Dear Michael,
Your message of yesterday was buried deep in the Bare Behinds thread. It is a beautifully written, heartfelt piece and to give it the prominence it deserves, I have copied it and started a new thread.
Michael wrote:
Long term consequences. June 4 2003, 11:14 PM
Dominum – and maybe it was his school I went to in Victoria, Australia, mentions the damage he may have done in his endeavours to maintain discipline amongst the boys in his charge. It can’t have been Dominum who so distorted me as I was at school before his time there. There were however, several like him, and, of course, in those days prefects also wielded the cane. Very strangely, at adolescence I developed a fetish to being caned and it has carried through my entire adult life. Insane though it must appear, when hit by sudden desire I change into a school uniform and enjoy the rituals and pain of being caned. For minor imaginary breaches of school rules on the seat of school shorts, for more serious offences, as Dominum has done in the past, on the bare bottom.
Yes, I enjoy these insane moments, but in looking back over 70 years of life, sometimes wonder at what I have missed of more normal sexuality. A marriage wrecked after only three months nearly fifty years ago and a rather lonely life since then.
That boy who Dominum caned on his bare bottom some 35 years ago, and all the other boys he caned in the past, where are they now and has he thought about them at all? How many boys, subjected to the treatment I myself experienced, and handed out apparently so generously by Dominum, have grown into rather useless adults like me?
was interested in what Michael writes about his marriage.
My interest in flagellation started when I was at junior school. Until the age of twenty-one it was not all-consuming: I was able to able to have, and enjoyed having, penetrative sex with women. I began to get bored with it during a three-year marriage in my early twenties and by the time this had ended (we drifted apart) the only thing that would excite me was the thought of corporal punishment, particularly at school.
None of my relationships since then have been long-term. My interest in corporal punishment is a novelty at first to the women I have been involved with, but they soon get fed up and move on to find a man who will give them babies.
My biggest thrills have been when I got women to talk about the punishments they received at school. I have been lucky in finding those who were given the cane or the slipper. They willingly let me spank them, but I did not find that as exciting as hearing them talk.
Increasing age has brought with it increasing shame. I no longer have any women friends and my fetish remains a dark secret.
I hope the following will be of interest to Michael.
In his book, The English A Portrait of a People, Jeremy Paxman tells of a banker who, after a lifetime of receiving corporal punishment, had some fresh skin grafted onto his bottom.
His beatings began in childhood at the hands of his father. During puberty and adolescence, my backside was assaulted by no less than seventeen people, including parents, nanny, teachers, and prefects. At this stage corporal punishment had for him no sexual connotations. As a university student his recollection of childhood punishments became the stuff of sexual fantasy. He read Swinburne, Fanny Hill and the Story of O. He was unable to find, however, girls who shared his taste. Marriage was no better: the thought of caning was abhorred by his wife.
He underwent a succession of treatments with three different psychiatrists to try to cure himself of his obsession. The third eventually advised that he could spend his money better by finding discreet ways of satisfying his need. His wife, with whom he conducted an otherwise normal married life, agreed to this, provided that no one, especially their children, saw his bottom until the weals had healed.
In answer to the question, Do you think this compulsion was the result of being beaten as a child? the banker said,
Well, it was the most plausible explanation the psychiatrists gave. When my father beat me, he was insistent that I didnt cry or flinch. If I managed it, he congratulated me. The shrinks thought I had associated receiving pain with earning love and respect. And as for schools, its certainly noticeable that English people like to be beaten with a cane, which was what was used in English schools, while Scots seem to prefer the leather tawse, which was what was used in Scottish schools.
Squirrel in his very matter of fact manner is correct.
No one thing could be responsible for such a preference as mine, and in my case there were many different experiences in childhood which probably together brought about the situation as it is. However, without the experience of corporal punishment, the situation might have developed differently. As I recall, I was a shy and nervous child, and the heavy handed discipline enforced with the cane I believe had a very great influence on my situation anyway, and together with many other influences it did psychological damage during the very fragile adolescent period.
Michael says he was a shy and nervous child. I think very highly-strung kids should be given proper treatment for it and not be flung willy-nilly into a “tough” environment. It used to be thought that this is what they needed to harden them up so that they could cope better with life. It doesn’t seem to work: I was also a shy, highly-strung child. I was sent to a very traditional boys’ school and 50 years later I am a shy, highly-strung adult! I don’t think this has anything much to do with corporal punishment (which I managed to avoid, as it happens).
The fact is, we cannot really know what makes us the way we are. My point was just that to put it all down to one supposed cause or one half-remembered traumatic incident is bound to be much too simplistic.
Brian, Prince of Wales, is an example of a sensitive child who received schooling in a tough environment. His much-despised father insisted that the boy should attend Gordonstoun to endure cold showers and floggings. (Brian was caned on just one occasion, but presumably took a cold shower every day). He is now a totally useless individual whose passions are shooting things out of the air and a woman who has the face of a horse.
Others who had difficulty coping with harsh school regimes were, dear, dear Larry, fellow luvvie Robert Morley and one-time friend of one-time Bexhill school-dinner lady, Stephen Ward.
Yes, I suppose the P of W could be an example of what I am talking about, though the royal family are all so extremely peculiar anyway that I’m not sure it really counts. At all events the P of W’s upbringing was pretty bizarre quite apart from being sent to Gordonstoun, an exceedingly untypical boarding school by the way. (Very little CP there, as a matter of fact.)
What are we to make of the fact that he has sent his own sons to Eton, another very odd place even by the standards of elite private boarding schools, though allegedly not so uncivilised nowadays as it once was.
(So far the very lovely William seems to be turning out surprisingly sane, despite both parents being positively barking.)