About this site and who writes it
A site about consent written by someone anonymous is a slightly awkward object. Here is what I can tell you, what I deliberately do not, and why I think the second list is shorter than it looks.
Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.
Who I am
A mature man, in London. I have been into spanking and caning for a long time, on both sides. I switch, which is less common than you would think and is the main reason I felt able to write most of this. Knowing what a cane feels like across the back of the thighs is different knowledge from knowing how hard to swing one, and most people writing about this only have one of the two.
It started quietly, in my twenties. I looked the word up in a dictionary first, and then worked out which shelf of the library the right books were on, years before I did anything about it with another person.
That turns out to be a far more common history than you would guess from how rarely anybody says it out loud. If you recognise yourself in it, that is worth knowing: this often starts privately and quietly, and nothing has to have happened to you to explain it.
I do not charge for anything, I am not a professional, and there is nothing on this site to buy. I am not a doctor, a therapist or a lawyer, and where I cite research or legislation I link it so you can check it rather than take my word for it.
Why write it
When I started looking into this properly, everything I could find fell into one of three piles. Pornography, which describes the fantasy and not the practice. Academic papers, which are careful but written for other academics. And a scattering of blogs, mostly American, mostly written a decade or more ago.
Almost nothing explained the ordinary things. Where is it actually safe to hit someone. Why does the comedown arrive on Tuesday. How do you tell whether the person offering to do this knows what they are doing. What is the legal position in this country, which turns out not to be what most people assume.
So this is the site I wanted. It is written in the first person because pretending to institutional authority I do not have would be worse.
My own experience, and what it leaves out
All of this comes out of my own experience and that of people close to me, who have talked to me about theirs over a long time. It is not a survey of the subject and it does not claim to be exhaustive. Where I have written confidently it is because I have done the thing many times or watched it go wrong; where the site is quiet, that is usually because I have no standing to speak.
Some of the omissions are deliberate. There are whole configurations of this that I have never lived, bodies I do not have, and arrangements I have only heard described at second hand. I have left those alone rather than produce a confident page about something I would be guessing at, because a reference site that guesses in one place cannot be trusted anywhere else. That is a limitation of the author rather than a judgement about the subject.
So take what is here as one person's accumulated experience written down carefully, and not as the last word on any of it. If you want something the site does not cover, that is a gap rather than a verdict. Where I know I cannot help, I would rather say nothing than improvise.
On anonymity, since it matters here
I write under a persistent name rather than my legal one. Not because of anything I am hiding from, but because this is a legal private interest that could nonetheless cost me my job and complicate my family, which is true for most people who do this.
I am aware that creates a problem. A site telling you how to vet strangers, written by a stranger you cannot vet, is asking a lot. My answer is that this site asks you to trust me with nothing except your reading time. Check what can be checked: the legal pages name their cases and statutes, the research is cited so you can look it up, and where I am giving opinion rather than fact I try to say so.
The people you might actually meet are a different matter, and they are where the checking belongs. The pages on vetting a partner and references are written for exactly that.
Discretion is not the same as shame
I want to separate those two, because the paragraphs above could be read as an apology and they are not one. I am not ashamed of any of this, and I would gently suggest you have nothing to be ashamed of either.
Wanting it, doing it, thinking about it for years before doing anything about it: none of that is a defect, and the pages on whether you are normal and what it is actually for set out why I think so at greater length.
The reason for the caution is simpler and more annoying than shame. An interest in spanking has not become mainstream yet. It may well do, given how much has moved in twenty years, and I think that will be a straightforwardly good thing when it happens: fewer people frightened of themselves, fewer people learning this from pornography, fewer people meeting strangers without knowing what to ask.
Until then, the honest way to describe where we are is slightly ahead of the curve, and being ahead of a curve has costs. Employers, professional bodies and relatives do not all read a private interest the way you would want it read, and the consequences of being wrong about who is safe to tell can be large and permanent in a way that is out of proportion to anything you have actually done.
So my position is this. Be discreet because the world has not caught up, not because you have done something wrong. Choose who knows, deliberately, and understand that the reason for choosing carefully is other people's assumptions rather than your own conduct. The practical side of that decision is at can I do this without anyone knowing.
Violence, which I cannot watch
I cannot sit through violence. Not in films, not in books, not in the box set everybody at work is talking about. I turn it off, and I have done since long before any of this. Real violence I find considerably worse, and I would cross a road to avoid a fight in the street.
I know how that reads on a site about hitting people, and I am not going to perform my way out of it. What I would say is that the two things sit so badly together in me that they cannot be the same thing.
One is arranged, wanted, stopped the moment somebody says a word, and done by a person watching closely to see whether the other one is all right. The other is the absence of every single one of those. The physical action is all they have in common, and it is the least interesting thing about either of them.
If both of those are true of you as well, you are not being inconsistent, and you are in more company than you would think. A striking number of the people I have met through this cannot watch a punch thrown on television.
I have no theory that reconciles it and I gave up looking for one a long time ago. It may simply be that consent is not a technicality. It changes what a thing is.
The pictures, and an apology for them
Every image on this site is AI-generated, and I am not entirely comfortable about it, so here is the reasoning rather than a quiet fudge.
The alternative is a stock library, and stock is a copyright problem for a site like this. The files that circulate are usually unlicensed previews, the agencies do enforce it, and a takedown or a claim against a site that exists to be a reliable reference would be an own goal.
Photographing my own would be the honest answer, and it also puts identifiable possessions of mine on a public page, which cuts against everything on anonymity above. Generating them was the least bad of three imperfect options.
So treat them as illustrations rather than evidence. They are there to show you roughly what an object looks like, and nothing on this site rests on them. Where a picture and the writing disagree, the writing is the part I stand behind.
A reference, not a way of reaching me
This site is here to be read. It is not a personal advert or a dating service, and there is no contact form or published address, deliberately. Most of what is here has nothing to do with me, and it works best for people who read it and never think about who wrote it.
I reread pages and correct them, particularly on anatomy and law, where the facts move. Every page shows the month it was last updated, so you can see how recently somebody looked at it.