There were obviously places in the UK where it was the case, and certainly individual schools where it was the case, and girls were nearly always, if not always, at less risk of being physically punished than boys, but that’s not the same thing as an automatic exemption which did apply here in Australia in my state. But only in my state and one other was the exemption absolute – other states had partial exemptions for girls, but not to the same extent we did.
I can’t see any evidence or reason to suppose corporal punishment fetishism is any more common in this state than any other. From my limited knowledge, if anything, I’d say it’s somewhat less common here than the norm for Australia (which actually disrupted some of my own theories as to the origin of fetishism). I think, in the end, it’s so multifactorial attempts to identify the origins of fetishism are difficult. In any individual case, you might identify a ’cause’, but that tells you little about the oversall causes.