Shitty still from “Forsaking All Others” (1934), one of a few pre-Code movies in which Clark Gable spanks Joan Crawford for being a bad girl.
Scott came to San Francisco a couple times a year on business. Though his evenings in the City were booked solid with dinners and drinks with colleagues, he would always find a night to fake food poisoning and call me, or some other girl, for an hour or two of spanking. He was less a hobbyist than an indulger, a guy who didn’t have the cashflow or the interest in regular transactional sex, but liked to treat himself every so often—as some people do with professional massages or prix fixe meals—to OTK with a girl-next-door type who didn’t cry.
Scott holds the distinction of having been my favorite client, as well as the only paying SM top that I didn’t daydream about murdering (most of those guys are bastards rather than tops, but even the real tops are almost exclusively bastards). He was clean, polite, decent-looking, and grateful for the opportunity to spank someone who enjoyed it, and I did enjoy it. Spanking, like any other SM skill, is both intuited and perfected over time, and Scott was a natural with a decent amount of applicable experience for a civilian. In fact, he was the only client who I probably would have had sex with for free. I still think softly of him from time to time, though since we saw each other last I quit the industry, moved across the country, and changed my body enough that a guy looking for girls to redden almost certainly wouldn’t be interested.
Although he made it clear he would have welcomed vanilla sex had it been included in my fee, for Scott, the spanking was the main event. A clean, polite, decent-looking straight guy like him could get laid any old time, but corporal punishment came much more dear. He insisted he could never tell his girlfriend, who he was going to marry, about his fetish. This had to do with his own shame, as well as the conviction that she wouldn’t be interested in partaking. But it also had to do with the hotness of secrecy, anonymity, indulgence, and the power trip of paid companionship. Scott’s girlfriend didn’t know what she was missing, but even if she did, she was too close to share the kind of experience he was looking for. Fantasy is funny that way.
Does it surprise you to learn that I was spanked as a kid? It shouldn’t, as that’s how our logic goes: Hit a child, create a pervert. As a culture we seem more disturbed by consensual adult reenactment of child abuse than the simple fact of harmed children (how many undocumented kids will benefit from Biden rolling back Trump-era immigration policy, and how many won’t?). While I personally tend to resent conflations such as these, I really can’t blame anyone for making the connection. I’m tempted to, myself.
I never asked Scott if he had been spanked, although with America’s cultural mores—apparently something like 75% of my fellow Millennials agree with their Boomer/Gen X parents that spanking helpless children is a good thing—it’s fair to assume that he was. But one of the many problems with the notion that masochism is always and necessarily a result of trauma is that it doesn’t account for sadists. If I like spanking because I was spanked, wouldn’t it make more sense that Scott liked spanking because he spanked his parents (or something?!). I’m sure psychologists have gone on record justifying both positionalities in ways I haven’t considered, but I also think the pat flimsiness of that reasoning suggests bigger inconsistencies deeper down.
Because I think there’s a connection between the false idea that victimhood is perpetuated by victims and the false idea that SM must be a therapeutic solution for pathologized desire. It’s currently in vogue to excuse one’s own SM practice as a component of healing; whether or not it is therapeutic (in the last installment, I insisted that it is), I don’t know how this argument is different from the one presented by concern trolls who see consensual leatherplay as inherently abusive, and masochists as inherently abused, a perspective that always seems to focus on bottoms and masochists over tops and dominants, women over men, people of color over white people, queer people over straight people, and mentally ill people over the sane and neurotypical. Both rely on the notion that BDSM, SM, leather, whatever you call it, is always already bad because of its superficial resemblance to certain kinds of abuse, and its tenuous, generalizing, and unproven origins in it. (Funny how spanking children also “resembles” abuse, and yet it’s not held to the same standards of decency.) Even if the abuse-to-kink pipeline was indisputable, I fail to see how preventing adults from being kinky together prevents the abuse of children at other adults’ hands.
All that’s well-traveled ground, and prejudices that leatherpeople have been grappling with for decades. It’s nothing new. What is new, or newer, at least, is the rise of a “normalized” (or commodified) SM alongside those prejudices. This series is my college try at tracing the trend of kink as therapy back to this a priori—and problematic—badness of kink. If kink is only excusable when it’s a response to victimhood, an undesirable but otherwise necessary curative for a disease (like shock treatments), that means not only that play must be justified, but also that that justification is elevating. Play is no longer a common pleasure, but a medical need. Like a disease, a desire to be spanked can be analyzed, treated, and cured. The doctor is in.
In the process of mounting such a strenuous defense of the chasm between kink and therapy, I kept forgetting that this separation has a way of contributing to that elevation, which I don’t want to do. Not because I don’t think therapy can be good or helpful—I am lucky enough to be in therapy—or that finding ways to treat and heal oneself can’t be done within the medical industrial complex. I just don’t trust it. No one should.
While I’ve written about this before, you’ll find a fascinating in-depth exploration of the tension between mistrusting the MIC and throwing yourself at its mercy over at Mental Hellth, a newsletter about how capitalism is bad for your brain, and often about how this country’s mental health care system is, at the very best, a stop-gap rather than solution, a dirty bandaid on an infected wound. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more than ever lately, inspired by writing like a recent Baffler piece about the boom of apps designed to treat mental illness. Samantha Nash zeroes in on clinical psychologist and philosopher David Smail’s book Power, Responsibility, and Freedom, which argues that most people’s suffering is a question “neither of medicine nor of ‘therapy’. . . [but] of morality and, by extension, politics.”
The formalism of clinical psychology, [Smail] writes, leads too many people to view their well-being as a matter of medical diagnosis rather than as the result of externally imposed conditions—chief among them “the machinery of global capitalism,” which “has enormous effects on vast numbers of people in the world who are themselves in no position to see into its operation.”
So spells the end of another DAVID series, but since the implications of SM’s commodification via medicine—kink as not just a product, but as a treatment—are far-reaching and many, I’m sure this won’t be the last time I write about this subject. Until then.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
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