The next dimension of our current topic has already featured in a number of the pictures shown in the first part of the series, but let’s have a few dedicated examples to pin it down, from a 1960s historical pageant to a 1980s grunge mag to modern (and ‘modern retro’) photography.
In real life, about one in ten people are left-handed.
But those proportions do not seem to be reflected across the corpus of spanking imagery: right-handers are generally in the majority, as expected, but left-handers are a much more substantial minority than 10% — and in the case of documentable scenes in high school productions of Men are Like Streetcars, remarkably, the southpaw spankings outnumber the right-handers by two to one!
I can think of two or maybe three possible explanations for the statistically anomalous proportion of left-handed scenes: they aren’t mutually exclusive and they might each be true in different cases. Maybe other people will have other, perhaps better ideas.
One turns on the question of what is the most strenuous part of a spanking, and therefore the task for which the spanker will use his dominant hand. You might suppose that the core element is smacking the girl’s bottom, repeatedly and hard, requiring the full force of the stronger arm. But the other hand has its allotted function too:
Don’t underestimate the importance of the hand pressing down on the small of her back to keep her in position while the spanking is in progress! That’s one big girl to control and just one arm to do it with… so there’s at least as good an argument for using the right hand there and leaving the ‘PLAPS‘ to the left.
And the other half of that rationale might also apply, especially in examples where the spanking is performative rather than primarily punitive, and even more so when the performer concerned is an inexperienced amateur. If you don’t actually want to hurt the girl, then it’s safer for a right-handed spanker to use his left hand, because it will still (hopefully) be a spectacular display but with less force deployed. That might apply especially to high school spanking scenes, and so help to explain the Streetcars anomaly.
The third possible explanation introduces an aspect we have not yet considered. We are accustomed to think of a spanking as a transaction between two participants: giver and recipient, upright and horizontal, spanker and spanked.
But in any spanking scene, whatever the medium, there is always a third party. In real life, many spankings take place in private and are genuinely a matter between two individuals; but spanking scenes are always made to be observed by someone, whether it’s a single person looking at a photograph or an assembled audience of hundreds in a playhouse or movie theater. And there is a 9-1 chance that any given individual among those third parties will be right-handed.
With that in mind, take a look at some more examples.
The last one helps to underline that, for the idea I’m pursuing, gender is immaterial. In fact, even left-handedness, in literal terms, is beside the point.
In those two examples, the lady’s spanking hand is her right, even though the naughty girl is across her knee with her head towards the left of the frame, putting her bottom closest to the spanker’s left hand. But the slight awkwardness of the pose doesn’t matter either…
Some spanking photography, especially but not exclusively porn, deliberately composes the shot so that the spanker’s head is out of frame. These two examples, needless to say, are not porn:
The spanker becomes effectively anonymous, a lay figure important only in establishing that this is actually a spanking photo and not just a shot of a generic prone girl. But it is the girl who counts. Strip it down to its most essential element and what you are left with is this:
If a spanking photograph works rhetorically by making spectators imagine themselves in the position of the spanker, with the girl across their knee, then her orientation, right to left or left to right, will make a big difference. There are 180 degrees of difference between the spanker in the picture and the fantasizing person looking at it, so it’s the left-handed position that translates into the ‘natural’ one for the right-handed 90% of observers. And that’s my third possible explanation for the curious preponderance of southpaws in spanking imagery.
It has to be said that this kind of visual substitution only works within quite a narrow range of viewing angles, close to four-square with the spanker and the observer, so to speak, sitting directly opposite one another. Once a front- or rear-favoring angle puts the spanking onto the diagonal,
Our first case of the new decade is Louisa(1950), in which Ronald Reagan plays family man Hal Norton. His mother, Louisa (Spring Byington), has a late-life romance with a grocer, Henry Hammond, and ends up the object of rivalry between the grocer and his (Norton’s) boss, Mr Burnside; her amours parallel the behavior of adolescent girls, including her own granddaughter, Cathy, who is herself having boyfriend trouble. She’s played by Piper Laurie, who was later spanked in The Prince who was a Thief (1951).
The story, as told by Piper herself to several different reporters a few years later, goes that Reagan asked her out on a date after work one day, and that she was amused to be squired around town by a man who had spanked her only four hours earlier, as part of a scene in the film. She also said that, before they parted that night, she gave him ‘a polite smack’ in return for the spanking.
If we fact-check this, the first thing to say is that Ronald Reagan was between marriages at the time of making the film: he and Jane Wyman (whom he had spanked in Tugboat Annie Sails Again back in 1940) were divorced six months earlier, and it was two years before he married Nancy Davis. So it would not be implausible for him to be dating just then, though it is also worth remembering that he was not only playing, but also actually old enough to be, her father: at 18 years old, she was less than half his age. In her autobiography, Learning to Live Out Loud (2011), Piper Laurie confirms that Reagan took an interest in her during the filming, and also that the studio bosses didn’t think it was quite proper, though she doesn’t say anything about the spanking.
