Girls Like To Be Spanked
From a delightful 1995 essay called Girls (by Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter) in Granta magazine #51:
I read this short story in a magazine where a girl student goes into her professor’s office and sits at his desk and passes him a note which he opens and which reads: ‘Girls like to be spanked.’ But I’ve lost it. I’ve lost the magazine. I can’t find it. And I can’t remember what happened next.
…
I simply don’t know whether the girl was in fact spanked, there and then, without further ado, in the professor’s office, on his desk, or at any other time, on someone else’s desk, here, there, everywhere, all the time, on the hour, religiously, tenderly, fervently, ceaselessly, forever and forever and forever. But it’s also possible that she wasn’t talking about herself. She might not necessarily have meant that she liked to be spanked. She may just have been talking about other girls, girls she didn’t even know, millions of girls she hadn’t even met, would never meet, millions of girls she hadn’t in fact ever actually heard of, millions and billions of girls on the other side of the world who, in her view, liked, simply, without beating about the bush, to be spanked. Or on the other hand she may have been talking about other girls, girls born at Cockfosters or studying American Literature at the University of East Anglia, who had actually told her personally, in breathtaking spasms of spectacular candour, that they, when all was said but nothing yet done, liked, when the chips were down, nothing better than to be spanked. In other words, her assertion (girls like to be spanked) might have been the climax of a long, deep, thoroughly researched course of study she had undertaken honourably and had honourably concluded.
I love her. I love her so much. I think she’s a wonderful woman. I saw her once. She turned and smiled. She looked at me and smiled. Then she wiggled to a cab in the cab rank. She gave instructions to the cab driver, opened the door, got in, closed the door, glanced at me for the last time through the window and the cab drove off and I never saw her again.
Yes. We love her too.
I wonder, truly, whether Pinter’s fragment-of-memory of a mostly-forgotten short story is real (that is to say, Pinter really did remember such a story when writing this) or a literary device. If real, wouldn’t it be fun if someone in our spanko community could help out Pinter’s ghost by finding and surfacing the story from whatever long-dead magazine it was in?
Eternal thanks to Valdor at The Spank Statement for finding this.
See Also:
It’s from a story in Antaeus, Spring 1988, page 285. “She comes to my office, sits, looks me in the eye and says, “Girls like to be spanked.” Ortega says men are public, women are private, mysterious. Montaigne says, if you want to know all about me, read my book. They say the same thing.”
I don’t know the author of the story. Google Book search was unavailable to Pinter in 1995.
Awesome work! Thanks ever so much.