disingenuous attempt to rationalize or justify anything: no ‘she deserves it’, no ‘it’s for her own good’, no ‘with a lot more spanking there’d be a lot less crime’. These assertions, whether or not you agree with the social conservatism that underpins them, are framed in terms that might easily make logical sense for the non-spanko black-is-black-and-white-is-white world. But that is exactly the same kind of equation also used by our detractors, usually of the opposite social and political stripe: ‘spanking is abusive and sexist’. I recently made the point that some fetishists and some feminists operate according to very similar underlying principles, and this is another instance of that kind of unexpected congruence.
The need to avoid misrepresentation of all kinds, including self-misrepresentation, is one of the central challenges that comes with having ‘illogical’ sexual tastes. We are kinked; a large proportion of the world is not. The nature of the challenge is to be true to both and do no harm. Participatory spankos have pretty much got this licked: if spanking is something you like to do, then your best course of action is to find someone who likes it to be done to her, role-play the non-consensuality and put up with any disappointment that goes with a slight sense of the inauthentic. That’s something that has become accepted, if not necessarily understood, by socially liberal people who give such matters any thought. But people like me, who only want to watch, perhaps don’t have it quite so thoroughly thought through.
The fundamental of my own experience is detachment. When I enjoy a spanking scene, I don’t identify with either participant: I don’t want to spank her and I certainly don’t imagine myself in her position. I am simply not a part of the scene’s fictional ‘reality’ (what literary theorists call its ‘diegesis’), but rather on the outside of it as part of its audience – which is not the same as being a Peeping Tom or some other kind of voyeur. That could potentially raise ethical issues comparable to those faced by war correspondents reporting on atrocities, albeit on nothing like the same scale. The reason it doesn’t is because I really am talking about scenes, in the broad sense, which means that there is some kind of built-in filter between me and what I’m watching.
Let’s have an extremely obvious example. I wouldn’t feel comfortable watching a real woman being spanked non-consensually, but I have no problem with looking at this,
because, self-evidently, she’s not a real woman, just a heavily stylized representation. And it can also work in less obvious ways. Meet someone who certainly is a real woman, Saralynn van Doll:
That’s not in fact her real name: it’s her professional name as a model and burlesque artist from (notwithstanding what her panties might seem to imply) Berlin. And it’s because I know she is a performer that I can appreciate this picture as an example of her work:
It’s an authentic-seeming spanking simulacrum rather than a documentary record of someone actually being punished (or else, in this day and age, engaging in a private bedroom game). It’s the filter of performance, creativity, fiction, that keeps my interest from being abusive or intrusive, and means that I too do no harm to anybody.
So maybe there is, after all, a very good reason why the girl of my dreams should be a fictional character.
Our coverage of the decade begins counterintuitively, and in disregard of strict chronology, with a brace of spankings from 1933 that certainly didn’t happen.
The first film was called Hot Bullets. The story concerns neophyte attorney Ted Astrid, who is drawn into a plot to take revenge on the corrupt politician John Maurie, who had defrauded his now-dead father. Ted’s wife Helena begs him not to get involved, but he has already started. One of Maurie’s associates becomes interested in Helena, but when Ted tells her his suspicions, she becomes angry and threatens to leave him,
‘whereupon Ted turned her over his knee and administered the spanking he thought would bring her to her senses.’
She does leave, but Ted eventually wins her back and successfully breaks up Maurie’s racket.
That may sound fairly definite, but, as I said, it didn’t happen. If you were to look for Hot Bullets on IMDB, you wouldn’t find it, because the film was never made.
By now, cinema was a hungry maw, always in need of new scenarios. Talking Picture Magazine published thousands of prospective film stories, undertaking to negotiate deals between the writers and any interested producers. Hot Bullets, by Dorothy M. Hewlett, was offered in the January 1933 edition. At the other end of the year, the same publication presented Leslie A. Croutch’s Aboard a Comet, a tale of 4000 AD in which freethinking political prisoner Barry Keith is accidentally released from his Bolshevik cell by the violent arrival of a comet from outer space. Aboard the comet is green-eyed Princess Xona, who turns a death ray on him, only to find it doesn’t work on humans.
‘Barry advanced upon the dumbfounded royal lady and turning her upon his knee spanked her before her royal guard.’
