What is the true meaning of Easter? Well, in the Czech Republic…
OK, obviously bottoms aren’t the whole point of a Czech Easter, but they figure more prominently than in most other parts of the world, thanks to the Easter Monday tradition of showing appreciation for pretty girls by whacking them on the rear with a specially made switch decorated with ribbons, known as a pomlazka. The girls are supposed to give the boys a run for their money…
and then submit graciously to the inevitable outcome, knowing that this isn’t an act of punishment or disapprobation, but rather admiration.
We’ve covered this subject before, so what’s called for here is a roundup of the pleasant pomlazkas from Easter 2019.
It mainly happens in public places, most often out of doors,
but sometimes inside, too:
It’s a basic fertility transaction: the guys wield a long, thin weapon and the girls respond with gifts of eggs.
Those who are ill-prepared, and have no pomlazka, may find themselves obliged to improvise:
As you can see, girls are often whacked in an upright position, but some guys make an effort to bend them over:
They’re starting to get the idea…
Because of course you can’t beat a girl in one particular position. Well, actually you can…
Often traditional dress is worn, which mean the girls have many protective petticoats, but guys often try and find a way around that:
If they succeed, well, make sure you wear proper panties, girls, or, as the saying goes, woe be unto you:
Less traditional dress also has its perils,
but girls don’t seem to mind. In fact, they sometimes cooperate:
And if there’s no hot young man about, some will even resort to DIY!
This is a deep-rooted, much cherished national custom, and many Czech people react with dismay at the ignorant, prejudiced reactions of would-be progressive outsiders who sourly suppose the women are being demeaned rather than celebrated.
So accepted is it that journalists sometimes write Easter features about celebrities they’d like to see getting the pomlazka, while the celebrities themselves are only too happy to participate, like television news anchor Eva Perkausová:
But pride of place at Easter 2019 goes to the soprano Lucie Bila,
who didn’t just pose for a standard pomlazka shot, but went over her man’s knee for a fullscale Easter spanking:
Among its other satirical pleasures, Moliere’s comedy L’Avare (1668) presents a familiar situation we know in everything from La Fille Mal Gardée to Romeo and Juliet, and all the way back to far antiquity: the parent and daughter with mismatched ideas about her marital future. In this case, the parent is miserly old Harpagon, the daughter is named Elise, and they have a confrontation in the first act about their differing ambitions, which ends when he proposes they submit the disagreement to the arbitration of a servant, who only happens to be Elise’s boyfriend in disguise.
This isn’t a Moliere play like Le Malade Imaginaireor Le Médecin Malgré Lui, where the script has some form of beating written in, creating a decent chance that productions may interpret this specifically as a spanking; but with a father-daughter argument, it’s never beyond the bounds of possibility that some business might creep in, as it did in a German production that opened in 2012 and had a long run in several towns across central Europe. Bernd Färber played Harpagon, and Inga Wolff was Elise. Here she is in costume:
And here she is with Anselm, the unwanted elderly suitor her father wants her to marry for his money:
How could a properly dutiful daughter not go along with that paternal plan? And what father could tolerate daughterly defiance in such matters? Certainly not Harpagon:
Here’s the trailer:
And if you’re even remotely disappointed by the dead sound of the impact, caused by heavy padding in the seat of her panties, spare a thought for Inga Wolff, who had to play the scene for more than three years!
London-based Buki Koshoni is an award-winning, internationally exhibited fine art photographer.
His style combines coolness with uncommon intimacy.
He describes his work as ‘a unique exploration of culture, identity and environment’,
and he’s especially interested in male identity, and in photography that has a sense of story.
The particular story we’re looking at today dates from 2012 and concerns the British saxophonist Tyler Rix.
His lady friend is Iveta Hendry, who’s also a make-up artist. And, Iveta, you might like to put your panties on: you’ll be glad to be wearing them later.
Because what happened to Iveta was:
If you are interested in Buki Koshoni’s work, please visit his website.
We start with a bad situation for Miss Dany Robin.
In the 1960 German comedy Scheidungsgrund: Liebe (Grounds for Divorce: Love), she plays Marylin, who has the habit of rapidly falling in and out of love, and whose life so far has been a series of brief marriages and early divorces. The most recent of the latter has turned nasty, and the discarded ex brings a criminal charge of assault against her with the intention of forcing her to pay financial reparation. Her clever lawyer, Thomas Werther (O.W. Fischer), disposes of the trumped-up threat, and unwittingly becomes Marylin’s next amorous objective. After a strenuous pursuit, she gets him… and more than she bargained for.
Werther is determined to wear the pants in the marriage, though at the crucial moment when he puts his foot down, the only pants he’s wearing belong to his pajamas; she is likewise in her nightie. He picks up a riding whip, causing consternation:
There follows an extended and entertaining chase as Marylin tries everything to evade him:
Everything, that is, except for running out of the bedroom door! But it’s to no avail:
And elsewhere in the house, her mother listens delightedly, realizing that at long last Marylin is properly married to a man who truly loves her.
The same realization takes a little longer to come to Marylin herself. Now it’s her turn to sue for assault, leading to an amusing situation where he demands that she show her injured bottom to the court, and ultimately leading also to her formal admission that she deserved to be spanked and doesn’t want her usual divorce. Happy ending!
The spanking is obviously the pivotal moment in this story, the incident that enables the structural balancing whereby Marylin is first defendant and then plaintiff, and part of the transformative experience that turns her from a marital mayfly to a long-term wife. It was to be expected that it should feature prominently in the publicity:
That’s the poster used in the French- and Dutch-speaking countries of Western Europe. But one detail of the scene seems to have been considered a little much for the domestic German market. Just as a few years later the poster for McLintock!replaced the coal shovel with John Wayne’s hand, so here the riding whip was removed:
The other problem with the riding whip is practical rather than a matter of taste: what’s it doing in the bedroom to start with?
A key point I’ve been making about spanking implements throughout this series is the importance of a fit between context and function. So you might expect Werther to spank his wife using something that would ordinarily be found in the bedroom.
But a riding whip has no place there, so it must have been brought there for the specific purpose of spanking her – at which point, perhaps it does come back to a matter of taste after all. Because of course there is an entirely different bedroom context for spanking, albeit one that’s far more likely to be acknowledged today than in 1960.
Girls who want to be spanked may well be content with the usual range of tools – yes, even the belt!
But specialist manufacturers and retailers also offer custom-made implements for bedroom use, generally in two modes: on the left, the paddle, and on the right, the ‘flogger’, a development of the French martinet.
Paddles in particular will often have appropriate or quirky designs: just as sorority paddles tend to be etched with the Greek letters of the sorority’s name, so love-paddles and the like may have words relating to their function, such as…
But it’s a particular kind of spanking, associated with pleasure, sought after rather than dreaded, which is why there’s a market for these things in the first place.
‘Spank someone happy,’ it says. Preferably the one you love, which is why hearts are also a common theme.
You can also get implements with the business end in the shape of a hand:
You can use them in whatever position you like,
but they are generally small enough not to rule out the most intimate position of them all:
Now, if Thomas Werther had one of those in his bedroom in 1960, there’d have been no plausibility issue in what happens to Marylin!
In 1988, Pasadena’s California Music Theatre issued its patrons with a questionnaire asking, among other things, which musical they would most like to see produced in 1989. The answer: Kiss Me Kate. So Kiss Me Kate it was, from April 22 through May 7, and a lot of LA newspaper reviewers duly got onto a lot of high horses about the show’s perceived sexism. Leslie Easterbrook had more pressing things to worry her: she spent the run of the show going over Terry Lester’s knee…
… though we are told by an eye-witness that she only got five smacks per performance. The scene also made the cover of the program:
Also in April, a youth organization in Wisconsin produced the musical, and Dana Uelmen got taught a lesson by Alan Venturini:
KMK came to Vero Beach, Florida, playing April 28 through May 6, and starring John Toohey and Susan Gibson:
The production was notable for the way Toohey chose to play the spanking threat: no stage whispers for his Fred, it was ad-libbed directly into the Shrew action with suitably cod Shakespearean wording – ‘Woman, if thou dost not cease, I shall spank thee!’
Husband and wife Victor A. Young and Jayne Lewis did a lot of spanking during the period June 2 through October 29, the dates of the run at Stratford Festival, Ontario. Unhappily for Jayne, he did it with a stick:
From September 6 through November 5, the Westgate Dinner Theatre in Toledo, Ohio, hosted a production starring Michael Lackey and Ellen Morrissey:
The Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, Minnesota, started its run two days later, on September 8, but continued much longer, through March 18, 1990. Good news for Paul Boesing – maybe not quite such good news for Susan Long!
KMK also accompanied dinner at the Darien Dinner Theater, Connecticut, September 14 through December 3, with Kurt Peterson and Beth McVey:
Jack Green spanked Eileen Hafner in a production at the Airport Playhouse, Sayville, New York, that opened in November and ran until December 17:
And that’s it for 1989. What can possibly follow but 1990?
