Recap: MBS Sunday Brunch for Aug 23

This week's topic generated a tremendous response. Thanks to everyone who shared their experiences. The question dealt with when and how we discovered that we were definitely not alone in our spanking interest. Here are your thoughts.

Anon VII: We discovered it through the Internet, and in particular, through sites such as this one. In the early days of the Net, there were stories and pictures, but very little to assure those like us that we weren't oddballs. In fact, most of the early sites seemed to reinforce the view that we were. So we pretty much left them alone. We've been together for over thirty years, but its only been within the last seven or eight that we've gotten the message that we are far from alone and that our inclination is so commonplace that it's really not even a kink.

Ms. Betty: It was when my ex-husband and I discovered boxes and boxes of femdom magazines left behind in a storage unit we were cleaning out.

I was shocked and thrilled all at once. I'd had no idea. Most of them were more dungeony than I was into at the time, with lots of forced femme and some real extreme stuff, but plenty of fun and interesting ideas to explore. To this day, I still remember some of the stories.

Mr. Shiny: It was a multistage event for me. I was well read enough to know of BDSM and just figured I was "that" – until I attended a full fledged BDSM convention and realized that it was NOT my crowd. Eventually, I noticed a newsgroup devoted just to spanking, checked it out , and found my peeps. :)

Carly: It's pretty funny now, but I used the internet for years, and absolutely knew if I typed "spanking" into the box, I would find amazing things. But I couldn't make myself do it. I guess I wasn't ready to confront it in myself.

By the way, like almost everyone here, it was you, Bonnie, who made it seem okay for me. When I read your blog, I realized that it could be a fun, loving, sexy thing between two people in love. Thanks a million times over.

You're very welcome, Carly. My reward has been the pleasure of meeting fascinating friends like you.

RPT (Fred Bloggs): Some time in the early 1970s, I went in to a shop in Walkers Court, Soho, London, UK. The shop sold and indeed still sells to this day, fetish items. I bought some magazines. I responded to some of the small ads in the back of the magazines and discovered the scene that is BDSM.

(That's the short version, in reality it took a long time to get into the scene in any meaningful way)

It's easier nowadays. Just Google "BDSM" or "Spanking." You youngsters don't know you're born... /grumpy old man!

Hermione: As a child, I saw pulp fiction novels in the drugstore, similar in theme to Ms. Betty's magazines, with cover illustrations of semi-clad women cowering and bleeding as men wielded whips. While in my teens, I discovered spanking stories in magazines like Penthouse Variations, before it was censored for Canadian readers. There was also the occasional spanking in National Lampoon. Then I came across paperback novels set in the Victorian era, full of spanking and sex, as well as scholarly books on S&M, B&D and spanking in my university's bookstore.

Maryann: When I found your blog a year and a half ago.

Jay: Last January. I realised that I could get internet on my phone and typed “spank” into Google. One of the first pages that came up was Lowewood Academy (so sad its ended). I went on there and started reading. Eventually, I formed a friendship with Paul and he helped me take my first steps. I got my first adult spanking in February of this year and have not looked back since.

Spanky: That's easy! It was when I found your blog. Simply put, sending the link to Kallisto transformed our lives.

Ken: My first realisation that my interest in adult spanking was shared by other people happened was when I read an article on it in Forum magazine at university.

I had already experienced it with a girlfriend in my final year at school, so I should have known that I was not alone then. But I thought it was just the two of us that were strange.

Curtis: It was a different era way before the Internet. I guess the first time I knew I wasn't alone was in the eighth grade when a music teacher tended to bring the classroom discussion about twice a week to spanking and allowed that it was "fun." There were also some of the threats that some teachers, aunts, etc. made that seemed to have a sexual overtone.

My knowledge of an adult spanking community, I think, came from a magazine called Mr. which had letters about spanking in every issue. Occasionally, there were articles about spanking and, in each issue, there was an interview with the model of the month which always included her childhood spanking experiences. I don't know how I found that magazine. Later there was Penthouse Variations, and more rarely, something in Playboy about spanking. Then there was Wicked Wanda, an adult cartoon in Penthouse that on three occasions featured spanking. There were adult book stores and they had little pamphlets-sized story books with a picture of some one being spanked on the cover. There was a store in New York, that still exists but has moved several times, called Kinematics where you could watch spanking films.

