Creepy Political Spanking Rhetoric
There’s been a lot of attention recently to a ten-second clip of right-wing demagogue Tucker Carlson saying “when Dad gets home, you know that he says? You’ve been a bad girl! You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking” in a speech at Turning Point USA:
I used the word “creepy” in the post title for a reason; I acknowledge that it’s subjective as hell. But we all recognize the intensifiers in that sentence as sexualized. If Tucker were talking about an actual Dad, spanking an actual girl-child, rather than an erotic power exchange impact-play session between roleplaying adults, the repeated “bad girl” and the adjectives “little” and “vigorous” would be out of place. We all understand: that’s porn talk, kinky talk, like we celebrate here at Spanking Blog all the time. It’s not something we’d feel comfortable hearing an actual dad say to his actual teen girl children.
But Tucker? He’s making an extended metaphor, between what he considers an intolerable cultural and political situation (beyond the scope of this blog and this blog post) and an imaginary domestic discipline scenario that we are to understand as metaphorically equivalent to what will happen when his preferred candidate wins. In the 11-second clip above, he’s speaking the words of “Dad” to a pair of rebellious teens, described in the extended clip below as a “your 14 year old [who] light[s] a joint at the breakfast table” and a “your hormone-addled 15 year old [who] slam[s] the door of her bedroom and give[s] you the finger”. Watch the full minute and a half, and it becomes clear: he’s describing this domestic punishment scenario with a lurid and pornified enthusiasm.
Whatever we may think of family corporal punishment for actual teens (never a topic for this blog), describing it in the sexualized words of adult-spanking roleplay porn is, yes, creepy.
See Also: