Some bdsm-related reasons why beating children is a bad idea 10: children’s reactions to being beaten

How often will both the teacher and the child be aroused during a “spanking”?

The 5% rule means there are likely to be 816 instances a year where both the teacher and the child are mutually aroused by the spanking experience they are sharing. 

However, the true number is likely to be more than that. Because children who discover an arousing situation are liable to search it out – or make sure it happens – so they can experience it again.

It's a great porn scenario, and it can be a fun role-play for those that role-play. But let's make it fictional, huh?

It’s a great porn scenario, and it can be a fun role-play for those that role-play. But it belongs in fiction, not the real world. Love her specs, by the way.

Likewise, teachers choose who they beat. Only a small proportion of school children and young people in schools get beaten. Children selected for beatings tend to be from minority ethnic groups or to have a disability.

Also, they tend to be the vulnerable children.

They won’t be the children who have powerful, well-connected parents, but they will be the ones who have a single working parent, or parents who are highly unlikely to have the skills or the networks to challenge the authority of the school.

We also know that within those minority groups some children are likely to be singled out and repeatedly beaten. (That makes nonsense of one of the key supposed justifications of child-beating: that it has a “deterrent effect”.)

Some of the children will be repeatedly beaten because they are “badly behaved”. Beating a “badly behaved” child may sound like easier work than trying to find out what the problem is, but any teacher with any experience knows that hitting a child only means you have to hit them again, because it doesn’t change “bad behaviour”.

There can be multiple motivations in play. As we’ve noted, the children who are picked for repeated beatings are those whose parents are least able to do anything about it. 

But there’s another issue. The priests and lay brothers (and others: this isn’t just a problem in religious schools) who raped children after beating them, selected their victims for powerless and “attractiveness”. A child who is in one of the vulnerable categories is therefor more likely to be beaten if he or she is perceived to be “pretty”. 

There are also the children who have a nascent sexual response to their beating. This may be hard to explain to people who don’t include spanking in their sex lives. But the fact is that anyone who has spanked a few people of the sex or sexes they prefer knows when the spanking is working and their “victim” is turned on. It can be a subtle thing, a matter of a certain kind of silence and attention, of small body movements and so on during the spanking, and the abstracted emotional tone they have afterwards. 

Teachers who have bdsm sensitivity will recognise those and similar signs. That child and that teacher, who is in denial about their own attraction to spanking, or is aware of it and unscrupulous, will meet again, and re-enact that ritual, in an odd form of erotic courtship and release.

This isn’t common. It’s somewhere over 0.25% of all school beatings. The odds are that it won’t any particular parent’s children who get caught up in that cruel and unfairly balanced erotic ritual, but it will be someone’s children. 

 

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.

 

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?

 

Marie Bonaparte’s amazing moveable clitoris!

Marie Bonaparte. Great grand-daughter of the Emperor. Mad as a meat-axe. Orthodox Freudian.

Marie Bonaparte. Grand-niece of the Emperor. Mad as a meat-axe. Ultra-orthodox Freudian.

I’ve finished Between the Lines, revised, final edition! This involved, among other things, going through and making sure all the footnotes are correct.

The last footnote I verified concerned the amazing mobile clitoris of Marie Bonaparte, grand-niece of Napoleon.  

Freud’s disciples followed him in focussing on the problem of ‘masochism’. After all, if you think masochism causes Nazism, as Freud did, then you’re bound to pay it a bit of attention.

 The orthodox insiders included Anna Freud, Karen Horney, Marie Bonaparte, Theodor Reik, Helene Deutsch, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein and others, up to the June Rathbones of today.

They’re as eccentric a line-up, in their various ways, as the Medieval Catholic saints.

Marie Bonaparte for example, great grandniece of the Emperor Napoleon, had such faith in the doctrine of female masochism that she “discovered” the masochistic ovum.

She believed that because eggs are female and they are beaten by the head of the penis during intercourse – Bam! Bam! Bam! – they come to enjoy that pounding. This, she concluded, is the cause of the essential masochism of women. As a Freudian true believer, Bonaparte had to believe in the essential masochism of women. 

Clitoris, getting the hell out of Marie Bonaparte's way.

Clitoris, getting the hell out of Marie Bonaparte’s way.

In one of the more amazing demonstrations of faith that any disciple has ever given a cult leader, Bonaparte had her clitoris surgically relocated closer to her vaginal entrance, so that she complied with Freud’s directives on the superiority of vaginal orgasms.