It all ends happily (and matrimonially) for him and the Princess, but again the story didn’t get to Hollywood.
What these two unmade films illustrate is that there was an appetite for spanking scenes in the 1930s, a demand that outstripped supply even though 1933 was one of the peak years for movie spanking. That’s also reflected in the way various films were described in the press. A case in point is Bird of Paradise (1932), starring Dolores del Rio as the South Sea islander Luana
and famous for the nude swimming scene featuring her truly awesome glutes. The London Daily Mirror offered a precis of the story, in which she is romanced by visiting American Johnny Baker (Joel McCrea), including the following:
‘He is stopped by the shocked natives who tell him she is tabu to all except a native prince. The lady, however, has other ideas, and makes a bed of rose petals for her young man in a secluded glade, where the young couple are caught by the native elders and the fair damsel soundly spanked.’
No she isn’t! But Dolores del Rio herself wasn’t so lucky (as you can read about here).
Similarly, the Australian Women’s Weekly reported that the French actress Annabella ‘had to take a good spanking’ in the British film Wings of the Morning (1937).
Again, the short answer is, no, she didn’t.
The title makes it sound like an aviation movie, but Wings is actually the name of a racehorse. Annabella plays Maria, a gipsy girl who arrives in the film dressed as a boy. The hero, Kerry (Henry Fonda), thinks she really is one, and intends to ‘make a man’ of ‘him’ by throwing ‘him’ in the river; but first he rips all her clothes off and makes an embarrassing discovery. They take against one another, and he calls her a ‘spoiled brat’ – but takes it all back when he sees her in women’s clothes, and romance follows. So as the story is structured, there’s no point at which a spanking could feasibly happen – unless of course there was an alternate version in which it took the place of the ducking.
And there’s a direct contradiction in the case of Girl Without a Room (1933), a comedy about two Left-Bank artists in Paris. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer,
‘Before the film is over, one of the two achieves fame because a careless gallery attendant hangs a picture upside down, and the other has spanked the daughter of a man for whose revenge nothing save a duel will suffice.’
The artist in question is Crock (Charlie Ruggles), and the daughter is the Russian gold-digger Nada, played by Grace Bradley.
I avoided calling her the ‘spanked daughter’ for reasons that will start to emerge when I quote another review in the Springfield Leader and Press:
‘The Russian father is satisfied that he has avenged the insult to his daughter. As a matter of fact, Ruggles wasn’t trying to insult his daughter. He was only trying to give her a spanking, which she needed very badly.’
So, trying to spank rather than actually doing it. But the film itself contains no reference to spanking whatsoever, and what Crock was actually doing with Nada when the father burst in on them was wrestling on the floor, in the course of which he rips her skirt partly off, revealing her panties.
Nada does later get a kick on the bottom,
along with other indignities,
but not a spanking (even though the Springfield reviewer was right about her needing it). So far as we know, Grace Bradley got through the rest of her 11-year career without any more direct brush with spanking, but Ruggles later spanked Margaret Kerry, playing his daughter in the early ’50s sitcom The Ruggles.
This sort of thing means that we can’t be sure about newspaper reviews of films that we haven’t seen for ourselves, such as Disorderly Conduct (1932), in which Sally Eilers
plays Phyllis Crawford, described in the Richmond Times-Dispatch as ‘a very engaging young scapegrace’ who ‘has been spoiled by the sparing of the rod… As soon as she gets her long deferred spanking … she will settle down and become a praiseworthy citizen’. The available synopsis indicates that she gets arrested twice by the policeman hero and groped and slugged by the villains, but not spanked. (Sally Eilers herself was, however, in Sailor’s Luck the following year.)
And while the Hobart Mercury may declare that in Jimmy the Gent (1934) Joan Martin (Bette Davis) ‘got a good spanking at the hands of her hero,’ played by James Cagney, there’s no sign of it in any other account of the story, and anyone wanting to see Bette Davis over Cagney’s knee will have to be content with the Faux-TK scene in The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941) – which was itself promoted several times as a spanking, but isn’t one!
