The Spanko Experience?

I’ve had this post knocking around for a while and it’s been finished, so while I’m struggling to connect to kink, I figured it was a good time to roll it out.

A fetish is loosely described as sexual attraction to an atypical stimuli. There are all kinds of fetishes – spanking, of course, and feet, rope, panties, shoes, balloons, tickling, diapers – you name it, there is someone who derives sexual pleasure from it. Given the variations in what works for people’s heads, truly there are as many fetishes as there are for people enjoying them.

I have a spanking fetish, obvs, that is rooted more broadly in CP and discipline, but spanking is also the way I feel most connected to other people and myself. It makes me feel seen, cared for, loved, grounded, and is an outlet for me. It’s affection. I have thought about spanking in some capacity, for my entire life. For as long as I can remember. I think my earliest memories of thoughts of spanking/being spanked, were around the age of 5 or 6. For me, this feels innate, hasn’t changed, and has been lifelong. This is key. When I first got access to the internet in 2001 (I’ll save you the strain of doing the math, I was 12 and I am now 36) and found people writing spanking stories and talking about spanking, and holy shit, spanking each other in real life? I was relieved. This was a pre-sexual realization for me, but I made the connection to my sexuality eventually as a much older teen. I wrote recently in my post on spanking as sexuality, that “spanking is my sexuality, sexuality is complicated, and spanking is also so much more than my sexuality” and I feel like many spankos have this experience. Spanking is/can be our sexuality but it is also so much more than that and the thoughts came during a pre-sexual period and somehow defined how we relate to the world and those around us.

The thing is, spankos of my generation (millennials and xennials) seem to have a shared history from our childhoods. Older spankos share a lot of it, and younger less – because of the internet. The common denominators? We often refer to ourselves as “dictionary spankos” because we looked up the word “spanking” in the dictionary incessantly – this one seems to span generations. Paddle, paddling, smack, whack, wallop, are close seconds, thirds, etc. We all also tended to hyper focus on spanking scenes in books and television shows, rereading, or recording and rewinding and rewatching, reminiscing. Worrying that everyone else in the room could tell how those moments made us feel inside. Those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s and earlier would latch onto stories about our peers being spanked – those much earlier might have even experienced spanking or CP in schools – themselves or witnessing classmates. Especially in the UK! We’d casually engage in conversations about these experiences. Were we trying to suss out if the other person shared our interest or were we looking for an above board way to talk about what filled our heads so often?

There just seems to be a lot of “I did that, too!” when spankos get together and get talking.

I had early access to the internet via an AOL dial-up connection (on a teal blue iMac!) at my grandparents house in the summers of 2000 and 2001 – though by 2001 they had DSL (my grandparents are fairly young and tech savvy, my grandmother was a computer teacher in a local elementary school!) and I was largely (ok, totally) unsupervised. After all, back then, any danger seemed wildly abstract and theoretical. That’s not to say there was no danger – but it was a brief period of blissful ignorance. I found the spankos right away though. Google didn’t exist back then but both Amazon and Ask had a search feature that seemed to crawl the internet. I found stories – a geocities site for SamPast, Hayley Brimley’s ‘Down in the Den’ and Mary Catherine’s Saint Francis stories, among others (I’ll make a post soon about specific spanking fiction and where to find it). I landed on the treasure trove that is and was, Laura’s Spanking Corner, and then found the soc.sexuality.spanking Usenet group – but I found it via Google groups, so much later. I knew it existed because I found the website, but I didn’t have the skill or means to access it before Google started indexing Usenet groups. Anyway – I knew from a young age, that I wasn’t alone. That these thoughts I was having actually weren’t so unusual and not only that, there were healthy and happy and normal adults doing this thing in REAL LIFE. Because of this, I’ve never, not once, felt shame for my kink. A genuine privilege.

Around the time my pre-teen self was discovering this, young adults and people more than twice my age were as well, because the access existed at the same time. Their childhoods were much different – they relied on all the things I did (books, TV, peers, the dictionary, etc) but they didn’t have the internet to see that there were other people like them, to see a glimpse ahead to adulthood and what life could be like. Maybe they saw personal ads that mentioned spanking or BDSM. Younger spankos usually don’t have any of the same spanko-cultural references that I do. I speculate this is because of the exodus that started between 2013-2015 of blogs, websites, etc. The SL chatroom disappeared around then, SSS was taken down, many forums simply died off – Fetlife came into much heavier use around this time but goes back to 2008. I’ve had an account since I was 19. GenZ spankos have Discord servers, podcasts!! like Sips and Smacks (which recently celebrated their 100th episode!), kink aware & supportive TikTok and instagram accounts – they don’t know who I am talking about when I mention spanking fiction writers from 20-30 years ago, role play forums, etc. I also would like to write at some point about the difference between folks who identify as kinky vs folks (like me) who have a lifelong fetish. Not from an us vs them perspective, but rather talking about this differing lived experience. There is also something about the non-sexual aspect of this fetish that feels different from many. Not that other people don’t have a similar experience, but I wonder if the rate of ace people is higher in kink communities, or people who can and do engage with their kink in a way that is distinct from explicit sexual activity.

My curiosity, however, is do other fetishes, have similar communities and histories? I know BDSM broadly and the leather community have very rich histories and long-lasting deeply integrated communities, but I’m talking about this shared personal history and realization. Are/were there forums for foot fetishists and those into tickling that mirror spanking ones? Do people with other fetishes relate and connect to people the same way spankos do? Is there a rich history of written stories and erotica for their fetish, with its own customs, etc.?

This is a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about! I suppose I could google – but I find human connection more informative. I may, though. Spanking feels very niche in this regard. I can’t say it for sure stands out, but I think I’ve only met one person who’s talked about their childhood realization about a fetish other than spanking (it was tickling and they have both spanking and tickling fetishes). That doesn’t mean folks aren’t out there, but I’ve met a lot of kinky people and haven’t come across any others maybe never thought to ask? I hope this blog reaches those people or gets shared beyond, because it’s a conversation I’d love to have.

I did speak to a friend who has a completely different fetish than I do – he’s primarily submissive and into face sitting and similar. I asked if he’d had these thoughts as far back as childhood, he said yes! But he grew up in a country where community access was non-existent so didn’t have a similar reference point. It was a fascinating conversation and I want to have more of them.

This community that spankos have is something that is so precious to me – I know not every spanko wants or needs to be a part of it, but that it exists for people like me who thrive with it makes me glad the internet came around when it did so we could all find each other somewhat out in the open. I’d love to hear your own experiences finding the spanking scene, other spankos, and your reminisces.

-M