Spanking: How a sexual fetish went mainstream 

Just one of the excruciating details to emerge about the private life of Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk over the past few days – indeed the one responsible for his suspension from the Labour party in the first place – was his alleged sext message to a 17 year-old student, in which he reportedly asked to spank her.

While much has been made of Danczuk’s subsequent downfall and the age of the girl in question, little shock was expressed at its content: the expression of desire to spank Sophena Houlihan.

Spanking has long been called ‘the English vice’ – perhaps thanks to all those bygone boarding school canings, featuring slippers and rulers.

As an erotic act, it's as old as the hills. An Etruscan tomb in Italy, dating from 490 BC, (and called the 'Tomb of the Whipping') contains a fresco depicting two men flogging a woman for sexual pleasure . The act of spanking was a repeated refrain in Victorian erotica, too. 

But the truth is that until recently it was still pretty niche. Sex shops in Soho sold magazines, and fetish clubs existed, but those who were that way inclined had to work to seek it out, or hope that the person they were dating would be accommodating.

So when did spanking go mainstream? How did we get to a point where an MP can allegedly ask a teen girl for spanking rights and expect to get away with it?

Somewhere between the internet, which facilitates kinky dating sites like FetLife.com (a Facebook-style social network for people with a wide variety of sexual predilections) and the Fifty Shades phenomenon, spanking has entered our everyday sex lives.

Many women told me they’d recently had sex with men who seemed to think spanking was just a standard part of intercourse.

“I slept with a guy who I met on Tinder, and during foreplay he started spanking me out of nowhere. It hurt and I was supremely p****d off” said Kate, 26, from London. “I just don’t understand why he thought that was OK.”

“After a few dates, I had sex with someone I’d met online. But just as things were getting going, he slapped me, hard, across the backside,” Emily, 30, from Surrey, told me. “I didn’t say anything but I felt humiliated and really violated afterwards.”

Anecdotally, at least, it would be easy to conclude that men are more interested in spanking than women. But it might be that they're simply failing to have the necessary conversation about consent with their sexual partner, before launching in for a well-placed smack.

Perhaps men are suffering under the misapprehension that all women want to be spanked? In porn, spanking is a standard move of encouragement from a male to a female porn star. And, as we’re constantly told, what our partners see on the screen increasingly tends to inform what we experience in the bedroom.

Or could it be that spanking (and wider BDSM kinks) are experiencing the problem that beset anal sex in the early 2000s?

A decade or so ago, anal sex became a hot topic for female-orientated TV programmes, chat shows and magazines. It was swept up in the sexual freedoms that series such as Sex and the City promised us. As a result, some of the taboo surrounding anal was broken down and, for many people, it became the new ‘fifth base’.

This normalisation destroyed the perception of anal as something that required negotiation between two partners.

For years – and still now – it was common to hear stories of women having first time sex with a partner and being badgered for anal straight away – it’s certainly happened to me.

Professional Dominatrix Mistress Wryly explained to me that the spanking world used to be a closed book, which protected the people who indulged in it.

“When spanking was practiced predominantly by dedicated fetishists who sought out chances to experiment, it was more of a community,” she said. “Fetish clubs, sex shops and private parties provided introductions, but with such a limited pool of people to choose from it was essential to maintain friendly relationships, or else lose all connection to the scene.”

BDSM practitioners indulge in some risky sexual games, so it’s not surprising they’re evangelical about consent and personal safety.

The ethos is described as ‘SSC’ (safe, sane, consensual) or ‘RACK’ (risk away consensual kink). All fetish clubs have strict policies and will eject anyone regarded as violating those rules.

Emma, 28, from London told me “I feel safer going out to a fetish club than I ever do in vanilla ones. No-one thinks that wearing a corset or dancing is consent, and if someone does push the boundaries there are loads of helpers around who’ll probably kick them straight out.”

The issue seems to be that spanking, in becoming mainstream, has transcended its previous  rules and regulations.

When a bloke you swiped right on earlier that evening via Tinder tries to spank you, there’s a good chance he hasn’t done his research. He probably doesn’t know the importance of not hitting your kidneys (a common mistake), tailbone or hips, and to start gently and build up to avoid bruising.

“I actually like being spanked” said Sophie, 24. “But that doesn’t mean I’m always up for it. I was sleeping with this guy who just went for it, he hit me really hard and he clearly had no idea what he was doing. No surprise, I went straight home and didn’t see him again.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with spanking, whoever wants to be on the receiving end.

Wanting to spank a woman isn’t about having an issue with her gender or wanting her to feel small. The desire to be spanked doesn’t make you a bad feminist or mean there’s anything wrong with you.

But as with all of these things – spanking, anal sex, sex full stop – everyone needs to be having fun or it’s a really, really bad idea. The serious kinksters have definitely got it right when it comes to caution – being over careful might not sound sexy, but even Christian Grey knew the importance of safewords.

If you spank someone without getting their express consent? Let’s face it: you’re actually just taking someone home and assaulting them. And whichever way you look at it, that’s just not sexy.