Some bdsm-related reasons why hitting children is a bad idea 5: The school setting

It’s not just that hitting a child or young person’s buttocks pumps blood to their genitals. That’s a powerful sexual signal, and we’ll come to that in the next couple of posts. But there are also things about the setting of schools, especially “strict” or authoritarian schools, that make it easy for children or young people to sexualise things that happen to them in that setting. 

For many children in the English-speaking world, school is their first experience of an organization that runs on dominant and submissive hierarchies. It’s also their first experience of a relationship with a dominant figure who is not a parent or older sibling, but an unrelated adult who may be quite young and attractive.

Authoritarian schools place children in a setting not too different from a classic bdsm scenario. (You could also say that some bdsm scenarios draw heavily on the authoritarian school experience, but in fact it doesn’t make much difference.)

hand-ruler-childDressed in uniform or according to a dress code intended to stress their non-adult and subordinate status, they must obey orders, restrict their body movements, address the teacher respectfully, and present themselves submissively for verbal humiliation.

They must also remain in detention rooms (a harbinger, in its way, of the bondage experience), and in some schools, for example in the southern and mid-West United States and in Saudi Arabia, present their hands or buttocks to be beaten by a teacher or other official.

So the issue isn’t just of the flow of body fluids. It’s also a matter of the flow of the ritual of child-beating, and the way the institution itself affects people’s behaviour, and their interpretation of what they do and what others do to them.

Leaving aside the evidence connecting corporal punishment with later violent offending, it’s not good for adults to hit children in a ritualized setting, with deliberation, using an object specifically designed and manufactured to hurt children, with the adult using their institutional power to force the child to cooperate in their own beating.

I mean, how could that possibly have anything to do with bdsm?

Sinful Sunday: Cinderella returns

But the time came when the princess awoke again, with her prince’s leg over hers, still her beautiful man even with his face slack with sleep and his mouth open. The last trickle of white juice on her hip had dried. He had released it onto her after he had softened slowly inside her and at last withdrawn. She moved carefully away, letting his leg slide off her and onto their down and silk marriage bed.

The movement reminded her that her hips still hurt, from the violence of his grip as he’d held her and bucked into her before he came. She smiled at the memory and kept still, waiting until the prince’s breathing returned to normal and he seemed deep asleep again. Then she carefully arose, as she felt compelled too do, and walked noiselessly down to the kitchen. 

She took off her ermine and satin robe and stood there naked, glorying in the cold and grimy air. She caught a glimpse of her naked reflections in the shiny metal of a row of pots, and paused, looking back. The marks the prince had laid on her buttocks and thighs with the riding crop the last time she’d come here had faded. If she didn’t know where to look they would be unnoticeable.

She should feel pleased, she thought, that her skin was again immaculate, and that the prince had been happy with everything in her person and her behaviour. So why did she feel disappointed?

She opened the kitchen cupboard where she had stored her old, ragged dress. But then she started, shocked, as the prince’s hand caught her wrist. 

“No,” was all he said. 

“Ah!” She turned, and stared at her husband, mouth open. He had been feigning sleep, when she left their bed. He was naked, and erect. He held the cane in his hand. He’d looked at her, with meaning, when he’d put it into her wardrobe, but he had not used it.

“My prince?” Usually he was smiling when he found her, as though they had been playing cat and mouth, and the cat had won again. As it inevitably must. But this time there was neither triumph nor anger in his expression. 

He pulled her to the kitchen bench, pushed her until the edges of the wood bit into her upper thighs. Then he pushed her down. The wood was hard and cold under her stomach, then her breasts and her face and arms. She shivered, not entirely because of the cold.

“Don’t move. Stay down till I say you can get up.” His voice was stone, like his face.

“I’m sorry, my prince. My husband. I love you! I don’t know why I – “

But he interrupted. “Why doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all, any more. Now, if you want to stay married, stay over this bench.”

Then she felt the first stripe of the cane, a line of fire across her bottom. She said, “One, thank you.” Her stepmother had taught her to say this for her more formal beatings, in the house she had left when the prince found her.

That shadow on the ground between her legs is my own hand golding the cane. I'm quite pleased with that.