But I owe my biggest debt to Eve Howard, who wrote under her own name for Stand Corrected (which started as a spanking mag) and as Lizzie Bennett for Lyndon Publications and did a turn as a spankee in Nu-West videos. What she wrote made me comfortable in my own skin with my sexual proclivities. Then, if you wanted to hide your identity, you got yourself a P.O. Box under an assumed name, sent orders for mags via money order, and made connections via ads in the magazines. It was a different world, more furtive, less expansive, but I never felt alone – just often horny when I didn't have a partner.

Our Bottoms Burn: I discovered that I was one of many when, in the very early days of the Internet, I searched for spanking and got back over a hundred hits (the www was brand new). I found a newsgroup Alt.sex.spanking (ASS), which later became Soc.sexuality.spanking (SSS). Through that forum, I learned that my interest was not rare at all. We also met others who shared our interests and quite a few whose interests were “more robust.”

If only MBS had been around then. In my never humble opinion, Bonnie has done more to make spanking accepted by spanking enthusiasts than any other medium.

Wow, thanks, Bogey, but I think we each play a small role in establishing spanking as an acceptable, safe, and fun alternative.

Paolo: I am old enough to have been turned on by all things spanking WAY before the internet arrived! It is all and well that the 20- to 30-somethings have had the internet to propel them into the wonderful world of spanking and all of that. But tonight, I would love to raise (another) glass to those of the “Before the Internet” (BI) age who went forth with their beliefs, and spanked for all their lives were worth!

Diesel Diva: It was three wonderful years ago when I joined the 21st century and finally got the internet (I know, the kids hated me for not having it). Then I got beyond brave (for me) and Googled the word “spanking.” I discovered this wonderful blog and now know two things. (1) I'm so not alone, and (2) I'm not the flaming weirdo I always thought I was while trying to suppress my spanking desires.

Missy H: Curtis, I envy you your music teacher. Jokes about adult recreational spanking in the 8th grade! LOL

But I remember my own personal epiphany very well. I've been enthralled by spanking my entire life, but I thought my interest was weird and unique to me. Then one night, when I was 12, I was watching the comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There's a scene where Sir Galahad wanders into a castle filled with dozens of pretty, flirtatious young women. They tease him about his hopeless quest and suggest he stay with them. When he becomes agitated and exasperated, they coyly suggest he spank them for their impertinent irreverence. At the “magic word,” they all crowd enthusiastically around him, chanting,"A spanking!" while clapping eagerly and jumping up and down. *smiles* A tad overdone, perhaps, but most welcome by one newly enlightened and oh so relieved young viewer.

I still vividly remember how at first I felt awestruck, and then serene at the realization that my dreadful, unmentionable secret was actually just a playfully joked about commonplace. It was nice to learn that I wasn't Jack the Ripper!

Plus, I'm an anglophile, so the acceptance and validation by a British film was especially gratifying. I did not know the term 'le vice anglais' yet, but I would soon. As my taste in books and movies grew more sophisticated, there were many more such references. But I'll always have a soft spot for Michael Palin and Company.

A'marie: I'd fantasized a lot about it, and my partner at the time knew of it (and thus thought I was a bit wacky). It wasn't until I found myself in an IRC chatroom during my freshman year of college that I knew I wasn't the only one thinking of such things. :)

I still have an excellent friend from that particular era.

There was relief, but I think it also scared me a bit that it could be real and not a fantasy.

Prefectdt: Back in the 1980s, when I became tall enough to reach the adult novels in the book shops (it's how they are stacked in the UK, so that the little kiddies cannot reach them), I found books of collections of spanking and BDSM stories amongst the vanilla titillation novels. This lead me to adult shops where I found the specialist magazines. Then I knew I was not alone in my desires and fantasies.

It was not until the advent of the internet that I realized just how many of us that there are. Even the conservative estimates of how many pain playing kinksters there are in the world still amaze me.

