I am not sure just what sort of altercation these two ladies in red are about to solve by means of a brisk whipping, but it’s sad that we only get to see the beginning of it:
The art is from a classic Margaret Brundage cover for Weird Tales in December of 1934.
I don’t know the story behind this artwork so I had to make one up. Sister wives, I think, in a patriarchal scheme where the odious burden of pleasing the patriarch is lightest when fairly shared. The brunette tried to shirk using the old “play dead until he goes away” strategy and this made life more miserable for the other wives. So the blonde got appointed to “liven her up.” It seems to be working:
She’s a farmer’s daughter who got caught dressing up for an unauthorized date with a town boy, and now she’s in the woodshed to pay the price. You would think a nubile young woman of 20 wouldn’t be in such a domestic predicament, but it’s a sad case of the old “our house, our rules” and so what’s she gonna do?
I believe the artist is Roger Benson. By the way, I could use some help from some of you compleatist OG spanking art collectors. The above is a cropped version of the original image, which was taller and showed the spankee all the way down to her cowboy boots. You can see a lower-resolution scan of that taller version illustrating a 2010 story at Voice In The Corner. Does anybody have a higher-resolution scan of the full art? If so, please share. Thanks!
Long ago in 2005 I published a much smaller version of this orientalist bastinado scene, which I imagined to be some sort of Turkish judicial punishment fantasy:
Although I did not know it at the time, the artist is Gottfried Seiben, also known as the “Archibald Smith” responsible for the luridly-pornographic anti-Ottoman propaganda series Balkangreuel.
Gottfried seems also to have painted another series called Sultanslaunen (Sultan’s Whim, perhaps?) of which I only have a few examples from a presumed-larger set. It features heavy punishments under the supervision of a cruel sultan and his minions:
For completeness only I will also link (but not display inline, as a matter of editorial compassion) a companion image to the above. There’s blood on the furniture in the scene (by implication, from the person being whipped) so view it at your own peril, or — my advice — don’t.
And finally, I have this lower-quality whipping bench scene that very much appears as if it might be part of the same portfolio:
Judging by the forensic evidence left behind, it looks as if our two rude gentlemen took the less common route of slaking their considerable lusts before commencing to whip the hell out of the lady captive they’ve got tied over their punishment horse:
She went to a consciousness-raising meeting run by the local womyn’s collective, which meets every Thursday in a classroom at the high school. Apparently she said some things that were ideologically unacceptable, so they asked her to stay after class for “a friendly chat.” She found out that their actual approach to reeducation was more hands-on and direct than she ever imagined!
Vicki Palmer is somewhat famous as a 1950s pinup model, but she never did fetish work that I’m aware of. However, it doesn’t take much of a spanko imagination to imagine that in this photo, her hands are tied and her caning is imminent: