The Crossed Wire

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.

This is the face of the woman I love.

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.