Spanking

What is spanking?

Spanking is striking the buttocks as an erotic act, with the bare hand or with a tool. It is the most practiced form of impact play. The act carries a plain English name and the scene keeps it, and that word covers the play with a paddle, a belt, or a cane just as clearly.

What spanking looks like in practice

Most spanking happens on an ordinary weeknight, with a hand, and without the word ever coming up. Only when you look it up do you find you were already doing it.

Two forms turn up most often, and they resemble each other less than you’d think. The first is domestic. You lie over a lap or over the edge of the bed, there is no tool in the house, and what carries the scene is the pace and the talking in between. The second plays out on a spanking bench or a bench, with a belt or a paddle, an agreed number, and someone counting. The same act, a different evening.

That the first form is so ordinary shows up in research that wasn’t even looking for it. Herbenick and colleagues surveyed 4,998 American students and published in Archives of Sexual Behavior what those students mean by “rough sex.” Of the 1,795 participants with a partner of at least three months, about 80 percent had done it with that partner, and most of them liked it. The acts they most often named as rough were choking, hair-pulling, and spanking.

Where the word spanking comes from

From a dictionary, and surprisingly late. Etymonline dates the verb spank to 1727, in Bailey, with the meaning “to strike forcefully with the open hand, or something flat and hard, especially on the buttocks,” and suspects it is imitative: the word sounds like what it describes. The noun for the blow follows in 1785. And spanking for the act only in 1854, where it is described as a punishment for children.

That order explains why the word lives two lives today. The erotic meaning is the youngest, and it has never quite shaken off the older one.

There is a second complication, and you notice it the moment you read English-language material. The encyclopedia lays it out side by side. American dictionaries explicitly allow spanking with an implement, so a paddling at an American school is simply called a spanking, while most British dictionaries count only the bare hand and use the word smacking for the rest. One thing is the same everywhere: a spanking always lands on the buttocks, while a smack can also land on a hand or an arm.

Dutch never had this quarrel, because it never borrowed the verb. In Dutch you cannot spank; you give billenkoek, or you say it in English. The person is missing too. Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists spanko for someone who loves this, with a single citation from 2007, and no Dutch word exists for it.

Why people love spanking

Rarely for the pain. That’s the shortest summary of the best research done on the question itself.

Labrecque, Potz, Larouche, and Joyal gathered the accounts of 227 people who practice masochism or submission and analyzed them in The Journal of Sex Research. Sixteen themes came out of it, and the reasons for doing it fell into three groups: the use of power between two people, the experience of physical pain, and the shift in your own state of consciousness. That last one, the authors say, is the most important. What people are after is the head that goes quieter, and the blow is the means.

As for how the interest starts, they found something else. It usually begins early, long before anyone has a word for it, and participants described it sometimes as something from within and sometimes as something a single event set off.

• For you as the receiver, the gain is that attention moves from your head to your skin, and you don’t have to invent anything to make that happen.
• For the one giving, the gain is in the dosing. Every decision gets an answer within a second.
• For a couple, spanking is the cheapest experiment on the whole list. You need nothing you still have to buy.

Spanking removes nothing. An evening that starts with a fight does not end as a good scene because someone got hit. And the threshold is low enough to roll into it without a conversation, which is exactly how it goes wrong.

How people do spanking

Almost everyone goes through the same four stages: agreeing, warming up, building, talking after. The differences sit in what happens between the second stage and the third.

Roughly three forms turn up:

1. Hand only. Where nearly everyone starts, and the one form where the person hitting feels exactly what they are doing.
2. Hand plus one object. Usually something from around the house: a belt, or the back of a hairbrush. The hand stays the warm-up, the object is the second half.
3. As part of a story. An offense, a number, a posture, sometimes a maintenance spanking at a set time. The blows are then the least interesting part of the arrangement.

The posture varies along with it. Over the knee is the best known and the most intimate, bent forward over a piece of furniture gives the most room, and standing against a wall is the hardest because you have nothing to lean on. The difference between an evening that fits and one that derails does not sit in the posture. It sits in whether it was said out loud beforehand where the scene stops: at a number, at the clock, or at a word.

Misunderstandings about spanking

“Spanking is what you see in porn.” What you see there is a selection. Bridges, Wosnitzer, Scharrer, Sun, and Liberman analyzed 304 scenes from best-selling films and published in Violence Against Women that 88.2 percent contained physical aggression, with spanking the most common form. The targets were overwhelmingly women, and they usually responded with pleasure or neutrally. That last part is the problem: you see a thousand blows and not one negotiation, and you never see anyone saying that’s enough.

“Spanking belongs to rough sex, so it’s in the same category as choking.” Not according to the students who do it. In the Herbenick study the idea of “rough sex” split into two groups: hair-pulling and spanking on one side, and choking, slapping the face, and punching on the other. That distinction is more than a filing system. Spanking lands on the part of the body with the thickest padding, choking on the part with the least.

“Spanking and billenkoek are the same word in two languages.” Almost. The difference sits in the register: in Dutch billenkoek is first the punishment and only after that the play, while in the scene spanking is the play right away. So someone who picks the English word in an ad or a profile is also saying something about what they mean.

