I’ll share with you that my comments here are those of a married 48 year old man with a wife and three kids who’s taken 10 months of psychotherapy in the last year to deal with a life long sexual spanking fetish as an addictive compulsion lived in secret shame.

It’s true that people vary in their degree of compulsion with a spanking fetish. The lucky ones think they have control over it to be only expressed in sexual relations with a willing partner and leave it to only that act. But there are many others who do this and then still continue to deliberatly and/or unwittingly recieve sexual arousal gratifications from spanking their own children living with a complete dissociation from their trauma and fetish while they perceive the two adult acts as being healthy and separate expressions of sexuality and good parenting. When in reality they are actually experiencing the same sexual feelings and desires in both.

While in psychotherapy I’ve experienced emotionally painful trauma flashbacks to a time some 40 years ago to very terrifying utterly humiliating moments when my most trusted caregiver, my mother, methodically removed my lower clothing to a completely bared state to be genitally exposed to her while she unwittingly indulged in her own sexual pleasure sadistically smiling at my utter emotional degradation almost to a point of a self- annihilation as she ordered me to bend over her knees for a spanking! To this day I can’t even remember any other details after such devestating images! I still hyperventilate with a rapid heart rate when I write these accounts!

Some child personalities escape this trauma while others like myself are handicaped for a lifetime in our sexuality suffering feelings of feeling uncomplete and emotionally unloved unless we find a willing sadistic partner who can participate in our spanking fetish. If no willing partner is available we continue to seek relief in fantasy or extramarital relationships for fulfillment. The distractive loss of productive life and potential marriage conflicts are real dangers of masochistic spanking fetishes!

To claim that only a minor number of children are actually traumatized by spanking and develope masochistic sexual fetishes is really just a predatorial self serving argument used to preserve parents ability to consciously and/or unconsciously act out their need for sexual satisfaction when spanking their own children and/or to preserve corporal punishment for the absolute control of immediate child behaviors among non-spanking fetish pro-spanking parents. It’s almost alwasy argued as morally and anciently culturally accepted. For some children, who’s parents will not preemptively be able to identify, the damage is real emotional trauma resulting in a subsequently induced sexual addiction for masochistic sexual acts. Such children when they grow to adulthood have such a fetish with spanking and are then motivated to aggresively use spanking upon their own children. They may deny out of some condeming moral sexual taboo any sense of emotional or sexual enjoyment from doing it but unconsciously or consciously in secret, they enjoy sexually the spanking of their own children.

My trauma was so strong I was fortunate not to engage in spanking my children out of some self-intuition of harming them. My therapy has brought me past the most painful post-tramatic stress feelings of my childhood but I live with, and according to my therapist will continue to live with, masochistic sexual desires. The childhood trauma and inability to express my fetish with a sexual partner has left me feeling isolated and incomplete with my emotional intimacy with my sexuality.

The professional psychology community will only uncover this insideous form of sexual abuse to the degree it’s admitted by sexual fetishists and society can bravely face the true harm over the pressures of cultural tradition and mislead religious advocacy.

To explain why some people claim to have “innocent” adult sexual fetishes my therapist states the a person doesn’t need to actually have been spanked as a child to have a spanking fetish. A child may have been too young to recall the experience of being spanked or they developed the spanking fetish when they felt threatened to a point of emotional trauma from the exposure of observing, percieving or understanding the concept of a spanking as a shocking threat to themselves.

I’m only one small bit of empirical data but stil a real living defending witness to the harm of spanking. I’m encouraged even by the slow progress of exposing the truth despite human resistance to change and the prefference to deny it. A few hundred years ago the world was believed to be flat, but was radically changed by the truth. I hope for the very sake of a healthier human race we find enlightenment sooner rather than later.

I daresay that raising the specter of “spanking during sex” as some terrifying aberrant practice, though, is not a smart move. This form of sex play is relatively commonplace, and if Western society is trending to disapproval of non-consensual or dangerous sexual practices, it’s also (and not necessarily paradoxically) trending toward more tolerance of consensual S&M among adults. If you’re going to bring up “masochistic sex” as a negative, you need to unpack why you’re doing so.

If you’re having a problem getting your point across about spanking, that’s why. Offer some practical data along with some discrimination between levels of spanking, and people will pay more attention.

I was spanked a few times with a belt as a child, but more often than not, all my father had to do was pop the belt to “keep me in line.” With my own child, I popped on the diapered behind once when she was about 18 months old after she suddenly ran out into the street. She never did that again.

I only spanked her twice after that, and then by the time she was two, all I had to do was ask if she wanted to be spanked, and I didn’t take it to that level very often.

Of course, personal anecdotes are hardly better than unnumbered correlations, but the point of my story is that spanking was an effective tool for me as a parent, which I used sparingly and judiciously. Personal experience makes it difficult to take seriously child rearing ideas which seem based on nebulous data and definitions.

