Spanking is back in the news. Le vice anglais was meant to be a dying art — a vestige of a time when men were more repressed, but it’s recently become clear that British men enjoy a thrashing just as much as they ever did.
In the past few weeks a London barrister, Robert Jones, has claimed he was unfairly dismissed after a consensual spanking session with a junior worker, while up north a ‘dungeon master’ called Shaun O’Driscoll, who has thrashed diplomats and a duke, gave evidence at Bolton Crown Court. Then there’s the big one: the claims by the erotic actress Stormy Daniels that she spanked Donald Trump with a rolled-up copy of Time magazine that had his face on the cover.
Why do powerful men like to be spanked? It is a question I have often asked myself during the many years that I have spent researching Britain’s escort agencies and massage parlours (I edit a guide to what’s known as ‘adult services’). Received wisdom once had it that public schools were to blame. Because a generation of men were beaten during their formative years, so the theory went, they yearned to be spanked as adults. But long after the last boy was legally caned, and ten years after Max Mosley’s famous tryst with ‘Mistress Abi’ was revealed in the tabloids, Britain’s S&M business is still going strong.
I’ve asked around and discovered that far from feeling ashamed of their jobs, sex workers in so-called ‘corrective services’ consider themselves a cut above their less assertive colleagues. They dominate not just their clients, but the industry. Such is the demand for spanking that many parlours have their own house dungeons.
In fact, dungeons operate all over Britain, in our sleepiest and most respectable towns.
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