PUNISHMENTS I DIDN’T RECEIVE – therapy

Content warning: Historical corporal punishment of children. Abuse actually. Please leave well alone if this might be disturbing for you.

This is a follow up to my earlier post where I wrote about memories of my arrival at boarding school at the age of ten. Here I explore my memories of the corporal punishments that took place there.

A common trope assumes that a predilection for corporal punishment in later life is driven by the experience of it while growing up. The French used to refer to such a predilection as Le Vice Anglais. There’s a humorous song that tells exactly that story here.

Given that I went to a fee paying boarding school at a time when corporal punishment was still the norm, you might assume that I am a living example of that trope. However I was never beaten at either my junior or senior school.

I think that for reasons I’ve written about before, I was predisposed from a very early age to to see the giving and receiving of pain as an act of intimacy. What turned that early predisposition into part of my wiring, a fundamental component of what it is to be me, could not have been the personal experience of corporal punishment. I now realise that what solidified those early, vague fantasies was not the beatings I experienced at school, but the ones I didn’t!

That might seem counter intuitive, but here are some examples:

• Age 9. A boy comes out of the headmaster’s office in tears as I wait to be called in. I glimpse the cane being put away.
• Age 11. A boy comes back to the dormitory after being punished with a slipper by the music master. We stand around him, touching his bottom admiring how hot it is.  (The music master was a fucking pervert, used to take boys up to the attic room he lived in, pull their pyjamas down and spank them with a slipper.)
• Age 12. Showering after swimming. A boy has been caned and I can see three double tramlines, deep, angry reds and purples, across his bottom.
• Age 13ish. I and another boy are threatened with being beaten, a threat that is built up over two days until, with the cane on the table in front of us, and with us absolutely certain it is going to be used, the master picks it up and walks away. Part of me is disappointed. I told this story here.
• Age 15. Hearing that the headmaster has beaten a boy particularly severely for stealing. A school myth, quite possibly true, has it that he keeps a Maori ceremonial club in his office for the rare beatings that he delivers.

Perhaps if I had actually experienced the terror and agony of a real beating at such a young age, it might have killed off those early fantasies. However, the connection between these stories is a glamorisation of punishment and pain. The kid in the shower with the cane marks was someone to be admired and praised. How impressed we all were with his swollen welts!

As I went through puberty there were no girls for me to start to notice or to fill my fantasies with. However, for someone who was already applying Deep Heat to their genitals for sexual stimulation, the chatter about corporal punishment and the evidence of it taking place seemed edgy, exciting, and, frankly, downright sexy. I once told an entirely made up story to another boy about my father beating me with a belt, perhaps wanting some of the glamour of the boy in the shower for myself.

Is this then the true origin of my kinks? An early life that led me to link pain with the intimacy that was otherwise withheld, followed by a school life that made the same kind of pain exciting, erotic and validating, while denying me the experience of it.

Small wonder I have spent so much time chasing that experience since then!

 

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I’ve always fought against the idea that my kinks were there “because of” something that happened or didn’t happen when I was growing up. I preferred the idea that I had been “born this way.” It took Pandora Blake’s excellent talk at Eroticon 2023 on The Origins Of Sexual Desire to open me to the idea that there could be a range of influences on how our sexuality develops and that, in my case, “nurture” might be very much part of that mix.

 

I don’t need you to read these posts but I do need to write them. They give me a sense of of finally putting demons to bed and developing my understanding of how I came to be me. However the catharsis only fully arrives once I’ve pressed “Publish” on the blog! Others writing comments or sharing their own experiences aids that process so feel free to comment below. Thanks.