There’s no spanking scene in the finished film. Hal is harassed by the impact of his mother’s behavior and takes it out on his children. Their biggest confrontation comes towards the end of the film when Louisa disappears (after reading a detective agency report procured by Burnside which suggests that his rival is a serial bigamist), and Cathy ties up the phone talking to her boyfriend Jimmy, then tells her father he’s being melodramatic. A spanking would be consistent with his impulsive characterization (the film begins with him coming home with gifts for the entire family after he gets a promotion), but it wouldn’t be a vital moment nor, arguably, merited by Cathy. That might, of course, explain why it isn’t in the film: in all likelihood, they shot the scene but decided it didn’t work in the context of the overall story, and the footage hit the cutting room floor.
We previously encountered columnist Harold Heffernan indulging in baseless speculation about the spanking of Virginia O’Brien in a movie she never appeared in. He returns to our attention with a newspaper article, syndicated in the fall of 1951, about the different and inventive ways that screenwriters set up ‘boy meets girl’ romantic encounters. One of his examples was the high-budget medieval adventure The Black Rose (1950), starring Tyrone Power as Walter, the educated but illegitimate English hero who joins a caravan journeying to far Cathay and en route meets the heroine Maryam, played by Cécile Aubrey, who was spanked offscreen in her next film, Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard; 1951).
According to Heffernan, this is how boy meets girl:
‘Tyrone Power first thought Cécile Aubrey was a native Arabian boy and he became irked and started to give the “lad” a spanking. Only then did he discover Cécile was far from masculine.’
Luckily for Cécile, and unhappily for us, that’s another load of rubbish Heffernan foisted on his readers. What actually happens is that Walter is asked to help Maryam, known for no good reason as the Black Rose, and is also advised that he needs to take on a second boy servant. He spots straight away that the boy and the girl under discussion are one and the same, with no need for spanking – or indeed disrobing.
I haven’t seen The Strip-Tease Murder Case (1950) and, even if I had, I couldn’t be sure I’d seen the whole of it: one early review mentioned that its running time was likely to be different in different states. In other words, not all of the film would necessarily make it past the various local censorship boards. We know that one particular part of the film fell to the censor’s scissors in Kansas: ‘man slaps girl dancer on posterior’. It was probably marginal, but all the same…
Next, meet Beverly Michaels.
Rumor has it that she was spanked in the uncomfortable semi-noir drama Pickup(1951).
She plays the unscrupulous, mercenary Betty, who marries an older man, Jan Horack (Hugo Haas), with a view to cheating him of his money, only to learn that she has no case for divorce and can only get her hands on the cash by becoming his widow. Setting about to arrange this, she lies that Jan is a wife-beater in the hope of provoking her lover Steve (Allan Nixon) into protective reprisals. So there it is: beating, not spanking, and untrue to boot.
Hugo Haas not only starred in Pickup but also wrote and directed it. He went on to write, direct, produce and star in Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1953), and there’s also a persistent rumor that Cleo Moore was spanked in it.
Another disappointment! It’s a period drama set in 1841, and the truth is that Cleo’s character gets publicly flogged for adultery,
which will be of interest, I expect, only to the hardest of hardcore sadists, and not the usual readership here.
The Richard Greene swashbuckler Captain Scarlett (1953) was originally made as a half-hour television series, but proved insufficiently indestructible to escape cancellation after three episodes, so the material was edited together into a feature film for cinema release. The story anticipates Greene’s most enduring role: the good captain, dispossessed of his lands in post-Napoleonic France, goes around the country fighting injustice and protecting the poor, though for companions he is limited to a single merry man, Pierre, plus a benignly jolly friar and Maid (well, actually Princess) Maria, played by Leonora Amar in riding breeches.
What would have been the second episode, and is now the middle section of the film, begins with Scarlett gallantly saving a lady farmer, Josephine, from some soldiers who want to confiscate her cow (and, therefore, her livelihood). She’s played by Isabel del Puerto:
And she’s not very grateful: the villain bribes her to help him trap Scarlett using her womanly charms.
This intensifies Maria’s antipathy for ‘the cow with the cow’, which is not assuaged when the dastardly plan fails and the main enemies are routed – all except Josephine. She’s not important, says Scarlett as he and his friends ride away victorious. Maria disagrees and immediately rides back for a reckoning. Scarlett and Pierre follow, but at a distance we may have cause to regret; ‘An angry woman is nothing to trifle with,’ says Pierre. So when they arrive, Maria has finished and is emerging from the cowshed, saying ‘I feel better now.’ Out comes Josephine, too, looking somewhat subdued. She gives a sniffle and puts a hand to her bottom:
The implication is discreet, but clear enough: Josephine has just been spanked – alas, offscreen!
