What Having a Spanking Fetish Was Like Before the Internet

Kinky art by John Willie

This cockamamie internet thing we’re all addicted to didn’t exist yet when I was a kid and has transformed our world in ways no one could have predicted. There are days when I wish we could shove the genie back in the bottle, but despite those reservations, I can’t deny the blessings the internet has showered upon us spankos.

I was born in the marvelous year of 1985 and knew from my earliest days that something about me was different. (That ‘something’ had to do with how I felt about spanking, masochism, and discipline.) In middle school, I sexually matured right as the World Wide Web began exploding across society, changing how we access and share information. Much has changed since then, but I still remember how different it was to have this fetish before the net came along and swallowed us all. 

Spanking kids was more common.

Adults of all kinds would freely threaten to spank kids when I was young. It would happen at friends’ houses or even out in public. Parents and other family members would embarrass us with stories about spanking us, joking about those moments together years after the fact. I hated seeing and hearing it happen, even in movies, along with witnessing how much joy certain adults clearly derived from hitting children. My complicated proto-sexual feelings about the whole thing caused immense discomfort whenever I was exposed to it as a child.  

This culture of gleefully spanking children still exists in some areas, but has died down considerably where I live in California. Thanks to the internet, we all have access to countless studies documenting the developmental damage spanking can cause in children and the issues that can follow well into adulthood. Any school employee caught spanking a child here these days would be promptly fired and maligned online. I don’t see many parents swatting their kids at supermarkets anymore either. To do so is now taboo and viewed as abuse. When parents joke about spanking kids on social media or rally to bring back paddling in schools, viewers rightfully call them out and spread education about the myriad harms of developmental trauma. 

Child battery is still a massive problem and the long-term impacts of this violence on our society are apparent. Things have noticeably improved, however, and I believe the internet has quite a lot to do with it. 

We spanko kids had a thing for dictionaries.

Sometimes spankos in the kink community refer to themselves as “dictionary kids.” I was one too and remember it well. Sometimes at libraries or other places where dictionaries were present, I would open one and secretively look up words like ‘spanking’ or ‘whipping’ or ‘punishment’ and stare at the definitions. I knew this was unconventional behavior and couldn’t explain why I did it if you’d asked me. I didn’t even know what sex was yet or that fetishes were a real thing. What I did know was how powerfully reading those words affected my body and mind, sending illicit tingles through my nervous system from head to toe. 

Now that we have Google, curious mini-spankos have no reason to flip through dictionaries for a glimpse of language describing their obsession. An endlessly expanding sea of spanking-related information awaits them online. We “dictionary kids” will be a thing of the past. 

BDSM was not commonly spoken of in society. 

Ethereal god-on-earth Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was the first person to awaken me to the fact that BDSM not only existed outside my head, but was a widespread phenomenon practiced around the world. I watched him writhe on MTV, tied up and blindfolded in the video for “Closer” and didn’t know what I was seeing, but couldn’t look away. I heard him sing about “Happiness in Slavery” and sensed the message was transgressive, but was hooked for reasons I couldn’t yet understand. That man’s music spoke my soul at a time when middle-school goth kids like me were decidedly uncool and for the first time, I felt seen. Maybe I wasn’t the only emo weirdo drawn to dark fantasies about suffering.

Soon after that period, the internet gave kinksters like me a place to chat openly about BDSM, but 50 Shades of Grey—originally a work of online fan fiction—blew the door off the hinges. It wasn’t the first erotic novel of its type, but its mainstream success did get society talking about BDSM and normalized associated sexual interests like spanking and bondage. I now see suburban teenagers on social media calling themselves doms, subs, and even masters. Not sure whether that’s a good thing, but it wasn’t a thing at all when I was a kid, even here in hippie-dippie California. Outside the Folsom Street Fair, BDSM was a niche subculture you had to go looking for.

Spanking porn was hard to come across.

Playboy and Penthouse were household names before the internet, but other forms of porn were less common. You had to buy it at a sex shop, order it over the phone, or steal it from someone’s pervy older brother. In middle school, boys would show me porn featuring college lesbians or housewives getting fucked by plumbers, but I didn’t see spanking porn until high school. I remember visiting the Virgin Megastore in downtown SF and thumbing through erotic books in the adult section. I ended up buying a comic book filled with short disciplinary tales and bringing it to the register with an armful of other items, praying to make my purchase and escape without the cashier making some mortifying comment. (They didn’t say shit and I doubt they even noticed.) The shame, oh the shame!