There are several points to make about this material. To begin with, there may be a mismatch between what we want from the reviews and what they are actually trying to do: we are looking for literal descriptions of what happens in films that, nearly a century later, we may not be able to see for ourselves; but the reviewers are trying to write in an engaging way about upcoming moviegoing opportunities, and may, in good faith, choose striking but figurative language with which to do so. And since some such statements are disprovable, when the opportunity to see the film comes up, there must necessarily be genuine uncertainty about others when we don’t have the same access.
I do mean uncertainty, the state of not knowing one way or the other. As a further illustration of the difficulty, let’s take another film I’ve never seen, Dangerously Yours (1933), and the way it was written up in the Adelaide News:
‘According to English law, a man is – or was – allowed to spank his wife so long as he did not use a stick thicker than his thumb. In film law, the trend is all for bigger and better spankings. Witness, the ultra-modern scene in Dangerously Yours: … Warner Baxter does not only spank Miriam Jordan; he puts chains on her. But it is all done in the spirit of high and up-to-date comedy.’
That’s a distinctively written, circumstantial account which tallies with direct evidence in the form of a photo from the set,
and also with the available plot synopsis, which refers to ‘a brawl’ preceding the ankle-chaining incident shown in the picture. But ultimately it all comes down to the fine detail of semantics and syntax as we try to interpret the statement, ‘Warner Baxter does not only spank Miriam Jordan; he puts chains on her.’ Does this mean he not only spanks her but also chains her, or does it mean that he does worse than merely spanking her? And if it is the ‘not only … but also’ formula, is ‘spanking’ a loose way of talking about the brawl or a precise way of describing something that happened in the course of it?
The second thing to observe about these reviewers’ remarks is the choice of vocabulary: even when it is certainly loose or metaphorical, the words still evoke a literal event, so that the journalists and their readers are imagining the ladies concerned being spanked even when what they are seeing is some other, less attractive kind of rough handling. Not only does that reinforce the point I made earlier about appetite, it also ties in with the way the studios’ publicists often got the idea of spanking into movie taglines, introducing a dimension of possibility even for films that don’t get anywhere near the act itself. We’ll now take some examples from across the decade.
The Brat (1931), starring Sally O’Neil (previously spanked in Don’t!) deals with a guttersnipe thief who is taken in by a wealthy novelist as a rags-to-riches social experiment. According to the newspaper ads:
‘And what a brat she is! You’ll want to spank her soundly!’
The Misleading Lady (1932) stars Claudette Colbert (later spanked in Bluebeard’s EighthWife).
She plays actress Helen Steele, who covets a role the producer doesn’t think she is capable of playing, and tries to persuade him by wagering that she can make mining engineer Jack Craigen (Edmund Lowe) fall in love with her within three days, despite the fact that she already has a fiancé. Craigen has just come back from a tour of duty in South America among the cannibals, who have rougher ways with women than prevail in the USA, so there’s the prospect of some robust treatment, albeit not what the ads seem to have in mind:
‘A He-man turns cave-man to save a good girl who needed a spanking.’
In Walking on Air(1936), another take on the familiar story of a father-daughter dispute concerning son-in-law identity, the feminine side of the argument, Kit Bennett, is played by Ann Sothern,
and Gene Raymond, who previously spanked Dolores del Rio in Flying Down to Rio (1933), is singer Pete Quinlan, whom she hires to persuade her father she could do worse than the fiancé she covets, a scheme which backfires but ends in marriage.
‘Gay, madcap romance… of a spoiled society girl who needed to be spanked… and the boy who elected himself to the job!!!’
And that goes a bit further than most of these lines towards the promise of some action, though as usual there’s no sign of it in the finished movie (and Pete can’t really be said to have ‘elected himself to the job’, either).
Janet Gaynor, previously spanked in Lucky Star (1929), takes the title role in Three Loves Has Nancy (1938): Nancy Briggs, stood up at her wedding by one suitor, who gets two more on the rebound. They are a pair of non-confirmed bachelor friends played by Franchot Tone and Robert Montgomery, who later spanked Betty Lynn in June Bride (1948), though it’s unclear whether it’s him or Tone’s character, Robert Hanson, who is most relevant this time round.
‘One wanted to kiss her, spank her and send her home…’
Neither says anything of the sort in the film, co-written by future Kiss Me Kate librettists Bella and Sam Spewack, but if spanking is meant to imply domesticity, that would seem to indicate Tone.
