Time and again we read that the inclination for BDSM is caused by the spankings
suffered by the practitioners in their childhood. It has been repeated so often
and it sounds so reasonable that most people (even the professionals in the
area) believe it is true. From there it is easy to assume that the people that
enjoy BDSM were spanked and abused as children.
You will find it mentioned in many environments, from psychology to the
anti-spank community. For the last, the fact that you could convert your kids in
sexual perverts (like us?) if you spank them seems the ultimate argument against
spanking. And the psychology explains that the subject plays to try to replay
his or her childhood traumatic experience to get control over it. Or the pain of
the spankings is converted to pleasure by unspecified mechanisms. Or you want to
be punished because of the Oedipus complex. Or… The fact that there is no
agreement in the mechanism after so many years is suspicious in itself.
The myth probably derived from the fact that a man as famous and influential as
Jean Jacques Rousseau in his “Confessions”, published after his death, credited
his own inclination to submission to a spanking received as a child in one of
the first printed mentions of what is now called BDSM .
Krafft-Ebing in his “Psycopathia sexualis” considered masochism and sadism as
probably inborn (his most significant cases on the area were not spanked as
children). But as Freud enthusiastically embraced Rousseau’s theory at face
value (“
Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, it has been well known
to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of the buttocks…
(1)”), it became a fact, as many other theories that Freud embraced or proposed
for no other reason than that they seemed reasonable. Spank a child and you’ll
get a sexual pervert. And as we play with spankings and pain, we entered in the
bag.
Only, BDSM is not about spankings and pain, even if often includes them, but
about dominance and submission. Even Rousseau, while attributing his inclination
to a spanking, said in the Confessions that his fantasy was “
to fall at the feet
of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon”, that is,
submitting to her, without mentioning being spanked by her.
There are many variations on our games, and many do not include spankings,
corporal punishments or pain. Would somebody be inclined to enjoy submission
because of a childhood spanking? Of course, a spanking includes being dominated
and in a violent way, but all punishments are delivered to enforce submission
and obedience. And some show the submission in a more explicit way. Standing in
the corner just because somebody ordered you to do so is a strong sign of
submission. The same is true for any kind of punishment that requires a
voluntary compliance, even writing lines or being grounded. If somebody would be
attracted to submission by a punishment, not only spankings but any punishment
received as a child could cause the inclination.
Surprisingly, more than two hundred years after being proposed, we don’t know of
any research that studied in a scientific way the correlation between receiving
corporal punishments in the childhood and the inclination to BDSM in adults
(2). It seems that all professionals are so sure of the
correlation that no one bothered to corroborate it. Or perhaps it is not so
surprising, as many of the theories of the psychology, and almost all the ones
in psychoanalysis are based in the insight of the Masters that developed them
studying their patients, with no independent corroboration.
If the relationship between spanking and BDSM is true, there are some puzzles to
solve: Why some children are driven to BDSM by spankings and so many others not?
If there were a direct connection between being spanked and an attraction for
BDSM, it should happen to everybody (at least, to most). But even when most
children were spanked in the first half of the 20th Century, only a 10%
developed the inclination (the survey that showed that 10% of the population
enjoys our games is from the mid 70’s, when the kids from the first half of the
century reached adulthood). You could say that spanking only causes the
attraction on somebody that has some kind of predisposition, but it would mean
the inclination was there before and the spanking was just an accident that
brought it to the front, what is exactly what we propose. And it is not even a
necessary accident, as for all the ones that were never spanked it came to the
front in some other way.
In other words, we know that many people can relate the inclination to BDSM to
being spanked or even to a specific punishment on their childhood. But the fact
that somebody (as Rousseau) became conscious of his or her inclination to BDSM
while suffering a spanking is no proof that the experience caused the
inclination. It is perfectly possible that the spanking just brought to
consciousness an inborn attraction that was not manifest before.
It is our experience after many years practicing and in contact with
practitioners of BDSM that many of them (as me and many of the ones that write
to our site) were never spanked or saw spankings in their childhood, and many
can recall sexual or pre-sexual reactions to BDSM-like practices (not only
spanking) before being exposed to spankings or knowing about them.
And this brings up another puzzle for the supporters of the theory: how and why
children that were not spanked (and, if our observations are true, as many of
them as of the spanked) developed the inclination? Could it be that there is one
reason to be attracted to BDSM if you were spanked and another if you weren’t?
This would sound as an effort to try to keep afloat a theory that doesn’t hold
water.
So, until somebody presents hard evidence, a study or a convincing mechanism
that confirms the correlation, our opinion based on the many cases we know of
(and, thanks to our site and the Internet, we were and are in contact with many
more BDSMers than the ones met by most psychologists in their whole life of
practice) is as valid as anybody else’s. And our experience suggests that the
inclination to BDSM is innate. Some people discover it in association with a
punishment, but many remember early reactions to BDSM-like events not related to
them. And many, many people were attracted to BDSM before having experienced or
witnessed any corporal punishment.
The supposed correlation is, for us, just another of the many unsupported myths
surrounding BDSM. You will enjoy BDSM if you are so inclined, and you will not
if you are not, no matter if you were spanked as a child or not.
(1) Sigmund Freud. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905)
(back)
(2)There are studies that seem to correlate
childhood spankings with aggressive behavior in adults (most do not separate
light spankings from abuse) but many people in BDSM, even dominants, are not aggressive
in their real lives. (back)
Published: 04/11/07