Over a Knee, Willingly: Personal Reflections on Being Spanked

Not that I wasn’t spanked enough as a child. Neither was I spanked too much, unless you consider all spanking a strictly grown-up game. I imagine my childhood spankings played some sort of role in my development as a spanking aficionada, though I couldn’t say exactly what kind, nor how significant. I’m not sure whether they’re tightly or tenuously connected to the sort of spanking I most relish today. “The child is father to the man,” as the poet said, but the course of that relationship is scarcely linear and predictable—at least as far as sex is concerned.

The spankings I got then (really not many, I was a rather good little girl) and the spankings I love now share a powerful central physical motif: a big hand thwacking audibly on my ass. The contexts and emotions evoked, though, differ entirely. At the very least, the memory of childhood spankings gives me a benchmark: something I can compare to those very adult spankings that I so often fantasize about—and sometimes even get. I did not fantasize about spankings as a child; I worried about them, but they did not become a form of pleasure for me until childhood, and the indignities to which children are subjected (like being in thrall to or in danger from everyone bigger than you), had long passed.

Of the several variations of the grown-up spanking fantasy, one especially stands out for me, though it is quite likely that another will be more erotic to you. As with every other possible building-block of sexuality, we all have our various preferences. Who knows entirely where they come from? Even when we can make plausibly causal connections between our kiddie macs and our grown-up latexwear, our pirate games and our adult love of bondage, our youthful punishments and our later ecstasies, there seems to be a nonlinear quality to them, as if the road we traveled to adulthood wound through dreamy, subconscious territory and left unpredictable elements to everything.

But I was about to describe my spanking fantasy, wasn’t I? The way I love to imagine (and experience) spanking combines a bit of the fear, hurt and outrage that being spanked evoked in me as a child with intense arousal—the sort I never felt before puberty—a thrilling fusion, and not something that I (or anyone who ever spanked me) ever flirted with before I reached the age of majority. Here’s my preferred spank: I am taken over a knee, either male or female, just as long as the person is invested with enough natural authority to get away with such a thing. (It helps if they’re at least a little larger than me.) This position combines a furious, helpless vulnerability with the opportunity to rub off on a lap. Yes, where my pussy and clit are positioned is quite important. This way the blows rub my clit into the lap of my tormentor—and when he or she stops the spanking for a moment to rub my ass and slide fingers down between my legs, the discovery that I am wet and panting becomes an excuse for more spanking, or an invitation to slide those fingers all the way in, or—if I’m very lucky—both. I can cry or protest, or I can respond with utter lewdness; in any case my captor assures me that what’s going on is for my own good.

As indeed it is.

Oh, it’s classic, I know, almost classic enough to be mundane. An over-Daddy’s-knee (or Teacher’s knee, perhaps) flat-of-the-hand spanking, the kind that makes my spanker’s hand just as red and tingly as it makes my buttcheeks, uniting us in sensation and heat. No canes or switches or paddles or rulers: Those are preferred elements in some others’ fantasies and play, I know, but not mine. No need to be chased and captured and taken by force (though that would indeed be very sexy foreplay), no need to be called a bad little girl or an awful slut or any other nasty name (though that too might give the scenario extra heat): The only necessary elements are the position, the intermingling of blows and sexual arousal, and my partner’s air of authority or power. Everything else, as they say, is icing on the cake—or even unwanted distraction.

Though I’m not overly inclined to top, to play Mistress or Domina or cruel Correctrix, my love of the supine, submissive posture in this spanking fantasy allows me to fantasize the pleasures of the spanker, as well. In fact, part of the pleasure of the fantasy as well as the act is that I can picture the globes of a pretty, naked ass displayed helplessly on my own lap, can imagine the first red hand mark and the first involuntary squirm—oh, yes, especially the squirm. Because the delight of grown-up spanking, you know, is where all that squirming is bound to lead.

I first confessed my spanking fantasy to my then-lover Natalie, whom I met when I was just twenty-one. She was a bit older than I and quite adventuresome, and what should happen next but I found myself over her knee! I was wild with aroused delight as she quickly improvised characters for herself and for me: I was a naughty schoolgirl and she was the lesbian headmistress, correcting me “for my own good.” Blows from her determined little hand rained down on my ass and I squirmed with the thrill: I squirmed so evocatively that soon her fingers were hunting my slippery-wet clit, and I suppose shortly thereafter we forgot all about our improvised roles.

