The Library of Spanking Fiction: Wellred Weekly
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Articles
Items of interest regarding all things spanking
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The Psychology of Spankings - Part 1 In the 2008 Report on Physical Punishment in the United States, Elizabeth Gershoff defines physical punishment as the "use of physical force with the intention of causing the child to experience bodily pain or discomfort so as to correct or punish the child's behavior." The intensity of pain ranges from a mild slap on the hand to severely hitting the buttocks with an object for an extended period of time. Physical punishment also covers other methods of inflicting pain, such as kneeling on sharp objects, hot sauce in the child's mouth, and so forth. So for children, spanking is a subset of physical punishment that specifically involves striking the buttocks to inflict pain or discomfort to correct or punish behavior. Spanking a child is a form of physical assault. By 2011, spanking of children in both schools and at home was banned in 31 nations. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child provides a framework for a global ban on such assaults. Notably, the United States does not endorse the UN Convention on he Rights of Children. In the United States, 22 states still permit paddlings (spankings with wooden boards) by teachers and other school personnel. School spankings are mostly legal in Southern states where slavery was once practiced. There are historical, cultural, and ideological linkages between spanking and slavery. Spanking by American parents is legal in all 50 states, although parents face criminal prosecution when spankings are deemed "excessive." Parents who spank and who spank frequently tend to be concentrated in the South. Among adults, spanking can be used as a tool for domestic discipline among consenting adults. Spanking, coupled with other forms of hitting or intimidation, also can be a form of domestic violence among non-consenting adults. Finally and most significantly, spanking is a form of sexual foreplay, as a prelude to sexual intercourse, cunnilingus, and/or fellatio among consenting, semi-consenting, or non-consenting adults. The Physical Linkage Of Spankings & Sexuality  At base, we are naked apes, driven by the same physiology of all other primates. When subjected to painful spankings, our primitive brain makes simple "fight or flight" decisions. Primates have large brains. Among primates, human brains are indeed the largest, with 100 billion brain cells and 500 trillion connections. Our big brains support a complex psychology about many things, including spankings. So while the amygdala responds to a spanking at a primitive "fight or flight" level, other areas of the brain are processing the spanking in very complex ways. Further, the spanking is a social event, involving at minimum a dyad, where one human is more or less expected to submit to pain inflicted by another human in a dominant/submissive relationship. Outside the dyad, the spanking plays a key role in establishing and maintaining a certain type of social organization. One cannot appreciate the psychology of spankings without considering the physiology and neuroscience that operate below the psychological level of analysis and the social construction of the institution of spanking that operates above the psychological level of analysis.Physiologically, the spanking is a sex act, whether done to an adult as a part of foreplay or to a child as a form of punishment. Physiology is not concerned with intentions. Just because an adult intends the child's spanking to be a form of punishment only, the inherent sexuality of the spanking act at the physiological level cannot be denied. The spanking is a sex act because it excites nerve endings close to the testes and penis of the male and, in females, the labia, which protects the clitoris. The nerves that carry messages from the buttocks to the brain are closely associated with those that carry messages from the genitalia. Recent advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging or FMRI promise new ways to analyze those parts of the brain that are activated when we experience emotions and sensations. We now have brain scans that pinpoint areas of the brain activated when we are afraid, when we feel pain, and when we feel joy. The brain scans are so precise that we now know which types of pain activate which specific areas of the brain. Thus far, we do not have brain scans to pinpoint the areas of the brain activated during a spanking, during sexual arousal, or both. And although MRI scanning machines are cumbersome, such research could be conducted, once certain ethical issues are resolved. The head of a child or adolescent could be inserted into the MRI machine, face down. A brain scan could be conducted while the researcher administers corporal punishments of varying intensities and durations. In a similar manner, brain scans could be conducted while a tween or teen engages in auto-eroticism. In American culture, administering painful corporal stimulation on minors for research purposes likely would be considered less ethically problematic than encouraging pleasurable auto-eroticism in minors for research purposes. Nevertheless, such research would prove invaluable in establishing the neuroscience of spankings and its physiological linkage to sexual stimulation. The degree to which most American adults acknowledge the linkage between spanking and sexuality is most likely underestimated. The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior, published in 1993 and based on a U.S. national stratified random sample of 1,700 adults, indicated that 8% of men and 7% of women thought "discipline and bondage" was "very normal" or "all right." About 11% of men and women, the survey indicated, had "personal experience" with discipline and bondage. Because large numbers of respondents regarded discipline and bondage as either "unusual" (19%) or "kinky" (63%), those respondents were unlikely to report behavior they regarded as deviant. According to the Janus Report, about 16% of men and 12% of women agreed that "pain and pleasure really go together in sex." This is an interesting finding and also an opinion that is probably under-reported. One can speculate that this cross-wiring of pleasure and pain sensations can be traced back to early childhood experiences. We know that boys and girls commonly begin experimenting with their genitals at age 5 or 6. Some start at a younger age. Childish genital pleasure seeking happens early on, even though orgasms typically must wait for the tween or teen years. Now consider the forced, painful excitation of the child's body parts immediately adjacent the genitalia. Parents often tell their children after a spanking that the painful but erotic experience was a display of parental love. Very confusing? Indeed. The Psychology Of Spankings  In his 1998 book, Sin, Science and the Sex Police, noted sexologist John Money defines a lovemap as "a developmental representation or template existing synchronously in the mind and brain (midbrain) depicting the idealized lover, the idealized love affair, and the idealized program of sexuoerotic activity projected in imagery or actually engaged in with the lover." In this book, Money indicates that spankings can vandalize a child's lovemap. Dr. Laura Berman is a television personality and sex therapist. In her book, It's Not Him, It's You! Dr. Berman writes that spanked children sometimes have their lovemaps vandalized by the mixing of pain and sexual stimulation."A good example of vandalized lovemaps at work," she writes, "is actually the result of something that people once considered quite harmless-childhood spankings." These spankings can lead to problems in adult sexual behavior, such as risky sex (no condoms), verbally and physically coercive sex, and-of course-sadomasochistic sex. "The fine line between spanking and physical abuse can be blurred, both in the child's mind and the parent's mind," Dr. Berman writes. "Additionally, little boys who are spanked over their parent's lap are receiving indirect genital stimulation" because the penis and testes are squeezed into the parental lap by the same strokes that inflict pain on the buttocks. For a little girl, a natural reaction to unwanted pain near her labia and clitoris is to secrete natural lubricants. This is no doubt a biological defense mechanism to protect the vagina at times of unwanted penetration. When a girl's bottom is hit repeatedly and painfully, and especially on the lower area near her labia, such sexual lubrication in response to a punishing experience is confusing. This natural lubricating process is associated with a girl's experiences during pre-masturbation stimulation of her clitoris, a generally pleasurable event. "This association of pleasure and punishment also happens mentally," Dr. Berman notes. "The child's parents, a natural source of love and support, are also inflicting pain upon the child, which creates a distorted link." Psychology meets physiology as pain signals are passed to the brain along with signals of sexual arousal. In the brain, these signals are put into some kind of order or structure, called schema. Schemas are mental constructions where key elements of memory (nodes) are linked together in patterns understandable to the individual. These schema are rehearsed and reinforced whenever the child is spanked. That's because these mental highways of interconnected nodes (the child's spanking schemas) become more durable for easy recall through repeated use. The more often a schema is invoked, the more the nodes of the schema become interconnected, the more enduring they become, and the easier they become to access in memory. The eroticism and pain of a spanking is like memorizing the Gettysburg Address. The more your bottom is spanked -- the more you repeat "Four score and seven years ago..." -- the more both stick in your brain. The degree to which these same schema are re-enacted during acts of masturbation also serves to reinforce those patterns. A lovemap is simply one of many schema that we store away in our brains. And while every child is likely to experience physical sexual arousal when struck in areas close to his or her genitals, that does not mean every child constructs a lovemap that tightly commingles pleasure and pain nodes into a common schema. Indeed, because a spanking is an event designed to inflict pain and shame, the dutiful child may strive to construct a lovemap that segregates feelings of parental love from how he or she feels during a spanking. The difficulty, of course, is that the child has no choice when subjected to spankings. Adults who engage in sadomasochistic acts often have a safeword to signal when a painful act is beyond the submissive's level of tolerance. Children, unfortunately, do not have a safeword. A spanking that a parent sincerely believes is a "normal" albeit firm punishment for misconduct might be experienced as terrifying and life-threatening by the child. Trauma coupled with sexual stimulation is a toxic brew. One way for a child to deal with spankings is to shut down emotionally. In fact, for boys, great shame is associated with excessive displays of emotion during corporal punishment. This is especially true with institutionalized corporal punishment, such as in schools. The ritualized paddling of children in front of other children in an institutional setting strongly encourages children to shut down emotionally. This emotional shutdown may be at the core of the oft-repeated claim that "I was spanked as child and I turned out okay." A man or woman may see no harm in their childhood spankings; a deaf person may not hear what others hear in a symphony. The emotionally shutdown adult may joke about even hard, abusive spankings he or she received as a child, seeing nothing odd when they laugh at memories of their own pain. continued... |
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