James Dobson In Hell
For the last 24 hours my social media has been alive with celebratory news of James Dobson’s death. His crimes were many and his victims innumerable, but in particular he wrote and sold millions of books advocating that very young children (and older ones too) be routinely and harshly subjected to corporal punishments by their Christian parents, to break their “strong wills” and prevent them from growing up rebellious. Starting in the 1970s, these books were insanely popular with large evangelical families, resulting in abuse affecting perhaps dozens of millions of American children. So, yeah: if there is a hell, which I doubt, I hope he rots in it.
Did I say “abuse” in connection with Dobson’s prescription for spanking children? Indeed I did, with my full chest. Spanking is a sex act, and should have nothing to do with children. In my view that puts Dobson at the head of a child abuse cult of enormous size.
Moving on. There’s a reason the Spanking Blog subtitle is “adult erotic spanking at its best”. Not all kink is a response to abuse or trauma, but some of it inevitably is. Many people who enjoy spankings as adults have childhood trauma around spanking abuse. (Others were never once touched that way, we can’t generalize.) I’m an elder member of Generation X. There are an awful lot of people in my generation with childhood trauma from being hit way too much by family members who were supposed to love and protect them. A big subset of those were Dobson cult victims. (Not me, actually. My folks were atheist ass-whackers. But some of my close good friends were Dobsonite whackees who weren’t allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons, again thanks to Dobson. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s was wild, I tell you.)
One influential parenting book inspired by Dobsons’ approach advocated so-called “blanket training”: spanking very young toddlers every time they would crawl off a blanket, and then putting them back on it. Over and over and over. Yup, to break their “strong will” again. This caused one TikTok commenter I saw to fondly imagine Dobson spending his eternity on a blanket in hell, wearing a diaper, getting spanked every time he leaves his blanket, until hell freezes over. There is no justice in this universe, but if there were, I imagine that would serve.
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The whole psychological area of childhood abuse and its affect on adult sexual preference for corporal punishment is little researched. The book “A little life” had a go, as have many before. Nigel Balchin wrote many books that looked at this issue, sometimes looking at the friction between the love of a person, and the desire to inflict pain. There is no doubt that corporal punishment (“back in the days” ) left an impression on a generation. As always with human emotions, there are many aspects that need to be balanced… power, submission, pain, control, punishment. I will simply submit my one point of reference. I was beaten as a child by everyone except my father. He was quite a serious sadist, and my mother was a serious masochist, and they enjoyed a long life together… but he could never punish me , as for him it was way too close what he enjoyed with his wife