Turning the Tables on my Spanking Fetish

How can a feminist reconcile being submissive?

I’ve had a spanking fetish for as long as I can remember — at least since my teens when I first started heavy petting. And I’ve been ashamed of it all that time. What’s wrong with me? Why am I thinking about being humiliated? I’m a strong woman. This fantasy is gross! Still, I couldn’t orgasm without it.

That doesn’t mean that I needed to be spanked in real life. Even though I was fantasizing about it every time I had sex (or every time I wanted an orgasm, which was not the same thing), I didn’t tell any sexual partners about it, much less give it a try, until much later with my husband, when I was in my 30s. And when I finally did try it? I found it disturbing in a way that shut me down rather than opening me up. It wasn’t erotic. It was too much.

Where did my fetish come from?

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out where my spanking fetish came from. I think it must have imprinted on my brain when I was spanked when I was small. That almost never happened in my childhood. But I do remember one spanking. My mother told me my father was going to spank me when he got home from work. I spent all day dreading it. Then when the time came, I had to go into his bedroom. I think he was lying on the bed. He told me to pull my underpants down. I don’t remember the rest, except crying afterward. I’m pretty sure that not remembering indicates it was traumatic.

So what happened? Was my father enjoying the spanking in an erotic way? I’ve asked my sister if she thought our father was a pedophile. She said no. She hadn’t noticed or experienced anything like that. But it’s still a possibility. Another possibility is that any sexual energy connected to that spanking was generated from my own little girl body, even if I didn’t know what to make of it at the time.

The idea that children are sexual beings is noxious to some, but one study says children who were spanked are twice as likely as others to enjoy masochistic sex as an adult. And that could explain why so many adults have BDSM fantasies. Here’s a quote from Sex and Psychology by Dr. Justin Lehmiller:

According to a 2014 survey of over 1,500 Canadian adults, most women (65%) and men (53%) have fantasized about being sexually dominated; likewise, a majority of men (60%) and nearly half of women (47%) have fantasized about sexually dominating someone else. In addition, roughly half of women and men have fantasized about being tied up during sex, or tying someone else up.

The desire to mix pleasure and pain was a little less popular, but still common, with 44% of men and 24% of women reporting fantasies about spanking or whipping someone else during sex, and 36% of women and 29% of men reporting fantasies about being spanked or whipped.

I also learned that you don’t have to be an active sexual participant to have sexual responses. I learned that by listening to Connie Chung describe her own sexual assault as part of the #MeToo Movement and in support of Christine Blasey Ford. An unscrupulous doctor induced an orgasm in Chung’s body before she’d ever had one or knew what was going on.

I remember talking to a little girlfriend about spanking in elementary school when I must have been around the same age as when I got that traumatic spanking. I told her my father spanked my mother, which wasn’t true, and said I thought that made for a good marriage. She responded that her dad spanked her mother, too, which also was untrue.

Corporal punishment in schools was still a thing at that time, and I remember being horrified at the thought that our principal had that authority over me and might spank me one day. I made sure to never get in trouble to preclude that event. Already, before I was sexually aware, spanking had an outsized, erotic charge for me. Why?

A contributing factor might have been all the spanking that was happening on TV in my childhood. I remember watching Calamity Jane every year like we did The Wizard of Oz. My mother would make a point of letting me know when it was on. Damn you, Mother! What the hell were you thinking? *shaking my fist at the heavens*

Based on a real person but not real events, Calamity Jane was played by Doris Day as a rude and uncouth gun-slinging tomboy, until she gets spanked by John Wayne. Then she puts on a dress and walks around with a dopey smile. Because she’s fallen in love.

That was a common theme on TV in the late ’50s and early ’60s: Man dominates woman and she likes it — a lot. “Women Need a Spanking” is one of the “lessons learned from movies” in the New York Times story below.

No wonder we needed a Woman’s Liberation Movement.

Keeping my fetish under wraps

When I became sexually active in my teens, I asked my best friend about the fantasy, confessing to her that thinking about spanking made me horny. Does it make you horny, too? I asked innocently. No, she told me and looked at me sideways, like I was very strange.

I didn’t talk about it again for a long time.

Years later, when I was married, I finally found the courage to bring up my shameful secret with my husband. He wasn’t appalled and even suggested we try it in real life, but the outcome wasn’t good. It worked a lot better in my imagination — where I could substitute other people, or replay scenes from movies, or invent outlandish scenarios — than it did in real life.

While on the topic, Hubs and I also agreed that we would never spank our own children because I didn’t want them to turn out like me. I think that was a wise decision, considering that the buttocks are a sexual organ — or at least a “private part.”

What happened after we opened our marriage

So that’s where things stood when we opened our marriage just a few months ago. I had a fantasy that could bring me to orgasm, but which I was ashamed of since it went against my feminist principles, so didn’t always employ. In fact, the powerful fetish added a negative aspect to every orgasm I had and made pursuing the big O less appealing overall. Then a strange thing happened.

The fact of opening our marriage also opened my mind to trying other new sexual adventures. And when Hubs suggested I try spanking him instead of the other way around, I agreed to give it a go.

It didn’t take a whole lot of convincing. First, he sent me a video about how to spank someone in an erotic way. (YouTube has about a thousand of those.) That got me going. Then he fashioned a kind of stick with a leather handle. Later, we tried a leather belt.

What I’m finding in practice is that although I don’t like being spanked myself, I absolutely love spanking Hubs. Here finally is a fantasy that I can get behind! :p

Psychologically, I can’t justify submitting to a man — that’s the yoke we women are trying to throw off! But I can absolutely justify punishing him for the countless wrongs he’s done me.

The only problem is, I can’t do it for long. It makes me too hot. We tend to move quickly to other things.

As a result, I’ve only given him maybe 1/1000th of the punishment he deserves. Oh, well. Tomorrow’s another day!

For further reading…

Hubs and I just opened up our long-term marriage. Find stories about how it’s going on this List, or sexuality in general on this one. Get an email whenever I publish. Or sign up for Medium with my referral link. Let’s do this!