Questions From Readers: Childhood Spanking

Private Life and Play, Scenology — By Adele on 16 March, 2006 12:36 pm

Ah. The inevitable question in the mail: “Were you spanked as a child?”

I know women in the scene who fly into a rage at being asked this question: they don’t like the thought of their childish selves being sexualised. Me, I don’t mind, because I don’t view my kid entity separately from my grown up entity: the kid Adele doesn’t exist any more. Instead, there’s a young woman Adele, with all her experiences blended together. If I can’t discuss my childhood, I can’t discuss how I arrived at being me today.

I also know spanking models who make up hugely elaborate history of their frequent floggings at the hands of parents, teachers, priests and pretty much any authority figure they’d come into contact with at an early age. You can normally recognise these stories by their markings, because they all start the same: “I grew up in a very strict *insert nationality or a religious denomination* family, with three uncles, fifteen older brothers, a family priest and a Labrador. They all were allowed to spank me.” I’m not saying that every girl who claims to have grown up in a strict family is lying to you – there are, unfortunately, plenty of parents around who think that smacking kids is a good idea – but every story that starts off this way does that because the girl is making a conscious effort to capitalise on spanking fantasies. Yours or her own.

And that’s OK. If I was spanked as a kid, I’d probably capitalise on it, too, and build up fantasies around it just for my own amusement. Sexualising it is OK, too: that’s why the stories are shared.

Anyway, the answer is no. I wasn’t spanked as a child. I wasn’t punished in any way at all, not even with grounding, not even with time-outs. I got corner-time at school on one occassion (unfairly), but insulted me rather than teach me any sort of a lesson (that’s what unfair punishments do).

I spanked myself, though, and downright tortured my dolls and teddy-bears. (One bear was punished with having to stand on his head, I recall, and when he couldn’t, I smacked him. He was quite dusty, though, and made me coughed my head off in revenge.) I also tried to get my little friends to punish me when we played mummies-and-daughters, but they weren’t too keen.

Sorry to disappoint.