No one argued, “I took phenylpropanolamine and it never did ME any harm!” as if that proved it should remain on the market and that evidence of harmful
side effects was false.

If even a small percentage of users are harmed for life and we can’t tell who they will be until it is too late, no one should take this drug. The logic of that proposition is obvious to all. But somehow, when we are talking instead about a childrearing method in common use rather than a drug, and talking about serious lifelong psychosexual effects rather than physical medical effects, logic seems to go out the window.

Check out my site for testimonials by spanking fetishists about how childhood spankings permanently altered their sexuality.

These kinds of reactions may not be typical, any more than severe adverse reactions to phenylpropanolamine are typical. But unlike the adverse reactions to the drug, long lasting sexual effects of childhood spankings aren’t exactly rare either. We don’t know in advance which child will become sexually fixated for life as a result of spankings and which child won’t. So spanking needs to be “taken off the market” immediately in the interest of general child welfare and safety. Research by Murray Straus and others has sufficiently demonstrated that spanking should be “not generally recognized as safe.”

A passion for flogging is a well recognized form of sexual mania. I am far from suggesting that all parents who whip their children are flagellomaniacs or that all children who are so punished will develop into sexual perverts, but I do maintain that an unhealthiness of mind is produced in those children who undergo such punishment.

How anyone in their right mind can deny that spanking produces sexual fetishism is beyond me. Type “spanking” into the Google Image search box and you’ll come up with almost nothing BUT sexual imagery of spanking, much of which features adults dressed in childish costumes role-playing scenes of disciplinary spanking at home and at school.

How sad that our culture gives adults who are sexually gratified by spanking children a license to indulge their lusts upon their offspring with only the limitation that they not inflict serious bodily harm likely to cause death or loss of use of a limb.

The problems with this kind of change are many. First off, the spanking parents didn’t descend from another planet, they were raised here and were often spanked. The increased adult problems from spanking are present to various degrees in all of them, in all of us. Further many are sexualized to spanking, particularly in institutions like schools where they can spank other people’s “kids” through adulthood with impunity, so they are highly motivated by their own hidden lusts to keep the spanking rhetoric and practice going and to try to discredit science and research.

Further, even well meaning people are confused by thousands of years of heresy and false teachings within major religions like Christianity that have turned Jesus’ gentle teachings on childcare upside down. Actual torture of people has been religicized during 700+ years of Inquisition and 400 years of American slavery, where the paddle was invented and first used, and was also granted “biblical sanction.”

To have change we have to teach the true history of torture and abuse in the West, teach the true Christian texts to believers so they know there is not one single New Testament verse that instructs anyone to hit anyone, teach and show that hitting children is never necessary, and finally if those roadblocks crumble, people might open their minds to science as well.

It will take and has taken decades of efforts by many people from many perspectives, but the results are worth it and are actually liberating for the parents and adults as well, once they get used to family nonviolence.

I’m not talking about “someone else” here either — I’ve had a long struggle to understand this and to search out the truth, and it was not easy. I hope my efforts make it easier for some others to learn nonviolence toward children.

Here’s what some experts have written to us about Plain Talk:

Alice Miller, Psychotherapist and internationally renowned author of (among other books) the best-selling For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence — “Thank you so much for your clear, true, brave and convincing booklet. It should be offered free to every parent immediately after the birth of EACH of their children.”

Janice Christenson, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist –“ ‘Plain Talk’ is my #1 tool in helping parents make the decision to stop spanking. I can’t tell you how many have come in after reading it and said, ‘I’ll never spank my child (children) again!’ ”

Katherine Bensinger, M.S., LCPC, Program Director, Parenting Education Program, Community Counseling Centers of Chicago — “This is the most articulately written argument against spanking I have ever seen. A free resource like this is invaluable as we serve a low income population out of a Community Mental Health Center. If every pediatrician in this country gives this booklet to their patient’s parents on the first visit and recommends a short discussion on the second visit, we will have a reduction in child abuse.”

James A. Deutch, DSW, LCSW, Lecturer, Family and Consumer Sciences, U. Of Hawaii; Past President, Family Education Centers of Hawaii — “I have made ‘Plain Talk About Spanking’ required reading for my parenting classes at the University of Hawaii and for parents at our Family Education Training Center. Thank you for helping me teach that discipline and spanking are not the same. As an Adlerian family counselor, your booklet is congruent with my professional and personal beliefs. Both of my now grown children were successfully parented without ever being spanked.”

Janelle Kaye, M.A., Instructor of Speech Communication, South Central College, Minnesota — “Students report to me that they have changed their views on spanking and discipline as a result of reading this booklet. I hope to be able to continue ordering this wonderful booklet for as long as I teach.”

——————————————————————————–
Jordan Riak, Exec. Dir., Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education (PTAVE); Web site: “Project NoSpank” at http://www.nospank.net ; PTAVE, P.O. Box 1033, Alamo, CA 94507 US; Tel: 925-831-1661; FAX: 925-838-8914