The musical Paris Honeymoon (1939) is set mainly in the Balkans rather than Paris, and features Franciska Gaal as local lovely Manya.
‘She’s a sweet little headache… and ought to be spanked!’
That references one of the songs in the film, addressed to Manya, which begins:
You’re a sweet little headache, But you are lots of fun. Maybe I ought to spank you, Then thank you for all you’ve done.
‘She ought to be spanked’ is an easily-concurred-with judgment in view of the mayhem this ‘Balkanese brat’ causes when she falls in love with the film’s cowboy hero, Lucky Lawton (Bing Crosby), which includes breaking up his engagement and drugging both him and her rival with strong liquor. And it might have been a very pleasant spectacle, had it happened.
Which brings us back to the key point that these were scenes that people wanted to see, or at least enjoyed imagining, and the publicity taglines were designed to facilitate that rather than tell prospective moviegoers definitively that this was something they could actually expect for the price of admission.
But in the case of Smarty(1934), maybe the publicists’ imagination had gone a little too far into overdrive:
It’s a film entirely about the issue of whether a husband should ever hit his wife, starting off with an incident when Tony Wallace (Warren William) loses his temper with his wife Vickie and slaps her face during her birthday party. She is played by Joan Blondell, who was previously spanked in a publicity still for God’s Gift to Women (1931).
It’s also pertinent to mention next-door neighbor Nita, played by Claire Dodd, later spanked in In the Navy (1941).
She obviously has mixed feelings about what happened: she says Tony had no right to hit Vickie, but also that every woman should be hit once in a while, and keeps on smirking about it. In the course of the film, Vickie goes through two divorces and quite a lot of manhandling, which she clearly accepts and tacitly enjoys – but absolutely all of it, despite the overt implication of the ad, takes the form of slaps to her face.
This is one of those cases where there is such a blatant disconnect between how the movie was promoted and what actually happens in it, that one is left wondering whether something was changed between production and final release, but that nobody remembered to tell the publicists. Perhaps it’s pertinent that it’s only just a pre-Code movie: the Hays Code, which did so much to inhibit American cinema in the second half of the decade, came into full force on July 1, 1934, exactly six weeks after Smarty was released. In other words, it’s tempting to speculate that the movie was originally scripted, maybe even shot, to feature at least one spanking scene, but that it was toned down before the final release print, perhaps because the studio saw which way the wind was blowing.
Another case that invites this kind of speculation is Café Society (1939), starring Fred MacMurray, who later spanked Dorothy Lamour in And the Angels Sing (1944) and Paulette Goddard in a publicity still for Suddenly It’s Spring (1947). This time his co-star was Madeleine Carroll.
She plays the strangely named heiress Christopher West, who gets married to reporter Crick O’Bannon (MacMurray) for trivial reasons, only to discover that he in turn only married her to get a story. According to the publicity in Modern Screen, it is a marriage that ‘Might work … if the handsome husband uses the back of the hairbrush – diligently.’
That might seem like just another of the kind of spanking tagline we have been considering; but many contemporary reviews confirm the hint with direct statements. According to the New York Times,
‘It’s the same old yarn about the social butterfly who needed a spanking and got one from the strong-minded reporter she had married to win a bet.’
South Dakota’s Daily Plainsman gave a fuller account:
‘She is a spoiled brat of great wealth who deserves to be spanked and gets what she deserves. Fred MacMurray administers the spanking, being a mere news reporter with no respect for society. The chastisement knocks the gal off her high horse and she decides she loves the mud, thereby earning the gratitude of her old grandfather who had just about given up hope of her ever becoming a lady.’
And the London Evening Standard said that the working-out of the story gives Crick time
‘to spank her, to throw her into the sea, to drag her five miles on an aquaplane, to deliver cryptic morality lectures, and to behave generally in that extraordinary way demanded by such films before happiness between rich girl and poor boy can be gained.’
Most of the specific things mentioned there do actually happen in the film, but regrettably not the first of them. When they discover their mutually unsatisfactory motives for the marriage, she slaps his face and he slaps her right back. ‘He smacked me,’ she tells her grandfather afterwards. Fair enough, but he didn’t spank her.
