Spanking in Movies, TV, and Books

I know everyone is going on about the WoT series, but just to get back on about John Norman and Gor, I tend to think Norman was wrestling with issues, thus the superfluous adjectives. Or he was getting paid per word. Or he was enamoured with Edgar Rice Burroughs which I had read just prior to Gor and saw some similarities in writing styles.

I read about 9-12 books of the Gor series, and can tell you he seemed to have an obsessive nature, something I can relate to, which is why I didn't stop reading after the first 5 stories. I only stopped reading his books because the local book store didn't carry any more, and I was unaware I could request them to order books for me at the time.

I tended to "drift past paragraphs (or pages)" of both ERB, and Noman. Writers sometimes get obsessive withtheir going into details they feel is important. As a writer, I resemble that remark, but as a reader, I'm quickly intolerant and think "I get it! Sheesh, move on already!"

Whenever I think of John Norman I have to wonder what he taught in his classes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Norman#Academic_career
[He] earned his PhD in 1963 from Princeton University. His dissertation was named: "In defence of ethical naturalism: an examination of certain aspects of naturalistic fallacy, with particular attention to the logic of an open question argument". [He] summed it up in an interview by saying "if one cannot make sense of morality within some sort of satisfying, natural context, then one is likely to end up with no morality, which is less than societally reassuring, or is likely to end up with a competitive plethora of moralities in which ninety-nine percent of the world's population is convinced that the other ninety-nine percent is unclean, stupid, uninformed, vicious, depraved, in need of coercive correction, and such. That too, seems less than reassuring."

He was a professor at Queens College of the City University of New York before retirement.

A funny/oddball reference:

As a kid I had a book/tape combo called "Planetron and Me". It involved a boy getting a toy robot (Planetron) that turned into a spaceship and took the protagonist on a tour of the solar system.

Planetron's onboard computer was named A2Z, and possessed a somewhat sassy attitude. Whenever A2Z got too out of line, Planetron would give "her" what the narrator called "an electronic spanking" , which was represented by a loud zap followed by a pained squeal from A2Z. The "spankings" were a running gag in the book.

There are far too many responses in this thread for me to read them all, so I apologise if I am not the first to mention sci.fi/fantasy writer Robert Heinlein.

He espouses what is, for me, a rather right wing world view which despite being in the mouths of his characters, are, rather transparently his views. This is not surprising as his siblings all became high-ups in the US military. In Starship Troopers, for example, the hero/narrator approves of floggings in the military and says that those who won't take up arms for their country, shouldn't be allowed to vote.

He is incredibly (and refreshingly) non-PC (he was writing in the 50s and 60s) and describes worlds in which CP is normal and discussed. To a secretary: "If you are not here in one minute, I will paddle your pretty fanny." "Yes Boss."

No set-piece spankings but a constant undercurrent. Good stories too.

Geoffrey Stirling.

For decades, I've been looking for a kids/young adult book about a grandson and his female cousin go to the grandfather's farm for a competition for a magical sword. The grandson tries to destroy the sword but it saves itself. The grandfather build's a spanking machine and the kid bends into it without knowing what it is.
He's interrogated while the machine works. The book was from the 70's. Never got a chance to finish and I don't know what the title is. So please, if anyone knows; please tell me.

Not sure if anyone here is still watching Outlander, but the current season has a scene with a father strapping his teenage daughter. You only see her face, her skirts are up around her waist and she’s bent over a table. Her father stands behind her and lashes her backside with his thick leather belt. I think the actress was trying to show defiance, but she looked almost bored.

Shame. The belting of the heroine in (I think) episode 8 of series one, is very good indeed. Not only do we know the characters very well by then but her defiance and (overcome) resistance is very realistic.

The cherry on the top is the remarks of the men at breakfast next day. They had, of course, heard it all.

The clip, Outlander episode 8, is widely available on the net.

The most recent series of Fargo (at least on UK TV) is also entertaining. In the first few episodes a teenaged black girl seems to be paddled regularly by her headmaster. Probably because she is too clever. We don't see it happening but we do see her rubbing her bottom ruefully and walking very painfully after a paddling.

Geoffrey Stirling.

Considering the characters involved, mild boredom might not have been the wrong emotion there.

There are plenty of figurative spanking-based references in Starship Troopers, including a high school class discussing parental CP of children and its supposed benefits.

If my memory is correct, there are actual spankings described briefly by Robert A. Heinlein in I Will Fear No Evil (M/F) and Waldo & Magic, Inc. (F/M)... --C.K.

Dragonsdawn, which is my favorite Anne McCaffrey novel about Pern, definitely establishes the science-fiction underpinning of the "Dragonriders" stories.

In The Masterharper of Pern, Ms. McCaffrey describes a situation within which a middle-aged father repeatedly spanks his young-adult daughter, in order to motivate the girl in her harper training... --C.K.