I posted an autobiographical essay for one of the online spanking groups in 1999 and it’s an excellent review of my spanking history.
Internet discussion groups (usually called “newsgroups”) allow one to communicate with others around the world. Most people begin by simply reading others’ comments, without responding. This is called “lurking,” and although that sounds faintly sinister, it is what everyone should do until they get the hang of the conversation.
Once you’re comfortable with the topics and conventions of the newsgroup, though, it’s much more fun to begin contributing yourself. In some of the spanking newsgroups, new posters are encouraged (although certainly not required) to begin by posting a note about themselves. This typically includes their age, sexual orientation and spanking preferences, and then a little more about themselves, which could be about their job, their family, their significant other (or others?!), or a story about a spanking they once had or hoped to have. Since you are no longer lurking, posting a note like this is called “delurking.”
When I started posting on soc.sexuality.spanking I began with a delurk that was so long I had to split it into two parts. I kept a copy and here (with a few revisions to reflect my current life situation) is what I had to say.
I’m a doctor in Houston, Texas. I’m in my fifties, white, male, heterosexual, and sexually dominant, but my concerns reach beyond these boundaries. This narrative talks about spanking, a lot, but also touches on parts of my personal and professional life that are not “about spanking” but are part of who I am and how I got here. I describe the odyssey that led me to this point, a journey that included challenges that are familiar to us all.
The first challenge is simply coming to terms with spanking as the core of your sexual being, confronting your own assumption that sexuality that involves blows and pain is a mental illness and a moral wrong. This guilt and shame can be crippling, and part of the power of this newsgroup, and of other discussions of our kink (whether they are of the “let’s reason about this” or “let’s get turned on by this” variety), is the chance to compare our views with others and realize through conversation that we have as great an opportunity as any vanilla bean to live our lives and express our sexuality in a healthy and caring way. We find a way to believe that spanking is OK.
I faced another challenge that is not universal within this community. For some of us, a mild spanking, given in a context where either person can say “let’s stop now,” is spicy enough. Not for me. For those minutes of passion, I want to control and punish my beloved, to feel her struggle, see her flesh turn red, hear her cries. So even within the context of “spanking is OK” there is the further question of whether *this kind* of spanking is also OK, this spanking that has strong elements of nonconsensuality, suffering, and punishment. I solved this riddle only after decades of struggle; if the internet’s communities had existed when I was younger this process would have been greatly accelerated.
My story begins, like so many others, with an early childhood memory. I was three or four years old and got into some unremembered trouble with my friend’s mother. She told me that if I misbehaved again she would spank me. Then she looked me straight in the eye and said that if she spanked me, she would take my pants down and spank me on my bare bottom. Looking back I'm not sure if this was a threat or a promise; but it was certainly a shock to me, and I think, but am not certain, that there may have been some interest mixed with my anxiety. She didn’t make good on her threat, although one could certainly speculate that if she had done so, the intensity of my interest in spanking might well have been augmented. Spanking is already a prominent feature in my mental landscape, so on balance may be just as well that it was not further accentuated.
I don’t think that my resonance to spanking at this early age *proves* that all spankos are hard-wired, or that I am hard wired in particular, but it certainly makes me think that my interest was not a result of my experiences in later childhood or adolescence; it was there already. (Translation: I’m hard wired.) Nor is my interest in spanking a result of a subconscious desire to harm women; it’s the result of a *conscious* desire to spank their bottoms (quite hard and quite long).
Ah, childhood. We don’t really know that much about sexuality’s roots, but all of us can observe the behavior of children, and now and then I meet young children who are also interested in bottoms. We had heavy rains one Saturday last fall, and when the downpour had softened to a drizzle our street had several inches of water (our storm sewer was plugged up). Both my son and C, the very charming daughter of our neighbors, went out to play in the water, and I played with them while keeping an eye out for cars. While I was bending over to pick up my son, C sloshed over and, laughing gleefully, gave me a sharp smack on my bent, wet, jean-clad bottom; immediately thereafter, still laughing, she gave my son’s bottom the same treatment. She obviously thought these bottom smacks were great fun. Although I wouldn’t presume to predict her adult sexuality from this play, I would be surprised if she, when she is an adult, is indifferent toward bottoms. And she is five years old.