You might think that all those reviewers were merely guilty of using the loosest of language, but another possibility emerges from the fact that, in this film, spanking isn’t just a passing misnomer.
Grandfather, played by Claude Gillingwater who put Colleen Moore across his knee in We Moderns fourteen years earlier, is a firm believer in the efficacy of spanking. He apologises to Crick in terms that begin to elide the distinction between smacking and spanking: ‘If I’d started smacking her earlier it wouldn’t have been necessary for you to do it.’ And later on he says that the West women need firm handling:
‘You know, Christopher’s grandmother was never any good until one night I spanked her with her own hairbrush. … And so after that she was alright, we had no more trouble with her.’
Put that ongoing theme together with the hairbrush publicity line and it starts to look just possible there might have been an earlier version of the script in which Crick did indeed spank Chris. There’s no room for that in the film as it stands: when he returns her slap, he says it makes them exactly even, which wouldn’t have been the case if his rejoinder to a slapped face were a spanked bottom; then he walks out, which leaves no opportunity for subsequent escalation. So a spanking could only have taken place in an earlier draft or an alternate version.
But the scriptwriter, Virginia Van Upp, certainly wasn’t averse to the subject: she went on to write the screenplays for One Night in Lisbon (1941), in which Madeleine Carroll does finally get her bottom smacked by Fred MacMurray, and Young and Willing (1943), with a full over-the-knee spanking scene. If she also wrote a spanking into Café Society, it’s not inconceivable that it might have found its way into the publicity press releases, and thence into the reviews (which were, of course, often merely previews by writers who hadn’t actually seen the films).
Censorship illustrates the obverse of the phenomenon I have been mainly describing so far: just as there were people who relished spanking scenes, so there were others who really didn’t want to see them, or allow anyone else to do so. There are a few more Kansas cases, both from 1930, including The Party Girl, a film denouncing what would later be called escort agencies, which had been ‘passed by the National Board of Review’, as audiences were assured by a note at the foot of the title slide. Among the incidental delights that didn’t trouble that Board was Diane Hoster (Marie Prevost) taking a phone booking while on a massage table, mainly below frame level to imply that she’s nearly nude, and wincing from time to time as the masseuse gets in a few hefty smacks on her bottom.
What did bother the state-level Board in Kansas was ‘man spanking posterior of girl on his lap and resting hand on same’. A viewing of the film reveals that what they were objecting to was this obviously appalling sight:
Which means that the similar ‘cut order’ in respect of The Bad One, starring Edmund Lowe and Dolores del Rio, probably didn’t refer to anything we would be altogether heartbroken to lose, however much we may disapprove of censorship on principle. At least, ‘Lowe spanks girl twice as she sits on couch on which he is reclining’ doesn’t sound like spanking in the purest sense of the word!
As an example of the lasting impact of this kind of intolerable impertinence, we’ll take the very minor Western Riding Speed (1934), directed by and starring Jay Wilsey (otherwise known as Buffalo Bill, Jr) as undercover border patrolman Steve Funney, and Joile Benet as rancher’s daughter Gypsy Vale.
He saves her from a car crash, for which she is somewhat ungrateful.
Later, she’s out riding and falls into a ravine from which she is unable to escape.
Steve finds her and attempts a rescue,
but falls in himself, meaning they are both trapped at the bottom of the ravine. She rebukes him for his temerity in attempting to save her life a second time,
and so he spanks her – which has the usual aphrodisiac effect. Or, as one available synopsis rather awkwardly puts it, she ‘is now in love with the spanking stranger’. But this change of heart is mysterious in the surviving print that’s available on DVD, because, tragically, the scene has been snipped!
So the climate was contradictory, for and against spanking scenes, meaning that studios and directors swung both ways on the issue. On May 15, 1937, reporter Harrison Carrol was visiting the set of Saratogaat MGM. It starred Clark Gable, a once and future spanker in Forsaking All Others (1934) and Across the Wide Missouri (1951), and Jean Harlow,
who plays Carol Clayton, the ‘high and mighty’ daughter of a wealthy stud owner. The first thing Gable’s character, bookmaker Duke Bradley, says about her is, ‘That brat needs a good spanking.’
