Is spanking fun or punishment?

Hi Sir I’m confused about spanking/ flogging / pain play in the kink community... sometimes it seems to be for punishment and then sometimes it seems to be for fun... How can it be both? Or am I not understanding?
 Hey anon! Don’t worry; this one confused me early on too.

The most basic answer for you is: “It depends on whether the person likes impact play (an umbrella term for the list above) or not.”

For some people, spanking is a punishment because they don’t find it enjoyable. Getting hit becomes a corrective measure. Some people see spankings from movies or older media and get a thrill from transgression even though they dislike the pain. “I was naughty, so I got spanked. Being spanked means I was sufficiently naughty to warrant a sexy punishment. I’m gonna act out again because the harder I’m spanked the naughtier I was.” For people who enjoy transgressing it’s important to understand the transgression and getting caught is the thrill even if the act of being punished is not enjoyable for them. They may wear spankings and the like as a badge of “badassery”. “My daddy gave me 40 lashes of the belt last night and I didn’t even cry!”

Awhile ago I wrote a piece on pain with more information here. But I’ll summarize. As animals, pain is something our body is built to adapt to because in our ancient past getting a skinned knee and stopping to take care of it when being run down by wolves was death. So when you’re hurt sufficiently, your body floods your mind with endorphins to help counteract the pain and help you survive by dulling it. In BDSM we can manipulate that endorphin rush by impacting a boy in such a way that it’s uncomfortable but doesn’t actually hurt. He’ll get that natural high and his pain threshold will not only be increased, pain at the levels that got him there will actually feel kind of good and tingly. You can ride this natural high even further if you increase the impact and push the boundary up each time. There are of course limits but it can be an amazing experience.

My very first experience with BDSM was with someone who enjoyed the pain and was so used to it that his body would slip right into that rush. When I struck him, he would push back to meet the blows and I could see his fingers and toes curling and he made these sounds that were some warbling mix of pain and pleasure. It was intensely erotic.

A final thought on the subject. Even for guys into pain, you have to hit them in the right way to illicit the proper response from them. So even for someone into pain, it’s not just “hit him hard as you can right out of the gate” because you haven’t done the work to make it pleasurable yet.

I hope that makes more sense for you now that I’ve talked it through and thanks for the question!

Got a question about BDSM? Something you don’t understand? We’ve all been there. Ask me anything!

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