Where do these impulses come from? I don’t know, but they do run in families. I suspect that my mother is a spanko; I *know* that she has always been a fan of bottoms. The point is not that we did or didn’t get spanked, or that I was taught in some unconscious way about spanking sexuality or inherited a spanko gene from my mother, but that I remember these (and many other) references to spanking with such absolute clarity.
I would guess I was about nine when spanking moved from being nonspecifically exciting to clearly sexually exciting. That was when I read and re-read the Dr. Seuss book in which the naughty young prince is spanked on his velvet-covered bottom. While reading this I was fantasizing about spankings and clutching and stroking my own small rear end. I found that if I put a nail file in the cleft of my bottom under my pants, it would give me an uncomfortable but delicious rubbing sensation. My impression is that it’s not uncommon for children to develop real sexual interests at about this age, even though puberty is still distant.
My mother was close to her sister, Aunt J, and she and her children visited us fairly often. It was when I was about twelve that I had an experience that caused long-lasting damage to my self-image. One of J’s daughters, G, and I were fooling around and somehow I landed a smack on G’s well-rounded rump (G was a year older than me, and at 13 she was an attractive older woman). G did not object when I gave her another spank or two, in fact she went all loose and drifted down to the floor. My younger brother was with us, and I sent him to get a ping-pong paddle: here was our chance to give her a spanking! He came back with the paddle and we spanked her with the paddle for a minute or two. During most of the paddling she remained immobile, then suddenly she moaned and shivered all over and seemed to come back to consciousness. We stopped spanking right away. We weren’t sure what had happened but it seemed like a good time to quit, and none of us discussed it afterward
I don’t remember exactly what happened later that afternoon (we did some general roughhousing and other rowdy stuff), but somehow my mother got wind of the fact that G had been hurt (something about a broom hitting her, which was certainly not during the spanking) and was livid. Her anger (she said, “You are a menace!”) imprinted a sense of enduring shame in me. It took years for me to come to better terms with these desires, and in fact it was only when I was in therapy, in college, that my psychiatrist pointed out that G’s moan and shiver suggested that the spanking had not been entirely unpleasant for her.
All of this took place in grade school and junior high.
I had just one girlfriend through my high school years, and of course I constantly dreamed of spanking her steadily maturing fanny. I was once able to talk her into letting me spank her. I was very excited, but she did not like it, and we did no more. (Don’t you hate real life stories?)
Trying to spank vanilla girlfriends was to prove the source of much frustration. I had similar experiences in college and medical school; it was often possible to talk girlfriends over my lap, but even mild spanking was more than they could tolerate. I remember persuading P, who was sexually uninhibited, into letting me spank her. I didn’t spank very hard (at least that’s how it seemed to me) but before long she complained, “my bottom feels all red and burning.” I thought that was just how her bottom *should* feel, but she preferred it pale and cool, and that was the end of our spanking experimentation.
These repeated tentative experimental spankings, and the unwillingness of my girlfriends to continue or repeat the experience, led me to the conclusion that a girl who was really into spanking (if such a divine creature existed) would only want mild spankings. The idea that she might want *more* was completely unsupported by my experience. I once pushed past that limit with a girlfriend who liked me enough to let me give her a moderately hard spanking. She was motionless during the spanking (she thought I wouldn’t like it if she responded to the pain); I enjoyed the spanking but was also apprehensive about how she would react, and with good reason. She hated it, and afterward she was upset and so was I; that was another low point in my journey.
These spanking frustrations and humiliations are a formidable barrier to a fuller appreciation of the joy that spanking can bring. This is how so many of us have been so repressed, for so long.
