How Common is Domestic Discipline?

There are those who try and paint spanking as a fringe practice, or at least one that is uniquely for erotic purposes. They think it is either abnormal or kink. While its popularity appears to be rising, spanking can be easily misportrayed because of the very fact that many people who do it are private about their habit, and no one knows the true numbers of those in such relationships. It is also confused by a mix of labels, and varying kinds of relationships, so it’s hard to tell if it is a unified whole, or a set of different activities. How do you measure that? I believe the topic is important, because it is important to know how common and normal spanking is. Most people fantasize about it. Regular folks do it. Your neighbors may do it and you’d never know. 

In order to look at the topic, I’m going to take a broad approach, and include a wide number of relationships which may include authority and corporal punishment, both within marriage and without. In terms of spanking only within marriage, and only for discipline purposes, I have found no way to determine how common it is. Most metrics you can find are simple BDSM ones, or dom/sub ones, so those are the metrics I’m using. However, when it comes to spanking within normal marriages for discipline, my experience and common sense tell me the answer; and I can only say it occurs for discipline in a minority of marriages, though a large minority. For erotic purposes, it may in fact occur in a majority of them. Naturally, in other cultures spanking in marriage for discipline is actually still a practice in the majority of marriages, and it is common knowledge that it occurs in those communities. However, I am mostly speaking of people in our culture in the West.

An article in El Pais in English, a major newspaper in Spain, cites “A Systematic Scoping Review of the Prevalence, Etiological, Psychological, and Interpersonal Factors Associated with BDSM,” and quotes that between 40 and 70% of people fantasize about BDSM practices. Approximately 20% of them have engaged in BDSM. This fits with what a lot of us have seen, with a large number of people being curious or excited by the idea, and a significant minority actually doing it. The research article itself is long and semi-technical, but here is a pertinent quote [I have removed the hyperlinks in the citations]: 

“One nationally representative study found 68.8% of participants reported at least one BDSM fantasy or practice (Holvoet et al.). Twenty-two percent of participants reported fantasies without acting on them; the remainder indicated engagement in at least one BDSM behavior. Submissive (9.5%) and masochistic acts (15.3% reported being hit by a partner) were more common than dominant (8%) and sadistic (11% doing the hitting) acts (cf. Joyal & Carpentier).”

El Pais also cites the popularity of the Fetlife website, which has over ten millions users, as evidence for growing popularity of BDSM, along with the spread of BDSM groups and clubs.

Similarly, an article in Psychology Today, titled “BDSM Is Increasingly Mainstream, and It Boosts Intimacy,” convincingly shows both the popularity and the growth of relationships which include authority and the use of spanking. 

Here are a few relevant quotes from the article:

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“Fifty Shades of Grey. Critics panned it, but readers—overwhelmingly women—ate it up. The book quickly became the fastest-selling novel in the history of British fiction. It also topped best-seller lists in the U.S., was translated into 52 languages, and sold like wildfire worldwide. After only a half-dozen years in print, it had sold 150 million copies, making it by far the best-selling novel of all time. As the book became popular, sex-toy marketers reported a major surge in sales of BDSM gear, and hardware stores reported an unexpected spike in sales of rope.”

“A 2015 survey of a representative sample of 2,021 American adults by Indiana University researchers showed that elements of BDSM were fairly popular, such as spanking (30 percent), Dominant/submissive (D/s) role-playing (22 percent), restraint (20 percent), and flogging (13 percent). And a survey of 30,000 Americans by condom maker Durex found that 36 percent of U.S. adults said they’d used blindfolds and/or other BDSM gear during lovemaking.”

Recently, investigators in Denmark and Norway reported the results of a large survey that provides a snapshot of current interest in BDSM and its impact on relationships.

“The Study

The investigators recruited participants by sending emails to 12,000 Norwegian adults who had previously participated in Gallup surveys. A total of 4,148 people responded—2,181 men (52 percent), and 1,967 women (47 percent), which makes this one of the largest surveys of BDSM ever conducted. Participants’ average age was 47; 94 percent identified as heterosexual; three-quarters were involved in relationships; and 60 percent were college graduates, a greater proportion than within the Norwegian public, but previous studies agree that BDSM players tend to have more years of education than average. Participants completed an anonymous Internet survey.

The study showed that overall, 34 percent of surveyed adults admitted BDSM play. Given the reticence to admit activities that have been historically stigmatized, actual figures are undoubtedly higher. But here’s what the researchers found:

• Dom/sub role play (master/slave, teacher/student)—17 percent.
• Consensual dom/sub intense sensation (i.e. pain)—16 percent.
• Other role play (doctor/patient)—14 percent.
• Bondage play—10 percent

Norway and the U.S. differ culturally, but there’s little reason to believe that these results can’t be extrapolated to Europe and North America.

The upshot is that approximately one-third of adults admit BDSM play. This means that virtually everyone knows someone into BDSM.”