Fancy seeing Rhonda Fleming get spanked?
Me too..
Yet more rumor would have us believe that fate is in store for her at the hands of Ronald Reagan in Tropic Zone(1953). She plays Flanders White, owner of a failing banana plantation. He’s Dan McCloud, who gets off on the wrong foot with her when she catches him sleeping in her beach hut, just after she has changed from jodhpurs to swimsuit unaware of his presence, but whom she eventually engages to manage the plantation. The trouble is, their relationship, though it eventually becomes romantic, is essentially an adult, professional one, with no room for a plausible spanking scenario to develop.
It’s not always clear where these rumors come from. Sometimes they may have some scintilla of genuine background information at their root, sometimes mere wishful thinking. In the case of Tropic Zone, it’s a combination of misinformation and overstatement. We should, perhaps reluctantly, stop looking at Rhonda Fleming and pay more attention to the other girl in Dan’s life, Latina nightclub dancer Elena Escobar, played by Estelita Rodriguez (who had already been spanked three times in previous films).
So that’s the misinformation. And the overstatement will be obvious when we see exactly what it is that Dan does to her:
Not unwelcome, but not anything that will increase Estelita’s still impressive tally of screen spanking scenes!
In contrast with all this chaff and uncertainty, the British crime thriller The Good Die Young (1954) certainly featured an honest-to-goodness over-the-knee spanking scene, when GI Eddie Blaine (John Ireland) comes home unexpectedly and catches his wife Denise with her lover. She is played by Gloria Grahame, recently spanked in Prisoners of the Casbah (1953).
As Eddie walks in, Denise and boyfriend are about to take a drink, and he announces his presence with the interjection, ‘Bottoms up.’ It’s only the first straw in the wind. Once he has thrown out the interloper, he says he is going to do ‘something I should have done a long time ago’ – another pretty clear indication of where this is going…
And then, enter another kind of unwelcome interloper, the censor.
Principal photography had already begun at Shepperton Studios when an instruction came from the British Board of Film Censorship: take out the spanking.
It’s not altogether clear why this should have been a problem. There had been no change of personnel at the top of the Board, such as might have resulted in a change of policy: the same President and Secretary, Sir Sidney Harris and Arthur Watkins, had been in charge when the Board had passed, among others, The Girl Who Couldn’t Quite and The Romantic Age (the latter ending with a spectacular hairbrush spanking on a diaphanous negligee and visible panties), though it is true that there was some trouble over the soundtrack of Her Favourite Husband. But now it seems a spanking scene was beyond the pale; there wasn’t another one in a British film until Doctor at Large in 1957.
It’s not known whether the spanking had actually been filmed when the order was issued, but it was evidently so late in the proceedings that a complete rewrite was out of the question, which is why the pre-spanking signals, ‘bottoms up’ and ‘something I should have done a long time ago’, are still there in the final version. Since the preferred option wasn’t permissible, the director, Lewis Gilbert, needed to find something else that would serve the same purpose. He told a visiting journalist what they had come up with:
‘We’re going to have the husband dump the wife fully dressed into a hot bath. This way she suffers indignity as well as discomfort – which is why spanking is so effective!’
But that wasn’t the end of the scene’s censorship troubles. They were also warned that the bathtub scene would itself be unacceptable in America, because it was anticipated that Gloria Grahame would emerge from the water with her dress clinging suggestively to her body. It doesn’t do that in the finished scene (we see very little of her after immersion), but they were concerned enough to shoot an alternative US version where he ducks her under the shower, leaving her merely sprinkled rather than totally sopping.
Ironically, the bathtub scene is now itself considered problematic: it is specifically mentioned as an example of ‘domestic abuse’ in the content warning section of the modern British Board of Film Classification’s page on The Good Die Young, whereas there’s no such warning for any of the spanking scenes in British films of the same era!
The newspaper advertisements told us what to expect from the Western Many Rivers to Cross (1955):
‘The girl needs a spanking – who will do it?’
(It’s tucked away at the bottom right.) An alternative version of the line was:
And another one:
The ‘impatient maiden’ is Mary Stuart Cherne, a frontier gal played by Eleanor Parker,
and the question ‘Who will do it?’ was answered by an anecdote from the set, concerning a scene in which she kicks the trapper and Davy Crockett dressalike Bushrod Gentry (Robert Taylor). She asked Taylor how hard she should do it. ‘Use your own judgment,’ he told her. ‘Just remember, though, that in the final scene I spank you!’
