Does child-beating in schools “cause” people do become involved in bdsm as adults?

In one sense the answer is “yes”. 

Charles Moser’s research on a bdsm community in California found that about 5% of the community members had became aware of their sexual interest through a childhood spanking. About one in 20 (that ratio keeps coming up in this context!) bdsm participants were launched on their bdsm career by being spanked by an adult, when they were a child. 

Disciplinary conditions at the Shelbyville Baptist School were strict because … Jesus.

Although that’s a minority of bdsm participants, and it’s not the only experience that makes people aware of their response to bdsm, that means it’s still common for adult participants in bdsm to have had their first bdsm sexual experience, which they remember as a sexual experience, while being beaten as a child. 

So how many people are we talking about?

If we apply Moser’s finding to the 16,000,000 people who take part in bdsm or sexual spanking in the United States alone, that comes to 800,000 Americans.

Given the strong advocacy for child-beating from the US Chrstian right, which  hates everything they consider to be “perversion”, it’s ironic that so many people have the US Christian right to thank for their bdsm sexual awakening.  

Bdsm “trigger events” 

In another sense the answer is “probably not, exactly”.

That’s because some people have some genetic susceptibility to interest in bdsm, but they need a trigger event, something to show them bdsm and its erotic possibilities, before they develop that interest.

A similar process – genetic susceptibility plus a trigger event to bring out that genetic potential – applies in the development of phobias. I’m not comparing bdsm to phobias in any other sense, of course.

Child-beatings in schools are only one kind of event that can trigger an interest in bdsm, and particularly in sexual spankings. If you remove child-beating from the mix, there would still be plenty of other triggers that a bdsm-susceptible person will notice and respond to.

Potential bdsm triggers include passages in books, scenes in movies, in TV shows, in fashion shows, images on advertising billboards, and so on.

A hot night in Castle Anthrax. Spankee doctors Winston and Piglet

I know a woman who discovered her interest in submission during a screening of, of all things, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was the scene where a bunch of Glasgow girls dressed as novices (hah! I’ve been to Glasgow) demand to be spanked.

The woman was surprised to find she thought it was even sexier than it was funny. It stayed with her.

She kept on saying the punch line, “And … after the spanking, the oral sex!” at odd moments for years afterwards. Caught my attention, anyway.

The point is, the trigger event can be something that other people don’t see as sexual at all. 

When “corporal punishment” is finally banned in all schools, and parents are educated about spanking’s sexual payload, bdsm won’t disappear or even shrink. People who have a propensity to notice and react erotically to bdsm triggers, including spankings, will mostly become bdsm-aware through some other stimulus instead. 

But it’s better that people pick this sexual interest, bdsm, voluntarily in their own time, and not through a dangerous punishment ritual forced on them by an adult.