Kim Ackerman is an experienced professional photographer based in southern Illinois; her studio’s in Highland, but she works all round the area, including across the state line in St Louis. Her fashion work is shot under the banner of Vogue Portrait Studios,
and more intimate photography is done as Bella Boudoir.
She’ll shoot for special occasions, like holidays
and weddings.
One stated aim is to make every client feel more confident in her own skin. A measure of her success is the popularity of her ‘bodyscape’ range, pictures that focus on just part of the sitter, without ever demeaning or dehumanizing her. Our selection of examples concentrates, predictably, on the part of the sitter that sits:
Now let’s meet model Abbi Chartrand, first courtesy of a different photographer.
And now courtesy of Kim:
That was her at the top of the article, too, being spanked by Drew Menning. And it seems she’s a trifle accident prone, because look what happened her at the hands of another male model on another occasion in front of Kim’s lens:
If you are interested in Kim Ackerman’s work, please visit her website.
There’s a moment in the 1941 Italian fairy tale Cenerentola e il Signor Bonaventura (Cinderella and Mr Goodluck), also known as Princess Cinderella, when Cinderella’s two stepsisters (Tina Mannozzi and Teresa Palazzi) are bent over in front of the King (Guglielmo Barnabo) to have their bottoms whacked:
What makes the moment a little less than commonplace is what they’re being whacked with. Because it’s an artificial hand, it looks, especially if you haven’t watched the rest of the movie, as if it has been designed to replace the human spanking hand with something essentially the same but more durable. But it’s actually the royal sceptre, the symbol of authority being used ad hoc to impose that authority in a physical way.
That contrast between the impression and the actuality helps to define a major distinction between types of spanking implement. As we have alreadyseenatlength, many are repurposed from their original function, but there are also some, not yet discussed in this series, for which corporal punishment is the original function. Artifacts like the paddle…
the cane…
and its medieval ancestor the birch rod…
not to mention the French martinet…
the whip…
and the riding crop.
Just running through the arsenal like this immediately brings up a number of pertinent points. I’ve said these are all purpose-built artifacts, but some of them are still the product of some repurposing, at least in their recent history. A riding crop was always designed for striking blows, but the originally intended target was a horse’s crupper, not…
And the familiar example of Charlie Chaplin shows that canes were originally an aid to walking; but as the twentieth century went on, the walking stick and the bendy cane parted company, and the latter became primarily known for a different function.
So it’s not just that spanking implements are improvised out of other tools which also retain their original primary purpose; some such tools are improvised into spanking implements, and that then becomes their primary purpose.
This can then result in another round of improvisation. For instance, you might want to spank someone with a whip,
But if you don’t have a whip, you might use a rope in the same way:
(It’s a procedure that has been known since at least the time of Shakespeare: in The Comedy of Errors, Antipholus sends his servant to procure a rope’s end with which to spank his wife.)
Likewise, what this naughty medieval lady doesn’t realise is that the product of her mischief…
is also the instrument of her punishment:
This helps account for a curious phenomenon we recently observed in the use of the pingpong bat: its tendency to appear in all sorts of places where pingpong is not ordinarily played. Turn your attention for a moment to the spanking paddle, of all implements the one with the greatest variation in design and appearance. They are often broadly rectangular, with a short handle and a ‘contact area’ of varying sizes.
Larger editions will sometimes be drilled with holes to assist with the velocity of the whack by cutting down ‘wind resistance’.
Other paddles are longer and thinner, more like an oar or cricket bat.
And some are round – like a pingpong bat.
So if you’re looking to acquire a spanking paddle, you don’t necessarily have to go to a specialist dealer. Or at least, not one that specializes in spanking paddles!
This also raises the matter of how the dynamic of the imagery changes with a custom-designed implement. If spanking is usually a last resort when all else fails, it’s something that you hope never to have to do; so a cane or paddle (or pingpong substitute) will be a probably pointless purchase, and you’re better off with a more ad hoc implement like a hairbrush or slipper which is also worth having for its other uses. In other words, when there is a custom-designed spanking implement in play, it carries with it the implied assumption that someone was always going to get spanked.