And when my lover Robert first spanked me, I was the one who invoked our roles: As I wiggled and squirmed and pleaded, I found myself calling him “Daddy,” even though this experience was worlds away from the spankings I got from my daddy as a child. Goodness knows, my father never rubbed a hard cock on me the way “Daddy” was doing here, and I’d never have tried to wiggle my pussy onto it the way I was trying to do—the beauty of a panties-down, skirt-up spanking being that you can wiggle anything into or onto anything with ease.

Is this an over-amped Electra complex at work? Who knows? Who cares? The impulse to say “Daddy” in the midst of sexual heat isn’t a direct reference to my old dad, I’m sure of that much, although I have no doubt that my most primal relationships source all my erotic feelings, including these. It takes a naughty adult mind (or at least a precocious adolescent one, for I was cooking these fantasies up whilst still at school) to transmute those emotions into grown-up sex. I wasn’t always certain about this; I admit that I spent a few young years wondering if I were perhaps a bit of a psychiatric case and feeling especially defensive and buttoned-up around Dad. Today, though, I’m very comfortable with bringing a symbolic, larger-than-life, eroticized Daddy into bed and into my sexual dreams; this dream Daddy is loving and sexy-scary and supports me in my sexuality in a way that real-life Dad never did.

At least as difficult to put to rest as that source of guilt was my critical Inner Feminist, who thought my romps with Natalie were suspicious enough—with Robert (much less “Daddy”), however, how dare I? Taking a subordinate sexual position! Allowing him to treat me like a child! Spurning the fight for the equality of the sexes in favor of sex play that reinforced my own feelings of low self-worth! Masochism!

This experience is only too common, though I didn’t know it while I was struggling with my own guilt. Many women have had to come to terms with the supposed contradiction between feminist ideals and their sexual feelings, especially their “kinky” ones. In fact, my feminism is very much alive, finding its wellspring today in my right as a woman to express any sexual desire that brings me pleasure. The strain of feminism that fostered my self-doubts in a petri dish of sex-negativity has proved itself anachronistic and prudish. At best—when I’m feeling charitable—this feminism is simply ignorant of much of human life’s sexual possibility. It has made the mistake of overestimating its expertise, assuming that because it does a good job of cultural and political analysis of gender, economics and power, it can proceed to analyze everything, including sex.

Perhaps one day this analysis will have important ramifications for gender relations and sexual practice (I shudder at the latter thought, but then, discussing sex and mainstream feminism always leaves me feeling oddly jaded). Until that time, it serves primarily to separate feminist women (and many right-thinking, pro-feminist men) from one another, creating guilt and allowing intelligent adult women to struggle for sexual fulfillment without any reassurance from their peers. Some women are deeply damaged by this absence of support. Others are simply turned off by feminism.

For, of course, most of us do not eroticize spanking and other pervy joys out of any lack of self-worth. The woman with impaired self-worth submits to her partner’s interest in spanking (or other sorts of sexplay) simply to please him or her, without having any interest in or desire for it herself. Those of us who want to be spanked dream erotic dreams of it even in the absence of a partner to reach to us, draw us close, bend us over—our dream of this finds its source in self-esteem: a desire to be pleasured any way we want. How on earth can feminists (and others) imply that our desire for pleasure is a source of weakness or worse?

For that matter, even though the particular strain of feminism I’ve been addressing doesn’t concern itself much with the experiences of men, all the points I’ve made about pleasure and desire, guilt and self-esteem, can also apply to men who love to be spanked. After all, neither does the socio-sexual male role leave much room for wanting to be turned over another’s knee. That power, authority, dominance and submission are gender-coded, whether they occur in a sexual context or not, makes our experiences with them loaded no matter who we are.

It is a core sex-negative belief that one loses one’s power when in a state of intense arousal: Arousal is seen as positively dangerous. Our mothers warn us against it, televangelists tearfully apologize when they’re caught in it, the notion of “sex addiction” has been devised to enforce and profit from it, and ordinary people describe experiencing it with phrases like “I felt out of control.” All of this is rubbish. The belief that sex weakens a person’s morality is dangerous; it is a Christian chimera, a social fiction with a hard edge of social control. This existential sucker-punch leaves us unprepared to make sensible decisions, to respect ourselves and the people we have sex with, and to assert our needs.

