KatiePie:
Thinking about it, it was the very realness of the story that made it horrible and so if he hadn't been caught I suppose I would have wanted some sort of thoughts from the narrator about where his sympathies lay. If the story had seemed like complete fantasy, some sort of ridiculous character with a Dickensian name, roaming the country spanking random women, even it the women hated it, it wouldn't have been particularly upsetting because it would have been obviously fiction.
This, basically.
Spanking stories that place their sympathies with an abuser can work as long as they don't take themselves too seriously. The more abusive the spanker is, the more fantastical or tongue-in-cheek the tone has to be to make it palatable.
Like, take barrethunter for instance. His stories are all full of innocent women being beaten, raped, sold into slavery, etc, and usually with the text encouraging the reader to empathize with the tormentors rather than the victims. But he writes it with an almost Douglas Adams-like level of cartoony irreverence, and that makes all the difference.