## Why I Am What I Am - a Corporal Punishment Enthusiasts Evolution

Why am I into this? Why does something that was intended to cause me pain as a child to correct my behaviour (and which succeeded on both counts in my view) affect me so much as an adult?

This is something I have thought of a lot over the last year or so as I've finally been able to be semi-open about my feelings. I went over 30 years knowing at some level that I had these feelings, and feeling that it was completely necessary to conceal them.

When I started being open, about a year ago as I write this, I think I was pretty much convinced that I had no sexual feelings about spanking until my mid to late adolescence. Over the last year, thinking and writing, I've come to doubt that. I now think the feelings were there much earlier, but were unacknowledged and my memory of them was somewhat suppressed. I now begin to think things started much earlier.

My early childhood - right from my earliest memories - was spent living in a rather discipline free environment. My mother didn't believe in disciplining children in any way, shape or form from what I can remember. She wanted me to be free to do what I wanted to do. I think my father went along with this - I'm not sure what he really thought of it. We lived on an isolated property - it was actually pretty rare for me to see anyone except my parents, I had very little contact with other children. I wasn't sent to school - my mother was handling my education from an early age, so I had a very narrow field of experience. I learned things from what I was told, and from books. I don't even think I knew what a spanking was until I was six.

On my sixth birthday I was given a book that I still have - The Boy Next Door by Enid Blyton. This was a book about three children who discover the boy who has moved in next door is being hidden to protect him from kidnappers who are after a fortune he inherited. Nothing spectacular as literature, but not a bad book. But as I read it, I was introduced to a new concept. Quotes follow.

The dragon undid Robin's ropes and the boy then set his sister and cousin free. "Now, if I catch you here again I shall quite probably spank the whole lot of you," said the fierce woman. "And remember what I've said - there is NO BOY HERE!"

"Is that dragon-woman very fierce?" asked Betty. "Who is she?"

"Oh, she's not bad," said Kit. "My tutor, Mr. Barton got her to keep an eye on me, and to watch out that nobody came near me, or knew about me here - and I'm not supposed to leave this garden at all, or show myself. If I obey her, she's all right - but honestly I believe she'd get a stick and spank me if I didn't do what she said!"

"I shouldn't be surprised if she did, either," said Betty. "She looks like that. I hope she never discovers us here!"

"Your friend!" said Mr. Barton scornfully, in a horrid dry voice. "You are a most foolish and tiresome boy. You know quite well that we have been given instructions to keep your hiding-place a secret, and to let you make no friends until that unpleasant uncle of yours is caught and dealt with. And you make things as difficult as possible for the people who are doing their best to guard you. You deserve to be whipped - and so does this boy, too, coming into other people's houses without permission!"

"Go up to the attics and see if he is hiding there. I'll go downstairs. And if I catch him I'll give him a good whipping."

The man was in a real fury. "Kit, I shall give you a good hiding for behaving like this! What do you think you are doing? These silly ways you have of hiding have to stop! Come out at once."

"I was just going to bring him along when he dashed out of his bedroom and upstairs here somewhere," said Mr. Barton in an angry voice. "Wait till I catch him! I'll box his ears and give him the best hiding he's ever had in his life!"

"I know that," said Mr. Barton. "If only I could find that boy! I'd give him a good hiding before I handed him over to you, I can tell you that!"

"He'll get one from me, too," said Kit's uncle in a grim voice. "Causing us all this trouble! If only I could get hold of him this very minute."

Now when I read these passages, I had only a limited idea of what was going on. The word spanking meant nothing to me, nor did hiding. Whipping, I knew, so I worked out a rough idea - but I had to go to a dictionary to find spanking and hiding.

When I read these words in there, and found out what they meant in a bit more detail, I can remember feeling rather interested. There certainly wasn't any conscious sexual aspect - I was six and that type of thing didn't figure - what I found interesting I think was that this was totally alien to me - and to my mother, I'm sure would have been barbaric - but it was portrayed in quite a neutral way - the 'Dragon' was the person who most cared for Kit, that was obvious in the book - and yet she threatened to do this to him. And while the children seemed apprehensive about these things, they didn't seem terrorised by them. Spanking seemed interesting to me - the idea that somebody could hit a child and not apparently hate them... interesting.

