Spanking and the ‘Sexual Revolution’?
Scenology — By Adele on 27 March, 2008 8:30 pmToday I happened upon an interview with one Richard Croker, author of “The Boomer Century”. The article concentrates (or tries to) on examining how Croker’s generation has ‘transformed sex’.
Never mind the interview, though; he says some bizarrely conservative things (“in the African-American and immigrant communities, seven out of ten children born today are born to single mothers. Seven out of every ten. The prospects for those children are dim.” Dude, really? It has more to do with ‘sexual rebellion’, than it does with, I don’t know, discrimination maybe? *shakes head*) The topic of the conversation got me wondering, though.
Did the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 60s have any impact on the spanking community? The way people experienced kink – be it inside their own heads or with each other?
I have no idea, and don’t know where to read up on it, but I’d like to know.
If you were around and grown-up enough in the 60s, and if you have any memories on how ‘sexual revolution’ influenced your kinky life, would you mind sharing your memories with us youngsters?
Share on Facebook
Digg This
Bookmark
Stumble
13 Comments
(Anything for you, my dear Adele)
I believe I have earned the right to speak on this subject. I was born in New York City in 1950, and experienced the 60’s Sexual Revolution first-hand. I lost my innocence, in many ways, as it were, at 15, but strangely enough, I had been a spanking enthusiast for many years before that…LOL! As far as spanking during the 60’s is concerned, I found that it was initially just as taboo a practice to the “enlightened” masses, as being Republican or getting a haircut. Most women I met eschewed spanking and thought I was a weirdo. LOL! This coming from girls who screwed anything with a penis, thought showering regularly was a capitalist plot, spent most of their time stoned, and slept wherever they happened to pass out. Needless to say, as a true spank lover, I had to move with a certain amount of stealth, and have a solid escape route, if all did not go according to plan.
So, I developed my own little system to weed out and separate the spankos from the non-spankos. It was fool-proof. You know it as the “Birthday Spanking.” I would coyly introduce the subject into a conversation to test the waters. Magically, the true spank lovers would unknowingly reveal themselves, causing the game to be afoot (Sir Arthur just turned in his tomb).
I have found that introducing the idea of a birthday spanking still comes in handy when I am unsure of the lady’s preferences. The explosion of birthday spanking videos on You Tube can attest to its continued popularity as a ritual practice as well.
I didn’t realize it at the time but the spank lovers of my generation needed to be liberated just as much as everyone else. Over time we have been, and continue to be, thanks to the courage and efforts put forth by “youngsters” like you, Adele.
Much love from Oldmanville, USA
Vincent the Spanklover
I really don’t think the sexual revolution had any effect on the male population’s kinky life. My kinky life started from school punishments from the 50′s and it was not altered by the swinging 60′s. It was just there. However for women it may well have been different. School punishments did not seem to happen much to girls or women. So maybe it was just inherent. One thing though;in the early 60′s The Story Of O was released in the UK. That book may have had a profound effect, coming as it did in the middle of the good old sexual revolution.
I think I can help a bit. I was born in ’42, and I don’t remember when I wasn’t fascinated with spanking, mostly on the receiving end, which I frequently was. There was, in the early years of television, a fair amount of spanking but it was always a women or girl getting it and it was a playful thing or punishment. It was never done in an obviously sexual way. I guess Bettie Page was doing her thing, but those things were kept were I had no access.
Then along came the sixties, and it was very much the sexual revolution. Sex without marriage became acceptable and open. Bras were scarce on campus, at least in Southern California. The term “shacking up” lost its status as a pejorative. The pill and the relative lack of STDs, at least among the middle class, made it all rather easy. Spanking however was something that maybe you did but you didn’t talk about. To be complete oral sex was not talked about very much either, even though people were doing it. I was happy to discover that getting a girl to let you spank her was not hard, and a few encouraged it. But I was still reluctant to let anybody know how much I enjoyed it. Then sometime around ‘65 or so I discovered that there were books with pictures and stories. This was in the “adult” book stores in Los Angeles. But it was the same thing, always a female getting it. But at least I knew I was not alone. But strangely enough I it took me a long time to be open with the girl that became my wife, even though she had become quite open with how much she liked it. I think that about that time Playboy had some letters to the editor about how much fun it could be, but Hugh let us know that he did not approve and that ended, for a time at least, their interest.
It wasn’t until the early seventies that I discovered that there were other men that wanted to be spanked like I did. That is when I became accepting of myself and my kink. But I think it was not until the nineties that it really started to get mainstream, and in the last few years has become quite open.
And that’s my rather brief take on it.
I missed the sexual revolution by about a decade, so there’s not much that I can add on that subject.
I do, however, remember books about spanking being around in the seventies. This was the time that I was at secondary school, and I recall occasions when pornography got smuggled into the school for viewing behind the bike sheds and other such concealed locations. Mainly paperbacks, sometimes magazines – probably obtained by boys from their elder siblings.
Once or twice, spanking books did turn up, and they generated just the same level of interest and curiosity amongst us hormonal lads as all the rest of the porn. As Fred mentions, it was always women receiving spankings from ridiculously stereotypical studs.
By the end of the seventies, I can remember spanking material being openly displayed on the top shelf in a few shops.
