A submissive woman once told me she spanked her children when they misbehaved. I don’t get shocked all that easily, or I don’t think I do, but I was stunned by that. The flirtation ended there. Hell, if anyone’s going to know that spanking children is abusive, shouldn’t it be us?

The thing is, corporal punishment is always bad except between consenting adults. I can argue about all sorts of things without getting angry, but people arguing for corporal punishment in schools seriously disgust me and piss me off. Adults terrorising children into making their hands or buttocks available, so that the children are forced to cooperate with their own pain and humiliation have veered some way past creepy and on into actual evil.

It’s hard to believe it’s still legal and actually practised in so many American States. What the actual fuck can those parents be thinking of? 

Anyway, so when we play teacher-schoolgirl, we’re playing with something that exists in the real world, and in the real world it’s kind of horrible.

There’s a related issue with Doms who wear SS uniforms and do “torture” with people who are, at least conceptually, Nazi victims. That doesn’t mean the person chained up in the basement “torture chamber” is necessarily pretending to be Jewish (or homosexual, a Gypsy or a communist), but’s what they’re enacting. There’ve been some serious confrontations in bdsm clubs over that.

I can see that the SS costume is sexy. After all, Hugo Boss designed it that way, so SS men would find it easy to get laid and have lots of Aryan babies.  

Also, a lot of people in English-speaking countries think of Nazis as comedy figures. The uniforms looked good, but at the top was that shouty nutcase with the toothbrush moustache and the leather shorts. So the costume means ultimate evil to lots of people, and to others it means the ludicrous bad guys in Allo Allo and Hogan’s Heroes.

And The Code of the Woosters, where the British Fascist Leader (Oswald Mosley, thinly disguised in the book under the name Sir Roderick Spode) gets heckled by Berties Wooster:

“The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a    handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’ “

Schoolgirl spanking stories aren’t about real schoolgirls, then, or about young women who are actually of school-going age. If that was the point of that fantasy, then it would be a pedophile fantasy, at least in media terms.

Pedants might point out that strictly speaking it’d be a hebephile fantasy (that is, about people who’ve recently passed puberty) and even then it wouldn’t necessarily be hebephile in clinical terms, since that requires a primary or exclusive attraction to that age group. But the clinical definitions aren’t really the point: the point is about ick and squick factor.

But the “schoolgirl” in those stories – even more so in roleplays – is an adult. Even if the story makes her improbably ignorant and inexperienced sexually, she’s not underage. But the stories do stress one thing about the age of the characters, and it’s clear that it’s part of the hotness of the scenario: the schoolgirl is younger than the teacher. She’s physically mature, but he has knowledge and power that she doesn’t have.   

Sarah Palin schoolgirl doll: talk about squick factor…

So there’s definitely an element of age play in the scenario, because the “teacher” may have to play older than he or she is, and the man or woman taking the “schoolgirl” role will generally play it as younger than they really are. They have to if they want to play as sexually naive as the “schoolgirl” character usually is. After all, someone who’s doing bdsm-themed roleplays probably isn’t all that naive. 

In some versions of the naughty schoolgirl scenario, the schoolgirl is “the school slut”, and sets out to seduce the teacher. In that version the real person wearing a little pleated skirt for hotness’s sake is a sexually experienced woman who is playing the role of a younger sexually experienced woman who is playing the role of a virginal girl. Complexity is hot, of course.

It’s the combination of age-related ambiguity and non-consent that makes the schoolgirl spanking scenario edgier than it seems.  

In a schoolgirl spanking story, why does the schoolgirl do as she’s told? Even if she fancies the teacher, or she’s interested in exploring sexually, the story makes it a point that at the moment she’s made to undress she’s usually embarrassed and humiliated, and – even if the story says she enjoys the hand spanking – she’s afraid when the teacher brings out the paddle or the cane.

Bad role-playing costume

The stories work by having it both ways. The schoolgirl usually attracts the attention of the disciplinarian by being bratty, or lazy, or cheeky: after all, she’s a “naughty schoolgirl” so she’s obliged to. And she hay have set out to attract that attention. So you have an element of choice: the schoolgirl initially takes the lead, and makes the story happen.

But once the teacher is interested, and she’s all a-tremble in his office, she doesn’t have any choice any more.

There may be some dialogue about that. “You – you can’t cane me,” she says. “Oh yes, I can, girl, and I certainly will,” he replies.

He points out that the school has legal powers (maybe it’s a reform school) to use corporal punishment, or that her parents have signed over the right to punish their daughter to the school, or that the schoolgirl herself has signed some long, small-print consent form that she never bothered to read at the time.

Now that’s more like it

She can undress and bend over (and subsequently stay in position to be fucked, and accept fellatio lessons, and so on) or be thrown out of the school.

And that’s no choice because she’s got no money, her parents would only send her somewhere even worse, and she might (if it’s a reform school story) go to prison instead.

There is no choice: it’s a non-consent scenario.

Many people feel vaguely uneasy about the schoolgirl spanking fantasy, or story or roleplay, even if they’re otherwise okay about bdsm. That includes people who do bdsm. 

Caution: This image may may not contain actual schoolgirls

I think that the reason people often give for that unease is that it eroticises young girls, and shows them having sexual things done to them in ways that would be evil if they happened in reality.

Most real schoolgirls are well under the age of consent in their respective states, and in any case they shouldn’t be hit on by older people even if they have passed the local age of consent. Above all, they shouldn’t be hit, let alone hit on, by men or women who have institutional power over them. 

