Eve's Corner
Column #12
1/13/2008
Who Needs To Know You're Into Spanking?
And some True Confessions
By Eve Howard
Do spankings still embarrass you, even a little? If so, you're probably somewhat chary of letting people know about your secret life. You have to be pretty freewheeling not to care who knows you're into spanking.
Even when you're in the very spanking industry, a writer, producer or model, utterly free of guilt and really rather pleased at your affinity for corporal punishment, you must make a conscious decision about who to tell, when to tell and why to tell of your involvement in the spanking scene. For, how interesting do you really want to be to the girl who brings the waffles at the diner, your bank teller, the president of your home owners' association or the footloose and horny stranger you wind up sitting next to on a plane for nine hours?
Telling someone you write "erotic novels" alone is dynamite, no less that you film girls getting bare bottom spankings. You really have to pick the kind of stranger you tell that type of thing too.
I have told many people that I am into spanking, that I have written spanking novels and that I produce spanking erotica. It's not that I have an urge to tell people, but the scene is my job as well as my hobby and I'm not ashamed of that. On the other hand, I'm not an exhibitionist and I don't particularly like to talk about my work. But this is exactly what one must do after dropping the verbal bombshell, "Oh me? I shoot spanking videos." Or, "I write erotic novels."
The inevitable questions are: "What are those like? You mean, like SEX?" Ever try to explain the nature of fetishism in less than twenty minutes? Grasping an enormous subject like spanking eroticism requires a degree of sophistication that some people instinctively possess and others never even come near. So the question is, who are you going to knock yourself out explaining this to? Who deserves to know? Who can process the information without judging you or asking for free samples for freakiness sake?
I do have an excellent catch all phrase that I came up with to explain the allure of spanking to the erotically challenged and it really seems to work. I say, "You know, it's just cute." This sentence seems to work like magic. The sun comes out over their heads and the confusion clears from their minds. Distantly and vaguely, even youthful persons have now and then glimpsed a "cute" spanking, in an old TV show or old movie, an illustration or comic book. Cute is a great frame of reference for spanking because it's the opposite of scary old B&D. Everyone understands cuteness. It's not the Marquis de Sade, it's "just cute!"
Sometimes, however, if I'm dealing with a free thinker, a libertine or someone I sense to be humorously inclined, I'll come out and admit what I do just to see how they react or because I'd just like them to know. I remember showing one of my books to my doctor back in California. Being Jewish he of course started reading it back to front. Immediately he laughed and said, "Oh, come on, no one can have an orgasm from an enema!" This completely shattered my illusion that doctors are hip. The next week was Xmas and my doctor sent me a card with an enema nurse on the cover. I thought that was kind of cute! He got it after all.
Before entering a career in erotica, I was just as shy as anyone about revealing my interest in spanking. Of course, in childhood and during one's teens, it's easy to express an interest in spanking without actually coming out and admitting you have one. Especially if one was a child of the 1950's.
I remember that in kindergarten (this would have been 1958) we were given a large dollhouse to play in in the back of the classroom and two boys and two girls were allowed to go in together. My playmate, a little boy named Charlie, said at once: "I'm the daddy so I will give the spankings!" I was five years old and already consciously into spanking. Obviously, so was Charlie. Unfortunately, I cannot remember whether a spanking occurred that day in the playhouse, but I'd like to think it did and can't imagine that it didn't, because kids are very playful when it comes to spanking each other. Two years later, Charlie's cousin, Susan, was my classmate in third grade. She would come over to my house to play and we would always play spanking games. I never found out if Susan also got spanked by her so naturally dominant cousin Charlie. I'm positive she did.