Searching for online spanking porn in the early dial-up internet days was a wild and nerve-racking experience, especially if you still lived with your parents and were sneakily using the whole family’s shared computer. Amongst the general public, the prospect of having one’s online porn habits exposed was an absolute nightmare. Those of us with innocuous sexual proclivities had no idea back then how truly violent and weird society would go on to become, so getting called out for being a big ol’ butt-obsessed spanking fetishist was pretty much the scariest thing we could imagine. 

I remember using search engines like Netscape and Prodigy to look for photos of bare-bottomed, over-the-knee interactions. They would load glacially slowly, manifesting out of the ether. The same types of images my mind had generated for years were suddenly appearing before me on the screen (along with other shocking sexual sights I was not aiming to see). With time, the internet got faster and was flooded with porn of all kinds. People became desensitized to sexual material and while spanking is still kinky these days, it’s candy compared to some of the shit we see online.  

Side note from that era—a lot of guys started doing similar things in the bedroom thanks to what they were seeing in internet porn. When I first started experimenting sexually as a teenager, the dudes I messed around with seemed more present, playful, and inquisitive. They wanted to flirt, have fun, and figure out how to turn me on. By the time I was in college, however, some guys seemed more detached in bed, like they were stuck in their own heads, starring in their own films. They would choke me without asking or try to cum on my face or do that thing where they slap their hard dick on your vulva over and over, thinking that must feel amazing for women. That phase was a bummer, but I feel we’ve now gotten to a point where society as a whole acknowledges that porn is not a great guide to sexual prowess or satisfaction. We talk a lot more about consent and true pleasure these days than we ever did before the internet gave people—especially women—a voice. Thanks to those complex conversations, I sense more “organicness” in intimacy and feel like playful curiosity about our partners is making a comeback. 

It was way harder to meet spanking partners.

I met nearly every spanko I’ve ever known online. Before the internet, I was trying to explore my sexuality with non-spanko boyfriends and doing an abysmal job of conveying my needs. (Imagine trying to make a guy telepathically understand your ‘spanking fetish’ without ever actually saying those words out loud. Hmm…) My first foray into real-world BDSM happened with a kinky couple I connected with through a mailing list of a dominatrix I found online in my 20s. Sites like FetLife eventually allowed me to connect with kinksters who wanted to focus primarily on spanking like I did. Now I have the pleasure of meeting other spankos fairly frequently. 

Some pre-internet spankos would also search for each other at kinky clubs or publish personal ads in magazines like Janus. These ads would detail their desire to give or receive bare-bottom spankings, but I imagine this felt a lot more like yelling into the void than the internet feels today. Back then, there was no way to see who was on the other end of the line when someone did finally call and arrange to meet in person.

The internet has given us all a place to carefully articulate who we are and what we’re looking for. We can communicate our desires in appropriate forums from the safety of our homes without the risks and embarrassment of randomly broaching the subject of spanking in person. We can take our time while searching for compatible partners and vet them thoroughly during the process. For me, this has led to safer, more successful interactions. 

Overall, being a spanko was more isolating. 

I’ve talked with a number of seasoned fetishists who, like me, thought they were the only people in the world who experienced these kinds of thoughts and feelings about spanking. The lack of access to information about alternative sexual practices made it easy for us to believe we were crazy or broken or that we’d never find our people, doomed to spend our lives alone. I can’t even fully remember the depth of the anxiety, shame, and misery this caused me while I was growing up. Something is wrong with me, something is wrong with me… I needed someone to explain that what I wanted was okay, made sense, and could be done safely with fun people who treated me well. Some guidance on how to make that happen would’ve been helpful too.

Younger spanko generations don’t need to go through that these days, at least not to the same extent. They can find out early on that they’re not alone or crazy and that whole communities exist to accommodate such needs. They can read advice from other spankos on how to safely navigate this lifestyle and make it work for their unique situation. No more feeling around in the dark or worrying in isolation. I think this is worth celebrating. 

All in all, the internet has done wonders for our potential to live out our intimate lives as we see fit. Online dynamics have fostered social division in recent years, but among spanking fetishists, we’re more connected than ever. 

-T