5 Reasons No One Should Spank Their Kids

Content note: This piece touches on nonconsensual spanking, other forms of physical abuse, sexual assault, trauma, suicidality, addiction, and human rights violations.

 

1. It doesn’t work. According to one expert, Elizabeth Gershoff, who reviewed 61 long-term studies and 8 international investigations, “Zero studies found that physical punishment predicted better child behavior over time.” The same expert also noted that some studies found physical punishment increases children’s aggression and other behavioral problems. (I mean, yeah, when the person you’re supposed to be able to love and trust implicitly starts beating you on a sexual body part, you’re gonna have some feelings about that, and those feelings might manifest as aggression.) Gershoff’s final word on the matter: “Physical punishment is harmful to children’s development and well-being. There is no evidence that it has any positive outcomes whatsoever.” Hear hear.

2. It’s traumatic. Studies have found that, in terms of inciting behavioral problems in children the likes of which are usually due to trauma, spanking has “statistically indistinguishable effects” from other forms of childhood trauma, like emotional abuse, neglect, and the death of one’s parent. People who were spanked as children are likelier to die at a younger age from cancer, heart disease, and respiratory problems. They are also likelier to develop aggressive and antisocial behaviors, anxiety, depression, and autoimmune disorders – all problems known to arise from trauma more generally. Spanking is also linked with an increase in heavy drinking, street drug usage, and suicidality.

3. It’s sexual. As spanking fetishist and journalist Jillian Keenan argues in her brilliant Slate piece on the matter, the butt is an inherently sexual zone. The area shares an artery with the genital region, which is why spanking feels pleasurable for many kinksters – and why it’s a vastly inappropriate thing to do to one’s child. Worth noting, too, is that statistically speaking, given the amount of kids who grow up to be spanking fetishists, there’s a non-zero chance that any kid you spank is experiencing that spanking as a sexual assault on some level (sadly, I speak from experience). A scientist who’s studied spanking’s neurological effects says it produces “the same reactions in the brain” as sexual abuse. Just because a body part doesn’t seem sexual to you doesn’t mean it’s not sexual, culturally, biologically, and for many people, personally.

4. It teaches a terrible lesson. I don’t know about you, but when I think about the wisdom I hope to impart to any offspring I bear, “hit people when they piss you off” isn’t high on my list.

5. It’s a human rights violation. Children should have just as much of a right to bodily autonomy and protection from harm as anyone else in society, but as things stand, they don’t. It’s still perfectly legal to spank your kid in many places, even though – as described above – there are mountains of evidence showing that spanking is ineffective and harmful. This one form of physical abuse has been privileged as an “acceptable” form, and it’s not. It’s abuse. It’s a violation. It’s not okay.

On Bad Teachers, “Naughty” Fantasies, & the Awkward Space In Between

Me on my last day of high school in 2011.

Content note for this one: sexual assault/abuse/exploitation of minors.

 

Recently a media arts teacher at my old high school was arrested for sexually assaulting and exploiting two of his female students.

You know when you hear a piece of news that ought to be surprising, even shocking, and yet somehow it just… feels true, completely and immediately? That’s what happened to me when I heard about Mr. Field.

It’s not that I’d ever seen him being overtly creepy in school – after all, many long-term abusers get good at flying under the radar, operating on such subtle levels that their victims can never quite tell for sure whether they’re being manipulated and mistreated or not. But as I reflected back on my time at Rosedale, I remembered that he had “favorites” every year – students, usually girls, who he spent extra time with, heaped extra praise onto, and had extra expectations for. A close friend of mine was one of these girls, and I saw the micro-level boundary-overstepping time and time again – most notably, an occasion where Mr. Field needed something from my friend’s locker for some art project, and she wasn’t at school at the time, so she just texted him her locker combination. I shudder now to think of what he could’ve done – what he maybe did – with that information.

The reason behavior like this went unremarked-upon at Rosedale was that odd relationships between teachers and students were sort of the norm there, especially since it was an arts school whose student body and staff lineup alike were always packed with nerds and weirdos. Not all of these relationships were abusive or problematic by any means – in fact, feeling able to trust some of my teachers in a way I’d never trusted a teacher before was one of the major things that helped me get through high school as a person with chronic depression and anxiety. I felt supported and cared for in a way most schools would frown upon. But I can see how that core belief Rosedalians held – “Our teachers are cool teachers, and it’s cool to be friends with them” – could easily devolve into grooming and exploitation in the wrong hands.

