FWIW: my least favorite spanking theme

Hell, if you're going to worry about litigation the only spanking story you could possibly write, set in modern times, would be one about consensual, adult, erotic spanking. Virtually any other scenario could result in legal trouble. Hollywood screen writers certainly don't worry over much about turning out stories that are actually probable in the real world. Why should we get hung up about it?

Thank you! (uh.... you were talking about mine, weren't you?)

I agree with just about all comments made here - especially Guy's, about how these stories should be viewed as our fantasies and nothing more. Having said that, I'll mention my most favorite spanking themes: ones with a healthy dose of eroticism and/or humor and/or spanking as a mild form of masochism. I'll avidly read any story here with any combination of those elements.

Chard, yes it is fantasy but it goes back to what I said about getting readers to suspend disbelief. If you write a story set in today and the plot is that the person will be fired unless they accept a spanking, the reader has to roll her eyes because it just won't happen unless your characters are morons. But you could sell this scenario if it were, say, 1948 when there was no feminism, NOW, etc. The idea, at least for me, is to get your readers to accept that, yeah, this could really happen. That's why I set Falls Creek, for example in 1955. Even then I'm quite sure there was no official CP sanction in women's correctional institutions, but if it's 1955, it's easier to sell the idea that there could have been.

rollin
I understand your point, Rollin, but I still think you're worrying about it a lot more than you need to. Entertainment fiction is about escapism, not realism. People get enough reality in their daily lives. If Dirty Harry did even a tenth of the things he does in those stories he'd have been suspended years ago. Hell, he'd probably be in jail himself, or a psychiatric hospital. On 24, Jack Bauer's teenage daughter spent as much time fighting terrorists as he did and she wasn't even on the payroll. And why did the Howell's bring all that money and luggage on a three hour tour. All of these story lines are absurd, but they are still very popular with the public. If the story is entertaining, then people will suspend their disbelief.

Well, I do worry about this aspect of writing stories and will probably continue to do so.

There is a lot to respond to in this thread.

First I should probably confess, at the risk of offending quite a few authors, that I tend to enjoy only a very narrow range in spanking stories. However, while that range excludes a lot of popular spanking themes and scenarios, it also includes quite a bit of variety as long as the central issue of willing submission is explored. So, for example, while I tend to avoid child discipline stories, I have enjoyed a few that clearly depict the victim as complicit in, and even desirous of, their fate. The same is true of M/F, F/M, M/M, F/F, etc. If the story involves a believable, dynamic with a willing victim, I will enjoy almost any dynamic even though I prefer F/M. However, this is still subject to good content. A sequential narrative does little for me regardless of the detail. 'This happened- then this happened-and then this happened' ----(yawn). A story needs a point.

As for believability, I would have to agree with rollin. While I do encourage my own willingness to suspend disbelief when reading spanking fiction, that willingness still only goes only so far. Just because a popular majority is willing to be entertained by the implausible does not mean that such tolerance is embraced by me. Enjoying the implausible is fine in the context of fantasy subjects. ( For example, I happen to love the whole comic book superhero genre....and much of that subject is overloaded with unrealistic ability and situation.....but then again there is no actual, real life Spiderman to pattern a more realistic story around. The subject exists only in fantasy.) But for me "spanking" isn't the same. Living with spanking is a very real and enjoyable fact for me. I know plenty of people who do it. Therefore I know it can be explored quite realistically, and I want a story's characters to come across as real as the people I know, and the spanking situations to come across as real as the situations I've been in or have been told about.............even if the situation is stretched a bit for variety. Stretching I can overlook. Total fabrication with no tie-in to realistic observation of people and how they act? Maybe if it is a Spiderman spanking story.

If I return to the original question posed in this thread though, I would have to say that my least favorite theme would have to be the period home or school discipline scenario. These situations invariably contain my two biggest turn-offs: underage victims & nonconsentual punishment.

While talking about realism there's another word that can be used - plausibility. It's an important one for World Building. If you construct a world where spankings are radically more common than this one then you are working in an unreal world but still need to keep it internally plausible.

Example: If you establish in your story that a judge needs to fill out form C-677-D before someone can be led into the punishment chamber you can't have someone pulled in there at random. At least not without consequences - something like someone being fired, fined, or there being clear evidence of an honest mistake being made. Otherwise the world you've built, a world where culprits go to punishment chambers to be spanked, rings hollow. What was the point of introducing the rules that the society follows if the characters are just going to discard them on a whim - with no repercussions?

If your world building results in a world where someone's mother-in-law can spank them then only the mother-in-law should be spanking them. If you establish that spankings happen regularly in the changing room at the local department store then you can't have a store clerk being shocked to discover that a spanking is happening there - unless this is her first day. If each manager can spank his secretary, and no other manager can spank another's secretary, then you can't have the mail boy giving a spanking when the Assistant VP isn't allow to give one.

It's a lesson that all fantasy and sci-fi writers learn and it's one of the three most common things they say when asked "What advice would you give someone looking to write like you?" (the other two blurbs are to read the style of fiction you want to write so you can see how others do and to actually write because you only horn your craft through writing). When you work in imaginary worlds you are already asking for a massive suspension of disbelief and any inconsistency might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's something that I try to do in some of my more fanciful stories.


Oh, and to stay on topic there is another thing I hate to see in a spanking story - or any story for that matter. A story set somewhere in the past where everyone has modern enlightened attitudes. Or everyone except the villain has modern attitudes and the villain has the attitudes of the day.

Authors control every aspect of their stories so if you don't want to deal with what actually happened then set it some when else, or elsewhere in the same time period. You don't like the common attitudes on the class system that is found in the Victorian period? Then have your Victorian caning story set in the Wild West (drastically different attitudes) with someone who emigrants from England. Bang - you've got justification for a good Victorian caning story without the blatant class system of the Victorians. That's a much better solution than a setting where every Lord and Lady treats everyone - from the maid to the stable boy - as their social equals.

Or worse, blatant historical inaccuracies. I'm not talking about using a car that wasn't designed until at least two years after the story is set or something about what hat was in style (we can't all be history buffs) but I started reading one set in the fifties where someone answered a cell phone and another set in the sixties where someone had a gameboy. Then there was the movie where someone asked her daughter if she was wearing a corset (in Victorian England if your dress was fitted to you while you wore your corset you would split seams if you tried to wear it without one) and ended with someone trying to establish a England - China trade route long after the Opium Wars.

Sorry, I got a little distracted there... but if you're going to call something Victorian or 1950s or whatever and it has no relationship to the real thing then you are better off making a fantasy world out of whole cloth and setting your story there.

Goodgulf

I demand that all spanking stories be 100% congruent with this reality. That is all spankers desire the best for their spankees, all spankees may be mischievous, bratty, or the like, but never really bad and that they realize deep down that they deserve the spanking, that all spankings be supremely painful but never injure the recipient, that spankees may struggle a bit against the spanking, but never be successful in avoiding it, even when the spanker is the 75 year old grandfather of the 25 year old spankee who teaches karate, and while there may be witnesses, they rarely call the authorities regarding the assault and on the rare occasions that they do, the police, or social worker, congratulate the spanker and warn the tattle-tale about wasting taxpayer resources. If the spanking is set in the past, the spanker will have no problem divesting the spankee of panty-girdle, corset, hoops or other items of clothing which took her 30 minutes and the help of a maid to don.

Sorry if I seemed a bid judgmental in my post....

I'm fine with minor problems - such as using the wrong style underwear for the period and such - it's just game boys in the 60s and other glaring things that get to me.

Goodgulf