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Those are very large portions of the population involved in authority structure and corporal punishment. It’s large enough that it is truly false to call it fringe or abnormal. It’s unrealistic to imagine it simply attracts people with specialized “fetishes,” or strange personality types. Clearly, it is a human activity, and fulfills common human needs.

I find it interesting the massive success of Fifty Shades of Grey, which the article mentions. Not only does it show great interest in authority and discipline, but it shows how massive the female interest is, being the majority of readers. The movie was a stunning success as well, making over 570 million dollars in the worldwide box office, and over 65 million in domestic video (according to the-numbers.com). Those who published it, or produced it, surely knew they were putting forth a work not for a specialized niche of the population, but rather for the general population, which loves such things. They knew they had a money-making venture for that reason. 

Some people try to avoid the truth behind the story’s great popularity, because the truth that women love to be led by their men refutes their own worldview. It’s an annoyance to them. They have to try and distort the meaning of the results to breathe a little more easily. They may say that women were just attracted to the romantic or sexual elements, yet that does nothing to disprove that they were attracted to the spanking as well, since the spanking is a large and distinguishing part of the story. Tons of movies have lust or romance. Yet Fifty Shades of Grey was practically defined by spanking, and the public knew that. Besides, those elements go hand in hand, and women are free to be attracted to romance, sex, and spanking all together. Many are. Other deniers will claim it does not prove people are truly interested in spanking, since they only imbibed a story, and did not engage in spanking themselves. Yet the fact they imbibed the story in great quantity alone shows a desire for it, and a general acceptance of it. That’s part of the point. Moreover, hand in hand with the sheer number of people who practice spanking, it is irrational to try and splice between mere interest and practice. Studies show the increase and the popularity of the practice itself, and the article notes an increase in the sale of BDSM gear after the book became popular. Articles at the time the movie came out mentioned that even escorts, who were paid to spend an evening with a man or woman, were getting an overflow of requests for bondage gear and spanking. This alone, along with common sense, shows that the interest and the practice go hand in hand, even if there are some who never try it. The book and the movie were popular with women because it spoke to their feminine nature that loves the power of men, and melts at the thought of getting spanked. 

My old website used to be listed on a Wikipedia page compiling various kinds of spanking websites. I never counted, but I can only say the list was hundreds and hundreds of websites long, probably in the thousands. A few are popular blogs or information centrals, but many are small blogs with a small audience, run by an individual or a couple, describing their relationship. Beyond well-known domestic discipline blogs and websites, there are popular dom/sub websites written by married couples, or geared towards married couples. These include Submrs and Husdom. Other broader BDSM sites have specific sections or articles on authority and punishment in marriage. It may be impossible to extract the married couples who spank from the unmarried ones, but it clearly is a significant portion of the community. Of course, many married couples have always spanked, without needing lingo or a community to belong to. One just can’t track them all down to quantify them. When I knew people who participated in BDSM years ago, several of them were married couples, and some even got married in a unique BDSM marriage ceremony itself. I knew couples who shared their lifestyle only with close friends, and others who were public about it, parading about in obvious BDSM gear. We may never know the exact number of couples in this kind of relationship due to the privacy involved, but all the available evidence shows that even in the feminist West, they are anything but fringe relationships. 

For decades now, few westerners would be shocked to learn that friends or acquaintances got spanked in their relationships. Even with the privacy that many couples practice, it is well known enough, and accepted on a certain level, that it’s not really a shock to find out your neighbors practice it. What is stigmatized most, as I point out on this website, is not a simple whipping, but the leadership of the man in marriage, who by rights can discipline his wife, alongside a wife who is committed to serving her husband, and who accepts punishment as a part of marriage. Folks who find BDSM cool, or at least something to wink at, would still regard this is something on par with Nazism, and reject it outright. While that’s not the main point of this piece, I bring it up simply in contrast to the general knowledge that it’s really not that rare or weird for one adult to punish another with a spanking.

As I have said before, the popularity of spanking, and the desire for authority in marriage, is not a modern practice or an invention. It stems from a basic human need, and simply is a modern form of what has always been done, often more commonly in the past than it is today. While it’s a separate topic, modern spanking merely reflects a natural headship which exists in marriage, with the man as the natural leader in the home. That’s why discipline in the home was common for thousands of years, long before anyone coined the terms dom or sub, and long before the modern BDSM movement. They stole from us, and not the other way around. Men naturally disciplined their wives, because men were the leaders, not because they wanted to play a game. We can still see this today in others cultures; such as in India, Africa, or the Middle East. No one needs to explain it. People just understand this is how things are done, and it comes with marriage. It comes with human nature. It comes with leadership. No matter how stigmatized wife spanking may be today in our culture, it will never go away. Fantasies of it well up in nearly any human imagination, and men and women will always wade into the water to try it. Even if it is not taught in the culture at all, we come to it over and over again, because we know in our natures it is good. We have a hunger in our souls for it. Human society is built with headship and submission in its structure, and everyone knows that in their hearts. You cannot take away the leadership from our relationships. Nor can you take away the whip.