She needed another operation later, to fix the mess made by the first operation. Her Freudian wound never healed.[i]

[i] Appignanesi, Lisa, and Forrester, John, Freud’s Women, Basic Books, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 1992, pp 329-351.

Homo-phobia: stay away from Russians in uniform

Homo-phobia

Homo-phobia

It’s nice when a violently homophobic country like Russia decides to reach out to gays by naming their special police forces in their honour.

These are two officers of the Otryad Mobilny Osobogo Naznacheniya or Special Purpose Mobility Unit, who beat up and sometimes kill civilians at the orders of the Russian government. Gays, lesbians, transvestite and transgender people are frequent targets.

According to Wiki the unit was broken up three months ago. All I can say about that is that I took this photo yesterday, and there are still a hell of a lot of them around.

The previous post was about Russians being cool. Something fairly nasty happened yesterday, which I can’t talk about because there are going to be processes happening about that. But I had to revise that view.

Russians are cool, generally. Really. But Russians wearing uniforms are the faecal-matter-in-skinbags scum of the earth: stupid, corrupt and brutal. Long, nasty story, not for here. Anyway, here are two paramilitary cops wearing the names of people they hate.

(I flipped the image horizontally. Butterfingers!)

A Malmö question: Can men come without touching their cocks?

I’m at a sexology conference in Malmö, in south Sweden. It’s just across the water from Copenhagen, with a rail bridge connecting the two cities, and countries.

images-3Malmö’s not as cool a town as Copenhagen, where I’d move at the drop of a troll hat. I haven’t found a really nice place in the shade looking at water, where some waiter will bring me beers or mineral waters whenever I manage to make eye contact. Lots of places like that in Copenhagen; scarcer in Malmö.

Before I get to my question, here are some observations about Scandinavia, as experienced by me so far. 

1  The people here, and the way of doing things, are friendly and (some people would say “but”) punctual and efficient. 

2  It’s all very civilised. For example, they’ve preserved weekends as times when friends and family can get together and do things, because most people aren’t working at week-ends. Most English-speaking countries were fooled and bullied into giving that away, at great social cost and to no economic benefit. 

3  However, they can’t make a cup of chai tea to save their lives. I asked for a cup in Christiania in Copenhagen, and the girl asked me “what flavour”. By “chai” they mean some sort of powder that you mix with hot water, and that might be vanilla, chocolate, strawberry or whatever. 

4  You should have heard the cheers when England lost to Iceland at soccer the other day. Brexit has not exactly endeared the English to Europeans. 

5  There are no non-pretty girls in Scandinavia. Or if there is one, she must be hiding in Trollhättan. (Trollhättan is a town in Sweden. I think of it as meaning “Behatted Troll”. Obviously, it doesn’t mean that. I think “hättan” has the same meaning as in “Manhattan”.)

Anyway, at the conference there are poster sessions for academics who have something interesting to say, but who don’t have the material or weight for a full session of their own. So you get a room full of posters, with the relevant person standing beside it hoping you’re interested enough to want to talk about their work.  

The orgasm question

One raised a question about male and female orgasm. It’s that some women can come without touching their own genitals, or having someone else do it for them. Just the arousal, the flow of erotic ideas, can bring them to orgasm. But men can’t do that. They can get erect, obviously, without penile touch by themselves or others, but they can’t come without touch. They need friction, ideally slippery friction, to be able to come. 

I thought about that. In bdsm we do a lot of orgasm control. Me, I like female orgasms (I might be a female orgasm fetishist), so as a dom I may deny a submissive girl the right to come without my permission, and sometimes withhold that permission when she really, really wants to let go. However, usually I don’t deny her for long, if we’re in the same bed. Even a few minutes of denial, where she’s fighting back her orgasm while still being vigorously fucked, can get a huge release when I finally tell her to come. 

There are doms who’ve taken that further than I’ve ever felt the urge to. So they might deny the girl any orgasm while she’s being fucked. And then tell her to hold herself in suspense, not erotically relaxing, until he or she gives the word.

Because I like female orgasms, and the more of them the merrier, I’ve never done the kind of training. you need for that However, I’ve met submissive women who can hold on to their peak ready-to-come level for over an hour, and you can command them to come when they’re doing something like watching a movie or doing the dishes. I think of that as interesting rather than peak sexy, but it is interesting.

Master? Tell me a story?

Master? Tell me a story?

