If you've never seen spanking porn, you're in for a big surprise. If you're curious, you can get a pretty representative sample of the genre at the sister sites Spanking Teen Jessica and Spanking Teen Brandi. Be warned, though: part of you will invariably find your visit embarrassing, if not shameful. You might feel a little ridiculous looking at the photos of upturned bottoms. As erotica writer and editor Naomi Darvell puts it, "Spanking is still seen as a rather pathetic foible. Spanking is kid stuff. It's all about panties and hairbrushes," while Tony Elka, co-founder of the Shadow Lane spanking empire, compares spanking to the comedic cliche of "slipping on banana peels and falling on [your] butt." Worse, perhaps, are the qualms you might have about the arousal you feel at Brandi and Jessica's obvious pain. You may find it at least a bit objectionable that men pay to jack off to women getting beaten to tears. Would it assuage your conscience to know that after her first spanking, Brandi confessed: "I was so turned on that I could burst"? Does her spanking turn you on, too?

If it does, you might wonder what a mental health professional would say about your unusual tastes. They would likely tell you that you're exhibiting sadistic or masochistic tendencies. It is unlikely, however, that they would diagnose you as one or the other. Contrary to what some believe, the diagnostic criteria for sadism and masochism aren't met simply by being aroused by or performing sadistic or masochistic acts (typical of this misunderstanding is Clinical Social Worker Dorothy Hayden's charge that, "according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association... anyone who engages regularly in masochistic sex is mentally ill by definition"). Rather, the DSM-IV is very careful to pathologize only those behaviors that "cause... significant distress or impairment." In other words, no distress or impairment, no diagnosis.

So, if you survive your visits to Jessica and Brandi's websites without significant distress or impairment, you can rest assured that no one will be locking you up anytime soon. Yet you might still be wondering about spanking. What is it that makes it arousing? What about it thrills some people and leaves others puzzled? Who is turned on by spanking and what does it mean if you are?

While these questions don't have easy or clear answers, it might be worth sticking around these two websites to try to glean what clues you can from Brandy and Jessica. According to The Spanking News, spankingteenjessica.com and spankingteenbrandi.com have skyrocketed from spin-offs of the mom and pop realspanking.com operation to leaders of the pack in the crowded world of Internet spanking websites. Both Jessica and Brandi have good camera presence, enviable figures, and, judging from the frequent updates, an endless appetite for intense punishments. But underneath the outward similarities, the differences between the two of them illustrate some of the difficulties understanding a spanking fetish.

According to her autobiography (which, unlike those of many adult-industry personalities, feels genuine) Jessica grew up in a "very strict household" in a "farming community." She describes receiving frequent and severe paddlings both at school and at home, which she writes about in great detail and re-enacts on her website. She suggests that her webmistress also acts in loco parentis, a "substitute mom" Jessica found because she felt like she "needed some real guidance to stay out of trouble."

Jessica, in other words, comes from the kind of family you might expect to breed a spanking fetishist. This is a family in which punishment and spanking played a central role. A family like this provides the spanko-to-be with the template for their adult relationships. For Jessica, the resemblance of their adult erotic practices to childhood rituals of punishment is essential to their gratification.

Accounting for a spanking fetish would be easy if every spanking fetishist had an upbringing like this. But one need go no farther than Jessica's roommate Brandi to see the opposite end of the spectrum. She begins her autobiography by confessing that she was "never spanked as a child, not even once," but "the whole concept fascinated me." As an early adolescent, she witnessed her friend receive an intense spanking from her mother and "thoughts that I had previously been confused about were much clearer. I liked spanking! Not just a little but a lot." Brandi vividly describes her friend's mother's fury and the vicious beating. In contrast, she speaks of her own family in only tepid and vague ways ("my parents were no help- a punishment in my house was being grounded from the phone or TV").

