Metamorphoses of Spanking in Mainstream Media

Rants, Raves and Reviews, Scenology — By Adele on 19 July, 2006 9:47 pm

I have spent my evening going through the fabulous free gallery of spanking moments from mainstream cinema and television that’s hosted over on Discipline Domestique Online. (The site’s in French, but even my rudimentary self-taught French was enough to savour the good stuff.)

Something I noticed, particularly about the television extracts, is the change of ethos between how the spanking scenes between couples were served up umpty-ump years ago, and how they are done now.

In the old clips (“I love Lucy”, “The Saint”, “Frontier Gal,” “Kiss Me Kate”) the idea behind a spanking seems something like this: “The girl won’t behave. I’m her man (or would like to be her man). I guess I’ll give her a good, hard spanking over my knee, which will change everything. Isn’t this great fun for the neighbours?”

In the new clips (“Ally McBeal”, “Joey”, “Scrubs”) the idea is more likely to be like this: “One of us makes spanking hints, or even admits to liking spanking. It’s mighty weird. Everybody laugh now.”

I don’t actually like either approach very much, but the variant, where we’re encouraged to deal with the oddness of kink by laughing at it, is slightly less pleasant than the first.

The lucky exception is the clip from “Two Pints of Lager”, where a couple is enjoying a little spanking scene, and a friend who walks in on them doesn’t care *what* they do, as long as they don’t get in the way of her studying.

And, of course, there are clips that deal with things other than couples relationships. I particularly enjoyed extracts from “Frank and I”, “Halfway House” and “By the Sword Divided”. (If somebody can tell me what the father is using in that one, I’ll be forever grateful. He doesn’t seem to carry anything, but his hand makes swishing strap-like sounds every time it descends, plus the punishment is supposed to be such a big deal –a hand-spanking over a hundred layers of clothing doesn’t seem quite adequate.)