That shadow on the ground between her legs is my own hand holding the cane. I’m quite pleased with that.

There was a brief pause. She wished she could see his face. What had he meant by “if you want to stay married”? She loved him. She was his. She felt it in her head, in her heart so much that it hurt, and in her cunt. And now in that pain filled, burning line across her bottom. 

“You don’t speak, Cinders. Later, you’ll want to cry out, and you may.” His voice still seemed expressionless.

 

Touch these lips for more Sinful Sunday submissions.

Touch these lips for more Sinful Sunday submissions.

Some bdsm-related reasons why hitting children is a bad idea 4: Abuse and anger

Adults who spank children usually believe they’re behaving responsibly. Most certainly don’t believe that they are acting sexually, either from their own or the child’s perspective.

Suggestions to the contrary can enrage people, like the PJMedia people who called Jillian Keenan a pervert, a weirdo and so on. She’s “that disgusting woman” on a Christian right site for people who passionately like the idea of children being beaten, so long as they’re sure no one’s enjoying it. They call the site “Bring Back the Rod”, which sounds incredibly like a porn site, but isn’t. They don’t have any sense of irony, but they make up for that in anger. 

See? Jesus spanks little girls bare-bottomed, and there's nothing weird about the Lord! (From US Christian right pamphlet)

See? Jesus prefers to  spank little girls with their pants down, and there’s nothing weird about the Lord! My sweet saviour is not a pervert!”  (Illustration from US Christian right pamphlet)

The anger that’s tied in with denial is understandable, in a way. There’s huge cultural and emotional investment in child-beating, reinforced, in many cases, by religion.

Most people who beat their own children, or who support the idea of their and other people’s children being beaten in schools, had parents who beat them, or allowed their school to do it.  

So pointing out the sexually abusive aspect can seem like an attack on their parents.

Worse, once a parent has beaten a child, that parent will find information about the sexual aspects of “punishment” incredibly confronting. They have strong feelings about child molesters, and they don’t like to think of themselves shading into that group.

On my side, my feelings about any adult who hits a child with a strap or piece of wood or bamboo tend to start with anger. And contempt. And get stronger from there. 

And yet, it’s not helpful to think about this in solely emotional terms. Most, as in more than half, of physical assaults on children are not perceived as sexual by either the child or the adult. I think that people who hit children are wrong for a number of reasons, but in most cases they’re not “abusive” in the tabloid media sense.

In most cases the adult didn’t touch the child sexually, or rather, they didn’t understand that they were touching the child sexually when they held his or her body to theirs and touched their buttocks, and they didn’t knowingly make any sexual suggestions to the child. 

So, most of the time, the job is to educate people, not to shame them. 

Some bdsm-related reasons why hitting children is a bad idea 3: sex fantasy and reality

Today’s post was planned to be about why so-called “corporal punishment” is unethical. But I’ve decided to leave that argument till later.

You can think this looks like they're having fun...

You can think this looks like they’re having sexy  fun…

This post is about sex fantasy and reality, and how they do and don’t overlap.

I’m writing this series on child-beating in schools and in the home, and at the same time I’m writing a “bad headmaster/naughty schoolgirl” sex scenario. I’m doing it for my lover and for Wicked Wednesday.

He said, nobly.  

I considered having these two series a little further apart, but I decided they complement each other. Because “it’s a sexy scenario” is relevant to both series.

The actions and the symbolic interaction between an adult and a child or young person have some very powerful sexual messages and signals for both parties.That’s unavoidably true, and it’s a key reason why beating of children and young people, at school or in the home, should not be accepted or legal.

So “it’s sexy” is a good reason for having and enjoying the scenario as fantasy or play for consenting adults, and it’s a key reason why so-called “corporal punishment” should never, ever happen with real, non-consenting children or young people. 

I started writing the schoolgirl fantasy because my lover wrote a schoolgirl fantasy, and we thought it’d be a good idea if I wrote roughly the same story, but from the headmaster’s point of view. 

I made a few concessions, but even so I’m finding it quite hard to write. There’s a reason schoolgirl spanking stories are usually told from the POV of the schoolgirl. She’s an innocent, and she’s being swept along, having a sexy time. That’s easy.

