I’m still so trying to wrap my little brain around the idea that it’s 99% hetero women’s partners spanking them rather than the other way around.
No knocks on Em & Lo, who's post about their new book (150 Shades of Play: A Beginner's Guide to Kink
I’m just curious about the physics, or anatomy here. Because even doing non-”spanking” tapotement (those kind of “karate chops” with the edge and flat of the hands massage therapists use) seems to get way more women’s motors running than men’s. Or is it the psychology? I’ve almost never heard of gay men routinely spanking each other outside the context of more intentional BDSM. And it’s almost never mentioned by lesbians. And, maybe even more perplexing, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of bi men carrying spanking over to male partners, nor bi women requesting spankings from their female partners.
Do I just not get out enough anymore (entirely possible?) Or is this really an overwhelmingly majority-hetero activity?
And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it being majority hetero, if that’s what it is. What gets our motors running in bed is or should be entirely separate from what motivates our conduct elsewhere. I’m just curious about the source of the apparent differences.
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I can say that my gay ass
Submitted by Absurdist (not verified) on Sat, 2012-12-15 12:08.I can say that my gay ass likes the spanking from time to time, and I've never been interested in the dynamics of power exchange that's the core of BDSM.
Now Body Electric does teach classes in Power, Surrender and Intimacy that's all about conscious power exchange, including spanking work. The amount of money for workshop tuition makes it very Eat, Pray, Love, which is a bit of a disappointment to me, but that is what it is.
You could get out more, yes. Or at least engage more with someone like, say, Tristan Taormino. She knows stuff.
Dunno--this dyke loves
Submitted by LM (not verified) on Sat, 2012-12-15 15:44.Dunno--this dyke loves spanking, and most of the women I've dated have been into it, to degrees ranging from "occasional swat" to "BDSM beating." I only receive, but they tend to be more variable. With me, obvs, they're giving.
Possibly just one more reason I'm glad to be a lesbian. If I were into the stuff I'm into and straight I think fitting into that expectations box would make me pretty uncomfortable.
Anecdote != data, etc, but
Submitted by pseudony mousie (not verified) on Sat, 2012-12-15 17:43.Anecdote != data, etc, but my partner (straight male) loves being spanked.
Oh, I was hoping you'd make
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Sat, 2012-12-15 18:30.Oh, I was hoping you'd make this a post of your own, even though I have nothing significant to contribute, given that I "get out" even less than you do. I've seen erotica featuring lesbian spanking, but it tends to be more old-fashioned stuff set in schools than anything else, y'know? So I have no idea whether real people are anything like that. I'm sure that anything you can think of, people do, but you may be right about general trends.
It does occur to me that bigger hands might be better, but of course women's hands vary like anything else, and anyway that doesn't explain any lack of spanking (if you're correct) among gay men. You'd think that it would stimulate a lot of the same areas as anal sex, after all.
In response to Absurdist: whether you're into power exchange is different than whether you're into the sensation, right? I always thought that was part of the point of expanding the acronym to BDSM rather than just S&M, that there weren't just the two roles, but all kinds of aspects that you might be into or not, orthogonal to each other. Certainly for me power exchange has always been something that I have to kind of work out intellectually -- it's not somewhere I would naturally go at all. (I mean, I don't really go there; it's just not how I think about sex.) Whereas when I think about stuff in terms of sensation, it's easy: X would feel very nice, I am sure! Y would feel horrible, I am sure!
I think it's kind of revealing to ask nominally-vanilla people which aspect of BDSM seems to them to be an extension of what sex is "usually like anyway" in their experience. For a whole lot of people it would be the power-play aspect.
"I've seen erotica featuring
Submitted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-12-15 20:23."I've seen erotica featuring lesbian spanking..." No credit there unless we can confirm it's written *by* lesbians and not just *about* them." Also, regarding vanilla "normal" sex, I can't emphasize enough that the Victorians produce *two* varieties of extreme kink: B&D and... "Missionary." :-) --fl
That would be why I said
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Sun, 2012-12-16 15:39.That would be why I said nominally vanilla.
Wait, if we're going by
Submitted by LM (not verified) on Sun, 2012-12-16 16:14.Wait, if we're going by erotica, the Archive of Our Own alone has at least 1500 m/m fics tagged spanking, and maaaaany more I tagged spanking fics. By conparison, F/M has 451 fics tagged "spanking," and F/F (much more rarely written in general) has 128.