Daisy: Oh, well, that's easy, Bonnie. It was right here, on your wonderful blog. I will be grateful to you for the rest of my days for the reassurance that it is normal and acceptable and I am not alone. It gave me the courage to confide in my Davey, who looked up spanking and found himself in some serious BDSM sites, and was horrified to think I liked THAT! When we chatted about it, and I realised what he thought, I gave him your site to read. He then checked out your blog for reassurance that his wife to be was not masochistic, mad or alone, and that consensual spanking was not abuse! The rest is history...

Thank you, Daisy. Stories like yours remind my why I am still blogging after nearly four years.

Six of the Best: I grew up in England and I fell in love with one of my teachers. I wanted to spank her. I wanted to bend her over her desk, raise her dress waist high, and take down her knickers, and cane her bare bottom. While I imagined her wearing garter-belt and stockings, I wanted to give her 'six of the best' strokes of the cane.

Ally: About four months ago when I googled “spanking” and found this site. It opened up a whole new world to me!

Keagen: I've had a life-long interest in spanking, but discovered that I wasn't alone during my senior year of high school. I'd discovered spanking stories first semester and devoured them RAPIDLY. I read any site I could find. I was one happy kid. THEN, I decided to write my senior paper on corporal punishment, in order to give me a "cover" for being on all the spanking sites. That's how I discovered the forums, and this lovely world blossomed before me. :-)

Ernest: First EVER? In the mid '60s, I was not quite 14, even vanilla sex was something that wasn't quite nice to know about. You had to pretend to your parents and other adults that you'd never read any James Bond. I got hold of a book, a fairly run-of-the-mill thriller by James Leasor called "Where the spies are."

In one scene, there was a description of a consensual caning, the M being the villain, the anonymous (at that stage) f being a double-agent. And I found it quite flabbergasting!

Here are a few extracts (quoted from a 45-year memory):

"He wondered as he so often had, who enjoyed these sessions more, the giver or the taker of pain.”

"Mouth to mouth, tongues touching, he reached for the cane.”

" 'So you've been naughty again', he said. 'So you need the punishment that fits the crime!'”

"The cane rose and fell, and rose again..."

This is pretty hot, even now!

I've read an awful lot since, and I know a lot more about it since (and even done it myself), but that was the first time I had any inkling that my strange fascination with otherwise-to-be-avoided corporal punishment might link up to sex.

R Humphries: When I first started purchasing spanking magazines back in the early 1970's, it was a very "under-the-counter" activity and everybody was very secretive. Then before the internet, came the undernet and I discovered several "groups" mostly from the Bay Area of San Francisco and communicated with them. But they were more into hard-core BDSM than my particular interest in “Le Vice Anglais.” Then, of course, came the internet and the glorious heyday of the MIRC chat-rooms where I made many friends. And now we have the blogs!

What I love about the blogosphere is that it shares the wonderful diversity of our individual tastes in the delights of spanking. So, bottoms up everybody, and keep on blogging.

Lu: I always knew that kinks existed. But I guess it is different when you are thinking about yourself. The internet was not around when I fully realized my desires in the spanking area. So I just kept it to myself.

Now that the internet is everywhere, I always knew I could search and find things, yet I never did until a few months ago. This is the site that made me feel OK about it and made me able to share it with my partner. It also helped me to understand that there is more to it than even I ever realized. Once I felt comfortable about it, I started exploring the rest of the community. So, in short, I made this discovery only a few months ago.

Anon #1: I started with a dominatrix in my 20's and then found the Naughty Victorian. From that point on, I was interested in domestic discipline.

Anon #2: I've had an interest in spanking ever since I saw a Playboy article in the late '70s. But I never really pursued it or had a partner who was interested beyond the first try. I found your blog a few years ago and realized that it didn't have to have any domestic discipline overtones. That aspect had never appealed to me. It took more than a year for my husband to try after I first suggested it. And the first several sessions were very awkward. Things are getting better. When he left this morning, he told me to add to my to do list for the day, "think about the spanking you're going to get tonight." How am I supposed to think about anything else?

Urs0us: It was when I first saw a spanking video cover in a sex store. I was not looking for that then, but I was certainly thrilled.

