Fantasy vs Reality

I don't think giving kids hard spankings in stories is an issue as long as its in a believeable context. 100's of spanks not believeable. 30 spanks with a hand(if your counting in the story) for a major offense is believeable. Past a point it just becomes child abuse and I don't think most enjoy reading about that. Spanking adults is different HOWEVER...that also needs to be believeable. If a girl gets 100 hard licks with a cane I don't find that very believeable unless its describing the bottom being totally torn up bleeding and what not. The way some people write leads me to believe that they have never been spanked or given a spanking be it as a child or an adult.

All that being said if you can relate a harsh spanking within the confines of your story and make it believeable to the average reader then you can get away with bending the rules every so often.

In every story of mine I endeavor the make the spanking scene itself live within the bounds of narrative reality relative to justification, clothing and severity, among other things. Therefore 50 paddle swats, bare, for a schoolgirl paddling in contemporary times is not very realistic. If I don't buy it, my readers won't. My latest, The Prom, has a brief spanking with a slapper followed by six cane strokes. Originally I had written the story with the preliminary spanking given with a hairbrush and then decided it was too severe and therefore not believable. In my historical stories whips and birches are fair game---in modern times, not so much. It has to fit the culture and the times. I'm sure there are some unbelievable things people submit to at places like Shadow Lane parties, but I don't write about those, and in fact I don't write about "the scene" at all. So when I decide how and how much, I have to take cultural norms and expectations into account.

You can sidestep some of these constraints by creating your own world, (e.g.,Menace from Mongo) but even here I think it is better to show some restraint. In one episode Dale gets a pretty good whipping, but it's with a lash like a martinet---50 lashes is a reasonable punishment for an assault on a royal personage. I can believe that in a culture of cruelty like on Mongo, this would not be all that unusual. So fantastic situations and settings don't bother me. I like sci-fi and supernatural tales, so certain liberties can be taken there.

The key is that the punishment must fit the crime within the bounds of the culture and customs of the time or within the world created.

And he also has some prime swamp land that he would like to sell you.

It's cheap...

Galt54. I agree with you 100%. In those good old Victorian Days, the cane, and the birchrod was used on many a female's naughty bare bottom, and with great frequency. And believe me those stories, be they truth or fantasy, get to me, in a most enjoyable sexually erotic way.

I've recently had a couple of comments which said they enjoyed the story, but it was very improbable.
This got me thinking, and I concluded that the only realistic stories are consensual spankings. I do write these, usually with a large dose of romance, but it would get very boring if only these were written.
The only real CP I remember is at school, and it was almost always boys, although very occasionally and in some parts of the country girls were punished but usually on the hands-Yuk. I wouldn't want to write about the grim reality, but the fantasy of mature schoolgirl spanking is attractive.
I know that until very recently mature schoolgirls and female university students were beaten in South Korea, and I am reliably informed that it was so until very recently in Africa-maybe even still is.
The reality of CP in South East Asia is appalling, but I enjoy many fantasy stories based on this scenario.

However in my opinion to make a story enjoyable, a level of not completely unbelievable fantasy is both necessary and highly desirable, particularly in quasi-judicial stories.

When I write I use scenarios which are highly improbable, but which in my mind may just conceivably have occurred.

There is nothing wrong with stories which are complete fantasy, many are well worth reading.
However fantasy also exists in other areas of fiction-Sci-Fi, ghost and horror stories, and many crime stories-especially village murder stories, where the murders nearly outnumber the inhabitants.
Recently I've enjoyed The Time Traveller's Wife, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel both excellent reads, one of which is complete fantasy, and The Marigold highly improbable, and a similar scenario could be used for a spanking story.
So to conclude my ramble, perhaps we shouldn't worry too much about fantasy or lack of realism and just enjoy well constructed and written and for my taste hopefully erotic stories.

PS I don't read stories which involve children under sixteen or seventeen, so I am unable to comment on these.

One issue which hasn't been touched upon in this thread is that of the dilution of fiction.

When the ideas travel from the author's mind, through the filter of words and back again to the reader's mind some sort of diminution of those ideas comes about. This is due to the imperfection of the transfer of concept in each step of the process. I guess some of their potency is left behind on the page (or possibly nowadays, ends up swilling round in cyberspace incessantly).

Anyway, because of this the author has to exaggerate somewhat in order that the idea which reaches the reader's mind compares favorably with the original image. Hence spankings get more severe, women more beautiful, the men stronger and more handsome, the weather is hotter/colder/wetter/drier than is normal. If we wrote it down exactly as it appeared then the stories would come over as very boring.

Here I would disagree. I would say thast the concept is inevitably *changed* by this process of transmission, but it may or may not be diluted -- indeed one of the good things about written fiction (as compared to, say, video) is that a mere sketch can be filled out and enhanced in the reader's mind, quite possibly to a vividness that it never had in the author's initial idea.


Yes this exaggeration is frequent -- it is one of the reasons we call it fiction -- but I would say that it is not just to avoid or compensate for dilution. I would say that it is mostly the need for drama. Our emotions respond best to scenes and concepts that are abstracted and heightened, compared to ordinary experience. Videos have no "filter of words" -- they directly show images -- yet drama is if anything more prevalent there. My own fantasies -- and i suspect most people's -- are significantly dramatized compared to probable real-life events, and in that case there is no filter of any kind -- it is all within my own mind.

Actually, the same principle can apply to video. Years ago, I used to happily watch a tiny black & white TV from across the room. (OK, my eyesight was better then) Even though the image in the screen was tiny, low definition, and in sepia; the picture inside my brain was wall-to-wall, detailed, and in living color.

The brain is a wondrous thing, as is human imagination.

Whe you are writing you can describe in detail things that are not apparent when you are watching a scene. For example when I was a teen I had a job as an usher in a movie theater. I would often see the same movie dozens of times and even after all those viewings I would see new things that I hadn't noticed before. When writing you can bring out all those details that are ordinarily missed.