Simultaneously, I had managed to interest my girlfriends from across the street, in spanking games. That is, games that ended in one of us spanking the other. I don't know how, but I would think it was through suggestion and provocation rather than bluntly suggesting spanking specific games. These games came to an end when another girlfriend told us that she wouldn't participate in them because they were - I want to say "naughty" but I rather think she said, "dirty". This girl, Karen, was very sexually precocious. I used to play Barbie with her and she insisted I kiss her on the lips as Ken. Icky, though I did it. But, yet, she busted me about the spanking. I guess even children can be hypocritical! Or was it that Karen instinctively knew that while Ken might properly kiss Barbie, if he wanted to spank her, that would make him a dreaded "pervert".
I got my best friend in junior high school to play spanking games with me for two years, though we never officially decided to do so. We play acted stories I wrote from day to day, taking turns being the male or female characters and inevitably, I'd set up the action so that a spanking would be the logical conclusion of every episode. (The male characters were always the ones who gave the spankings, but we took turns playing them so we were always taking turns spanking each other.) She was a sensualist and enjoyed the erotic attention and never questioned it, but we never had any type of discussion about how we were spending so much of our time together playing spanking games. We just did it.
Coincidentally, my girlfriends from second and third grade and my junior high school girl friend were all Irish Catholic, blue-eyed brunettes or blondes whose bottoms colored up perfectly magenta from spanking. I have always admired that dark pink color that very fair skinned girls turn with ever so little spanking. It's one of the most exquisite colors in nature, occurring also in the hearts of Birds of Paradise blossoms.
When I obtained my first boyfriend, I would maneuver myself into the right position for a spanking, tease and provoke him and he quite naturally started spanking me as a part of petting and later, foreplay. He just sort of "got it" without my ever saying a word about it and we played spanking all the time we were together because on some rudimentary level he had figured out that this was my "on" switch.
In college, however, it became impossibly hard to get a spanking. The 70's had begun, with all the p.c. that implied and spanking stopped being the big part of petting it had been in the 50's and early to mid 60's. Indeed, petting itself seemed to disappear. Sex was quick, consensual and easy. You didn't build up to it for months any more. The physical playfulness of those long high school courtships became obsolete in college. The sex was there but the romance was gone.
It took me all the way to junior year to get my first college boyfriend and although English, he did not think of spanking me. I had to build up the nerve to tell him about being into spanking. I chose a camping trip in the White Mountains of Vermont. My confession was past awkward and the subsequent spanking ridiculously solemn. It was brief, halting, not over the knee and not well done. My junior high school girlfriend did a better job on her head. Thinking back on it, the whole event seems painfully embarrassing, though the boy became my first husband and actually liked spanking me a lot once he got comfortable with the idea.
Between breaking up with my ex-husband and getting hooked up with my next long term relationship, I sometimes went out to pick up bars in L.A. and connected with strangers for one night stands. This was just before AIDS hit big and people were still behaving somewhat recklessly in that boring, lonely city. If I felt like the person I'd just let pick me up might be at all intelligent or sexually mature beyond the average, I'd confide that I was into spanking. I mean, if not then, when? What have you got to lose? (Something on that presently.) But how can you know until you venture?
For example, once I told this rather athletic and at the same time intellectual fellow, "I'm into spanking." Initially, the guy unwittingly doused my enthusiasm by observing condescendingly, "Oh, you're a little masochistic, huh?" What a Freudian-era unsexy thing to say. It reminded me of boys in college who would clinically inquire, "Is this stimulating you?" while trying foreplay. All he needed was a beard and pipe to complete the picture. Come to think of it, he had a beard. ("You asshole," I thought, "What a fucking stupid thing to say!") However, he had the common sense to spank me, prior to taking me, doggy style. And I came! That was a good call. Still, I guess I'll never forgive him for the masochist remark.
On a different occasion I went home with a different man I'd met at the same bar and when I told him I was into spanking, he said that was "sick" and that he could never do that. (Then he demanded head.)
