Hi folks! In early 2020, the editor-in-chief of a major conservative Canadian newspaper reached out to me to say he admired my work and that his paper was trying to bring in more young readers, so he was wondering if I’d like to start writing a sex column for them. I was confused – it’s a seriously conservative publication! – but readily agreed to write the first column he suggested I write, which was about what to do when your partner discloses they have a spanking kink. However, after I had already written and filed it, I found out that said editor-in-chief had left his position, and I got bounced around between a bunch of different editors, all of whom must not have shared his belief that this right-wing newspaper needed a sex column. So, instead, I’ll share it with you all today. It was, to say the least, a fun challenge trying to condense all the crucial 101-level info about this kink into a short print column, especially knowing that many of the folks reading it could be anti-kink (or, for that matter, homophobic or misogynistic). Yikes. Hope you enjoy!
Has your partner expressed an interest in being spanked? While this kink might seem unusual, it’s actually one of the more common ones: a 2015 study found that 33.1% of Canadians have fantasized about spanking or whipping someone for sexual pleasure, while 32.6% have fantasized about being spanked or whipped. So there’s a 1-in-3 chance anyone you meet could have this proclivity – and your partner might well be one of them. Exciting!
Incase you missed the memo on kink, here’s a primer: while a lot of pursuits that fall under the BDSM umbrella (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism) may appear scary from the outside, they can also be (and should always be) 100% consensual. Just as non-consensual sex is rape, non-consensual BDSM is abuse – but that doesn’t mean that the enthusiastically-desired version of either activity is inherently wrong or harmful. Sexual masochism, among other fetishes, was once widely considered a mental disorder – but so was homosexuality, for instance, and we now know it’s a perfectly valid sexual orientation.