The scene Harrison Carrol saw being filmed was an argument between Bradley and Miss Clayton, in which she wrongfully accuses him of cheating her family out of their property. Bradley tells her, ‘Is that all, before I reach for that hairbrush?’ And so, said Carrol, ‘We settle back to see Harlow get the spanking,’ but then the director called:
‘CUT!’
It’s a picturesque story, but doesn’t reflect what actually happens in the film, where Carol Clayton gets not only to the end of the scene but, more importantly, out of the room, without the hairbrush getting anywhere near her rear end. The action doesn’t cut out before an offscreen spanking – no spanking actually happens, even though the prospect is clearly telegraphed by multiple advance references.
On the other hand, sometimes opportunities came unexpectedly, and were not eschewed. Our case in point is Daughters Courageous (1939), the second of the Warner Brothers ‘Daughters’ series of comedies. Three of the Masters sisters are played by the Lane sisters, Lola, Rosemary, later spanked in All By Myself (1943), and Priscilla, previously spanked in Love, Honor and Behave (1938).
It’s Priscilla’s character, Buff Masters, who provides the opportunity by exuberantly sliding down the banisters just as Penny the maid (May Robson) is coming to the foot of the stairs to call up announcing a visitor. As the scene was scripted, Penny simply registers her disapproval verbally, but when it was shot, they discovered that Priscilla didn’t have time to get off the banister before May arrived at the foot of the stairs. And so, according to an eye-witness:
‘Not being one to suppress her impulses, Miss Robson delivered a fairly sound slap to the most spankable portion of Priscilla’s anatomy.’
The other two Lane sisters enjoyed it a lot, we are told, but the person whose opinion mattered was the director. He was Michael Curtiz, whose work to date included the aforementioned Jimmy the Gent and also Dodge City (1939, with spanking threat to Olivia de Havilland), and who would go on to direct not only Casablanca (1942) but also The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939, with incidental smacked bottom for Bette Davis’ Queen Elizabeth) and The Vagabond King (1956, with fullscale spanking for Rita Moreno). And on the Daughters Courageous set, he decided that the smack made the scene funnier, so it was left in. It may not have been ‘a good sound spanking’, as the publicity put it, but it still made a welcome addition to the film!
And what’s more, there are likely to be a few more honest-to-goodness spanking scenes waiting to be discovered in 1930s cinema. Here’s a picture from an as yet unidentified movie of 1932:
And we’ll finish on a little mystery, a photo published in July 1939, showing Patsy Kelly being spanked by Jack Oakie (who had previous spanking experience both on screen and radio), with the assistance of Stuart Erwin (who spanked Dorothy Appleby in Small Town Boy):
The trouble is, these three can’t be placed in the same movie, or even the same studio, and Jack Oakie isn’t credited on even a single picture in 1939. So what’s the context? A completely unknown film, or three actors larking around together somewhere in Hollywood?
There’ll be more larks, on and off celluloid, when we pass on to the 1940s in the next installment of this series.
A shepherd rescues a trapped snake, only to discover that it isn’t any old snake: it’s the King of the Snakes, with the power to reward his act of kindness. Offered the choice between a bag of gold and the ability to understand what animals are saying, he chooses the latter, because you don’t meet grateful talking snakes every day, whereas he might have another chance of getting the bag of gold later by less improbable means. The snake is true to its word and hey presto, the shepherd does understand animals. But there’s a catch: if he should ever reveal how he acquired this special skill, he will die.
This folk tale is found in many different countries and cultures, and probably originated in India, where snakes are often credited with mystical powers; one version features an early incarnation of the Buddha. Most versions, no matter where found, saddle the shepherd with an inquisitive wife who persistently demands to know how it is that he comes to know the animal language. Eventually he gives in, gets himself a coffin and prepares to tell her what she wants to know and take the consequences. But then he hears a rooster mocking him for being unable (unlike the rooster itself) to control his wife.
Out of the coffin he gets, and proceeds to take a positive step towards wife control:
That’s an illustration of the Hungarian version entitled Az állatok nyelvén tudó juhász (translated in the title of the article), which has also been adapted for the stage. It’s often performed in junior schools for a very young audience – and also sometimes by very young performers, so beware!