Same bar, yet another fellow I told about being into spanking. Went back to his loft in Silverlake and went to bed. First thing he does is roll me over and swat me a few times. A little too hard. I can see this isn't going to be a turn on and am glad when it stops. Next thing I know, he is forcefully sodomizing me -- with no lube -- while I am crying for him to "Please Stop!" He wouldn't. He was most determined to continue until he had finished. (Is that date rape? I'm not sure.) I surprised myself by having an orgasm, but that seemed to happen by the wayside of the scene, which was mostly scary and violent to me. I called a cab directly and got the hell out of the psycho's apartment. I feel lucky to have escaped with so little damage. This was not the right person to let know I was submissive. I got the feeling that on another night, another mood, this man could have really hurt me.
Another time, I saw a really handsome, blond/blue stockbroker standing in a bar across from One Wilshire Blvd., where I worked at the time as a proofreader for a big accounting firm. He was so good looking and looked so serious and stern that I couldn't help staring at him and longing for him to come over to me. He came over. We talked, had a drink, I decided to go home with him. At the curb was a new Mercedes. He had good clothes. He was a surfer on the weekends. He was hip and well read. He had good weed and plenty of money for good restaurants. And when I told him I was into spanking, he was thrilled. I had found my first spanking fetishist by chance in a bar. We had an on going affair for about a year, which always included spanking. I think it only ended because the fellow was at heart much more a submissive cross dresser than a spanking dominant, though he never wanted to switch and have me dom him. This was the first switchable man I'd ever met in the scene. Making a confession of my spanking inclinations to this stranger was exactly the right call.
I had to confess to my next important lover, that I was into spanking, before getting a spanking out of him. My marriage was pretty much over at this point and about to be completely dissolved. We had outgrown each other and parted friends. My subsequent boyfriend would never in a million years have thought of spontaneously spanking a woman, but since I met him while we were both employed as writers in a company that published adult magazines, he wasn't exactly shocked. Like my ex-husband, he never quite got the over the knee concept, but he did spank me, pretty much whenever we had sex, and it was almost always anal sex, consensual and hot, for the next two years. Another confession well made.
On my first trip to Europe in 1980, I made one good confession call, one bad. After becoming infatuated with a clever young Englishman, (seven years my junior), I confessed my spanking fetish to him and this led to the loveliest spanking and sex scene I could have imagined over several days. It all worked out so nicely! But on the boat train to Amsterdam, an older man attached himself to me and being a bit of an operator, wormed all of my secrets out of me before we'd crossed the North Sea. When he found out I was the person who wrote the blurbs for 1,000 hardcore magazines the previous year, he became inflamed. I couldn't shake this guy for five days. I let him spank me and of course we had sex. The spanking was too hard, he was too huge and naturally, all he wanted to do was sodomize me. I'd already confessed to being "submissive" and couldn't think of a way to disengage from him without hurting his feelings or maybe I was intimidated. I didn't care for him much but yet I let him pretty much possess me for days without protest. This was one of the worst calls I ever made as far as confessing goes. Being submissive to the wrong person can really hurt and it's tedious too! But how can you learn unless you make mistakes?
This concludes the abridged account of my spanking adventures up until I began writing spanking literature, editing spanking magazines and making spanking videos.
But back to the original point about who needs to know you're into spanking. If there's any question in your mind about letting people in on your secret spanking life, realize that question might exist for a good reason. If your gut tells you that so and so is not really ready to hear about your spanking fetish, repress the desire to confess, go online and talk to one of your spanking buddies instead.
Cherish your complicit playmates but offer information to all vanilla others on a need to know basis only. If your sexual fulfillment is at stake, of course you have to reveal your innermost desires, but otherwise, do ask yourself before each act of confession, "Does this person really need or deserve to be privy to my private erotic life? Is he or she sophisticated enough to accept what turns me on without judging me for it?" If it's only going to result in your feeling silly or odd around your vanilla friend or relation, why subject yourself to the stress and or embarrassment?
I welcome comments on this subject. Please address them to me eve@shadowlane.com and I will print the responses in my next column.
Next party will be Aug. 29- Sept. 1, 2008 in Las Vegas. Details to follow as soon as we have them all nailed down but it's to be Labor Day Weekend again, at The Suncoast.
Best wishes,
Eve