I should add though that the references to 'hidings' affected me quite differently. That word scared me, and I wonder if that had partly to do with the fact that the men who threatened hidings in that book were nasty wicked men. That stayed with me - when I got older and corporal punishment became a fact of life for me, that word was truly scary to me. I was moderately frightened, sometimes seriously frightened, if I was told I faced a caning - when someone told me he was going to give me a good hiding, I almost wet myself in terror. Funny what a difference a word can make.

In any event after reading this book I asked my mother for more Enid Blyton books and she obliged quite often. I don't know how much of the reason I wanted them related to their spanking content - not all contained it, but a lot did - and how much just related to the fact I just liked the stories. I think it was mostly the latter, but I think the former may have been of more relevance than I have previously given them credit for.

Incidentally, in remembering those books, I often wonder how accurately I'm remembering them and how much my mind has warped my memories. I have VERY strong memories of certain scenes and events and some of them I have no real reason to doubt - girls being threatened with hairbrush spankings in the St Clare's books. Two boys being caned in Six Bad Boys. A magic wand being used as a cane on a fairy in, I think, one of the Wishing Chair books. Those all seem reasonable.

My solid memory of the Magical Land of Smacks at the top of Faraway tree and a teacher named Dame Spanks-a-Lot. Well, maybe they were in the books - but I really wonder if my mind has made them up. I often think I should but old copies of these books to check - recent editions are useless, even the mildest spanking content has been edited out of some of them - so I would really doubt some of what I remember would be in there even if I am remembering at all accurately.

Anyway - that was my early childhood, up until I was nine. When I was nine, my father and my mother both died suddenly. Men who knew my father - men he'd been to school with - arranged for me to go to his old school - the school had a policy of taking in the sons of deceased old boys anyway - it wasn't unusual. The legal niceties to arrange all this were something I knew nothing about. All I knew was I didn't have anywhere to go, and this school took me in. Initially I was placed into the family of one of the teachers at the school - he and his wife took me in, they had kids around my age - and they were kind enough to me. I was, naturally, devastated by the loss of my parents, but that can be overstated - I was only nine and I was pretty resilient. I had damage from that loss for years, it was years before I truly recovered, but it was only a couple of weeks before I probably seemed recovered to most people, and I was in fairly good shape. But everything was an adjustment for me, obviously. My mother's somewhat radical (for the time especially) theory of child rearing did not mesh well with the highly disciplined environment I was now thrust into - the family that took me in for that period were conservative people with conservative ideas. They were kind to me - but at the same time, I think... well, by the standards back then I must have seemed a monster child. I expected to be able to do what I liked, when I liked. I was used to speaking my mind. I swore. I lied if I though it was to my disadvantage. Honestly, I wasn't that bad - modern day, I'd be considered quite well behaved in most areas - but back then, I was not exactly what these people normally expected to deal with. They made allowances for a little while, because of my loss.

Really I was out of control, and really I knew it. I knew I wasn't fitting in, I knew I had nowhere to go.

So when I threw a rock at another child, and I finally tested the adults patience too far - and this lady came up behind me and gave me one hard SMACK on my bottom, I think that may have had more effect on me than she knew. It hurt. It hurt a lot more than I expected. I remember being completely and totally outraged at what she had done - and only the consideration that she was probably very prepared to do it again if I kicked her kept me under control :) But it was also, I think, on some level very reassuring - a concrete sign that people were going to take responsibility for me, they were going to look after me - and believe me I needed that. It wasn't sexual - but it was tied up in my feelings of security, and safety, and of feeling like I belonged somewhere. I wouldn't have been able to express it like that.

It wasn't tied up with sex - it was tied up with caring, which to me is something of a relative.

