I had my gothy black-lipstick phase in junior high. My rainbow candy-raver phase in high school. My tree-huggy hippie phase in college. My expat phase in Asia. During each of those stages, I explored associated interests and social scenes, learned a million and one valuable lessons, and eventually moved on to explore new dimensions. Though I still retain aspects of those versions of myself and maintain connections I made along the way, evolution occurred, as it tends to do. I still dig things like techno and yoga and foreign languages, but my tunnel vision for each softened over time.
I also toured various realms of BDSM Land throughout my journey. For a while, I worked with a dominatrix in Japan and was heavily into shibari, her #1 speciality. There were also needles, knives, wax, hypnosis, electro-torture, and other activities I can still enjoy, but no longer seek out in an active sense. When I began practicing kink, I wanted to try everything that wasn’t a hard limit and that attitude led me through all kinds of experiences that lit up my brain, but again, temporarily.
None of that transience applies to my spanking fetish, for it is not a phase. I’ve felt its presence in my mind, body, and soul every day of my life for as long as I can remember. It speaks to me from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep (and even in my dreams, when I’m lucky). My obsession with spanking has never wavered or shown signs of weakening. If anything, it’s grown stronger over time.
Kinks vs. Fetishes
A lot of folks use those words interchangeably, but they’re worlds apart in my mind. A kink, to me, entails a normal level of interest or enjoyment. I like being tied up and even fantasize about it when I masturbate sometimes, but I don’t crave it when it’s not happening. There’s no internal void seeking to be filled in relation to rope and if I died without ever experiencing it again, it wouldn’t be a tragedy. Shibari is not how I make love and I don’t feel an automatic bond materialize with the people I do it with. It’s fun, interesting, and sensual, but that’s the long and short of it. For me, rope is a kink.
Not so with spanking. When I’m not doing it, I want to be. That yearning gnaws at me like an itch that requires continual scratching. I feel closeness and affection for the people who do it to me because in my mind it’s essentially sex, but better. Someday I’ll die and before that point, someone will spank me for the last time, which I honestly find incredibly perturbing. We all pass on eventually and I can accept everything about that aside from the fact that afterward, there will be no more spanking. What a horrible thought.
A fetish is forever hardwired in our neurology. I could try not to think about it, but I’d fail and even if I didn’t, it would all come rushing back the moment spanking came up in a movie or conversation. If it sounds like a mighty force of nature, that’s because it is, and nothing inside me desires to fight it.
Many people without fetishes minimize their significance.
The other day, I came across a post from a spankee who was annoyed by her repeated experiences with interested men who’ve tried to shrug off her fetish, telling her it’s just a phase or the result of a petty desire to “spice things up” in the bedroom. I’ve had similar conversations.
“I like you, but we’re not compatible. My fetish is a big deal. I’m sorry.”
“Why is THAT a dealbreaker? I can spank you during sex or whatever, if that’s what you want. It’s not hard.”
“You can, but you won’t understand what it means to me. We won’t be on the same page.”
I’ve been yelled at over this and told to fuck off, no joke. At a certain point, you stop trying to explain yourself. I don’t avoid intimacy with non-spankos because I’m some sort of hater; it’s partly because I don’t want my orientation to end up hurting anyone who can’t possibly understand what they’re signing up for. It seems silly to them until they realize the immense psychological power this whole thing holds. Nothing petty or silly about it. Sexual fetishes have influenced the course of history.
It never, ever gets old.
In discussions about the negative effects of kink and pornography, I often hear people argue that addicts require increasingly hardcore levels of stimulation to get the same fix. Interests like spanking are gateway drugs, they say, and are eventually replaced with desires for dangerous levels of violence that can lead to serious injury or death. Serial killer Ted Bundy, for instance, cited kinky porn as a contributing factor that fueled and crystallized his murderous urges.
I know this does happen, but I’ve never personally felt that need for extreme forms of escalation and it doesn’t seem like a big issue for the spanking fetishists I know. Though some spankos do dig intense BDSM, it doesn’t appear to replace spanking as their main staple, much in the same way that it never did for me. Traditional bare-bottom ‘communication’ embodies the glowing essence of our happy place. If you observe our community, you’ll see slews of fetishists in their twilight years who’ve felt the same consistent level of passion for mushy-gushy, old-fashioned OTK since childhood, along with hardline purists who’ve never once had a desire to try anything else.
Will I ever tire of watching impish, wayward brats like me getting punished over the laps of their stern but caring disciplinarians? My crystal ball says no. How on earth could that ever become passé or insufficient? One cannot improve what is already perfect.
Long story short: This is how the gods made us.
It’s reality, nature, and the way of things. The sun rises in the east. Bees buzz and make honey. Tide goes in, tide goes out. (“You can’t explain that!”)
And spankos? We will spank and be spanked all around the world ‘til death do us part throughout eternity until the end of time. Amen! 🙏
-T