In the wake of the allegations against Mr. Field, I started hearing rumors about other teachers at Rosedale. I don’t know anyone who goes there anymore, but lots of people I know have younger siblings or friends who still go there, so I hear things through the grapevine sometimes. I heard a male English teacher got fired for having a mental breakdown at school and acting erratically toward his students (which he was already doing when he taught me in the 10th grade); I heard a civics teacher who I always disliked had been dismissed from his job for making creepy comments toward teenage girls; I heard one of the heads of the music department was kicked out for trying to kiss a student; and, most terrifyingly for me, I heard that the man who’d been my very favorite teacher – let’s call him Mr. J – had (maybe) gotten fired for (maybe) having sex with a student while (maybe) high on cocaine.

Now, granted, rumors are rumors, and it’s hard to know for sure what’s real and what isn’t. (I reached out to Rosedale’s administration for comment/confirmation, but as of this writing, they had not gotten back to me after four full weeks.) But like most people of my feminist ilk, I believe that the immense bravery and difficulty involved in coming forward with sexual abuse allegations are a sturdy enough barrier that false accusations of this sort are vanishingly rare (and the research bears this out). I tend to think that if the rumor made its way to me – particularly from multiple sources, which was the case with this one – that it contains at least a kernel of truth. And that fucking sucks. My heart goes out to every victim of every perpetrator of abuse and exploitation at that school and everywhere else.

This favorite teacher of mine, Mr. J, was an upper-level humanities instructor who brightened my days and changed my life. Ever-cheerful and ridiculously smart, he taught me things I still think about on a near-daily basis, made jokes that made me cry with laughter when I was supposed to be doing my readings, and wrote notes in the margins of my essays that made my heart jostle jubilantly in my chest. I became one of his “favorites,” I guess, and while I’d often been a “teacher’s pet” throughout my days as a nerdy, anxious goody two-shoes, this felt different; it felt like he actually liked me as a person, not just as a student. He took me aside before class on occasion to ask what I’d been reading lately (“I know you share my love of the written word!”) or what I’d been writing (“Did I hear that you won a poetry award?!”). He praised my answers in class discussions until I blushed and slunk down in my chair, too shy to talk to most of my classmates but never too shy to talk to him.

The memory that stands out the most to me about Mr. J is the time I was standing in the cafeteria line and I suddenly realized the two girls behind me were talking about him. They were a year or two younger than me, and were enthusing at each other about how cuuuute he was and how they wished they were taking one of his classes. Just then, he appeared, as if by magic. He greeted me, we bantered like we always did, I blushed like I always did, and then – without consulting me, without making a big deal about it – he quietly told the lunchlady to put my pasta salad on his bill. I didn’t fully realize what he’d done until he’d already paid and was out the door, and by then I had a free container of pasta salad in my hands, two jealous girls staring at me, and a brain soaked with syrupy infatuation and looping the thought, “Did that really just happen? Did that… really… just happen?”

I’ve been wanting to write an essay about this since I first heard the news about Field in August, and I thought the main point of the essay would become clearer in my mind the more that I thought about it, but it hasn’t. And that’s because… this is complicated. I had a crush on my teacher Mr. J, obviously. He thought I was cool, obviously. But what’s less obvious is: Was he grooming me, or was he just friendly and supportive? (Nothing overtly creepy ever happened; what I’ve described here is the closest he ever got to anything like that with me.) Are the rumors about him totally true, or totally inflated, or totally false? Should I be drastically revising my mental image of him?

The other thing that makes this complicated is that some of my biggest kinks first showed up in those interactions with Mr. J all those years ago. I mean, there’s a reason I talk about him in my “I’m a good girl” blog post. The idea of being “teacher’s pet,” of being “the favorite,” of being smart and good and celebrated and praised – these all loom very large in my present-day sexual psyche and they have for a very long time. Part of the reason I had a crush on him was that he inadvertently put me in a role that is, I now realize, kind of an erotic one for me. And yeah, that creates a weird dynamic where maybe I was (unbeknownst to him and even to myself) getting some kind of gratification from our relationship that he hadn’t necessarily consented to. But then, if these rumors are true and he’s a predator, maybe he was also getting something from me that I didn’t know about or consent to. Honestly, it makes my head spin to think about it.