I know that some will wonder how the feelings of being spanked, which I’ve described here with words like “helpless” and “vulnerable,” could feel like a source of power. This question may even be asked by people who would gladly spank, seeing the authoritative pleasure in it, but who would not themselves like to be put in a vulnerable position, such as over someone else’s knee. My response sounds a bit like a Zen koan: Erotic thrill is powerful, and empowering, even if the source of the thrill is the illusion that one is helpless. When I’m spanked, I am taken out of my day-to-day existence, even out of my everyday personality. I’m challenged through pure sensation as well as through my subordinate position, and I have to occupy my body, my consciousness, maybe even my spirit in a different way. I’m taken on a trip that unifies my child and adult selves for a moment. I get high. And I get intensely, powerfully aroused.

I feel even more powerful when I’m turned on, and so things that turn me on a great deal—like spanking—become laden with erotic meaning. Early sexologists hinted at this process when they borrowed the totemic descriptor fetish to apply to our most powerful, pervy desires.

Maybe I delight especially in feeling helpless and tormented in the context of spanking because it plays up my turn-on even more. Maybe, in fact, this is where my memories of childhood spankings meet my experience of being spanked today: reveling in very adult lust while I wiggle and squirm like a child, allowing myself to be pulled back into childhood feelings that no longer consign me to misery and real physical vulnerability; proving to myself that I’ve grown up, while still borrowing on the great store of emotions I retain from the little girl I was. In that nexus of emotional, sexual and physical sensation, I’m alive—quite intensely alive. And perhaps most magically, feelings that would not under ordinary circumstances coexist interweave and influence each other: not only childlike and adult, but also fear and trust, pain and pleasure.

Going on so about the delights of spanking, I’ve neglected to mention that sometimes it’s no fun: What about the scenes that go wrong? What happens during those (blessedly rare) times when over-the-knee is a passport not to ecstasy but to disappointment, when the discrepant elements don’t intermingle and fear, fury or even tedium comes out on top?

For me, the quickest way for a spanking scene to go wrong is in the absence of arousal. This can happen with a partner who doesn’t convey a sufficient character of authority. Nothing stops the alchemy of my desire faster than wondering, “Why is this person doing this to me?” If my top doesn’t evoke in me the desire to be there, over-the-knee doesn’t feel thrilling but, instead, annoying or embarrassing. (This embarrassment is a far cry from the erotic jolt I receive from erotic humiliation: When “Daddy” lifts my skirt, pulls down my panties and says, “Look, everyone can see your naked ass now—what a little slut you are,” the scene is without a doubt going right.)

I also need a certain feeling of love or appreciation built in to my top’s authority. I need to feel s/he’s proud of my submission and my response, that s/he delights in having me over her or his lap just as I delight in being held captive there. I appreciate the pleasure a sadistic top gets in my discomfort, but it’s not enough to keep me aroused. I’m talking here about a scene that has the potential to thrill me, not something I endure just to give another person some fun. That would be a different scene entirely.

The wonderful prerogatives of the grown-up—that I can revel in sexual turn-on and get satisfaction, and that I don’t have to do what I don’t want to—are what differentiate the spankings I love as an adult from the ones I suffered as a child. Spanking scenes that go wrong blur the line between those experiences so that I don’t have access to adult, playful delight; instead I get stuck in emotions that feel too close for comfort or pleasure to the pain and outrage that were supposed to be “for my own good” when I was a naughty little girl. (That could turn into an S/M scene that might prove intense and transformative, even wonderful—but I don’t love it the way I love spanking.)

As a naughty little grown-up, I declare that pleasure is for my own good. The years passing have transmogrified my father’s hand whistling down towards my tense and frightened ass: Now when the hand strikes home, I squirm and wiggle on “Daddy’s” lap, and every blow makes my pussy wetter, “Daddy’s” cock harder. It confirms that I am very delightfully naughty indeed. And that being grown up is everything I ever hoped it would be.