That New York Times article on spanking has prompted sex educator and blogger Emily Nagoski to write a post about the spanking fetish in women:
Our brains are HUGE, vast, unprecedented things. They are remarkable for their profound plasticity; they learn and build connections between things in ways we are only just barely beginning to understand. The consequence of our wrinkly brains’ hunger to build connections between experiences is that every individual has a slightly different view of the world, built from the links the brain has constructed through a lifetime of neural plasticity, a lifetime of cascading connections.
And sometimes that results in things like really, really loving to be spanked. Other times it results in becoming obsessed with collecting Longaberger baskets or in being an actor who thrives on the attention of thousands of people. Normal, relatively rare, and mostly explicable – though, as always, there is more science to be done.
One thing I stumbled on in her post was this line: “It is relatively rare for a woman to develop such a strong and specific fetish – rare compared to men, that is.” It hasn’t been my experience that there are more men with the spanking fetish than women, but Emily is very science-based, so I’m sure she has numbers to support her proposition that men in general are more likely to have a “strong and specific” fetish than women are. The key thing: there are lots of “strong and specific” fetishes out there; the ones more men have don’t have to be spanking fetishes for Emily’s statement to be true.
But they could be! My experience has been accumulated in my (mostly virtual) community, centered on this blog and others like it. This blog focuses on the erotic spanking of women by men. It’s been my observation that there’s no huge disparity betweeen “women who want to be spanked by men” and “men who want to spank women”; in fact, my sense is that the women are slightly more numerous than the men in that comparison. But a better comparison might be “women who want to be spanked by somebody” and “men who want to be spanked by somebody” and there, I don’t have data. Men who want to be spanked by women are a big enough group to support (in part) a professional dominatrix class in every American city; the converse is emphatically not true. Bethie runs a spanking personal site for men who want to be spanked that picks up one or two members every day with essentially zero marketing, so that’s a data point. It could very easily be the case that men who want to be spanked vastly outnumber women who want to be spanked, but for them to remain less visible “in our community” because “our community” mostly doesn’t include them.
Update: revised the post because of a brain flail; I had typed “more women with the spanking fetish than men” when I meant to type “more men with the spanking fetish than women”. Fixed now, apologies for confusion.
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