The idea that the rate of out-of-wedlock births is caused by “discrimination” is simply laughable. Fifty years ago the nuclear black family was remarkably stable, and births out of wedlock were relatively uncommon. Then came the Great Society, when young women were literally paid to have babies–each additional child meant an increased monthly stipend for the teenaged unwed mother. The results were widely predicted, and the predictions proved true. I wouldn’t say the increase in such births is caused by “the sexual revolution,” but it definitely is caused by unmarried young women having unprotected sex with a variety of men who have no intention of marrying them or supporting their offspring. Get real here.
Terry, you’re fighting windmills. I’m not suggesting that discrimination causes single-parent families. I’m suggesting that the “dim prospects” for children in immigrant communities have more to do with being poor or foreign, than being born to single parents.
I’m too young to comment on the subject first-hand, but one thing I notice often is that the revolutionaries of yesterday tend to be the most ossified convervatives of today.
I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to an old hippie or to a proponent of the 1960′s counterculture, or if you listen to interviews with politicians who were once a part of that movement and are now in office (usually in a socialist or environmentalist party). Very often, they have a very rigid, closed-minded, dogmatic worldview: “This is the one truth, and everyone should live by it.” I guess it can happen when you fight an old, established ideology – you just develop your own to counter it. As a result, a lot of these people are now frighteningly similar to the establishment they once fought.
It fits with your observation that Richard Croker “says some bizarrely conservative things”. Of course he does – there is no one more conservative than a former revolutionary.
I don’t want to downplay their achievements, which were certainly significant. Society in general is a lot more open-minded about (vanilla) sex than it was in the 1950′s. Sex out of wedlock, birth control and female orgasms aren’t the taboo subjects that they once were. People are also more open-minded about homosexuality.
On the other hand, I don’t think the same progress applies to spanking and the 1960′s sexual revolution. On the contrary – most feminists of that generation view all forms of BDSM and pornography as evil, a purely “male” form of sexuality that is typical of the “oppression” of the patriarchy, “promotes violence against women” etc.They have a rather simplistic view when it comes to that, and needless to say, one that isn’t grounded in any empirical fact. Again, it’s just an ideology.
To find feminists and other sexual revolutionaries who think that BDSM is good and unobjectionable, you usually have to look at the younger generation.
1. Why not ask the editor of Janus to look through the magazine’s national circulation figures for the 1960s and 70s? He may also be able to tell us about the rival publications and outlets that sprang up ( some of them survive to this day), the attitude of the obscene publications squad of the Metropolitan Police, the varying rulings of film censors, magistrates and legal advisers at the time.
2. During the forties and fifties the most powerful argument deployed by campaigners against school and penal corporal punishment was the increasingly recognized link between spanking and sexuality This made it embarrassing for supporters of CP to speak out, and must have contributed to the success of the abolition campaigns. It also seems to have discouraged “innocent” media reporting of CP stories as such. Perhaps similar public awareness in the USA contributed to the demise of spanking cowboy films and I Love Lucy type spanking TV drama. Thus by the mid-60s almost the only people who wouldn’t have been embarrassed about referring to spanking in any way would have been those who were “sexually liberated”. That’s my hypothesis anyway.
Adele, there is abundant statistical proof, at least in the US, that being poor at birth by no means precludes material success in life–every study tracking the bottom fifth of income earners discloses that it is a very fluid group, and that its members regulary ascend to higher levels as life progresses. Witness the wave of Vietnamese refugees, and countless others, who have arrived here penniless and have gone on to very substantial material success. The most reliable single predictor of criminality is being raised in a home without a father.
“The most reliable single predictor of criminality is being raised in a home without a father.” so, by your reckoning, my child has a higher than average chance of becoming a criminal? oh, i do so enjoy a bit of gross over-generalisation in the morning…
I don’t think anyone needs statistics to work out that if parents are sufficiently dysfunctional to allow their offspring to get involved in crime, then they are unlikely to be over adept at resolving their own relationship complications. Consequently, I’m not that astounded if it turns out that a disproportionate number of young criminals come from broken homes.
Relationship breakdowns, however, can be the result of a multitude of things, and can happen to good parents as well as bad parents. Being single, divorced or separated does not necessarily make an individual a bad parent.
Re Terry’s point about children growing up without a father, see Civitas Blog 2005-8. However (Anonymous, Steve from Kent), it doesn’t at all follow that every such child will stand an above-average chance of becoming a criminal. “Children growing up in a home without a father” aren’t a homogeneous group, but will include children whose mothers are widowed, have been deserted by their men or have simply chosen to manage their lives as single mothers ;and there are many other factors that will affect the child’s development. The overall statistics won’t allow you to predict how the individual child will turn out.
The sexual revolution did change the respectability of spanking. I remember going to the local used bookstore (Dedicated to philosophy and social science.) In the sociology section, I found “Spanking – Sex or Sadism?” The first few pages sounded quite scientific. The remaining pages were a review of the literature. Fortunately the author ran out of pages. I can only surmise the galley proofs containing the analysis and conclusions were lost in the mail. I knew then, I was not alone in the world.
The chain stores began offering books suited to my kink. I think they were “Blue Door” books. Slowly more and more material became available. Yes, I believe the slippery slope started in the sixties.