The closest I’ve come to that is getting a girl to come by tying her legs apart and her hands behind her back, and telling her a story calculated to appeal to her particular sexual tastes and fantasies. It’s the best possible writer’s audience. 

But she was cheating in a way. That is, she wasn’t being touched externally, but she could get physical stimulation by clenching and unclenching the muscles around her vulva and clitoris.

think that’s how women get to orgasm without apparent touch, though I could be wrong.

But men … We don’t seem to be able to do that, or any useful equivalent. If I have an erection, and I clench the muscles around my penis, I’ll make it wave up and down in a friendly way. But there’s no stimulation for me in it.

And I thought: If anyone can make a man, at least a submissive man, come without his being touched, it’d be a pro-domme. I asked this on Twitter, and got a couple of replies from pro-dommes saying that they’d never seen it done.   

Now I’m throwing the question to the room. Does anybody know of men being made to come without touch?

I’d  count it if the dom/domme used touch to bring the man close to orgasm, followed by orgasm denial, followed by instructing him to stay ready, and more than an hour passing before he was told to come. 

Can anyone help? (I mean, with reports of having that done to them, or doing it to some guy.)

Orlando thoughts: the bdsm and LGBTI communities

The rainbow flag

The rainbow flag

Sometimes people in the bdsm community – that would include me – talk about discrimination against people who are known to be involved in bdsm.

For example, there was a Cabinet Minister in New Zealand who was outed by right-wing nutters as belonging to a bdsm club. That ended his political career. 

Women who have any sort of public profile can’t afford to be open about being dom, or submissive. People wrongly think a submissive is a doormat, and no women who is outed as someone who enjoys getting a good flogging in bed, or being tied up, artfully, is going to get to have a political career. (There are many out lesbians in politics where I live, but no out submissive women.) They won’t get to be Businesswoman of the Year, either, no matter how great their achievements are. 

The BDSM Rights flag

The BDSM Rights flag

They’re also more likely to get raped, by guys who think that a submissive is a victim to be preyed upon. And in court, they will find that if they are submissive, they don’t have a right to complain about being raped or beaten up. There’s a British case where a woman was brutally raped, but her rapist’s defence established that she was into submission.

The judge said to the jury, “What was this young man to think, when he discovered a riding crop by her bed? When he saw those magazines?” The jury found the young rapist not guilty, and the judge commended their verdict. 

And so on. There are a lot of out gay men in Parliament where I live, on both sides of politics. But if I stood, and someone pointed out that I’ve been known to flog and cane women, and so on (see this blog for further details), the fact that it was for those women’s pleasure wouldn’t matter at all. I’d be de-selected as a candidate so fast it’d make my ears rotate. Widdershins. 

Adult couples outed for practicing consensual bdsm with each other, in private, have lost custody of their children as a consequence. 

So we are subject to discrimination.

And after Orlando, I thought, is it unthinkable that someone fired by by some mix of religious frenzy, hatred and (perhaps) self-loathing, could go and shoot up a bdsm club, mainly involving heterosexuals. And I had to say that it’s not unthinkable.

In the local bdsm club, I’ve seen submissive women fucked publicly by their masters (under the table, where the club staff can’t see them), men and women almost naked on the whipping frame, male and female doms leading their boy or girl on a leash, and so on. So, yes, I can imagine some holy nutcase with a gun deciding to cleanse the earth one pervert at a time, by blasting us all to hell.

Holy book (one of them) and Golden Shower

Holy book (one of them) and Golden Shower

We’ll politely ignore, for now, the fact that the holy books of the Judaic, Christian and Muslim monotheisms specifically endorse keeping man and women as slaves, and women in particular as sex slaves.

But, hey, they only endorse non-consensual, real slavery and rape. When there’s consent and mutual pleasure involved, that’s perverted.

Anyway, let’s ignore that.

 

But there are distinctions between the shit rained upon LGBTI people and bdsm people. For example, I remember when I was new to the internet, going to an IRC bdsm chat-room. An American woman took a fancy to my … typing, I guess, and enticed me into her own chatroom.  

A little later I started getting hate messages from Nazis, attempted hacking attacks, flooding and various other kinds of cyber-bullying. Then one of them looked at this chatroom I was in, and he apologised. The American woman had named her chatroom #bendover, and the Nazis had thought it was a gay room. When they realised that it was a bdsm room, and mostly involving women submissives and male doms, they had no problem with us. 

I can’t say I felt good about that. I feel better when Nazis hate me.

