Spanking With And Without Sex
Anybody who has spent any time at all on spanking forums and such has witnessed or participated in the train wreck of a discussion called “Does spanking need to be sexual?” or something similar. It’s a train wreck because the answer is different for different people. I myself consider spanking a form of foreplay, pretty much; other people don’t want any sex mixed with their spankings, or they do, but they are getting spanked by somebody with whom they have good reasons not to be sexual. Or whatever — there are ten different answers for every dozen people, and six of those people are convinced that what’s true for them ought to be true for everyone. Makes for a messy discussion, usually.
So against that backdrop, I thought it worthwhile to link you to Mistress Matisse’s slightly-more-general column that explains some of the reasons people may enjoy non-sexual BDSM. It’s called Spanks a Lot: BDSM Without Sex and it begins:
Someone said to me recently, “I kinda understand BDSM stuff when there’s sex involved. You tie a girl up, or she spanks you, or whatever, and then you fuck. That’s cool, if you like that. But I’ve seen people doing BDSM without sex, and I don’t get that. What’s the point?”
I’m not surprised he’s puzzled—even if you ask people who are in the BDSM community, opinions vary. My friend Greg put it to me thus: “Doing a scene without sex is like going to the movies, but leaving after the previews are over.” But other people see it differently. “Orgasm is not the only deeply fulfilling physical experience you can have with another human,” said Lorraine. And Steve’s reply was, “If you still have the energy to move, let alone fuck, after I play with you, I obviously didn’t play with you hard enough.”
I can go either way, so let me try to explain…
I think a big part also is how one defines ‘sexual’! To me saying something is only ‘sexual’ if there is intercourse is to me at best odd. Just making out with someone is, to me, something sexual, although not ‘sex’! To me to take a member of the opposite sex, and for me it would be the opposite, pulliing down her panties and giving her a spanking is a sexual thing even if no sex follows it.
G’day, folks :-)
A better question for discussion forums is “Apart from sex, what are the by-products of the submit-dominate experience?”
Notice that spanking hasn’t been mentioned in the above question. But I have heard devotees of spanking make comments like: “The real payoff for me was when she blushed. It was incredible. It engulfed her face, her neck, and her upper chest.”
And from the other side of the hand, so-to-speak, there was: “When I finally decided I wanted him to do it I felt like that time I admitted myself to hospital. I’d had this thing worrying me for ages, but never done anything about it. Then one night I just drove to Emergency, blurted it all out, and literally gave myself to them. You cannot imagine my sense of relief.”
Allied to the hospital experience is the spanking author who wrote “The erotic key is the act of submission itself.” The real dynamic in spanking, or big-game fishing, or in kicking the winning score, is the pleasure of the submit-dominate experience itself. Sometimes the pleasure is obscured, because the submission certainly wasn’t consensual, but the feelings of the dominant, the victor, are anything but obscure. Humans are not alone in the animal world for having an overwhelming preference to express this pleasure through sexual intercourse.
If some spankings are devoid of sex it may mean that the submit-dominate expereience, no matter how ‘impure’ it may have seemed, did bring such a surfeit of pleasure that anything else would have seemed like a chore. If the main course was such as to cause you to decline the dessert then maybe you will also decide the night has nothing better to offer when the audience displays unrestrained admiration for a caning demonstration you’ve just given.
Eric Carwardine, in Perth, Western Australia