Hi, fellow weirdos.

 

My name is Sweet Tea and as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, I have a spanking fetish. Always have, always will. I create for myself and others like me, for spankos are sensitive souls in want of resonance. 

 

Throughout my first few decades of life, I was on an inner quest to figure out what my feelings about spanking meant and why I ended up this way. The fact that I was different had been clear to me since preschool. No one around me appeared to think hitting children was a big deal when I was a kid. Some people talked about it openly, even laughing at times, but the subject mortified me. Just hearing the word “spanking” would make me freeze, blush, and desperately long to disappear. My parents hadn’t been spankers when I was little (or so I thought). What was my deal?

 

As I grew, intrusive thoughts about spanking frequently swirled through my mind in the form of masochistic fantasies of discipline doled out by the hands of faceless, nonexistent strangers. Firm-yet-nurturing entities of imagination. The mixture of shame, confusion, excitement, and contentment created by these visions intrigued me more than anything happening in the outside world. My dissociative fantasies were like background music, always present as the challenges of everyday life unfolded around me. My secret fixation made me feel like an alien and I put all my psychic energy into hiding my dark thoughts from those around me.

 

What if someone finds out I think about this all the time?

 

Eventually, of course, I discovered I wasn’t alone. The internet showed up and made it clear there were MANY people like me in the world. Toward the end of my 20s, I started exploring the BDSM scene and enjoying spanking for real. There were ups and downs to “the lifestyle,” along with profound leaps in self-discovery. I made many wonderful friends and several narcissistic enemies in the pursuit of enacting my masochism with safe, consenting partners, yet still couldn’t fathom where any of this stuff had come from. Like many spankos, I used to question whether my fetish might be encoded in my DNA or have spiritual origins.

 

With the help of countless psychological resources in my 30s, I followed the breadcrumbs of my fetish back to the beginning of my story to uncover the truth of what had happened to my young mind. My parents were indeed spankers, as I would discover, but had stopped doing it just as I became old enough to potentially remember and tell others about their violence. My brain blocked it all out until I remembered my mother bragging to a teacher about one of her episodes, beaming with pride as if she had conquered an enemy. Many of my friends’ parents had been spankers too and had punished their terrified children in my presence, which I remembered with acute clarity. The status quo of panic and desperate screaming. The suffering and betrayal. Everything stemmed from the disturbing nature of those memories and the lack of support in processing my feelings about them, thus cementing them in my brain as childhood trauma. 

 

Toddler me could not comprehend how my parents could claim to adore me, then suddenly hurt, threaten, neglect, and humiliate me in order to make themselves feel powerful. Jekyll and Hyde. To cope with this heartbreak and sustain a shallow emotional connection with my family, my mind romanticized their behavior and laced it with arousal. My entire sexuality built itself around stories that associated punishment, control, and emotional indifference with love. I was an evil person, I told myself, and something was clearly wrong with me. Why would my parents treat me the way they did if it weren’t true?

 

This was all subconscious, dictating my thoughts and behavior from deep within. My only means of aligning my warped self-concept with reality would be to connect with an intimate partner who could love and punish me at the same time, as my parents had. Finding this person became my mission and in intimate moments over the laps of play partners as an adult, I indeed found the existential peace I’d been searching for. Getting spanked calmed me and stopped time, allowing my soul to finally relax in the ways that seemed to come so naturally to others. It washed the noise away. Bliss.

 

It hasn’t all been shits and giggles, however. I’ve struggled with anger, anxiety, depression, insecurity, addiction, and discomfort with the jagged edges of real-world intimacy. Additionally, the more extreme sentiments and behavior I’ve witnessed within the “community” have taken my hope for the collective healing of humanity down a million notches. Narcissists, sociopaths, misogynists, and other toxic types plague the BDSM scene seeking a convenient and acceptable means of exploiting people like me—sexually submissive women, namely. Cadres of kinksters go blue in the face insisting BDSM practitioners are, by and large, healthier and better adjusted than our vanilla counterparts. I used to be one of those people, but experience has taught me this is an idealistic coping mechanism. Most of the people I’ve known in the scene have struggled with many of the same issues I deal with to this day. We are “adult children of dysfunctional families.” 

 

Spanking is child abuse. Hitting another adult on the ass without consent can land any of us in an HR office for sexual assault. To assert this situation is somehow different when the act involves a child is a predatory display of cognitive dissonance. Study after study has confirmed the long-term harm corporal punishment tends to have on a child. I’ve accepted my fetish as an integral aspect of self, but wouldn’t wish the confusion I experienced throughout my journey on anyone navigating the precariousness of life on this bewildering planet. 

 

To any well-intentioned parents out there who are considering using spanking as a punishment in their home: do not hit or humiliate your children if you want them to become confident, mentally resilient people. Doing so can harm the dynamics of your family system, both presently and in the distant future once your kids become adults and realize how your actions have impaired their emotional development. There are no take-backs when the destruction of your child’s self-worth and sense of security have hindered their progress in life, let alone their intimate relationships. There are ways to raise healthy kids without forcing them to live in fear and we all have enough information at our fingertips these days to learn what they are. Show your children love, and not the “tough” kind. Help them grow up believing they’re good, worthy, capable people. This is how we change the world. 

 

In spite of it all, my fetish remains and always will. It’s hardwired into my brain, body, and soul. I work to keep it compartmentalized these days, no longer allowing my sexual feelings around punishment to bleed into my self-concept. This isn’t a lifestyle for me. Still, I find nothing more thrilling or arousing than the intimacy I feel with safe, caring, respectful play partners who understand the vulnerable nuance of this experience. It is beautiful, my heart tells me, when we allow our inner children to connect and address the wounded parts of ourselves we’ve had to hide from the world. It’s a hard thing to understand from the outside, I’m sure, but the role spanking plays in the lives of fetishists like me can’t be overstated. This goes beyond pornographic titillation. It is our raw truth.

 

From what I’ve seen, many spankos out there are like me, doing what they can to consensually enjoy their proclivities alongside degrees of discomfort over the traumatic origins of their fetish. We connect to relish the playful whimsy of fantasies that have soothed our psychological pain since childhood. The comfort and excitement generated by these stories helped us survive the realities of what was happening in our homes. The creations you see on this site are expressions of this complexity. I hope they tickle your mind or, at the very least, help you feel less alone. Thank you for being here.

 

—Sweet Tea