There’s some amusing pre-spanking business when the wife thinks she’s being invited to sit on her husband’s lap, and he directs her round to the other side; she sits down again, and then he tells her he wants her the other way up…
This is from a school performance by an adult cast in 2012; the video is here. (Go directly to 16m for the spanking.) It’s a pretty lengthy spanking, but you only get to see the first part of it before the camera pans away to show the audience reaction.
Other performances are available, of the same script but with different casts. Here’s one that ran from at least 2015 until at least 2017, with Andrea Szőke spanked by Zoltán Baráth:
‘When My Boyfriend Spanks Me, My Inner Feminist Weeps’ is the title of a short poem by A.K. Blakemore in her award-winning collection Fondue (2018).
Let’s be clear about one thing from the start. It is not a poem about being spanked by her boyfriend. I don’t know if he really does spank her, or whether she even has a boyfriend at all. I can’t quite say that this is a matter of absolutely no possible interest, because I might find the idea mildly titillating; and I also can’t quite say that it’s absolutely none of our business, because you can’t claim a right of privacy for the things you make public – can’t fling open the bedroom door to the world and then object if someone looks inside. Once you publish something, it’s then for the public to decide whether or not it’s of any interest. But what I can say is that the point of the poem, and therefore its primary claim on our attention, has nothing to do with spanking in any literal sense.
It’s a poem about the tension, or contradiction, between a woman’s sense of self-worth and her wish to please her man sexually. There’s a familiar sneer at ‘male predictability’, evinced in a bar statue of a wench with the varnish worn off her breasts by repeated groping, and there’s a piece of reasonable plain-speaking in the line ‘I know I don’t deserve to be hurt’. But when in bed, she does whatever it is that the boyfriend likes.
The poem leads me to two substantial thoughts, or observations, about feminism, by which (and please take this as read throughout all that follows) I mean some versions of feminism and not necessarily the movement in its entirety.
The first observation is that feminists, inner and otherwise, seem to do a lot of weeping. I am struck by the way ‘women’s history’ is often framed as a narrative of gender oppression. In theory, it could be just a neutral account of a past mode of social organization that is different from today’s (and not one that most people now living would seriously wish to return to in earnest, any more than we want to have doctors stick leeches on us or consult sheep’s entrails for the weather forecast). But in practice, it often functions as what you might call ‘misogyny porn’ (which is, of course, not to be confused with misogynistic porn). It is as if some contemporary feminists feel a compulsion to keep on returning to the actual or perceived wrongs of the dead past in order to keep alive the sense of grievance that fuels the politics of the movement.
We find the same phenomenon on a smaller scale in the visceral outrage typically provoked by spanking scenes and imagery, which could be illustrated with a hundred contemptuous comments quoted from reviews of modern productions of Kiss Me Kate. It is not, on this occasion, my point that this reaction entails a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why others enjoy such material, but rather that there is an element of dependency here: that some feminists need spanking, not in the sense that’s sometimes asserted by the more bone-headed and self-unaware kind of socially conservative spanko, but because they enjoy the outrage and draw validation from it, and therefore need something to be affronted by in the first place.
In short, there is a streak of sublimated masochism in these ‘weeping feminists’.
Don’t look back in anger; look around in awareness. When I do so in the parts of the world that I know best, the creative and media sectors of the western liberal democracies, I see an environment where the feminist movement has largely achieved what it set out to do, and shouldn’t need to bring out the historical horror stories quite so insistently anymore. Religions and cults need to self-perpetuate like that; responsible political and social movements don’t, because they have defined, reasonable and achievable objectives beyond their own mere continuing existence. It follows that there must be a point when the job is done and the movement can disband and its members move on to other fruitful projects.
I don’t want that to sound complacent. The job isn’t done everywhere in the world: looking farther afield, and admittedly with the benefit of less local knowledge, I see many places where the position of women is dreadful and needs to change, the sooner the better; Afghanistan is an obvious and extreme example. I also don’t want to pontificate ignorantly about parts of our own society that are beyond my immediate ken. At this stage I am simply articulating an uncomfortable feeling that there’s something slippery and cultish about a movement that operates in practice through endless deferral; there’s always ‘more to be done’, just as you never get to heaven until you die. This is secured through the choice, or creation, of an enemy that can never be defeated because it is functionally immortal, since its only real existence is as a mental construct: nobody has ever seen ‘the patriarchy’, just as nobody has ever actually met Satan. Moreover, it is protected by a defense mechanism comparable to the taboo on blasphemy, as evinced in the reflex-action ‘feminism is not the problem’ comments one often gets after trying to talk rationally and even-handedly about the negative side of its impact on the world.