Over the next few weeks as they tried to work out where to put me - my lack of formal schooling meant they weren't sure what to do with me - by age I was mid to upper primary level, but they weren't even sure what standard I was at, so they started testing me to work out where they could put me - the plan was to stick me in a prep school at whatever age I tested at, until I was old enough to go to the proper school. The testing process took a while, because I was far more advanced than I expected, I had to do tests at a bunch of different grade levels. To begin with it was quite fun, and I really liked the idea that they were going to this trouble to find me a place - but it got onerous, and eventually I threw the mother of all tantrums when I was told I would have to spend yet another sunny day inside. And I remember the teacher who was running my tests, kneeling down next to me, grabbing my chin so I had to look at him, and saying in a very firm voice. "Do you know what a cane is?" That got me under control - from books, and some comics I'd recently encountered I did know what a cane was by this time, and I was in no hurry to find out any more about it! That memory is not as pleasant - this man didn't seem as caring and nurturing as the lady who'd smacked me, but the fact it has stuck with me suggests to me it had some real effect.

End result of all the testing was that I started at the proper school at the start of the following year, and then - as my accounts have indicated - corporal punishment simply became part of my life.

It wasn't just the experience of being caned and spanked, and witnessing the same and its afternmath though, that made it part of life. I'd put away Enid Blyton by now - reluctantly, but it wasn't something my classmates read anymore and I would have looked a baby if I'd continued to read them, but our House library was full of all the 'classics' of British schoolboy literature for our enjoyment - including large numbers of school stories. Our school, despite being in Australia, considered itself to be a British Public School, and I think the presence of all these books were designed to more firmly establish that connection in our minds. Tom Brown's Schooldays, The White House Boys, The Glory of Greystone, Fifth Form at St Dominics, The Impossible Prefect... dozens of titles, which I devoured. These described, but it does illustrate how school stories often contained canings - nothing unusual in that, given the type of schools they this was all around us, not just as part of our lives, but in other ways.

Comics as well - I'd started to encounter these soon after my mother died, British comics like Buster, Knockout, Beano, and Topper. These really often contained scenes of spanking and caning and slippering and they used to be passed around our boarding house until they disintegrated. I used to read them and I remember the spankings and the canings more than anything else, which suggests that even though I didn't know it, such things were already of special importance to me.

Now, this is time I first started to become aware of the sexual aspects of corporal punishment. They meant nothing to me, really, but older boys used to make jokes about it occasionally - suggesting that some of our Masters enjoyed caning boys - giving the impression that was something absolutely, utterly, revolting and disgusting, worthy of the most profound contempt. I think that had a real effect on me - it meant that if I did have any feelings like that at school, I locked them down, so tightly because they were made to seem such a hideous thing.

But looking back... I think perhaps, there started to be feelings when I was 12. I was sharing a dormitory with boys two years older than me and considerably more physically mature at that stage, so I started to be exposed to the fact of masturbation, which we were also told a bit both in science classes and in private and group conversations with our House master. We were given very mixed messages about it - that it was a sin, but that most boys did it, and that while you shouldn't do it too much, and should resist it, you shouldn't be worried about the occasional lapse. Boys tended to conceal it reasonably well - but occasionally you could tell it was happening and we did discuss things about it with close friends. Third form - that year - was the year boys probably got caned more often than any other year, and the news sort of spread around that one way to try and relieve the pain of a recent caning was to masturbate. It wasn't seen as a sexual connection between the two - much simpler, the idea was to try and take your mind off an unpleasant physical sensation with a pleasant one. Not everyone did it - but some boys did - and in an odd way, this was one time they tended to hide it less. In summer - the start and end of the year here - it was still not that dark when we had to go to bed - so you could see things in the dorm. If a boy managed to earn a caning near bedtime, or just after which did happen sometimes, a few times I did see him return to his bed, and it was pretty obvious what he was doing. Normally a boy would have teased a bit if people knew he was doing it - but nobody teased someone in that situation. Now I still hadn't gone through puberty at this point, and I didn't masturbate myself. I did make one half hearted effort after a caning, but it didn't seem to do much. But this was when I started to become aware of such things.

