I don’t run this site as a service but out of a personal interest in the subject, which I suppose is shared by those who choose to read my work. It follows that the site doesn’t offer a public bulletin board for general discussion of any and all topics irrespective of the site’s existing content and editorial policy. But from time to time readers do ask out of the blue for information about spanking scenes – and sometimes I can even give them an answer! This page is for these general readers’ queries, including ones to which I don’t know the answer, but would like to.
I don’t undertake to publish each and every query that is posted and I still don’t intend to host a communal discussion forum. What I do publish here will be questions I find interesting and (which perhaps comes to the same thing) questions consistent with the editorial policy. This may be briefly summed up if it’s not already obvious: this site deals exclusively with mainstream, non-porn material, respecting its integrity as such and acknowledging its proper context; the site does not support or promote misogyny or abuse, and it has a cultural and social standpoint that is liberal in the true sense of the word.
(Also, this is not the place for general queries about the site itself and the editorial policies behind it. Please use the comments facility for that.)
If you would like a query to be considered for inclusion here, just pop it into the comments box at the foot of any article anywhere on the site; the more information you can provide, the likelier it is that you will get an answer. And please do respond if you know the answer to a published query: you’ll make at least two people happy.
The most recent query is:
Alf asks:
Hi Harry. I have a question for you. Do you have any knowledge of a TV series from the UK, either called People Like Us, or Our Street? Sorry I can’t be more specific, but time has dimmed the memory.
I remember the series focused on one street, probably in London. They set the particular episode in the 1950s when clothing coupons were still being used. The story centred around a salesman who could obtain nylon stockings for a young lady. His wife became suspicious and had her friend use her husband’s car to follow him. The husband was having regular weekends away, I think he used work as an excuse.
This particular occasion, the wife and two friends followed the husband to the young woman’s flat, they followed them to a country hotel. The women gave the husband enough time to settle, got the room number from the owner of the hotel, and walked in on them. The two friends man-handled the husband into the wardrobe, whilst the wife set about soundly spanking the young woman. Other hotel guests came to see what all the noise was about and watched the spanking from the doorway.
The BBC did make a children’s sitcom called Up Our Street (1985), but what you’re describing sounds a lot more like People Like Us (1978), though it was set between the two world wars rather than in the 1950s. It was a dramatization of R.F. Delderfield’s novel The Dreaming Suburb (1958), set mainly in a London avenue, and there will be more about it in an upcoming article on the site.
Cyndie comments:
I first became intrigued by spankings as a teenager in the ’60s when westerns were on 7 nights a week and someone was always getting spanked.
However, I also remember two spankings in the newspaper comics and wonder if you know how to track them down. One was the series Mary Worth and the other was Prince Valiant. Any idea how to find them?
There were two on-page spanking scenes in Mary Worth and three in Prince Valiant. These will make a Valiant sandwich it we take them in chronological order. So we begin with a husband-and-wife spanking witnessed by Mary Worth on March 28, 1948:
Forward to January 3, 1954, and back to medieval times for this:
And on December 15, 1957, there was this,
followed by this on November 22, 1959:
(That last panel was later repeated twice in 1960 and 1962, in new contexts, and was also copied for the advertising of a 1960 Kiss Me Kate production.)
And back to Mary Worth for a spectacular scene on July 6, 1960:
You can read more about two of the Prince Valiant scenes here (along with details of an off-page spanking from 1971). There was also quite a lot of spanking chat in Mary Worth, a few examples of which may be found here, with the possibility of more to come in an article I’m planning for later in 2023. (But that’s not a promise, because I’m still working out exactly what examples the piece will use.)
Richard asks:
I am very keen to find the original of an image that appears on your page…
The image is the 18th-century themed spanking photoshoot mentioned there…
The only other evidence I can find of its existence is a large print hanging in the bar of the Austria Hof Lodge in Mammoth Lakes, California…
Any information you can provide me would be most appreciated. Thanks!
I have verified the appearance of the photograph at that particular bar, which opened in 1975 (though not necessarily with the same pictures on the walls as now). If you can’t spot it straight away, it is visible on the right of the picture (and is flipped). Here’s another shot of it in the background:
A close look shows that it’s not actually the exact same photo, but a variant with small changes to the poses:
Obviously I’ve flipped that back for ease of comparison; note in particular the exact position of both the spanker’s hands. Here’s a clearer, though still far from perfect, shot of the print in situ:
Anyone visiting the bar is warmly encouraged to snap an even better one!
I can show two other spanking images from this photoshoot, all slightly different again and all, to my eyes, attractive. One was issued as an A2-sized poster by the British girlie magazine Club International in around 1976:
Note the different expression on the spanked girl’s face! (And that makes it, to my mind, the best of the lot.)
Yet another variant was used on the cover of the first American printing of the Victorian sadism novel The Pleasures of Cruelty:
That was published in 1970 by Grove Press (an avant garde outfit in New York that also published the first US editions of other titles that were sexually ‘on the edge’, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer). The publication date has also been reported as 1971, but it’s 1970 in the Grove Press archive records held at Syracuse University.
So that means the photoshoot happened over 50 years ago! You will understand, therefore, that I have not been able to track down the precise origin of the photos, nor identify the models, nor even establish whether the photographer was American or British – or neither! But judging by how the content is handled, and by the girl’s basic hairstyle (though lightly dressed as ‘period’), I wouldn’t think it can have been far outside the range 1967-70.
