Imagine a world where the spanking agenda was everywhere. Think of times and places where BDSM and its relations informed many of the choices and infused many of the people who dwell there.

That world is not only here and now, but it has been forever, if you but know where to look. Looking back over cuttings and stored articles the pattern suddenly reveals itself. Prurience hides in plain sight.

In my school days the literature presented was liberally littered with spanking references, many lovingly described. Of course it was often boys who were caned and beaten. One school book had a graphic picture of a young Churchill being caned to rags taken from a drama at the time. References to girls getting spanked or caned were gold, but not uncommon.

These few snippets were taken from Google Reader that was not at all unlike some of the passages back in the day

I was late and Father was really quite vexed about it. On top of that the rain did rather spoil the picnic, not to say the tennis. It was all quite a bore.

‘What the tennis?’ Deidre asked.

‘No’ I confided, ‘Father of course.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Say? Not an awful lot, but a quick slippering to where he hoped it would do the most good did most of the talking for him.’

‘Oh my gosh did hurt?’

“Well yes, but my dignity suffered more.’

“Oh why?’ Deidre was grinning at me, ‘Did he take your under things down?’

Well I wasn’t going to admit to that and suggested we sat down for some tea before I remembered that I would rather not sit at all just then.

Flappers, as we can presume they were, were not the only gals getting spanked. There is a brief scene in many of the books I read. King Rat has a girl caned on the bare bottom. I also remember a colonial girl getting so soundly caned that two chapters later she laments that she still cannot sit a horse.

Still on the subject of horses, a TV version of Black Beauty back in the 1970s has our 20-sometrhing heroine firmly grounded and sentenced to two weeks of chores for defying her father in order to save the day. In a brief scene where she explains her plight to a friend she is seen massaging her bottom in the yard. The housekeeper comes out to scold her and threatens to spank her like her father did. She is clearly embarrassed by the reminder, having omitted that part in her story. But she replies, “Oh don’t, I think father already has more of that in mind.”

TV was awash with spanking in those days, none of it up front and sexual. McKlintock! Was routine fare and hardly a Saturday afternoon movie was complete without the heroine getting a spanking. In those days it wasn’t only necessary for a hero to spank, but it was cool.

In a scene from a Chicago gangster tale a hoodlum is spanking a would-be prostitute on the bare bottom when the police raid.

“Hey, hey leave that and come with us see,” the cop tried to make with the tough.

I could see half a dozen of them through the door all waiting. So I tells him that the whore ain’t no whore but a runaway I was just putting straight. By this time the girl was bawling and sporting a shiny apple-red tail end. At this the cop grinned and told me to carry on while the others all laughed. One of them even offered me his belt, which I took. No sense in leaving the job half done and in any case it was kind of fun.

Nor was it just fictional cops with this sense of ‘justice.’

In the 1980s a British senior police chief serving Greater Manchester commenting on youth crime said give me a birch and I will tan the bare arses of these little misters and madams myself. He went onto describe in great detail how these youths could be strapped down while he gathered a large judicial birch and ply it to their backsides until they cry for their mummies, until they bleed if it is needed. Are these really the words of a judicial zealot or did he have another agenda of perhaps even he was not aware?

Around the same time a mother of seven, by then mainly grown up children, lamented the decline in corporal punishment and said she had not hesitated to spank her four daughters and three sons when they needed it. Interviewed on early evening BBC TV, she sat with one of her older daughters and both expounded and expanded on her theme. A slipper or hairbrush was her preferred choice of weapon, but warming to her theme she said that a stick was sometimes required.

She explained that a dutiful daughter (or in past times son) would cooperate and would submit to a bare bottom spanking. And how old is too old? The daughter (perhaps 20-years-old) said “It depends.” As a student still living at home was she still liable to get a spanking, the reporter asked?

“Oh yes,” she replied with pride as her mother nodded in satisfaction.

And what about for a daughter not living at home, she was asked? The daughter continued to look amused, if slightly embarrassed.

“Well by then it is hardly necessary, not often anyway,” the mother reassured the TV audience. “My oldest daughter is 27,” she added in a seeming non sequitur.

And when did she last spank her?

“Hmmm, not so long ago,” came the reply. The daughter giggled.

The mother appeared in many TV chat shows and even a documentary for a while after that. The TV executives must have developed a profound interest in youth behaviour by then or did they have another motive?