Spanking bench

What is a spanking bench?

A spanking bench (also called a spanking horse; in gymnastics, a vaulting buck) is a padded block on four legs that someone gets bent forward over and fastened to. The name comes from the gym. In gymnastics a vaulting buck is a four-legged apparatus with an almost square top of soft material, usually smooth leather.

Why the spanking bench comes from the gym

The line is literal. The encyclopedia entry on erotic spanking explains that the use of adapted and improvised apparatus grows out of how those same pieces were used outside of sex. The gym buck, which the receiver bends over, was a common fixture in British schools for hitting with a slipper or cane. Anyone who now sees a spanking bench in a playroom is looking at that history.

The idea is older than the gym association, actually. The same source names the nineteenth-century British dominatrix Theresa Berkley, who built her own version of the same device, the Berkley Horse. And the best-known modern version, the spanking bench, reads in that description most like a trestle with a padded top and rings to fasten someone to.

What to watch for

A spanking bench sets the position, and that is exactly the gain. You do not have to work to stay bent forward. The flip side is that you also stop noticing you have been in the same position too long.

Two things matter. The first is where you land. For impact play the advice is to spare the tailbone and the hip bones, and in a bent-forward position those sit closest to the surface. The second is time and pressure. In Cureus, Khodulev and colleagues recommend spreading pressure evenly and keeping to time limits. And asking, along the way, whether the pressure is too much anywhere.

In practice: put something soft under the hip bones. Ask every few minutes whether arms and legs still feel warm. And use fastenings that come loose in one move.

Where this fits on this site

Bent forward over a spanking bench is one of the positions I work in, and which furniture is in the room depends on the space. How an evening like that is built up, and what we settle beforehand, is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Bok (turntoestel). Wikipedia. Gives the description of the gym apparatus: a four-legged vaulting apparatus with an almost square platform, rounded corners, and a top of soft material, usually smooth leather.
• Erotic spanking. Wikipedia. Gives the spanking bench’s origin in non-erotic school use, Theresa Berkley’s Berkley Horse, the description of the spanking bench as a trestle with a padded top and fastening rings, and the advice to spare the tailbone and hip bones.
• Acute Radial Compressive Neuropathy: The Most Common Injury Induced by Japanese Rope Bondage. Khodulev, Klimko, Charnenka et al., Cureus 15(5), e39588, 2023. Gives the recommendations on spreading pressure evenly, keeping to time limits, and checking in along the way.

Related terms

• Bench. The closest relative, with separate supports for the knees, belly, and arms instead of a single top.
• St Andrew’s cross. The same idea, but standing.
• Restraints and spanking. What a spanking bench is usually combined with.
• Over the knee. The position without furniture, and why you move on from there to a bench once the implement gets longer.
• Spanking. The act a spanking bench stands in the room for.
• Playroom, dungeon, and kerker. Three words for the room a spanking bench stands in, each with a different charge.