In college I discovered spanking erotica. This was clear evidence that there are others who share this passion; equally important, the erotica itself threw gasoline on my flaming psyche. Although my ideal is M/F spanking, other narratives can arouse me; after I bought “Harriet Marwood, Governess” I remained in my dorm room for most of the next several days. I read and re-read this thrilling narrative of dominance and discipline until my right hand was aching and I was almost in need of a skin graft.
It was in college that I decided to go to medical school, and not long after I had submitted my medical school applications I got an abrupt and intensive introduction to medicine as a patient. I developed pain in one testicle; the urologist thought it was suspicious, and I had surgery to remove the testicle. The pathology report showed cancer, and an x-ray demonstrated that the cancer had spread to a lymph node in my abdomen. I then underwent major surgery in which all the lymph nodes from the back of my abdomen were stripped out.
Lying in my hospital room recovering from this operation, my spanking desires were still vivid, but they seemed less wrong. They were such small stuff in contrast to this massive challenge to my physical integrity and life; suddenly the fact that I liked to spank girls and then make love to them (or at least would like to do so), and my friends liked to make love to them straight off, seemed less important. After I was discharged from the hospital I had radiation therapy for six weeks, and then chemotherapy for a year and a half. Testicular cancer doesn’t linger, undetected, for long. If it hasn’t come back in a couple of years, it’s gone for good; it’s been almost thirty years now. So, to answer the obvious question, yes, I’m cured.
The experience of having cancer was important in many ways. Having lived through those wretched treatments and not knowing if I were going to live or die has made me a more empathic doctor (and person). I believe that it has also made me more compassionate toward myself, more accepting of my kink, and more aware of the evanescence of life and our responsibility to cherish and respect each other.
Soon after I finished chemotherapy I started my first year in medical school. Being a medical student was a dream come true; I had no second thoughts, no matter how grueling the experience. Medical school kept me busy, but not too busy to meet a couple of spanking partners through personal ads. These experiences were limited but still terrific. Limited, because I was afraid of inflicting pain on my partners; at that point the idea that the pain might be something they sought had still not occurred to me. Terrific, though, because I was finally spanking someone, and that someone was just as excited about spanking as I was.
Many of you know the tremendous liberation and joy that comes when a lifelong fantasy becomes a physical reality. For me, that first time happened with R, who was more experienced and enjoyed introducing a newbie to the scene. (R gave me a key ring that I used for 15 or 20 years later). Yes, that was really *my* hand briskly smacking, and a real woman’s bare bottom nicely bouncing . . . for me, the thrill of the first time lasted for days. It’s totally different from the tentative sensation of spanking someone who is just tolerating it, or of a harder spanking given to a woman who may raise hell afterward. I was doing a lot of running back then, and I remember running into Central Park in New York with memories of that spanking adding a noticeable spring to my step.
And what did I learn from this? Although I didn’t harvest the key lessons, they were there for the picking. I remember P, for instance, who answered an ad I placed a few months after R had introduced me to the spanking scene. This time P was the newbie. She had never met, or even talked with, anyone who enjoyed spankings before, and although she was anxious and uncertain she was also very, very interested in getting spanked. We met at a restaurant and shared dinner and spanking conversation (she kept smiling and shaking her head in wonder at this) and then went back to my apartment for further discussions.
The "discussion" soon found her over my lap, where I lifted her skirt and then said, “Either you lower your panties or I’ll do it for you.” She said she wouldn’t pull them down, but I would, a very agreeable task that brought into view a well-formed, feminine ass. What came next was more enjoyable as I proceeded to spank her.
But as I spanked away (really not hard at all) she squirmed and wriggled and thrashed around very vigorously, making my task more difficult, so I threatened to use the paddle on her if she continued. (This was a large, oval paddle with holes). She continued her gyrations. I explained that the paddle was quite painful, but she kept on thrashing around (it was almost as if she weren’t trying to get out of being paddled).