That’s why these artifacts are more often associated with institutions than the family home, places that deal with larger numbers of individuals and therefore face a greater statistical likelihood that some of them will merit corporal punishment. To put it in a nutshell, a naughty girl may well be spanked at home, but she is more likely to be caned at school:
Many schools use the paddle instead, though on occasion role-reversal days will land the teacher on the wrong end:
School corporal punishment was progressively abolished from the 1970s onwards, but in 1979 an attempt to reinstate it in California led to a curious incident involving Bobbi Fielder, a 42-year-old Los Angeles school board member who later became a Republican congresswoman in the Reagan era.
She felt she couldn’t make an informed decision on the matter: ‘I have no idea what it feels like to be spanked with a paddle,’ she told reporters. So she made it her business to acquire some empirical evidence, with the press in attendance:
Some of the resultant coverage of the demonstration (or publicity stunt) took care to specify the exact nature of her coverage (woollen skirt, pantyhose and panties), and she gave a suitable quote: ‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. There’s a distinct sting to it. It stung for a couple of hours. The intent is to make an impression, and it definitely made an impression.’ And the experience made her a more committed advocate of school paddling – and therefore, like conservatives everywhere, on the wrong side of history.
But the paddle still survives even in enlightened and sometimes progressive institutions, albeit often in the semi-consensual circumstances of the sorority initiation.
These are private ceremonies, but are enthusiastically imagined in the sleazier end of cinema, in trashy exploitation horror films like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988),
or Vampires of Sorority Row (1999),
and its sequel, Vampires of Sorority Row, Part II (2000),
or Kottentail (2007), with Kristin Abbott in orange undies:
Less gratuitously, there’s this scene in the wholly non-trashy 2017 biopic Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, with Bella Heathcote and Allie Gallerani,
which depicts some of the complex kink that went into the creation of Wonder Woman.
And we mustn’t forget the Heart Attack Grill, an unhealthy eating establishment in Las Vegas where diners who don’t clear their plates get paddled:
There’s one other institutional context that’s worth introducing, even though it’s mainly relevant as a source of metaphor rather than a literal context for spanking. It’s a place where you might expect to find a whip in regular use,
but mainly as part of the animal acts rather than for female disciplinary purposes.
Let’s face it, whips have a fairly limited application to our topic, because they’re not really a precision instrument:
an especially skilled handler might succeed in hitting the girl’s bottom, but most people would end up landing blows all over, which might please a general sadist but can’t be properly classified as spanking in even the loosest sense of the term.
But it will already be apparent that many of these purpose-built implements are ill-suited for spanking in the strictest sense. Here’s a pleasing exception:
Now compare that with these ‘Bettie Page’ genre photos of country singer Erica Case and a friend (in black and white panties respectively):
To reinforce the point, here’s another OTK riding crop spanking from yesteryear:
And some OTK canings from then…
and now:
The awkwardness of the poses here arises from an incompatibility between position and implement. The cane and crop (and others) serve to extend the reach of the human arm, whereas the act of putting a naughty girl across your knee brings her bottom within convenient reach. It’s a problem that can be solved by a competent artist, like the Russian retro specialist Sveta Shubina:
But real bodies don’t have the same elasticity as toon bodies, so OTK spankers equipped with crop or cane have to contort themselves to bring implement and bottom into effective contact.
In other words, the longer or bigger the implement, the less conducive it is to OTK spanking. Let’s take an example from the 1966 German comedy Das Sündige Dorf (The Sinful Village), one of many screen versions of a popular play by Max Neal (1865-1941). It’s a curiosity over and above the point at issue, because the characters are Afra (Hannelore Auer), who has been jilted by her fiancé, and Korbinian (Gunther Philipp), whose daughter has replaced her in the young man’s affections. Not having seen this particular version, I just can’t imagine how that situation produces this outcome:
Luckily, the main point I need to make is the simple one that, with that big a birch, he has to put her over the gate rather than over his knee.
Once again, let’s reinforce the point with additional evidence:
It’s also true of the bigger kind of paddle:
And while none of those examples comes from an institution, they are consistent with general school practice. Although there is quite a smattering of documented cases of mid-century high school teachers who put their naughty teenage students across their knees, sometimes in front of the entire class, most schools required an offender to bend over instead. The only question that remains, an unanswerable one of the chicken-and-egg variety, is whether this dictated, or was caused by, the use of implements such as canes or large paddles: was the objective to avoid the intimacy of OTK and practice physical punishment without physical contact, or was it simply a case of human behavior being modified by the limitations of the available tools?
But there is also a quite different context for the use of purpose-built spanking implements where human behavior is certainly paramount. We’ve already glimpsed an example of it earlier, in the sports shop, and it is where our attention will turn next.
