When pervin' leads to thinkin'

Now that I lead a life of leisure, I've been working my way through my Netflix queue trying to catch up on cultural reference points, one of which was Midnight Cowboy. And not only did it helped me contextualize, "hey, I'm walkin' here!," but it even had something to feed my insatiable inner perv.

There's a dream sequence in which protagonist Joe (Jon Voight) is remembering a traumatic incident when he and his girlfriend are dragged naked from their car by a group of sneering, salivating men. Interspersed amid the haunting event are memories of Joe's grandma, including one in which she is giving him a spanking.




Half the men drag off his girlfriend and rape her, while the other half bend Joe over the front of the car and rape him (totally understand why this movie got an X rating back in 1969). As they pull his legs apart, there's another flash memory of his grandma preparing to give him an enema.




As you might imagine, the dream sequence was terrifically sexually charged for a pervert like me. Rape, spanking, anal rape over the hood of a car, an enema -- it's enough to get a girl rather hot and bothered.

But as I watched the dream sequence again to catch the spanking, it seemed like the boy was naked, which felt odd. I mean, it could have been that he had just gotten out of the bath or something. But the only children being stripped completely nekkid for a spanking I've ever heard of have been in spanking porn. And while it turns out that if you look at the picture closely there are pants scrunched up around his knees, it did make me wonder how much sexuality intermingles with the discipline of children, whether consciously or not.

I think about it a lot in terms of the environment in which I grew up. Not just in my family, but within the Evangelical community I was a part of throughout my youth. In first grade I went to a Fundamentalist Christian school where spankings were a daily occurrence. And on our birthdays the teacher would have us come to the front of the room, give us a traditional birthday spanking, as well as "a pinch for an inch" on our bottoms and "a hug to grow on." That's right, my first grade teacher pinched my ass. Now, I don't think she molested me or anything (though I doubt such a practice exists today at that school). She was a wonderful woman who would never have done anything to consciously harm a child.

Yet sexual awareness can be a lot like eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Though I think there are better ways to teach kids other than hitting them, I also know I couldn't possibly spank any children I'd have because sexuality is so attached to it for me. And I'd feel profoundly uncomfortable playing "spanking tag" with my nieces today, while I didn't at all many years ago before I began exploring my spanking fetish.

I wonder if that's why today pedophilia has become worse than mass murder. Now that we've eaten the fruit of knowledge, it's opened our eyes, but now we're banished from the paradise of ignorance. Don't get me wrong, I in no way condone pedophilia. Those who cross the line from ignorant, harmless bottom pinching to purposely hurting kids to get their jollies should indeed be locked up. Yet, what happens when the line isn't clear? When a person gets her jollies, but isn't always aware of it? Or gets his jollies from spanking young girls, but only spanks girls over the age of consent who look like they're not? I feel safe about where the line is regarding the later question, but not necessarily about the former.