In this way, Brandi's family fits a profile that is antithetical to Jessica's, yet it is a profile that is similarly common among spanking fetishists. Brandi's family sounds distant and disengaged- a family that may have been permissive to the point of apathy. Her parents disinterest in disciplining her seems to have left her hungry for it in her adult erotic life. Brandi says it's "the punishment aspect [that] I craved." In this case, spanking scratches the itch left by unmet childhood needs.

It's no surprise that spanking found its vogue at moments when gender roles were in flux (e.g., the Victorian era, the end of the last century) . When gender and identity are chaotic and up in the air, what could be more comforting than returning to a form of gender relations that was already old-fashioned when Shakespeare penned Taming of the Shrew?

Writing on Salon.com, author and essayist Ann Marlow writes: "I suspect that there's a connection between the collapse of masculine authority and the mainstreaming of S/M; neither gender is too good at distinguishing power and authority, and nostalgia for male authority can translate into fetishizing symbols of power. Women secretly want men with authority, but they fall for insecure passive-aggressive guys who view every aspect of life as a power struggle, or for cranky killjoys or petty sadists... Men [are] pussy-whipped and tamed by 30, but just below the surface they seethe with hostility and resentment at women."

Indeed, some spankers are men whose good-faith efforts to treat women fairly have left them confused and angry about the role of male power and authority in relationships. One of the few men brave enough to confess to this less-than-flattering origin of his fetish is "Spankboss," the man behind Spankingblog. He writes: "I think it's a power-and-revenge thing... Like most mild fetishes, it's more of a vestigial thing, a left-over artifact of a bad adolescent decade... I was pretty frustrated as a young man, and got told 'no' a lot, or (worse) ignored. Spanking a woman... amounts to a spot of harmless payback. It's sexually hot because when a woman is being spanked, she is, literally and symbolically speaking, in no position to say 'no.'"

An erotica writer and editor Marcy Sheiner might welcome Spankboss's attitude. She speaks of the feeling that "she's relinquishing her coveted female powers to the force of 'his' masculine desires." She embraces the "yearning for an omnipotent lover who will stick with us through pain."

For these sorts of people, spanking plays with fear, anxiety, anger and lust. Spanking is a way of playing chicken with the most proscribed acts, to taste the forbidden fruit of those fascinating and magnetic taboos on human behavior: it is about asses, aggression and submission. The incest taboo and the taboo on intergenerational sexual contact are transgressed in the unnerving experience of a lover becoming a little girl across daddy's lap (as Marcy Sheiner powerfully evokes when she writes "The words that came to mind as I masturbated were, 'Please don't stop, Daddy, don't stop hitting me.'"). Additionally, the primitive urges for unrepentant domination and passive submission - urges normally frustrated in daily life - return and are satisfied in erotic fantasy lives. Play allows access to these repressed urges. As sex columnist Dan Savage said, "domination and submission [is] sort of cops and robbers for grownups with your pants off." So what if it's a throwback to an illusory period when "men were men"? So what if it represents a retrograde power imbalance? It can be an island of scripted certainty in the otherwise uncertain sea of human interaction.

In the final analysis, while spanking may involve all of these ingredients, and while this article has hopefully made more than one spanko nod their head in agreement, nothing can really account for the breathless, flushed hunger that spanking inspires in its devotees. For them, some combination of childhood dynamics, cultural taboos, gender roles and adult sexuality come together to form a perfect storm deep inside their libidos. The result is that bare bottoms and stinging smacks have an allure like no other; spanking, as Tony Elka says, is invariably their "sexual homepage." For these people, spanking may raise more questions than it answers, but one thing is certain: it will never cede pride of place in their fantasy life to anything else.

Author Bio:

Brooke Stern is the pseudonym of an established writer whose fiction, essays and reviews have been translated into eight languages. Suffering the Consequences (Chimera Books, 2004), Stern's first novel, is about spanking and has been hailed by erotica writers like Violet Blue, Molly Weatherfield, and Debra Hyde.