What I notice myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, trained as a psychotherapist, and I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. Spanking is on my list of options and I have the tools for it, from soft to very sharp.

Here’s something I’ve never seen written down: the word you pick predicts fairly precisely what you want. Women who write to me about spanking almost always mean a scene with an object and a certain ceremony. Women who write billenkoek almost always mean a hand and a mood. I ask about it these days, because I’ve guessed wrong a few times.

The second thing that comes back every time: the question nearly always arrives with an apology attached. It doesn’t need one. Of everything on this list, this is the most done and the least discussed.

What you can do yourself

• Say which word you mean and what you understand by it. In American English spanking covers the tool too, and in British English it doesn’t, so name whether an object is coming rather than hoping it’s clear.
• Never put spanking and choking in the same arrangement. They get named in one breath because both fall under “rough,” but the risk lies miles apart. If you want both, agree on them separately, on different evenings.
• Settle how it stops before it starts: at a number, at the clock, or at a word. That’s the agreement that goes missing most often and the one you miss most afterward.
• Keep the tool out of the room the first time. Not because an object is dangerous, but because with the hand you learn what’s needed.
• Get it checked if something isn’t right after a heavy evening: pain that stays, a swelling that grows, something odd when you pee. Say in the exam room how it happened, or the search goes in the wrong corner.
• Agree on who starts the conversation afterward. With spanking that’s more often the one who hit than you’d think.

More reading about spanking

On this site the story sits on the other side: what is spanking is about how a blow turns into pleasure, and the art of spanking about the build step by step. And impact play sets spanking next to the rest of the family.

Off this site, the research by Labrecque and colleagues is the best there is on the question of why people seek this, in their own words. And on the reading list you’ll find The Compleat Spanker by Lady Green (2011), ninety-six pages devoted to this one subject: anatomy, communication, warm-up, instruments, and postures.

Where this fits on this site

Spanking is on my list of options, in soft, medium, and hard, and I have a range of implements for it. If you’d like to experience it once without having to invent the scenario, the pace, and the agreements yourself, the page about the BDSM date explains how such an evening comes together.

Sources

• What Is So Appealing About Being Spanked, Flogged, Dominated, or Restrained? Answers from Practitioners of Sexual Masochism/Submission. Frédérike Labrecque, Audrey Potz, Émilie Larouche & Christian C. Joyal, The Journal of Sex Research 58(4), 409–423, 2021. Qualitative analysis of the accounts of 227 practitioners; yields the sixteen themes and the three groups of reasons, power between people, physical pain, and the shift in one’s own state of consciousness, plus the finding that the interest usually begins early in life.
• What Is Rough Sex, Who Does It, and Who Likes It? Findings from a Probability Sample of U.S. Undergraduate Students. Debby Herbenick, Tsung-Chieh Fu, Dubravka Svetina Valdivia, Callie Patterson, Yael Rosenstock Gonzalez, Lucia Guerra-Reyes, Heather Eastman-Mueller, Jonathon Beckmeyer & Molly Rosenberg, Archives of Sexual Behavior 50(3), 1183–1195, 2021. Sample of 4,998 students, of whom 1,795 had a partner of at least three months; yields that about 80 percent had rough sex with that partner, that choking, hair-pulling, and spanking are most often named as rough, and that the idea splits into two groups, with hair-pulling and spanking apart from choking, slapping, and punching.
• Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos: A Content Analysis Update. Ana J. Bridges, Robert Wosnitzer, Erica Scharrer, Chyng Sun & Rachael Liberman, Violence Against Women 16(10), 1065–1085, 2010. Content analysis of 304 scenes; yields that 88.2 percent contained physical aggression with spanking the most common form, that the targets were overwhelmingly women, and that those targets usually responded with pleasure or neutrally.
• spank (v.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Yields the 1727 dating in Bailey with the description “to strike forcefully with the open hand, or something flat and hard, especially on the buttocks,” the suspicion that the word is imitative, the noun from 1785, and spanking for the act from 1854 as a punishment for children.
• Spanking. Wikipedia. Yields the difference between American dictionaries, which define spanking with an object too, and British ones, which count only the bare hand and use smacking alongside it, plus the rule that a spanking always lands on the buttocks and a smack can land elsewhere.
• spanko, n.. Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Yields the word for someone who gives or receives spanking for sexual pleasure, formed from spank plus the suffix -o, with a single recorded citation from 2007.

Related terms

• Impact play. The family spanking is the largest and lightest form of.
• Over the knee. The best-known posture, with the muscle and nerve layer underneath.
• Paddle. The tool reached for most often once the hand no longer suffices.
• Spanking bench. The piece of furniture the second form of spanking goes over.
• Maintenance spanking. Spanking at a set time, without anything having happened.
• Corporal punishment. The same blow with a punitive aim, which nobody chooses.
• Warm-up. The first ten minutes, which decide what the rest of the evening can take.
• Aftercare. The quarter hour afterward, and why a scene only ends there.