But when you imagine and write the headmaster POV, you have to acknowledge just how dark that POV has to be, for him to do what he does.

The concessions I made include that my heroine, Jennifer Perch, is over the age of consent, and she does lust after Mr Beecham, the headmaster. That wouldn’t help the headmaster in a prosecution, and nor should it, but it makes  him more tolerable as a story character. There’s some mutuality going on.

As well, the headmaster has moments where he reveals that he doesn’t just desire Jennifer, he also wants to do what’s best for her. Though his ideas of “what’s best” wouldn’t stand up in a courthouse, either, and nor should they.

Ans support outlawing child or young person beating in schools and at home.

And still support outlawing child or young person beating in schools and at home.

Still, as a passionate opponent of beating children and young people, so-called “corporal punishment”, in schools and in the family, I don’t have a problem with making the forbidden and dark aspects of the fantasy sexy.

As sexy as I can, even. 

The uniform, the authoritarian aspects of it, the shifting balance of power and meaning all help to make the fantasy sexy. And little pleated skirts are sexy. Period.

It’ll still be a sexy scenario when all assaults on children and young people are outlawed.

Similarly, I doubt if there are many French maids called “Fifi” left in the real world, who get spanked and inevitably fucked because they broke their employer’s best vase and tried to hide it. If you have a maid, and she happens to be French, and if you lay a hand on her because she broke something, you’d make a court appearance and the front pages. But the French maid game, ooh la la, donne-moi une fessée, s’il te plait, M’sieur, will always be sexy even as reality drifts farther and farther away from it.

So, “it’s sexy” is true. It’s hot in sex play and in fantasy and that fact is damn confronting to people who argue against the abolition of so-called “corporal punishment”. Their discomfort is telling, and it’s well-earned. 

Jennifer’s pleats and pleas is, among other things, a pair of fingers waved in their general direction.

 

Wicked Wednesday: Juniper’s Adventures 3

This is episode 3 of what evolved and expanded into the engrossing, erotic ebook, Jennifer’s Pleats and Pleas 1: Jennifer’s first Spanking, which manages to be sexy, severe and sweet, all in one sitting. 

In this episode, Jennifer has has begged very prettily for Will not to spank her. But Will does not change his mind. But when Jennifer submits, she finds that his hand on her bottom may hurt, but it’s not an entirely unpleasant kind of hurt.

But I’ve had to cut the text because this is now on sale at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Rakuten Kobo, Angus and Robinson, 24symbols, and Vivlio. You can access it from your favoured supplier here

badge-ww

Some bdsm-related reasons why hitting children is wrong 2

There hasn’t been much research on whether children get turned on by being spanked.

It’s not a research project you’d ever get past a university ethics committee, and no private research company would touch it because it’s one of those things that a lot of people don’t want to know. 

Ah, the Folsom Street Fair. And a woman dressed as a schoolgirl getting the cane. A memory for some and a fantasy for others.

Ah, the Folsom Street Fair. And a woman dressed as a schoolgirl getting the cane. A memory for some becomes a fantasy for others.

Still, a survey taken among participants in a California-based bdsm community (in 1979) found that nearly one in five of them remembered having been sexually aroused by one or more spankings they’d received as children. 

So it’s not a question of, “is there a danger that in spanking or paddling children, they may find that it turns them on sexually?” We know that that happens, for a significant minority of people. 

So the question we should be asking now (apart from asking someone to up-date that 1979 research), is not a factual one but an ethical one:

Is it right to impose a form of adult sexuality on non-consenting children?

And: does it make any difference if the adult concerned is unaware of the child’s possible sexual response to the spanking they’re experiencing, or the adult is in denial about it?

We’ll talk ethics in the next post in this series. Then we’ll start looking about the mechanisms: why is school or home beating of children likely to become sexual for some children, regardless of the adults’ intentions?

By the way, that this isn’t an argument that attraction to bdsm is”caused” by childhood beatings. It’s more that, for a significant minority of people, a beating experienced in childhood is their first experience of sexual arousal in a bdsm context.

