Back in the day, before the internet, the only place you could get spanking pictures was through a very limited number of magazines. In the UK these home-grown products were quite hard to find if you lived outside London. Later there were some US products available, but this was mostly in the guise of spanking books at railways stations.

Sometimes the pictures were good, but they tended to often vary little from the vanilla offerings. Rarely was there any added spanking dimension to these, largely because the law cracked down on the more adventurous offerings, particularly red bottoms. Kane actually broke the mould here, but only sporadically. Later we had Paula and her fantastic drawings that conjured up scenarios.

What I liked most was the stories, the words were so much evocative for me. Unlike the old joke about only reading Playboy for the articles, Janus et al often had great stories.

British Spanking Magazines blog has a great archive of some of these, but sadly hasn’t posted since 2012 and I recently linked to Spanking Magazine Stories which has a similar tribute.

Later I found Blue Moon Books and the works of Manton and Martin Pyx (sometimes Pix) and over such paperbacks, but just as the internet got going these offerings became tamer as F/M elements were shoe-horned into such books and the consensual requirement had to be hammered out on every page.

It has to be admitted that sometimes the old stories were OTT on the taste front and even I knew that the coarse sexist language often owed as much to misogyny as eroticism. However I think too often now writers second guess themselves and hold back as if their words can shape reality. I know I often do that. That is the strength and limit of the internet. Readers feedback and as the audience grows so does the feedback.

Overall I think this is a good thing and we have far more opportunities and openness now. I never really liked the coercive misogyny of many of the ‘flage’ exploitation, but sometimes I think we have lost some of the innocence of the old fashioned spanking stories.