It was usual at this time for photographers to take multiple alternatives of a scene, and offer them to prospective publishers. Another example might be these pictures which appeared in respectively Spanish and Dutch magazines in 1976:
Obviously the same shoot, but flipped and a long way apart geographically.
So that means the earliest identified appearance of the image you’re interested in wasn’t necessarily the publication and purpose for which it was originally shot. That said, the coincidence of the 18th-century setting and the novel’s links with the Marquis de Sade do still keep that open as a strong possibility, as does the fact that it’s tasteful erotica rather than outright porn. Whatever its origins, it subsequently became effectively a piece of stock photography that was repurposed at least three times (for the two magazines, and also the flipped poster in the bar).
I will keep my eyes open for other appearances (and, hopefully, other variants), which may help us pin it down further.
Boomerang Bruce offers:
Two or 3 decades back, Channel 2 held a ballroom dance comp for Australia’s finest. Highly accomplished couple, Karren Rufus and Paul Green, deservedly made the Final. To my delight, they opted to perform to Madonna’s spanking classic, ‘Hanky Panky’. The climax was Karren balanced precariously over Paul’s shoulder getting spanked repeatedly as he strolled off stage. Karren’s acting was fun kicking her legs and thrashing her arms in keeping with a true spanking.
A few years later for the opening number of a nightly variety show on Channel 9, comedienne Julia Morris sang the very same song dancing with ‘ManPower Australia’. The choreography built up to a climactic spanking administered to a smiling Julia bent over the knees of one lucky muscly hunk!
I’m on the case with this one but here’s an interim report of my findings so far.
The dance competition with Paul Green and Karren Rufus…
would have been the ABC show That’s Dancin’, which ran for three years from 1989 to 1991. I understand that ABC has wiped every single episode, but some survive as domestic recordings – including the 1989 final, which has been uploaded to YouTube but doesn’t have Paul and Karren and wouldn’t have ‘Hanky Panky’ anyway as the song wasn’t released until 1990. So the number was in one of the later series, perhaps 1991 (by which time Paul and Karren had already competed internationally).
The show with Julia Morris…
would have been IMT (In Melbourne Tonight), a Monday-night (i.e. weekly, not nightly) variety show on Channel 9 on which she appeared from 1996. ManPower Australia was (and still is) a Chippendales-style male stripper group whose act would presumably have been toned down a bit for television.
I’ll update this if I discover more – or turn it into a proper article if the videos turn up!
Andy S. asks:
MOVIE SEARCH
Hi, I’m searching for a US Action movie produced in the ’80s or early ’90s. A blonde girl is first picked up by the waistband on her tight jeans and carried away all the time kicking and then thrown over the shoulder of a huge man. It’s a very good scene!
He threatens her to give her a SPANKING (in the German version) and I could not remember if he did it.
Maybe someone remembers and could help me to find the title. BTW it was from a VHS movie!
Thanks,
Andy
Danny asks:
I have a childhood recollection of reading about a “forty smack spanking” administered by Bruce Yarnell to Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce. Some years later, when the film was listed for a tv showing, I was greatly excited, and greatly disappointed to watch it through with no trace of the spanking. Do you happen to know anything about that?
I don’t have a straight answer (or, put another way, the straight answer is that I have never heard this before) but as always, it helps to have as much contextual information as possible if we are to track down anything. You say you have a childhood memory of reading the statement. Now, obviously I don’t know when or where your childhood was, but please don’t feel you need to give out any personal information, because even without that I think there are several reasons to believe that this alleged spanking scene is a mere phantom.
Irma La Douce is the non-musical film version of the 1958 stage musical whose book was co-written by Julian More, who also co-wrote Grab Me a Gondola. The story concerns the salvation of a prostitute (Irma, played by Shirley MacLaine) by an honest Parisian policeman (Jack Lemmon). Bruce Yarnell plays Hippolyte, Irma’s pimp, who is an unsympathetic character. Movie spankings of this era were generally a mixture of comical, cutesy and mildly sexy, in varying proportions. They were rarely if ever presented as abusive (and if they were, we probably wouldn’t get much pleasure out of watching them). So a scene in which Hippolyte spanks Irma would never have been written in the first place.
Secondly, forty smacks would be an epic spanking well beyond the norm for a mainstream movie. Only a minority get into double figures; almost none make it beyond thirty. This is partly because with a longer spanking it is difficult to sustain the narrative interest: the only people who want to see forty-smack spankings are people who are interested in spanking for its own sake, rather than as an event in the story, and such people don’t make up the majority of the mainstream moviegoing audience. It’s also partly because of the need to limit what you are asking the actress to undergo, bearing in mind that there will be rehearsals and there may be retakes. The duration and intensity of screen spankings is a subject I shall probably write about at length in due course.
Thirdly, Irma La Douce was released in June 1963, and I have found no mention of spanking anywhere in the publicity for it that summer. If it had featured a notable spanking scene, one might then have expected there to be a lot less ballyhoo about another movie that was released five months later, where spanking did feature prominently and often in the publicity – I mean, of course, McLintock!
So I think your memory may be playing tricks on you. Is it possible, for example, that what you read may have used the phrase figuratively rather than literally? I mean, could it have said, maybe, ‘she looks as if she has just been given a 40-smack spanking’?
Vanilla Spanking 