And as that year progressed, while I was still a little boy physically I think emotionally I started to go through puberty. I started seeing things in new ways, I started feeling the beginnings of erotic feelings - and these focused on bottoms. Living in a boarding school, sharing showers, and dormitories where we changed I got to see plenty of them - and I started finding them attractive. I liked white boys bottoms. They seemed to me quite exciting. I quite often had the opportunity to see marred backsides though - marked with the cane - and that changed my feelings for it. It was interesting in a different way. I have to say at this time, I also had a real fondness for my own bottom - it sounds silly to say that, but I loved my tiny white backside, and I really hated it when it was marked by the cane. For a while knowing it was marked was in some ways the worst aspect of a caning for me. That only lasted a short while, though.

The next stage of my development in this regard came about my 14th birthday. By this stage, I was in the fifth form and had physically developed to an extent. One day I was summoned by my house matron shortly after I'd been caned and to my surprise was made to show the stripes I'd received to a nurse in training. She was quite young, quite attractive, and she actually wound up touching my marks. That night in my dormitory - well, that was the first time I'd masturbated properly, dreaming of the marks on my backside and a girl focusing on them.

When I'm 15, now I have the power to cane. And if I have sexual feelings at the start of year about it, I lock them down tight having internalised the message that this is totally wrong. And the first few times I cane another boy, I can recall no trace of any but the 'proper' feelings. And then, I thrash a bully - a boy who'd bullied me in the past, and who was still a bully and for whom a caning was a complete and total proper response in our school. I didn't need to feel reluctant about it. Indeed, the situation meant I was doing him a favour. I had powerful feelings of satisfaction over that, and pride - so powerful that I wonder if they might have been a substitute for other powerful feelings.

Over the course of the year... most of the time I caned reluctantly (or convinced myself I was) but there were occasions when I enjoyed it on various levels, but never acknowledging a sexual dimension. My enjoyment came from pride in having enforced the rules. How true was that - I don't know. It could have been a surrogate as in that first case.

I will say that I never consciously caned a fellow student for my own enjoyment. I never once handed out a caning I didn't fully believe was deserved - though I got it wrong a couple of times, it wasn't because I was taking advantage of the situation. I wish I hadn't the power to cane, looking back, but in as far as that belief is based on my sexuality, those wishes come from a belief the risks were too great, not from a belief that I succumbed to the risk. Often when I caned a boy, most of the time, I hated doing it - I did it because I saw it as my duty, but there was no real rhyme or reason to that - and when that happened, sometimes, I sought relief in masturbation so the two things started to become connected. And towards the end of the year, when I caned a boy for what at the time I believed was group sexual play, I did become quite excited by it - though to this day, I'm not sure how much of that was the sexual aspect, and how much was the caning.

There's only one fairly clear, unambiguous case. Right near the end of the year, my best friend at school earned himself a flogging. I was involved in his offence - arguably I could have been flogged myself, but there were complicated mitigating circumstances, and my position as Captain meant that flogging me would have also meant me losing my Captaincy and that wasn't considered warranted. But because of my involvement, my enabling involvement, in his offence I was forced to witness his punishment - the idea was that seeing my best friend punished in that way would drive home to me the gravity of my own actions.

Instead, though I concealed it, I greatly enjoyed watching what happened next. I was 15, he was 17, and to be honest, while our friendship was almost entirely platonic, I had a crush on him. Seeing him flogged was incredibly arousing and erotic and that horrified me. I still feel guilt about it to be honest. But that was probably when I really knew this was connected.

And I locked that down hard, because it still revolted and disgusted me. It took me about eight years, I think - into my early twenties - to finally come to realise that while I still felt shame for that incident, that my general interest wasn't an absolutely unforgiveable sin. And by that time, I was in a career where any sexual aberration could not be tolerated - so while I knew what I was, I kept it very hidden. No openness. Not until late 2003.

And now here I am.

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NOTE WELL: Several of the links above will take you to places where you can purchase certain books I have referred to. Please understand that I cannot remember them perfectly and cannot completely swear that any of them contain corporal punishment, though I am sure that most do. Also realise that many modern editions of these old books - in particular, those by Enid Blyton - may have had all corporal punishment edited out of them. Please do not assume these books will have what you are looking for, and I accept no responsibility for any consequences of any purchases.