Good to know, though if I
Submitted by figleaf on Sun, 2012-12-16 23:47.Good to know, though if I were aggressively pursuing my hypothesis I'd want to know what percent of m/m slash and fan fiction is written by men vs. women. Also what percent of *total* fiction on that site is m/m vs everything else. (I'm not asking facetiously, I'd never heard of the archive till you mentioned it here. I think I said I might not get out enough.) Thanks for the heads up, LM! --fl
Following up. An attempted
Submitted by figleaf on Mon, 2012-12-17 00:29.Following up. An attempted search at your Our-Own archive gave me results similar to yours. As a cross check I attempted comparable searches at Alt.Sex.Stories Repository and Literotica. Here's what I got:
Literotica
0553 - Gay Male / Spanking
0563 - Lesbian Sex / Spanking
8612 - Not "Gay Male" and not "Lesbian Sex"
Alt.Sex.Stories Repository
0250 - keyword:("MM") keyword:("span" "spank")
0861 - keyword:("FF" "les") keyword:("span" "spank")
1000+ - keyword:("span" "spank") -keyword:("MM") -keyword:("FF" "les")
- round number is probably a max return.
Not sure if it means anything -- for instance A.S.R has decades of stuff, much of which predated the recent spanking fad. On the other hand I remember they have a huge category for gay-male stories written by adult gay men. Literotica, I think, is both more current and far more inclined to stories about adults. One thing I will say that *could* support my hypothesis is that while LGBT stories about spanking are fewer than for hetero stories at A.S.S.R and Literotica, the numbers of LGBT S&M are a little more in line with the heteros.
--fl
But are there fewer LGBT
Submitted by Anonymous2 (not verified) on Mon, 2012-12-17 08:41.But are there fewer LGBT stories on Literotica that hetero stories?
As far as sensation alone goes or anatomy, I don't know. It feels good to me, and my partner prefers to give than receive in this regard. Of course the sensations can vary greatly depending on how it's done, but it seems to jostle the nerve endings in the vagina in just the right way, in a way that I don't see happening for men. Though they might enjoy it for other reasons, it seems like the intensity would be more direct rather than indirect. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Honestly, though dominance or discipline spanking can be lots of fun, part of me thinks that the reason it shows up more with women as the submissive partner, particularly in heterosexual material, is cultural or internalized culture. Of course it can be entirely enjoyable. But that may be why it's more eroticied.
More anecdotes, but a number
Submitted by Jzyme (not verified) on Sun, 2012-12-16 04:31.More anecdotes, but a number of my male partners (I'm a woman) - most? - have been keen in being spanked, and I can think of several men whose lady partners have told me similar.
Also read LGBT erotica with lady-lady flanking scenes (girls' boarding schools and France feature prominently).
Is male-male spanking not common??
I've been running a spanking
Submitted by Dan (not verified) on Mon, 2012-12-17 08:32.I've been running a spanking blog for most of a decade -- heck, I think I may have invented the spanking blog -- and despite focusing in a 99% sort of way on M/f-het spankings, I see a lot of what's out there. And, no, it's not even close to 99%; I'm not even sure het-male-spanking-het-female is the majority, though it's probably the single biggest chunk of the fetish.
Many many many men want to be spanked by women or by other men -- but that desire gets expressed much more quietly than the other way around. There's a lot of lesbian spanking out there (more in porn, where making things f/f used to be considered legally safer, than in real life, but lots in real life also) and plenty of explicitly gay M/m stuff too.
Good to know, Dan! I figured
Submitted by figleaf on Mon, 2012-12-17 11:00.Good to know, Dan! I figured someone who's more directly involved with people who do real, *non-fictional* spanking. Thanks. --fl
Uh, I didn't raise fictional
Submitted by LM (not verified) on Mon, 2012-12-17 11:13.Uh, I didn't raise fictional spanking until you did. Feel rather needlessly put down by this--hopefully I'm misunderstanding the emphasis on "real, *non-fictional* spanking."
I brought up fiction first, I
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Mon, 2012-12-17 14:38.I brought up fiction first, I think, and it was because of "framed that way" in the title -- it seemed to me that cultural framing would involve stuff like what the subject looked like in fiction. That is, not only does it appear that spanking isn't in reality as much of a 99% "girl-on-the-bottom" thing as Figleaf thought, it isn't framed that way, either.