Of course, there is a positive side too: a whole lot of good has been done to society. But if feminism is reckoned to need to change with the times, shifting its goals rather than retiring in satisfaction at the changes it has effected, then there is a risk that the good will recede into the movement’s past and the bad will come to the fore.
Feminists in Europe and North America talk less than they once did about equality, which, considered rightly, is just another word for fairness and as such can hardly be faulted as an objective. Nowadays we hear a lot more about empowerment. This is a much more sinister proposition, because power is a zero sum phenomenon: nobody has power unless someone else doesn’t, so that the natural corollary of anyone’s empowerment is somebody else’s disempowerment. What that also means is that power is necessarily at odds with liberty, and one of the challenges of civil society is finding the right balance between them. I want us all to be as little subject to the power of other people as is compatible with the well-being of myself and everyone else in the world. (In other words, I’m a liberal, not an anarchist.) So I don’t support an arbitrary project for ‘female empowerment’ any more than an equally arbitrary ‘male empowerment’. Empowerment is mostly harmful, and I wish that progressive and liberal political movements would talk instead in terms of ‘enablement’.
I suppose many activists do in fact have enablement as their aim, an entirely noble one, and much of this talk of ‘empowerment’ is just loose language. But not all of it. And empowerment means more than having what we all should have regardless of gender, a voice to be heard in a rational, honest, civilized debate between equals. Empowerment entails the ability to coerce others against their will, perhaps through brute force but more often through domination and fear. Let’s see how it can sometimes operate with a particular case in point. It is a true story.
Some years ago, a young male scientist appeared on television to discuss some significant project, and made the mistake of wearing a ‘retro’ tie with a scantily-clad lady on it. Because he had supposedly ‘objectified women’, he himself became the object of a storm of outrage that completely eclipsed whatever serious subject he had been there to talk about; he was even threatened with dismissal from his job. The upshot was that he had to go on a subsequent edition of the show to make a tearful public apology for, in effect, his poor dress sense.
These were not the tears of the weeping inner feminist at the compromises she has found herself making when her boyfriend spanks her. They were tears of a frightened man who had meant no harm (nor done any, in any real sense), but was adjudged to have committed a cardinal sin, and was now being targeted and victimized for it. The offending tie, incidentally, was a bespoke item designed by a woman.
This is the point that my argument has been meandering towards: feminism is not only masochistic; it is sadistic too.
Many feminists may hate spanking, but they operate, often non-consensually, according to the same psychological mechanisms as spankos. Perhaps that accounts for a persistent sense I have, and maybe others do too, that when I attempt to engage honestly with them, I often wind up feeling as if I’m trapped in someone else’s authoritarian fantasy. No thanks, that’s not healthy.
And that brings me to the other big thought sparked off by A.K. Blakemore’s poem. The title is quoted from an internet meme that began circulating in the early 2000s, before Blakemore herself was even a teenager. But the quotation is significantly selective, in a way that simplifies the issue by removing a second layer of contradiction:
The inner feminist of the poem weeps because she allows her boyfriend to spank her for his own pleasure: she doesn’t deserve to be hurt, so why is she putting up with it?
The woman of the meme, older and wiser, knows perfectly well why: the boyfriend may get pleasure, but she does too.
The inner feminist weeps not at the compromise, but at her own impotence. Feminism has many benign applications in society at large, but it simply doesn’t work when applied to the realm of sexuality. To give a ‘for-instance’ that’s so basic as to risk being crass, the principle of gender equality does not mean that we all have to be bi- or pansexual: it’s simply a given that I am sexually attracted to women and not to men, and we can particularize from there until we get to spanking (or raunchy ties, or statue-groping, or whatever other lawful thing that anyone, male or female, likes doing or enjoys fantasizing about). There have to be limits to the applicability of feminist thought. The inner feminist can weep all she likes, but she’s still not allowed in.
Vanilla Spanking 