What this ultimately points to, for me, is a fact I already know and would do well to keep learning until it’s completely drilled into my head: Fantasy is different from reality. I am sure that many predatory teachers’ “favorites” have, at some point or another, entertained fantasies of a romantic or sexual sort about their teachers. Abusers of this type actually work to create that feeling in their victims, often through horrible psychological manipulations that bear some resemblance to pickup artist techniques (neg them, play them hot and cold, keep them guessing, et cetera). But fantasizing about something doesn’t necessarily mean you want it. Or maybe it means you want it in fantasy but know it’d be a bad idea in reality. Or maybe it means you think you want it, but if it ever happened for real, it would horrify you and traumatize you.

I’ve felt very conflicted about my past feelings for a teacher who may or may not have preyed on my fellow students, but when I look at it through a consent-first framework, I can see that there’s nothing I need to feel guilty about. Having ached for some kind of relationship with Mr. J in fantasy does not mean I wanted one in reality, or that it would’ve been acceptable for either of us to pursue that. I was his student. True consent cannot exist in that situation; the power dynamics are too, well, powerful.

I still don’t know whether the rumors I heard were true. I still don’t know whether I need to denounce my past crush even though it was such a formative experience for me. But I do know that this experience has made me even more aware of the divide between fantasy and reality, between desires and behavior, between whims and decisions. I wasn’t wise enough back then to know that stuff, so I felt guilt for no reason about dreamily “wanting” things I didn’t actually, literally want. But the only person who ought to feel guilty, in situations like this, is the person in power, the person doing the victimizing. The atrocities they enact should only ever, at most, exist as fantasies inside their heads – and they ought to know better than to impose those fantasies on people too vulnerable and scared to even understand what’s being done to them.

On Men, Ren, and a Devastated Community


Question: “What man would you be most devastated to learn had secretly been a misogynist all along?”

Answer: My brother. My closest male friends. My favorite male podcasters. My favorite male musicians. Male theatre actors I’ve cried over and crushed on. The cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway.

A seemingly-progressive friend-with-benefits who talked the talk of sex-positivity and consensual kink. Oh wait, that happened already. A seemingly-progressive radio personality I once found charming. Oh wait, that happened already. A seemingly-progressive photographer who once shot pictures of me naked and having sex. Oh wait, that just happened.

In a world where men didn’t systematically hold far more power than women, where men’s abuse of women was as harshly stigmatized and fairly punished as it deserves to be, and where male hatred of women was not a widespread cultural problem, this question would be nothing more than a harmless hypothetical. But since we don’t live in that world, it’s a terrifying question to me. Every time another seemingly “good,” “safe” man is revealed to be toxic garbage, I can’t help but wonder: Who’s next? Who else will betray us? Who else will break our hearts?

The first night I remember meeting Ren Bostelaar in person, it was for a porn shoot for a feminist porn collective owned by some friends of mine. (They’ve since cut ties with him.) I remember, very clearly, that he asked me if I would be comfortable receiving some direction from him during the shoot – if, for example, he needed me to move a leg or turn my head so he could get a better shot. I was charmed that he asked this, and that he was (or seemed) so respectful, so conscientious a photographer. I said yes, of course that was okay. He didn’t give me any direction during the shoot after all, but that interaction stuck with me. He’s a good guy, I remember thinking.

Later, when he sent me the photos, I was delighted. He’d made me look great, and thereby, feel great. I told him so. “I’m so glad you like them!” he replied. Again, I thought: He’s a good guy.

Friends of mine liked him – progressive, feminist friends who I admired and whose opinions I trusted. Any time he was brought up in conversation, people spoke well of him. He’s a good guy. This is the thing about abusers, of all sorts: they are highly skilled at convincing people of their goodness. They are charming and persuasive. They know how to work a room, how to get people in their sway, and they do it amazingly well and often.

In the feminist and sex-positive communities I’ve been a part of, women rely heavily on other women’s testimonials about men in order to know which ones can and cannot be trusted. Men who are widely vetted as “good guys” usually attain that honor through consistently being good: supporting women, listening to us, calling out shitty dudes, speaking out in defense of feminism and women, and so on. It is understood that being a male ally is achievable only through consistent action, not just words. We watch carefully to see which men do what – and which men don’t do anything when they ought to do something. This information is always noted, assessed, and discussed in backchannels. It is a way we endeavor, as women, to keep ourselves and each other safe.