Hi LM. I didn't mean to put
Submitted by figleaf on Mon, 2012-12-17 23:12.Hi LM. I didn't mean to put you down! I was just expressing discontent with the ambiguity of genders and preferences of sources and audiences. As witnessed by the wide disparities between the fanfic site you mentioned and the ancient a.s.s.r. and the more suburban Literotica sites I tried. By "real, non-fictional" I meant people who run workshops and others who blog about them and thus have face to face contact with large enough numbers of people who spank each other to be able to offer credible generalizations. Hope that makes sense. --fl
Yeah, can't say I see this
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2012-12-19 14:12.Yeah, can't say I see this being a singularly het thing. In the scene I run in, spanking actually doesn't seem to be very common in the public eye, but I have seen F/f, M/f, F/m and M/m spanking happening all around. Not to mention as a biologically female pansexual I tend to spank ALL of the people (including some amusing accidental ball spanking with a surprisingly flexible partner...). I can't help but wonder if it's possibly because male-spanking-female is perhaps a common trope even among vanilla circles, and if it's also a little bit because a lot of sexual advice for het couples is about men doing things to women, except where that thing is blowjobs.
There's also kind of a retro
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Wed, 2012-12-19 16:13.There's also kind of a retro appeal to it -- IIRC, spanking (with clothes on) was mentionable enough to get into a number of classic movies and novels. For instance, in the movie version of Mrs. Miniver, the couple sleep in separate beds, but they get fairly saucy with each other, including a spank or two. It was probably one of the raciest things that could get past the censor, right along with We Will Do Sexy Things with Cigarettes Now.
As a blogger who talks
Submitted by Neurite (not verified) on Thu, 2012-12-20 12:24.As a blogger who talks frequently and thoughtfully about the tyranny of bogus gendered expectations on both men and women, I figured you would understand that such expectations influence how comfortable different sexes may feel expressing their enjoyment of/desire for spanking. I know quite a number of men who enjoy or even crave spanking, but are very careful about who they admit this to (including being scared of admitting it to their partners) because men associating themselves with a role that can be in any way read as "dominated", "on the bottom", "overpowered", etc. is stigmatized severely in this society ("a man must never be weak!") and there is a great fear of being seen as "wimpy", "unsexy", etc. Whereas a woman who likes to be spanked? Oooh, what a fun, naughty girl!
Of course, "I know several guys who like to be spanked" is clearly anecdata, but "...and they tend to keep it quiet because of gendered stigma" definitely raises the concern that this phenomenon could distort whatever we hear/read about this topic. So we should be cautious in assuming that what we see at first glance really reflects what's out there.
"So we should be cautious in
Submitted by figleaf on Fri, 2012-12-21 08:19."So we should be cautious in assuming that what we see at first glance really reflects what's out there." I know. I've been cautious about it for so long but with the whole $%^! shades of gray thing skewing the stereotypes out even further I just decided to throw caution to the wind and complain about what I see in pop culture (increasingly heavy M->F bias) and what experience and intuition tells me shouldn't be so big. So I just threw out a big WTF. Thanks, Neurite.
BTW, where do you blog?
Submitted by figleaf on Fri, 2012-12-21 08:30.BTW, where do you blog? Google's returning too many false hits on "Neurite." And yes, I should probably have already been following you. If so then my apologies. Thanks!
I think Neurite meant you
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Fri, 2012-12-21 15:00.I think Neurite meant you were a blogger who talked frequently and thoughtfully about said issues.
Doh! There I go being too
Submitted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-12-22 02:16.Doh! There I go being too literal again. Thanks, Irene, you're probably right. --fl
No no no, you were not being
Submitted by Neurite (not verified) on Tue, 2013-01-01 20:46.No no no, you were not being too literal, I was using bad grammar. One of my pet peeve grammar mistakes, no less. They way I wrote it indeed implied that I am a blogger. Which I am not - Irene got it right. My apologies for the bad grammar.
My (male) lover really enjoys
Submitted by Devon (not verified) on Sat, 2012-12-22 12:12.My (male) lover really enjoys getting spanked by me, and I (female) definitely enjoy doing it, although it doesn't actually turn me on much. I'd thought I would probably like being spanked, but the couple of times we tried it, I really disliked it. So when we do spanking, I'm the giver, not the receiver.