Many people are appalled by the evils wrought by permissiveness among America’s young people: the juvenile delinquency, the teenage pregnancy, and spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Schools are often rife with all kinds of disruption which has led many observers to call for a return to corporal punishment.
While psychologically oriented liberals concern themselves with “psychological trauma,” the pro-spanking side points out that discipline today is better than having another criminal or bum tomorrow.
Will the return of the literal, wooden, “board of education” prevent teenagers from going down the wrong path as adults? It may indeed. Many youths complain about the seeming irrelevancy of a high school education, especially those who are not college-bound. Teenagers frequently lust for vocational training because they want to graduate from high school as adults with marketable skills.
The Bondage and Discipline and Sado-masochism (BDSM) scene is a growing industry with a proliferation of books, magazines, videos, and clubs — uh, I mean assoc . . .er, uh — organizations devoted to it. Unlike much of the sex industry, work in this area is perfectly legal. Indeed, a professional dominatrix was acquitted of prostitution charges when she testified that her services included “spanking, domination and submission” but that she eschewed sexual intercourse, oral sex, and similar activities.
Today’s “bad kids” may, if regularly and vigorously spanked, develop a heightened pain tolerance that will be helpful should they choose to enter an BDSM-related occupation. Some might claim that this is an argument against employing corporal punishment. In an Internet discussion, Christopher Dugan said, “I don’t think that people who like to erotically spank each other are evil. But I do think that there is something very wrong with a discipline technique which causes even a small minority of children subjected to it to develop a lifelong erotic obsession around the subject.”
That position assumes that spanking eroticism is, at least to some degree, a bad thing. However, neither sexual masochism nor sexual sadism are classified as psychiatric disorders by the American Psychiatric Association unless they “cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” Furthermore, while traditional morality condemns non-marital intercourse, “Thou shalt not spank for fun or profit” is nowhere to be found in any scripture of which I am aware.
Teachers, principals, and others will surely rejoice when former students testify that they owe a successful, red-bottomed career to the swats they received as youngsters.
A previous version of this was published in The Stake.
