Sexual Abuse Under the Guise of Spanking for Discipline
by John
(Minnesota, USA)
I'm a married man who sought therapy for a spanking fetish I truly didn't understand until the last three years. Therapy is going well. Over the course of a year now, therapy has revealed trauma in the form of PTSD and flashbacks to my punishments from being spanked as a child.
Most of my adolescent and adult life, I've had to live with a sexual fetish for spanking and general masochistic/discipline erotic desires in shameful secret. I learned what I was dealing with when the Internet came along. Lots of people indulge in their sadomasochistic desires in their sex lives, but there is a group of adults who also do this and believe in spanking their children.
My therapist says spanking children creates this fetish in some of them. I've observed many parents who choose to refuse to see the association of having a spanking fetish and being spanked as a child for punishment. Such a fetish is a violation of a person's sexuality because the compulsive thoughts and desires are involuntary and addictive. Many adults I've met on the Internet who indulge in their spanking fetish see no harm in having one and don't worry about giving their children one when they spank them.
I've read some great books on child abuse. One titled Betrayal of Boys is by a psychotherapist who treats sexually abused men. He was brave enough to actually write in his book that a mother who removes the clothing of a boy, exposing genitals, is inflicting a "covert form" of sexual abuse. Sadly, it's a form of sexual abuse that society doesn't consider a punishable criminal act.
I do recall spankings from both parents. Only two from my father, and they were coerced by my mother. My feelings of humiliation and shame at being spanked were painful, even from my father, but much less so than those by my mother. Her ritual baring of me for the spanking felt like sexual abuse. Sadly, this type of covert sexual abuse is culturally, and in many instances, religiously consented to as a safe and legitimate form of punishment.
There is hardly any effort by anti child abuse professionals and advocates in print that I can find that clearly points out this insidious, covert form of sexual abuse of women on boys. While the idea will be greatly rejected for cultural biases about spanking, I believe its lack of discussion continues to harm boys. I sense the sexuality of the child is ignored when parents inflict this form of punishment on children.
The abuse I endured felt like real incestual sexual abuse to me, and I'm certain other men must have felt the same. I'm into a years worth of expensive therapy. The traumatic flashbacks are subsiding, but the fetish thoughts continue. My therapist says I might never lose them. My sexuality has been ignorantly robbed.
Darlene, do you have any sense of my interpretation as sexual abuse? I'm wondering if other abused adults would understand what most people would deny and laugh about if they were told about it.
John
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