Finally I declared I was going to give her ten whacks with the paddle on her bare bottom. She had the wisdom not to object (I might have stopped!) and in fact she wiggled a lot less, giving me a better chance of hitting the target. So I administered ten slow smacks with a mixture of pleasure at the paddling and some trepidation about how she would react, for the paddle clearly stung. I wanted to hurt her, but I couldn't imagine that she would want to be hurt.
I let her up after the ten smacks, and she laughed happily at the whole experience; she was as delighted at the spanking as a child who has just gotten the best Christmas present ever. She said it was “fabulous.” I had thought it was pretty swell, too, but I failed to grasp the obvious lesson, that she liked it most when I was hurting her. I thought she had enjoyed the spanking despite the pain, it didn’t dawn on me that a major part of her pleasure was the pain itself. In hindsight (so to speak!), before I let her up I should have asked her if she were ready to behave . . . and if not, more paddling, and a much redder bottom, would follow. I'm sure she would have loved that.
Eventually I graduated from medical school and began my residency. (In the US if you want to be a family doctor, after you graduate from medical school you spend three years in a family practice residency. During that time you’re called a resident; in the first year you can also be called an intern.) One of the nice things about being a resident, at least in the hospital where I worked, is a relative abundance of female residents and newly trained nurses who want to experience all that life has to offer, including the interns. The work itself, dealing with elemental life events, lends a certain intimacy to even professional relationships.
One of the new nurses was B, who had mid-length brown hair, a kind face, and a full figure. She was a great nurse, smart and gentle. We shared an interest in the humane care of the terminally ill, such as how dying patients do better if we give them pain medication on a regular basis (to prevent pain) rather than only when they request it; this led on to conversations about what it means if you give a dying person narcotics to control their pain and perhaps this also hastens their death: is that morally acceptable? (I believe it is.) And if it is acceptable, why are we still sometimes hesitant to do what we know in our heads is right?
Every moment was not packed with these serious concerns. One of our shared highlights involved an old man in the hospital who turned out to be a secret alcoholic. When alcoholics are hospitalized, and therefore abruptly deprived of liquor, bad things can happen; in his case, he developed hallucinations. When he started acting a little strange, B paged me to ask if I would please take a look at him (a typical intern duty). By the time I got to his room, he had climbed over the guardrails and out of bed and was crouching behind the bed with his IV pole tilting rakishly.
I tried to coax him back into bed but he became very aggressive and tried to attack me. We backed into the hallway, where we were locked in struggle, me in my white intern uniform and he wearing only a gown that was flapping mostly open. I had my hands full, trying to hold him, and keep him from hitting me, and keep his IV pole upright.
The commotion attracted B, and as she hurried down the hall toward us our patient suddenly lost control of his bladder and started urinating through the open front of his gown all over my pants. B called security and eventually we got him under control (and I had a chance to change into clean pants and dry socks). Some time later B told me how we looked to her; remembering it made her laugh so hard she almost needed to change her pants, too. A day or two later, the patient apologized, telling me that he had thought it was 1863, and he was a confederate and I was a yankee.
Not long after that B asked me over for dinner at her place. She had been developing a serious crush on me, and soon after dinner we were entwined on her bed. At one point, with her lying on me, I was able to reach up and give her exposed bottom a couple of friendly smacks. I did this because I enjoyed it, and was certainly not expecting a specific response, but she urgently said: “more! harder!” and it was thus I found a free-living spanko (one whom you meet in the ordinary course of events, not through an ad or newsgroup). So I gave her some more, and some harder smacks, but not a formal spanking. That was something I planned to remedy at the first opportunity, something I daydreamed about during the rest of the week.
The next time I was off call, B and I had dinner at an Italian restaurant. While we were waiting for our spaghetti to arrive, I told her I was going to give her a real spanking after dinner, then I turned the conversation back to ordinary affairs so as to let her simmer in anticipation.