(When I mention age of consent laws, I’m assuming an age that’s usually 16 or 18. I’m not talking about Islamic and tribal states. There are no age of consent laws in Saudi Arabia, for example, because Islamic sources say that Muhummad, of founding-Islam fame, married a six year old girl when he was in his 50s, and commenced raping her when she was nine. Moreover, Muhummad is supposed to be the perfect human being whose conduct and example cannot be criticised.

So a law against child marriage is a law saying that Muhummad’s example should not be followed, and many powerful Islamic clerics oppose that sort of thing. But that’s a big and horrible topic, and this isn’t the place.) 

However, I don’t think that the age issue is the most serious source of discomfort with the naughty-schoolgirl/bad teacher fantasy. The schoolgirl is usually imagined as over 18, with nothing odd about her being sexually active.

I think the real issue with schoolgirl spanking fantasies is the non-consensual element. It sounds like a fun, playful fantasy, and yet what gets people (including me) hot is the non-consensual bdsm: the beating, the tying down, the fucking. Strictly and honestly speaking, non-consensual bdsm means rape and torture. The school setting makes it fluffy.

I think that’s the real case against.

[To be continued]

The school spanking fantasy doesn’t, generally, involve actual schoolgirls.

I know a disturbing number of women who want to be spanked by Benedict Cumberbatch.

I suppose there are real girls who are really still at school who fantasise about being spanked by a particular teacher, or maybe, oh, Niall Horan out of One Direction. So that’s a schoolgirl’s spanking fantasy. But it’s a different thing, really. 

A guy on the train who spends his time looking at the knees of actual schoolgirls, hoping for a flash of knicker, is also something else. If the girls notice him, they’re likely to call him a pedophile.

According to the clinical definition, he probably isn’t. To get an age-related “-phile” attached to him, in clinical terms, he’d have to be exclusively or at least mainly attracted to people that age, when he might actually perve at anything female.

Even if he’s attracted to high school girls in particular, so his primary or exclusive preference is for girls in early to mid pubescence, say 12 to 16, then clinically speaking he should be called a hebephile, not a paedophile.

On the other hand, the language has moved on, and it didn’t consult a clinician. If he’s staring at real schoolgirls with, as Jethro Tull put it, “bad intent”, then he’s going to be called a pedophile. 

Whereas the schoolgirl spanking fantasy isn’t about the age of the participants. Well, it is in a way, but it’s not about the girl’s pubescence being fetishised.

Instead, the “schoolgirl” of that fantasy is usually young but clearly post-pubertal. In stories she tends to be somewhere from around 18 to around 24, say.

At 18, most young people have left high school, which illustrates how little the schoolgirl fantasy has to do with the real world. Though to feature a 23 year old schoolgirl, the story usually adds a line somewhere about the school being one that takes in students who left school earlier and are now returning to complete their diploma, or O levels or whatever it might be.

What’s significant isn’t the age of the schoolgirl, but the assumption that the teacher character is older, more experienced and obviously more powerful than the schoolgirl character. The “schoolgirl” is in a situation that’s generally seen as benign – what can be better for you than school? – but in which she’s actually utterly powerless, and subject to painful, humiliating and exciting sexual trials according to the whims of her teachers, and the creativity of the author. 

The fantasy isn’t about age: it’s about power.

(By the way, the “Cindy” that this story is written for and about is in her 30s.)   

One thing about schoolgirl spanking stories is that they stay light while actually going into some quite dark emotional and political territory. It’s odd that this scenario has managed to be mostly understood as a light and playful sexual game. It’s a non-consensual scenario. The behaviour of the institution, and the specific  teacher, in that scenario would be horrific, of course, if it were real.  

The scenario does everything it can to stress the submissive’s powerlessness. She wears a uniform that’s specifically designed to mark her as not free. She’s not an adult, no matter what her age might be. The school uniform marks her out as a child, regardless of her age in the fantasy scenario, or her real age if she’s playing it with another person. She’s someone under the control of adults and subject to a long list of rules, none of which respect her privacy or her dignity.

Good, sturdy desk.

She cannot leave the premises, and her contact with the outside world is controlled by the very people who have assumed the right to beat her and fuck her whenever they feel like it.

It’s the only scenario that goes so dark while still being read as a basically happy and fluffy kind of scene.

If you wanted to have a different fantasy scenario in which the submissive is so controlled without her consent, you’d have to go with something like “Kidnapped! Log Cabin in the Woods”, or “Women’s Prison Farm II: Night of the Warden”.  

Which means that we’ll have to look at some of the aspects that people can find troubling (eg the age play element, the non-consent) tomorrow.  

The girl in schoolgirl spanking stories acts a certain kind of sexual naivity. She encounters the teacher’s erect cock when she’s being spanked over his knee, and she’s likely to encounter his cock even more satisfactorily afterwards. But she’s assumed to not know what a penis is, or – if she’s had sexual play with boys – she’s surprised to find the teacher’s cock pointing at, or into, her.

“Uh, it’s a … thermometer.”

At the same time, it’s clear in most stories that there’s a game being played. Sometimes it’s made clear in the opening lines that the schoolgirl has always fancied that teacher, or the headmaster. Her misbehaviour is an excuse to get him alone and flash her body at him. In the expectation that he’ll respond and take it from there. Once that’s achieved she can relax and “not know” what’s going on.  

There’s often a sequence, early on, in which another girl comes stumbling out of the office, adjusting her clothes and generally being post-coital. She recommends misbehaving, for that particular teacher.

The schoolgirl is the initiator, though she pretends – both parties pretend – that she has no agency and no knowledge and is just doing as she’s told. 

That’s an important part of the scenario’s sexual power, I think. Both parties, but especially the “schoolgirl” are aware of more layers of meaning and power than they play on the surface. 

And maybe this complexity thing is just something I’m into. But I think I’m right about this for more people than just me: complexity is sexy.