Whipping And Pleasure
There are several persistent tensions here at Spanking Blog. A famous one is the chronic dispute between people whose fetish identification with spanking is narrow (so they don’t want to see any whipping or bondage or hot wax or other BDSM pain games) and between those of us who conceptualize the spanking fetish as one little corner of the big kinky BDSM tent. Every so often I still hear from a spanking-only purist, upset or angry or just sad that “Spanking Blog” dares publish BDSM material that doesn’t fit the purist’s notion of spanking porn. The frequency of this complaint has, blessedly, diminished a lot in recent years; I don’t know if it’s because by now my readers know what to expect, or because blogging doesn’t matter so much to people any more. But I can routinely get away, these days, with publishing erotic whipping imagery like today’s artwork by Loic Dubigeon.
The more persistent complaint has to do with the role of sexual pleasure in the spanking kink. From the BDSM perspective, this is rarely an issue. Although many practitioners are happy to play non-sexually, especially in public venues like fetish clubs and festival demonstrations, it’s my impression that kinky pain-play practice (whether spanking, whipping, or anything else that brings sadists and masochists together) is intended to be sexually arousing. And so it’s frequently combined with or followed directly by some kinky sex. That’s why Adult Friend Finder and sites of that ilk have long been popular; you can specify your kinks and fairly readily pair up with someone who wants to play with you and fuck you (perhaps even simultaneously). People do not, I think, go to such lengths just to obtain something that amounts to an irregular massage.
The narrower spanking purists, however, contain within their ranks a surprising number of folks who stoutly maintain that spanking is not about sex at all! When interrogated, they turn out to be all over the map about what they do think it should be about. Most personally amusing to me are the religious domestic discipline fans, who have convinced themselves that spanking is an important component of a healthy marriage but whose self-image and world-view is not flexible enough to allow them to imagine themselves as kinky people who do fetish sex. So they maintain that spanking has nothing to do with sexual arousal and is not a kinky practice. They practice spanking in one part of their lives and have non-kinky sex separately, perhaps in a different room, or maybe at another time. (It’s never been entirely clear how they maintain these distinctions, nor why they would come to Spanking Blog to complain that we’re doing spanking and/or sex wrong.)
My own viewpoint, I think, has long been plain. What I like best about (to use today’s example) the artwork of Loic Dubigeon is that despite being coded as “serious BDSM” artwork complete with Story of O type genital piercings and intimate branding, many of the images reveal a kinky worldview where even heavy players are easily distracted into sexual pleasure, despite (or perhaps because of!) serious whip welts that must have been exquisitely painful to receive.
That’s the view of spanking (and BDSM more generally) that matches my own experience; people who are into it are sexually excited by it. They play, they fuck. It’s a sex thing. Everybody, in the end, is having fun — or else, why do it?
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Hi Spankboss. Thanks for the fine work over the years. Always love checking in from time to time. Great artwork today. High quality scans, and lots of them.
As for your topic, your post today reflects a consistent, non-judgmental approach, more or less saying, yes, here it is, there are plenty of people who think spanking is sexy. You also acknowledge that there are people like to divorce spanking from sexuality, and some of them come along from time to time to say so, “my way of playing is ok, yours is not.” Some of the more hard-core practitioners of Domestic Discipline would no doubt brittle against the use of the word, “play.”
In any case, I think you’ve managed to foster a pretty inclusive dialogue over the years, while politely reminding people who may have different views to go make their own blogs if they don’t like it.