In fact we know, because of the two Australian Surveys on Health and Relationships, that people who’ve taken part in bdsm activities in the past year are no more likely to have experienced childhood sexual coercion than anybody else, and they have the same mental and physical health as everybody else. 

There won’t be fewer people attracted to bdsm if we make homes and schools safer environments for children. The question here is the ethical one, that is: Is it right to impose a form of adult sexuality on non-consenting children?

 

Some bdsm-related reasons why hitting children is wrong 1

abolishIt’s been surprisingly hard to get rid of “corporal punishment” in schools.

That’s the last time I’m going to use the “corporal punishment” in this series of posts. It’s better to acknowledge openly that we’re talking about the beating of children with lengths of wood or strips of leather,

It’s mostly directed that the child’s hands or buttocks, usually by adults though sometimes other children are delegated to beat other students. Let’s call it “beating of school children”.

Beating children in schools should really have gone out in the 19th century, along with shoving children up chimneys or working them in mines (future posts will go into why that’s so). But the United Kingdom only abolished school beatings in the 1980s, nearly a century later.

Former British colonies and dominions like Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and most of the African Anglosphere also abolished it at about that time. But children and young people are still being beaten at school, quite legally, in quite a lot of Asia, in Islamic countries and, weirdly, in the United States.

Those red-coloured States are the ones where child beating in schools is still legal.

Those red-coloured States are the ones where child beating in schools is still legal.

There’s an interesting correlation between between blue, or Democrat States and red, Republican States. as the map indicates.

The major opponent of abolition has been the political and religious right, particularly the religious right, who fought to keep child beating in every one of those jurisdictions.

In some jurisdictions, like Australia, there was a compromise that banned beatings in publicly owned schools but not in privately owned schools.

So if, as a loving parent, you felt your daughter should have the experience of having her arse beaten by someone you don’t know, unsupervised, possibly a male teacher, then you’d send that child to a school run by someone like the Christian Accelerated Education people. The Catholic schools would make sure the stranger who beat your child would be the same gender, as if that helped.

There’s one oddity about this, because many in the Christian right are fundamentalists, believing in Biblical inerrancy. And yet research on this group has found that most have never actually read the Bible.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child”: what’s that about?

Anyway, there’s that line, “spare the rod and spoil the child”. It gets quoted by people who think it’s God’s word endorsing beating children, and that it was probably something that Solomon said. (By the way, I’m not denying that the Bible says many creepy things about violence against children, including endorsing their sexual enslavement. I’m not arguing that the Bible isn’t nasty.) 

The real story of where that line came from is quite different, and it’s illuminating on why defence of child beating is so often so very passionate.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child” is from a satirical poem by Samuel Butler (a 17th century poet, not the Victorian novelist), called Hudibras. It’s long but very funny.

In the Second Book, the hero’s in jail, since he tried to break up a bear-baiting match. He’s got a nice widow coming to visit him in jail. She’s taken with him, since he’s got money, fame and a certain amount of charm. But he’s disconcerted: he can’t get an erection. 

So the widow gives him some advice. What he needs to get his sexual powers back, she says, is a good whipping. “Why not whipping?” she asks. “What medicine else can cure the fits/ Of lovers when they lose their wits?”

She explains that the god of sexual love, the boy-god Eros, is zestier if there’s a flogging in the air.

“Love’s a boy, by poets styled,/ So spare the rod and spoil the child.”

A good erotic whipping will not only fix his condition; it’ll also stimulate her. She points out that that whipping, done with grace and art, will “raise passion in a woman’s heart.”

Hudibras

Hudibras

Those of us who think that there’s a fair level of unacknowledged sexual interest involved in a lot of the advocacy of child beatings may also think it’s kind of amusing that this favoured phrase isn’t a divine command but a sexually impatient woman’s endorsement of sexual whipping. 

(Future posts in this series will be a tad less literary. But we’ve got to start somewhere.)

Sinful Sunday: Upskirt, princess

 

danseyse

“Lift your dress,” he said. The riding crop in his hand rose, as she had seen his penis lift, some hours earlier.   

