Back to school

Reading through the stories in The Spanking Collection (as I hope you will too), I was struck by how many of them are set in a school or some very similar institution. Of course I’ve read enough spanking material not to be surprised. It’s clear that memories (or imagined memories) of schooldays still exert a powerful influence on the adult mind when kink is in question. And I think the reasons for this are not hard to find. In the first place, spanking is inevitably a top-down process. That is to say, I doubt one could construct a very exciting spanking scenario that did not depend on one party having all the power and authority. Spanking is not really an equal opportunities activity. (Of course I recognise that some people like switching, but that doesn’t alter my point that in the actual performance there is always one who is top, and one who is bottom, even if it’s not always the same one.)

School is probably the only time in our lives for most of us (except of course early family life) when someone has actual physical power over us. It’s true that some spanking stories are set in an office (and I’ve written one or two myself), in which a girl whose work is unsatisfactory is offered the choice of dismissal or a spanking. But the employer doesn’t have anything like the authority and power that a teacher wields.

Even those too young to have experienced actual corporal punishment in school can imagine themselves into such a situation, especially since there is such a wealth of material, both kinky and not, set in such an environment. Moreover, a powerful element in a spanking scene is often that sense of humiliation experienced by the one getting spanked. Being made to bend over puts you in an inferior position; having to partly undress and reveal your underwear (and probably bare your bottom too) is calculated to strip away both modesty and dignity. Added to this are other rituals, for example of having to count the strokes, and/or say thank you, and perhaps having to suffer a scolding first, and corner time afterwards, all designed to add insult to injury. At such moments the one being spanked reverts to a state of child-like helplessness and vulnerability.

An appearance in the headmaster’s study puts all these things into play (though of course they aren’t exclusive to that particular scenario). In addition, the favoured instruments of the headmaster are almost certain to be either a leather tawse, or a cane, both of which are conducive to a good thrashing. They promise that what will transpire will be no mere tap on the bottom, not the symbolic spanks you so often see on websites, which deliver neither pain nor bruises. The tawse or cane promise both, in full measure.

However, I do wonder whether the aura of school has quite the same effect if you aren’t British. I am old enough to have gone to a school where corporal punishment was routine (now of course it’s outlawed); was that the case in other countries? I have to say that the experience had no sexual overtones for me at the time, or if so I was unaware of them. One’s emotions were a mix of fear and shame, and not the sort of shame that is sexually stimulating. But perhaps the passing years have cast a somewhat rosy glow (ahem!) over the memory, and what was once an experience of terror (on the receiving side) can now be a highly arousing scenario to a dom dishing it out, and hopefully to the naughty schoolgirl on the receiving end.