Have people ever tried to make you feel bad about having an interest in spanking?

Sadly, yes. The first person I ever told was a girlfriend when we were 16, and I asked her to spank me. She got a little weirded out and I let it drop. A couple days later she invited me out to dinner, and instead a restaurant, she and her parents drove me to their church so that all three of them, and their pastor, could "pray for my perversion to be lifted."

It was a very long time before I told anyone else again.

I think after publishing of 50 Shades of Gray and writing of Julian Keenan, adult moderate spanking has lost lot of its stigma. So I was never really shamed for it although I only confided to my gfs or other intimate partners.

I never really was made ashamed for this kink but a few times the women I dated said that they are not interested. Most did not mind an occasional firm spank as part of foreplay. None were interested in getting disciplinary spankings, experimenting with implements, etc... My wife is the same way, she is OK with some firm spanks during foreplay and sex but not really interested in anything more. She is also not interested in spanking me and was very surprised when I told her that I like to be spanked too.

I guess overall I was lucky with this as perhaps NYC area women are more liberal than an average American woman. I also never seriously dated anyone who was openly into BSDM. Not through the lack of trying but primarily because I could never find enough in common with these women outside of the bedroom to become real couple...

As someone once said, "You rarely meet a bad situation that religion can't make worse..."

Yes, so I put her over my knee for a hard spanking.

I was already long hooked on spanking literature and pictures long before I took a chance and revealed my interest. Fortunately she didn't get turned off, and eventually understood more and enjoyed it.
To follow up on earlier comments, F/M seems to have much more of a stigma than M/f spanking. It really shouldn't.

Yeah, the police tried to make me feel bad about being addicted to spanking. There was an older pro-spanking (of children) woman who lived in a neighbouring town. I'd seen her recently on a local talk show. I was desperate at the time for someone to talk spanking to, so I wrote her several letters. I gave her a basic accounting of my spanking history, and I mailed the letters (with only my first name and no return address) in her town.

I'd been very proper with what I said, and I certainly wasn't looking to meet her. Just the same, I probably should've passed on including a pamphlet from a California spanking outfit. What did me in, though, was my having sent a pro-spanking letter (it was currently in the news) to one of the Vancouver papers. The letter was printed, complete with my name and where I lived.

Anyway, the woman I wrote to had taken the letters to the police . I was living with my mum (after my divorce) at the time. Someone must've seen my letter in the paper because my mum got a call one afternoon from someone asking for me. I was out, but it didn't matter. The call was just to confirm my particulars.

Within the week, there was another call one night. It was a cop, telling me he had my letters to the woman, and wanting to know what kind of sexual spanking deviant he was dealing with. I was on an extension in the basement, and my mum never knew the nature of the call. The cop had been wanting me to attend at the station the next morning, but I was able to talk him out of that. It ended with me promising to leave the woman alone, and him telling me the police now knew about me, and that I'd better govern myself accordingly.

For at least the next few days, I kept expecting to see a police car pull up in the driveway. When I happened to be shopping in that neighbouring town a week or so later, I lost my wallet downtown. I backtracked, but I simply couldn't find it. And I wasn't about to report the loss to the police, for fear of my being recognized as the spanking sicko. I drove back to my mum's with my life in a complete shambles. But wait! No sooner had I come through the door when Mum was taking a call from a woman who'd found my wallet. Thank God!

Often123
The only thing that should be stigmatized in my opinion is the spanking of real-life children. I have a kink for this subject in "fiction" but believe it morally bankrupt in "real life," so I am a walking contradiction in that regard. Many countries in Europe have banned the practice altogether, and I would love to see that same occurrence in the U.S. if not for the sad excuses of conservative lawmakers we have here.

As for the F/M or F/m dynamic, I believe that any "stigma" around it is based on religious and cultural values stressing men as necessarily dominant in domestic settings. Unfortunately, M/F seems like the most common spanking pairing, and I would not be surprised if most who like this pairing prefer more traditional roles in their kink life that pair with the commonly espoused values of patriarchal society. An extreme example of this could be that other respondent's experience involving being taken to a church by his once-girlfriend's family to "cleanse his perversion." My question is: would the girlfriend's family have taken her to the church for confession or whatever had she asked the boyfriend for a spanking?

By this standard, I am a deviant at least as "perverted" as this individual, for I wholeheartedly eschew the customs of the binary dominant-male-submissive-female social order. Indeed, I am hardly one to stand for my country's National Anthem at sports games anymore, so I am a proper individual for holding a variety of alternative convictions. Sadly, history is filled with tales of similar people--mainly with respect to people of varying races, sexual/gender orientations, religions, ideologies and political leanings, etc.--being marginalized, demonized, and ridiculed. I see no fair and reasonable case for male-female spanking to be any more appreciated than female-male spanking beyond just proclaiming that "things are the way they are." If anything, female domination ought to be admired as something that lacks the same level of interest and thus as a rarer gem of quintessential extravagance. The F/m stories I have examined in this Library have captured my fascination, and I believe they should constitute a far larger portion of what is available here and elsewhere.

Lastly, with regard to the matter of speaking with others about one's kink, I have only told my mother and aunt up to this point. I did so when I was about seventeen, and both of them delivered a warm if somewhat concerned reception of my admittances. Fortunately, I was raised in a very liberal community and state and was never taken to church as a youngster, and my friends and family were fully willing to hear me out on sensitive matters. This gave me a lot of breathing room to grow into who I am now: an individual who wants to observe a world awash with revolutions of thought fraught with transformation and self-reflection until such a time that these conflicts and attitudes of prejudice, nosiness, and self-righteousness are relics of the past.

So, yes, I find your above point far more than just accurate.

BTW, the only people I ever revealed my interest to were the ladies I eventually ended up marrying.