When we got back to my apartment I had her go pee and wash up. When she returned I instructed her to disrobe and then, with her nude and me still fully clothed, we went to my bedroom. I took her over my lap. She said, “Not too hard, please.” I complied, spanking her relatively gently; my theory was that this spanking was for her pleasure, not mine; as you’ll recall, I didn’t yet know that her pain, which would bring me greater pleasure, might bring her greater pleasure as well. Later she told me that she had climaxed, thinking about her upcoming spanking, as I drew her over my lap.
B was a true spanko. For my birthday she gave me a photo taken from behind of her bending over, digging clams, while she looked slyly at the camera; she inscribed it “with love from B’s ass.”
Despite all her other virtues, discretion was not her forte, and our relationship (which in my mind was casual, not committed) was soon common knowledge among the nurses. Soon thereafter, one of the second year residents (one year my senior; this was the man who taught me how to do circumcisions, as it happened) took me aside for a confidential discussion.
He suggested that B had been talking far too much about our sex life and that it reflected badly on me (it turned out that he was conducting a very secretive affair with another nurse, so he was in on all the nurse gossip). I told him I appreciated his guidance and that I would ask B to show more restraint (I was of course afraid that she had discussed our spanking fun with her friends and I would become known as a pervert). It turned out that B had not mentioned her spankings, but that she had told every nurse on the floor what a fantastic lover I was. I mulled this over for a day or two and decided that comments like this reflected on me just fine! So I kept my mouth shut and let her talk.
That was a long time ago but those feelings remain strong. B and I broke up because of other incompatibilities and I developed other relationships. A month after my residency ended I married a wonderful-but-vanilla woman and I have had no further spanking adventures.
So what have I learned on this journey? The most important thing I have come to understand better, finally, is pain, which was the source of so much puzzlement before. First, that the pain of a spanking is not necessarily a turnoff for the woman; it can be essential to her pleasure. Second, that pain alone is inadequate to make a spanking memorable; the pain must be accompanied by a loss of control if it is to have real meaning, and the spanking as a whole must occur within a caring relationship. Spankings begin, then, with pain and loss of control between two people who care about each other.
One of the benefits of online discussion of spanking, whether it is in a newsgroup or just in e-mails between friends, is the ability to share at a remarkably intimate level. It is a wonderful forum to explore how we all feel about pain and pleasure; dominance and submission; shame, and shame vanquished; fear and hope and courage. And beyond these sometimes abstract discussions, it is a chance for us to express our love of spanking and to be part of the community of others who share that love.
With the delurk I plunged into the world of online spanking. I contributed stories and quasi-philosophical reflections to discussion groups, e-mailed other spankophiles, and developed some serious online relationships. The first was with Cheri, and I've posted four of the stories that we wrote here The Cheri Series. Later I connected with Michele (MrsMist) and she and I shared many good times online. There are several stories for or about her on this site. It was with Michele that I also first tried my hand at IM spanking. I haven't written anything on this site about IM spanking but may do so if there is interest. I also administered phone spankings to some wonderful women. All of this virtual activity whetted my appetite for the real thing, and eventually I took the plunge and started connecting with women who wanted to spank or be spanked in person.
For the first time I was able to give full expression to my central sexual interest, and it was glorious. Some of my spanking adventures are documented here in Real Spanking Sessions. During the early years, I was still married and I did not have intercourse (either in person or even online) with any of my spanking partners. Some of them climaxed (sometimes quite violently) but I refrained from explicit sexual contact of any kind. (You'll notice in the Cheri series, for instance, that although Cheri writes about how she would like me to fuck her, I say nothing along those lines myself.)
Despite these limitations on my activity, this arrangement was not fated to endure. My wife and I recognized how much of my sexual energy was flowing outside our marriage and I was unable (and unwilling) to change that. We therefore decided, after three years of individual and couple counseling, to divorce. I will never regret the wonderful years we spent together, and we are still in touch and still work together to raise our children (one a teenager and one a young adult). But my spanking interests are too strong to suppress, and I am now able to indulge in them freely.
Doc Tsai
Copyright (c) DocTsai 1999, 2006