Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I was spanked as a child and I have NO fetishes. I don't understand why people have to take things (ideas) to an extreme. I don't think everyone who was spanked as a child ends up with a spanking fetish.
The reverse is also true. Of all the people who -do- have a spanking fetish, only some of them were spanked as a child.
One way for a child to cope with unintegratable trauma is to eroticize it. This can give the child a safe outlet for the dammed-up energy of the repressed emotions, and temporary relief from the continual task of repression. I am convinced that some (but not all) spanking fetishes, are eroticizations of childhood traumas.
The more a child loves a parent and depends for life upon the parent, the more problematic intense negative emotions aroused by spankings may become. The appropriate emotion when someone deliberately tortures us is hatred. But for a child to consciously experience hatred for a beloved parent would create an impossible double-bind. Repression of such unintegratable emotions from consciousness is the only "solution" available to the child. Repressed emotions do not disappear, of course, and their mobilized energy must be handled by the brain in such a manner as to prevent them from reaching conscious awareness. Eroticization of such emotions and of the traumatic events which inspired them appears to be one possible neural "strategy" for coping with the overload.
A wide variety of other "paraphilias" can be explained in similar ways. For example, rubber/latex fetishists are apparently disproportionately likely to have been bed-wetters as children and to have experienced rejecting and/or punitive parental responses. The connection with rubber/latex comes in with rubber pants and/or rubber sheets used to protect the mattress from urine. Eroticization of early toilet training conflicts has been suggested as an explanation for some forms of S&M involving urine, feces, enemas, rectal thermometers, etc. Bondage could be viewed as eroticization of helplessness, and so on.
Below is an hypothesis of mine which, if correct, would account both for why some spanked children develop fetishes which appear to be eroticizations of their parents' physical punishments, and for why the majority of spanked children do not become spanking fetishists. Here goes:
The developing brain of the preschool-aged child has fewer ways to mediate emotional overload than the adult brain. For this reason, it is easier to traumatize children than adults. When a child "splits" away from some unintegratable emotion (the literal meaning of "trauma" in this context) the energy of the banished emotion must be redirected elsewhere to prevent it from reaching conscious awareness. One neural strategy for accomplishing such redirection may be the use of the nascent neural circuits relating to the child's developing sexuality as a "cushion" to absorb the redirected energy and to periodically dissipate the resultant tension via masturbation.
An alternate coping mechanism may be "acting out" behavior as a redirection of repressed aggressive impulses in symbolic, rather than actual, ways. If I am right, children who "act out" by being rebellious, violent or otherwise "bad" would be disproportionately LESS likely to become spanking fetishists because they are utilizing a different neural strategy. By similar reasoning, I would predict that a disproportionately high number of spanking fetishists were compliant "good" children in comparison with the general population.
(Needless to say, there are undoubtedly more than just two such coping strategies, since the human brain is extremely complex and subtle, and the population at large genetically variable).
Which neural strategy the child's developing brain utilizes will depend upon the nature of his or her unique, individual brain. Just as additive genetic loading at certain loci for alleles mediating tall stature correlates strongly with adult height, I predict that additive genetic loading at certain other loci for alleles relating to sexual imprinting by the environment will correlate with increased likelihood of trauma being mediated via sexual neural structures as opposed to other neural strategies (such as acting out by being a "bad" kid.)
If my hunch is correct, the same alleles which facilitate easier environmental sexual imprinting simultaneously lower the threshold for rerouting of traumatic emotions banished from conscious awareness onto the developing neural template for sexual arousal. (Indeed, these are really just two alternate ways of expressing the same basic concept: heightened imprintability or lowered threshold.) Hence, in a child with a high degree genetic loading for such alleles, when the pathway to conscious awareness for the unintegratable emotions is blocked by repression, the pathway onto the developing neural template for sexual arousal will constitute the path of least resistance.
While I am emphasizing the role of trauma here, it may not necessarily be present in all cases. I would predict that as the degree of hyperimprintability increases, the valence of the imprinting stimulus needed for development of a fetish would correspondingly decrease. Hence, in the most genetically loaded individuals it may be possible for strong but not traumatic stimuli to produce similar effects to those which only traumatic stimuli could produce in an individual with a somewhat lower degree of genetic loading.
Just as genetic loading and hyperimprintability should increase the likelihood of the development of a fetish due to the decrease in the necessary valence of the imprinting stimulus from the environment, a LACK of such additive alleles should correlate with a disproportionately LOW likelihood of development of a fetish when compared with the population at large.
To sum up: if I am correct, experimental evidence will show
(1) statistically significant degrees of allele-sharing among all varieties of fetishists,
(2) evidence that the protein products of such alleles mediate neural development of in early childhood of structures mediating sexual imagery and arousal (what Dr. John Money calls the "lovemap"),
(3) statistically significantly high numbers of fetishists who were compliant, "good" children, and,
(4) statistically significantly LOW numbers of fetishists who were rebellious, defiant, "bad" children.
Firstly your articles are interesting if not true, though the hypothesis appears valid. Though a child of divorce I don't remember ever feeling or being traumatized except by maybe society. Got good grades, still love being spanked! I think it has more to do with the prostaglandin release then with any suppressed childhood!
Location: where people are either too stupid to leave or too stuck to move
3,982 posts, read 6,686,739 times
Reputation: 3689
is that why i'm like this..well now this takes all the fun out of my bdsm play
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
No trauma
