I had a book of Mother Goose rhymes, it had been my grandmother's book. My favorite, of course, was the Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe. All those children, all those spankings. The picture on the page showed the Old Woman with a little boy over her lap, with her spanking his round bottom. A little girl was running toward the shoe, crying, holding her own recently-spanked backside, past a bunch of other misbehaving children, who were soon to have there own turns over the woman's lap. Even then - how old was I? five, maybe six? - I knew I couldn't tell anyone that this was my favorite rhyme. It was my secret pornography, something I had to sneak a peek at, even as I got older - nine, ten - worrying that the page was becoming too well worn.
By then I was using the dictionary - looking up "spank" and every spanking-related word I could think of. Thrash. Smack. Beat. Paddle. All of them gave me a thrill.
Although I wasn't spanked, a few other children I knew were. If one of them mentioned her mother's hairbrush, or that there was a danger of getting a butt smacked, I was dying to know more. How? With what? How hard? How often? Of course I was too embarrassed to ask any of these questions. Only my cousin Jerry gave me any details, unsolicited, of how his dad would put him over his knee. How it made it hard to sit down. How he once tried thwarting the punishment by slipping a book in the seat of his pants. Yeah, right - like that would work. All this made made me scared. When I stayed over, if Uncle John got angry at something we were doing. Would we both get it, Jerry and me?
As curious as I was, it wasn't something I was wishing for, for myself, not back then. I did occasionally wonder what it would be like. I'd pile up pillow on my bed, pull down my pajama pants, and then lie over the pillows, imagining I was waiting to get my butt smacked. It never occurred to me, though, back then, to try spanking my own bottom.
I was drawn to anything and everything spanking-related. If a book had even so much as a reference to a child getting spanked, I would re-read it over and over again, particularly that section. Or, a movie. That was so exciting, seeing some poor unfortunate child get his or her bottom whacked. When on vacation, I'd wander through gift shops, hoping that they'd have souvenir paddles for sale, and upon finding one on the shelf, having my heart pound as if it would leap out of my chest. Eventually, as an early teen, I would buy one, down at the Jersey shore, thinking that everybody in the store had to be looking at my purchase, That, though, was still years in the future.
At the time, back in my innocent pre-teen years, I knew I had a secret. I just didn't know that it was truly about ME.