Not in the final release print, he doesn’t! But it’s not for want of trying. In the course of the story, she has an on-off marriage with him, following him out into the Kentucky wild lands but then going off on her own and falling foul of some Injuns. When he rescues her, he remonstrates in promising terms:
BUSHROD: Soon as I get my breath, I’m going to bang you good, causing me all this work. MARY: You ain’t gonna bang nobody! BUSHROD: You’re my wife, you’ve got it coming.
So all the evidence points to there having been a spanking scene in the film as planned: an overt spoken threat to set it up, anecdotal evidence that it was on the production schedule and several different versions of a direct statement in the publicity. Sadly, it just didn’t get beyond the cutting room.
Our attention now turns to Julie Adams,
who is best remembered for being in and out of a swimsuit in the vicinity of the Black Lagoon.
She became potentially relevant to us when he played Sheryl Gregory in the plane crash drama The Looters (1955). Press publicity tells us about one of the first scenes she shot with Ray Danton:
‘The first day on the set, the script called for him to smack actress Julie Adams, a girl he had never met before. He smacked her and three months later they were married in real life.’
The story’s headline tells us:
Movie Spanking Leads To Marriage
But watching the film shows us definitively that what he actually does is sock her on the jaw. No spanking was ever intended or done.
Next up for a narrow escape is Marie Windsor.
In The Parson and the Outlaw (1957), she plays the girlfriend of gunman and gambler Ace Jardin (Bob Steele).
At one point he tells her to hand over her money so that he can use it as his stake. When she refuses, he puts her across his knee,
but only to shake the cash out of her. It’s not, as has been reported, a spanking attempt, because not only is there no spanking, there isn’t even any spanking intention – just routine tension that escalates when he loses, and brings them to breaking point when he wagers her on the next hand.
Maybe the arrival of a Western with an OTK scene that isn’t a spanking is a sign that we are starting to pass beyond the great age of cinema spanking scenes. It may be a premature end to the decade; but there are still some more cases to investigate as we travel onwards to the future in the final part of this series.
It was Year 75 for Kiss Me Kate. And, as is becoming tiresomely familiar, once again it was not a very good year. But it made a pretty good start at a high school in Texas from January 26 through February 4:
We can continue to accentuate the positive in Los Angeles, where Lanie Marcantel and Billy Walker were Lilli and Fred in the Iberia Performing Arts League production that ran March 16 through April 2, and gave us a classic rendition of the scene (not to mention the whole of their parts):
Yes, he’s raising her skirt! And earlier scenes have already shown that she’s not wearing bloomers… but he takes care to leave a ‘modesty petticoat’ in place,
though her frantic kicking does something to displace it as the spanking continues:
Well done, that lady! The video may be viewable here.
A church drama group in Minnesota performed the musical April 20-23, and awkward feelings about the scene were limited to the way the chorus were made implausibly quick on the uptake: they rushed across to block off the view before any normal, unprepared person could possibly know what was happening.
In Brazil, July saw a revival of the 2015 production that had produced some outstanding spanking pictures with Jose Mayer and Alessandra Verney. This time round, Alessandra returned as Lilli, but in the interim Mayer’s career had been wrecked by #MeToo harassment allegations (on the rights and wrongs of which I am in no position to take a view), so Miguel Falabella took over as Fred. He gave a somewhat less masculine version of the character, and this time round, for the most part, the production avoided using spanking imagery in its publicity. But at least they did shoot one photo:
And they even put it in the centerfold of the program… captioned with lyrics from ‘I Hate Men’, which is probably fair enough!
Also fair enough, however disappointing, is the publicity for the staging by Notrevo Productions of Moapa Valley, Nevada, which ran February 23 through 25. The trailer used a stills montage to promise patrons ‘a slapping good time’. Most of the slaps shown were dished out by Lilli, but they also found room for this:
I guess we ought to be thankful for small mercies, but it really is the most pusillanimous way of both acknowledging the existence of, and yet covering up, the spanking scene. Apart from anything else, it’s rather hard on Erin Panter, reduced to a bottom just sticking up into frame over Chris Wallace’s knee. So for purposes of giving due recognition, here she is in another scene:
But as I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s the prerogative of each individual group to decide how to publicize their show, even if their choices may often not align with our preferences. Our real ire should be reserved for productions with the impudence to monkey around with the fundamental logic of the show itself, like one that ran in Liverpool, England, March 30 through April 1, and cut out the spanking altogether (or, let’s say it as it is, censored it). Instead, Fred’s reprisals took the form of pelting Lilli with food as she retreated off the stage. The video of this travesty may be viewable here, should you want to give it your time.
Is this the way Kiss Me Kate ends – with a whimper?
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 Home Guard’s Little Shrew’, 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.
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.
Vanilla Spanking 