What's mild? What's severe?

Well, sure. But wouldn't people think of them separately? What they can take (or give) as an adult is what they want to see the adult characters get, or worse. What they got as a kid is what they compare with, in stories with kids.

Personally I only have adult experience to draw on, so my characters tend to get/give what I got/give, to keep it realistic (plus an added ~20% or so on top, cuz, you know, they've been bad and they need to learn...). If I go way outside or beyond what I have experience with, then I wouldn't know what I'm talking about any longer and it would probably show.

Well, no one had mentioned adult spanking experience, which struck me as a serious omission since for many members those interactions (as spanker, spankee or both) are obviously more recent and therefore likely to be more reliable overall than ones from decades ago.

Looking back on one's childhood, there's generally a tendency for a person to 'telescope' events so that memories of them are often unreliable, which is why I prefer relying on grownup perceptions--the more current the better--in determining how severe the chastisements within my stories are. (Of course I do my best to make reasonable adjustments for child spankees, but my underage recipients of corporal correction tend to be teenagers who are at least near-adults physically.)

From my personal perspective, there are two other key factors involved in describing the length and intensity of disciplinary activity described in spanking-oriented writing:

[1] Literary: Numerous stories are intended to be somewhat exaggerated (and therefore not entirely realistic) in terms of plotline, since appealing to the reader's fantasies is their primary objective;

[2] Physiological: How much physical punishment the posterior of a healthy grownup (or even teenager) can endure without permanent damage, bleeding or deep bruising, assuming its administered by a disciplinarian with adequate experience and expertise, strikes me as being underestimated by numerous readers/commenters.

I recall a brief remark within a spanking-machine story I read here in which a teenage boy (Tom Sawyer, in fact) protested that he couldn't endure the amount of walloping his naked buttocks were being programmed to undergo, only to be told by the young woman setting the punitive program, "You can take more than you think. You just won't like it is all." To me, that's the situation in many Library stories featuring disciplinary chastisements frequently described as excessive or even abusive.

This is my thinking on the subject anyway...

--C.K.

In addition to the physical, we have to take the psychological into account. There's a huge difference between a seasoned spanko who has arranged his or her own session, and a nonconsenting or semi-consenting teen or adult who is punished for an actual misdemeanour. One can't take the standards from one of these settings and import them to the other without creating a totally implausible situation – which is fine for some stories, but definitely not all.

Oh my.......
Your stories are fiction. They are aimed at an audience of spankers and spankees, who if they weren't, wouldn't be here reading them.
What is too much or too severe.....?
Well a story where an innocent is beaten bloody by a vicious teacher/policeman/parent/stepparent would just about do that, but hey, it's all about context. Such stories exist already in mainstream literature, but they are not the spanking stories that spankers and spankees like to read on here. We want and like stories about how spankings are earned, how the spankees feel about them and how their butts feel afterwards.
These are not real people and even if they were, pain-levels and physical results of punishment vary from person to person.
If an author is noted for writing about young children being punished and you don't like it (I don't) then stay away from that author.
If you are a male who thinks he is a big butch Dom and can't stand stories about men or male teens being spanked, don't read them.
Oliver Twist, Wackford Squeers, that film where Charlton Heston has his servant tie him to a wagon wheel and flog him raw, I can think of another where a Navy Captain's son is serving as a midshipman and a coxswain or bosun's mate who is seeking revenge on the captain beats the son every day with a knotted rope... these are vicious punishments that go far beyond what I have ever read on this site, but are not spanking entertainment nor in the slightest bit erotic or titillating. They are descriptive of events that happened in that story and are part of that story. Were one to read a real-life account of a teenager being birched on the Isle of Man back in 1966 it would tell of a severe and very real punishment, but there could be no entertainment gained from it.
Write what you feel. What you want to write about. If everyone's style and content were sanitized down to a warm-bottom spanking, every story would be so similar as to have no intrinsic value.
One cannot please all of the people all of the time.
Keep writing!
Please?

I'm not so sure. I might like to read that, if some detail were provided about the spankee's reactions, condition of his bottom, etc.

I agree the psychological circumstances can make a great difference - that's (probably) the reason for all the ritual surrounding a formal punishment.

Consider a young woman receiving a birthday paddling from her friends in a student bar after a few drinks - she can probably laugh it off. Then consider the same young woman being called to the Principal's Office, made to wait, lectured and then ordered to bend over. She may well be reduced to tears by a paddling no more severe than the first.

When we compare spanking stories to other kinds of literature, I think we have to take the author's (actual or perceived) intent into account. There is - at least for me - a huge difference between stories about atrocities that treat them as atrocities and stories about atrocities that seem primarily intended for sexual gratification. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have harsh stories in here, but personally I shudder at stories that seems to be without reservation on the side of the transgressor.

Of course, what we interpret as the author's intent may vary from person to person. If you want a case study, take a look at the comments to Alan Barr's story "Teenage Licks: The Death Of Innocence". (To avoid misunderstandings: I think it's a very good and important story and a very appropriate one for this site).

Just read Teenage Licks DoI. Ew, gross. And brilliant.

I'm glad it's on here, because I believe like you that not every story on here should be sweet and loving and make us feel good. Spanking isn't 'nice', and we should not get away with feeling nice about it.

Besides which, there are people who are entertained by reading accounts of true torture, in terms of intensity far beyond even an extremely severe birching, although I'm figuring that the vast majority of spankophiles wouldn't fit into that category.

If the person wielding the birch bundle were to be female and lashing the boy atop his naked buttocks, I'd quite likely be interested enough to at least finish reading the story...

--C.K.

Female spankers are pretty popular on this site, and they don't have to be particularly severe, either.