She obeyed, slowly. She never knew, when he was in this mood, whether he was really angry with her or whether he was pretending, to have the pleasure of watching her tremble. That uncertainty excited her as much as the tremor in her voice and the shakiness of her knees so obviously excited him. 

She had ample proof of his love for her, in her body, sweetly sore from being taken over and over, and the heat in her poor bottom when at the end he had rolled her onto her hands and knees and mounted her, lashing her on to her pleasure with that wicked leather crop. 

The crop lifted, again, in his hand. She thought of his penis, how it had entered her, filled her, stilled her, then made her move, rocking under him, her feet in the air, then resting on his buttocks while he took her. Her pulse raced, and she knew that prickling, trickling sensation between her legs. She blushed. Her fear and desire worked together: they made her ready for him. And she knew that he knew it.

The end of that biting crop pointed at her navel. His voice was hoarse. “Higher!” 

Touch these lips for more Sinful Sunday submissions.

Touch these lips to see more Sinful Sunday submissions.

 

 

E[lust] 87: I’m in an e[lust] a-[list]! I’m a Mollie’s Pick, so Mollie’s cool!

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Welcome to Elust 87 

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~ This Month’s Top Three Posts ~

On Secret Identities

Dividing lines…

Ember and Ash

 

~ Featured Post (Molly’s Picks) ~

Bdsm: Our pleasures are our obligations

Southpaw

 

~Readers Choice from Sexbytes ~

Change your Cookbook: a monogamuggle’s guide to cookin’ with poly folk

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When Love is not enough.
the fantasy and reality of my arrival

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When You’re Bad
How Women Use Their Sexuality As A Weapon
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GAME OF TWO HALVES – role shift
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A library of filthy books 2: The bdsm case

top-shelves

These are the top two shelves of the (mostly) bdsm bookcase. It starts with Taschen reprints of Eric Stanton femdom fantasies. And a shiny gold book of historical erotic photos, most of which don’t have any bdsm relevance, but it’s there to be with the rest of the Taschen books. There’s safety in numbers. As the mathematicians say.

Then Sade, Sacher-Masoch, “Walter” and his secret life (I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to: god, that man was a terrible writer), then various books of Victorian porn, and a few samples from pre-Victorian times. 

middle-shelves

The next two shelves are mostly 20th century bdsm erotica, plus two of the 50 Shades books, which I picked up off the free book exchange table at the local rail station. Plus a few non-fiction books. The wiry brass couple fucking on the upper shelf are from Mali. And the stocky fellow with a thick (but short) erection on the lower shelf is a piece of Saami art, from Lappland.

bottom-shelvesThese are the two bottom shelves. On the left of the upper of these two shelves, there’s one of the very few actually valuable books or series I own. Those three volumes are the bibliographies of Henry Ashbee, possibly better known as Pisanis Fraxi. The Index Liber Prohibitorium, or Index of Forbidden Books, and its two successors. First editions, from Victorian times.

The very bottom shelf has various books of erotic art, including bdsm art, like the works of Guido Crepax and Milo Manara.

The thing with a Playboy Bunny Symbol is the complete set of Playboy from the 1950s, on CD-ROM. I’d get the collection for the 1960s as well, but I’ve never seen it in this format. I wouldn’t bother with the 1970s, though Robert Anton Wilson was still editing and writing there at the time. But it was an important and stylish literary mag, for a while. 

The duck? He’s a reed duck decoy, First Nation art from the Canadian prairies. He’s got no business being there amongst the sex books in particular. But the duck, he just wanted to be there.  Maybe he’s a mallard: they – unlike most other birds – actually have a penis.

And you need a duck, don’t you, if you want to write a rhyming poem about sex.

I was walkin’ down the road an I met a little duck.

He said, “How are ya, human, you look down on your luck?”

I said,”I saw that sexy Sally, tried to slip my nip inside her tuck;

She told me nobody loves me an I’ll never get a -” And so on.

Anyway, that’s the Concavity of Depravity, where Cinderella posed, waiting for her Prince. (Who did come.)  

UPDATE:

Cinderella has naming rights, for various reasons. She tells me the whole room is the Library of Depravity, and only the sex books section is the Concavity of Depravity. That seems fine to me.