This book review of the diaries of notorious British theater critic Kenneth Tynan (who is perhaps most famous as the first person to say “Fuck” on television) reminds me of why erotic spanking is sometimes called “The English Vice”:
Smacking bottoms wasn’t just a hobby for Tynan: it was a way of life, a cause, and heavy is the hand that holds the whip (or cane, or paddle). Although some commentators still insist on treating his spanking fetish as if it were a kinky diversion, a naughty bit of English-schoolboy vice, he was engaged in far more than recreational play, as his use of the phrase ‘anally sadistic’ indicates. In the diaries, he puts on his A-list of desirable things “the propinquity of a female bottom I can quite freely whip”. Tynan’s sadism wasn’t just foreplay served with a sting, but systematic brutality against women – concentrated anger. “To cane a woman on her bare buttocks, to hurt and humiliate her, was what gave him his greatest sexual satisfaction,” Dundy writes in Life Itself! In the diaries he describes caning her for having a fling with Kingsley Amis, “one stroke for each letter of his name”, then ordering her to confess her punishment to another couple (like a dope, she did).
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Not that he’s unwilling to put his own pale moon into play. A cosy weekend with his regular spanking partner and mistress, Nicole, becomes a slapstick fiasco after she administers a vodka enema (his bright idea), which shoots through his anal canal like Prussic acid, turning his bottom into a scalding volcano.
Vodka? What was he thinking?