Handsdown: Like Spanky, for me, it was when I found this blog. I decided to search "spanking" – a word I never spoke for fear that my secret desire to be spanked would be exposed. I thought I was a freak, and alone. I didn't even share my desire to be spanked with my husband for fear he would also think me a freak. I self spanked for years because the desire would not be repressed. Many may know how unsatisfying self spanking is.

Finally that search and this site gave me the fortitude to tell my husband whom, it turns out, loves to spank me. 28 years wasted on dreams and fear. Thanks for showing me the light, or should I say feeling the red. :)

Handsdown, I makes me smile to be able to share something I love with friends old and new.

Anon #3: I had so completely suppressed my interest in spanking for so long that I even forgot looking it up on the Internet was an option until I was doing some research for a report I was to give on corporal punishment. That's exactly what I typed into the search engine. I found way more than I bargained for. I then typed in “spanking.” MBS was the first blog I read. It was also the first blog my husband read. In short, Thank you!

Hi Anon, and welcome. I'm pleased that this blog was beneficial for you and your husband. You are among friends here.

Indy: I have two stories about this. In the first one, I was too young to understand what it meant, but it made am impression nonetheless. When I was twelve years old, one of the choices for a book report for my English class was "I Will Fear No Evil" by Robert Heinlein. I had read many of his books for adolescents and liked the independence they showed, so I chose this one. A couple hundred pages in, the main character gets spanked to orgasm for pressing her man for sex when they had some kind of a appointment to keep instead. I seriously doubt that I knew what an orgasm was, but it made a lasting impression that the spanker alternated cheeks as he spanked. So I must have understood something about the scene.

As an adult, it was actually discussions about child-rearing with friends who have kids that opened my eyes. I was quite amazed at the number of x-rated sites that popped up on my computer screen – and at work! – in response to my rather innocently typing "spanking" into Google. I later got my own internet provider and tried the search again with a completely different objective in mind.

Indy, I read that book in eighth or ninth grade, along with Heinlein's Time Enough for Love. Both include descriptions of sexual spankings! These stories were mind-blowing for a secret spanko girl who was not very worldly at that stage.

Abby Williams: When I went to college, I was enrolled in an honors society that gave laptops to the eight or so members of the freshman group. This enabled us to have DSL access from our dorms. Yes! My roommate became fascinated by erotic manga. I, of course, sought out spanking sites.

This was the fall of 1996. Little was available to an eighteen year old with no funds for porn, let alone the awareness of what could be purchased. One of the first sites I found was Laura's Spanking Corner, a spanking story repository of excellent quality. I only realized a year or so ago that Abel of The Spanking Writers was one of the regular contributors to the site that aroused me eleven years ago when I was, as they say, "barely legal." I emailed him the minute I realized, "Oh my God, you were one of the writers who made me realize I wasn't completely out of my mind." That was the site that helped me understand that I was part of the grander scheme. Thank you, Laura, and thank you to everyone who has enriched the lives of spankos since then (i.e. Thank you Bonnie!).

Thank you, as well, Abby, for your many excellent contributions.

Bonnie: I recall many of the pre-Internet experiences that have been described. Randy and I combed Penthouse Variations and Forum magazines every month searching for spanking stories. We ordered some of the first Shadow Lane videos (in glorious VHS) by sending money orders through the mail. Their films were greatly superior to any of the earlier tacky porno-style spanking videos. We bought expensive spanking magazines at sleazy adult bookstores, only to find the photographs were obvious fakes. But none of these activities left us feeling as though we were anything other than denizens of the outer fringes of sexual weirdness.

For me, accessing the Internet was the singular event that opened my eyes. Specifically, at Randy's suggestion, I wandered into the ASS/SSS Usenet groups and just lurked. There I discovered thousands of posts written by real people who loved adult spanking. Some even embraced the very same practices we did. It was an vibrant (if occasionally bickering) community where members shared their discoveries and learned from one another. Lo and behold, we were not alone and we would never feel alone again.

With the blog, I seek to extend those feelings of community and inclusiveness to a broader audience. I want spankos to feel comfortable with themselves and with our common interest. We're not scary or strange. We are your brothers, sisters, friends, and neighbors. We live, we love, we spank, we share, and we enjoy. Nothing that feels this right could be wrong.

Thank you again for all your great comments! See you next week.