Spanking Is A Sex Act
It’s been axiomatic to me for as long as I have run Spanking Blog that spanking (at least the kind I’m interested in) has everything to do with consenting adult sexuality and nothing to do with child-raising. Which is why I agree with just about every word in Jillian Keenan’s new brave article in Slate. Keenan, who is famously out and proud about her spanking fetish, writes: Spanking Is Great for Sex (Which is why it’s grotesque for parenting.)
Keenan’s thesis paragraph, which she defends at length:
I realize that many well-meaning parents will disagree with me, but spanking kids is gross. There are a lot of reasons why—it’s counterproductive and ineffective, for starters—but there’s another reason that nobody talks about. Butts are sexual. That’s why the area is one of the few “private” parts that, along with breasts and genitals, we feel the need to cover with a swimsuit. If a parent saw a teacher patting a child’s shoulder, it’d be no big deal. But if a parent saw a teacher patting a child’s butt, she would (rightly) be very alarmed.
Readers of Spanking Blog may also enjoy Keenan’s citations with regard to the history of spanking as a sexual practice:
Spanking is a sex act. It has been for a very long time—probably even longer than it’s been a parenting choice. A fresco at the Etruscan Tomb of the Whipping, which dates back to approximately 490 B.C., depicts an erotic spanking. In Francum, a 1599 epigram by John Davies, includes one of the most explicit descriptions of sexual masochism in Renaissance poetry. In Victorian England—well, there are way too many examples to list them all, so suffice it to say that spanking was a constant focus of Victorian erotica.
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Keenan means well, but there are obvious problems with her analysis. First, spanking is an ambiguous activity; that is, it may be sexual as it obviously is for us spankos, but there are a lot of people for whom it is not sexual but simply a punishment. And I have no doubt that the punishment aspect goes back as far or further than the erotic one. And the fact is that spanking is an effective punishment – more’s the pity, since that is why it continues to be used in child-raising.
She is correct about the buttocks being (potentially) a sexual region – a point I make in the first chapter of my own analysis of adult spanking “The Whys of Spanking,” but again fails to appreciate the ambiguity involved. It’s going to be very hard to get parents to abandon an effective disciplinary technique on the grounds that it may produce an adult spanko, because many of these parents were spanked themselves without any such result – again, the ambiguity Keenan doesn’t see.