Early Days

I'm looking forward to making more specific posts about day-to-day life (and day-to-day spankings!), but first I want to give a little background.

I'm an undergraduate right now, which means I grew up at the time when most people were getting internet access in their homes. I wasn't spanked as a child, but I was obsessed with the concept from very early childhood. I used to look the word up in the dictionary again and again, a practice that appears to be common among spanking people. Anyway, by the time I was 9 or so, I could type the word into AOL or yahoo or whatever inferior search engine we had access to. Even with parental controls (oh, AOL...), I came across a lot of pages that, while not openly sex or fetish pages, were clearly authored by equally obsessed individuals. A lot of them were evangelical Christian sites written by parents or parenting advocates. In retrospect, I find these really disturbing, because the language and detail are so obviously fetishistic, but the subject is children rather than consenting adults. These are the people crusading against access to pornography or even sexual information, and simultaneously denying that anything sexual is going on when they spank their kids. Ugh.

As I reached early adolescence, I developed into an extremely sexually self-aware little person. I wonder how much of this is just inherent in my personality- I was always intellectually precocious. My pre-school report card reads, "This is an adult in a child's body." I read constantly from the time I was four, and when I started thinking about sex, I went straight to the library. I identified as a "pro-sex feminist," a term I thought I'd invented, by the time I was twelve. I read Nancy Friday's collections of fantasies, most everything by Susie Bright, and Leora Tanenbaums, "Slut; Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation"before my friends knew what a reputation was. I read about the Riot Grrl movement ten years too late, but that didn't stop me from listening to Bikini Kill records and writing zines with articles like, "What Every Girl Should Know About Vibrators," and "The Sexual Double Standard." I handed these out in middle school. When the administrator found one and called my mother, she was understandably horrified; I gave her a list of book titles to read and told her I had the right to assert my own sexuality in a healthy way. Poor Mom!

Meanwhile, I had subverted the parental controls and was reading spanking stories, BDSM 101 sites, and message boards galore. I started writing spanking stories in my notebook, and I masturbated copiously thinking about nothing but disciplinary scenarios. I did all this in a kind of bubble, unable to say or even think the word "fetish," but I did it relatively guilt-free. What I had gained from all that internet access was the knowledge that I wasn't alone- that there were lots and lots of people out there who thought and felt and craved what I did. At twelve, that was enough.

All of this raises questions that I really don't have answers to about kids and their access to "pornography." Do I want underage kids reading my blog? No, not really. Am I about to go write "18+" at the top of my page to protect myself? Yes. (Thanks to Amber for inadvertently reminding me to do this.) It's kind of like the alchohol age. Most people agree that it's stupid to allow people to vote and smoke and buy guns at 18, but not to drink for another three years. People under 21 find this especially infuriating. But once you're actually old enough to drink in a bar, you don't give two hoots whether younger people can get in; in fact, you don't really want them to.

It's easy to apply that rationale to teenagers- in my heart, I genuinely don't care if sixteen and seventeen year olds are reading explicit material, especially given that the age of consent is sixteen in many areas. But what about ten year olds? That immediately raises my protect-the-children hackles. But I still say I was lucky to grow up without the guilt and the shame that most fetishists experience, knowing that I wasn't alone, knowing that at some point in my life I would actually be able to do the things I thought about. I knew about safewords. I understood consent. I had a feel for my own preferences- I knew what turned me on, which meant that later I knew how to say "yes" and how to say "no." The internet is probably not the ideal place to learn all of this- the fact that the explicit stuff I saw didn't warp my little mind doesn't mean that less precocious kids wouldn't be negatively affected. But how are they supposed to get important information about their sexuality otherwise?