What’s devastating is that even men who’ve been widely vetted as “good,” like Ren, can turn out to be very much not so. Can turn out to have – in this case – leaked women’s private nude photos and personal information onto a “misogynistic cesspool of the internet.” We do all this careful screening and watching and weeding-out, and it can all be meaningless in the end, because people’s outward personas can look entirely different from the hate and rage swirling inside them.

This is why many women I know, myself included, have been tweeting/posting/saying lately that we feel we can’t trust men right now. Because even the men who seemed the most trustworthy can fail us. This is not unreasonable. If a panel of esteemed marine biologists told me a particular bay was safe to swim in, but then I saw someone get mauled by a shark in said bay, there’s no fuckin’ way I would set foot in that bay ever again, scientists be damned. This is not discrimination, unfair generalization, or unreasonable paranoia. This is pragmatism. This is self-protection. This is learning from experience.

I’m not saying there are no men I trust, or that I’ll never trust a man again, or that I believe all men to be inherently untrustworthy. I’m just saying, I and many other women in my community feel we need to be careful about men right now, and going forward. Even more careful than we had previously been about men, which was pretty damn careful.

Men: we do not need your loud proclamations of #NotAllMen, your privilege-blind demand that we consider all men innocent until proven otherwise, or your hindsight-20/20 insistence that you knew the creep was a creep before his creepiness went public. We need, instead, your support, your action, and your resolve. We need you to call out misogyny when you see it in your social spheres, to examine and unlearn your own misogyny when it comes up, and to listen to the concerns and frustrations of women.

To return to my shark metaphor: we don’t need you yelling at us about how the water’s fine. We need you lifeguarding, patrolling the water, and ready to take down a shark when the time comes.

Babes, Bards, and Batterers: 3 Brief Book Recommendations

Tina Horn has one of my favorite brains in the world, as I’ve told you before. When I heard she was writing a book about sexting, I texted my best friend a mangled string of all-caps words followed by a glut of exclamation points. I can’t help it: a favorite writer of mine writing about a favorite activity of mine? Sign me up.

Simply called Sexting, the book is as straightforward and to-the-point as its title would indicate. It contains practical advice on all things sexting and sexting-adjacent, from online dating to selfie-taking to vocabulary choice to sextual aftercare.

Tina’s book is written such that a beginner to the world of sexting can pick it up and learn, but you’ll come away with some fresh tips even if you’re a seasoned sexter. I love this book and find myself referring to it time and time again!

Incidentally, it was on Tina Horn’s podcast that I first heard about this next book, Sex with Shakespeare by Jillian Keenan. Jillian is a lifelong spanking fetishist – in the true sense of the word “fetishist,” i.e. she has never had an orgasm thinking about anything but spanking. This would be interesting grounds for a memoir in and of itself, but Jillian’s also a Shakespeare nerd, so she’s interwoven her personal story with kinky analysis of the Shakespeare plays that helped her process her emotions as she came to terms with her fetish.

Prior to reading this book, I liked spanking and kinda-sorta liked Shakespeare; now that I’ve read it, I like (and understand) both a whole lot more. Jillian’s writing transports you around the world and throughout history, and you learn a whole lot about her kink and any kinks of your own on the way. Now I’m hungry for more memoirs by clever fetishists like Ms. Keenan!

I read Sex with Shakespeare on my Kindle, but there are good reasons to go analog with this tome. When I gifted Georgia a hardcover copy, she proceeded to (consensually) spank me real fuckin’ hard with it while I was bent over the arm of her sofa. Be still, my li’l kinkster heart!

I recently found out a friend of mine is chronically abusive, and cut him out of my life entirely. I’m very lucky to have been spared the majority of his abuse, but nonetheless, it was a difficult experience to process. I kept wondering: what made him do those things? Was he aware of what he did to those women, or was it inadvertent? How could I have been so blind to his tactics? Or, to put it how author and domestic abuse counselor Lundy Bancroft puts it: Why Does He Do That?

I picked up this book as research for a writing project, but it quickly became clear that I needed to read it for personal reasons, too. Learning about the mindset of abusive men helped me understand what I’ve been through, and gave me tools to analyze potential red flags I see in the behaviors of other men as well. This book is written specifically for women currently mired in relationships with abusive men, but you’ll find it interesting and affirming if abusers have ever confused or frightened you in any capacity.

 

What books have you read and loved recently? Lay ’em on me!