The rainbow and loving

The rainbow and loving

But it does illustrate that people into bdsm have various advantages over gays and lesbians, and so on, in relation to persecution. I can go out with a slavegirl, who is wearing my collar and a slavegirl anklet, and a flappy little tartan skirt with no knickers, so she knows she risks giving a flash of recently-caned arse of she isn’t careful, holding hands, and no-one will notice.

Except maybe someone else who’s into bdsm and can see and read the signs. We risk getting smiled at, in a conspiratorial way.

But if I were a gay man, holding hands with my loved one, outside the city and a few safe suburbs, would mean risking getting beaten up. The risk of getting killed just for that is small, but it’s not zero. A lot of people hate and fear all kinds of sexual differences. Gays, lesbians, transgender people and intersex people cop the worst of it; there’s no doubt of that.

So we, as fellow perverts in the world’s eyes, need to make sure we stand up for each other. That damn rainbow, we’re part of it whether we like it or not. 

There’s also the issue of cross-over. Gay men and lesbians make up a tiny proportion on the population as a whole, about two-three per cent. But they make up a bigger proportion of the bdsm community: about 8-10 per cent. So we need to be together, politically. 

The attack in Orlando, and other violent or repressive acts of homophobia are aimed at a minority sexuality that I’m not part of. But they’re still an attack on all sexual difference: I could have been in that club, or a similarly motivated killer could have come to mine. 

Gays and lesbians are fighting for equality, particularly in relation to marriage, and people involved in bdsm are fighting to remove ridiculous anti-bdsm censorship laws. Though boringly straight, I’ve written submissions to Parliamentary Select Committees in relation to gay decriminalisation, and marriage equality, and I’ve been on marches and so on.

The rainbow and living

The rainbow and living

I’ve written a book that (among other things) summarises the current state of research into the effects of porn, and of bdsm porn in particular, which tends to tear the ground out from under the people who want to censor and silence our media. I hope it’ll have some impact. Both kinds of activism are part of the same project, really.

Anyway, attacks on one of us, or one segment of us, are attacks on all of us. We need to share griefs, and share our determination and energy to fight back. 

Because the people who hate us, hate us all, more or less equally.

Visas and sex work in Russia

So, Russian bureaucracy is … frustrating. I don’t have my visa, and they took my passport, while they consider whether to issue me with my visa.

Russians and vodka.So if a Jerusalem Mortimer starts committing assassinations, etc, I’ll know it’s a Russian agent using his replica of my passport. Which will be a great consolation to me when I get arrested somewhere or put on a “no fly” list.

No wonder Russians turned to drink during the Stalin years, and haven’t weaned themselves off yet.

Mind you, Israel does that as well: taking the passports of tourists, or copying them, to be used by their agents when committing what Auden called “necessary murders”. I guess the US of A doesn’t need to: they have the resources to create their own fictitious passports.

My nationality is a country that doesn’t really have any enemies. So it’s useful to use our passports (or replicas) to commit state-sanctioned murders or espionage, because we are, by and large, innocent travellers who nobody minds, or pays much attention to. There are documented cases of this, some of which have led to open diplomatic rows: it happens. On the other hand, my country doesn’t really have any political, economic or military power, so there’s bugger all we can do about it. Beyond throwing the odd diplomatic tanty.  

Well, as Stanley Kubrick (oddly enough) said, “The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.” He wasn’t completely right about the small nations though: we get screwed, but we don’t get paid. 

Sex workers protesting against unjust laws, police harassment and lack of protection in Russia

Sex workers protesting against unjust laws, police harassment and lack of legal protection in Russia. The guy in front is a sympathiser, enacting the role of pimp.

Speaking of Russian history, my first stop is Moscow. I understand my hotel is surrounded and besieged by sex workers, in a deployment based on the one the German army used in their encirclement of Leningrad just 76 years ago.

I wish them only well, because they have a rough time. Russia’s anti-prostitute laws are overseen by a Cabinet Minister who said sex workers are as bad as murderers. They risk theft, rape, violence and murder by police, customers and organised crime.

But I’m not a customer, for reasons I’ve set out elsewhere.

But if you’re interested in finding out more about the conditions sex workers face in Russia, here’s an interview with Irina Maslova, of the Silver Rose partnership of sex workers and supporters. She’s pretty damn impressive.

I’m going to be looking at architecture and art, mostly. I like those onion-shaped mosque things on the older buildings. And O Budgiegod, the art: a whole lot of stuff never seen in the West.