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A reference this size is useless if you cannot find the door. Pick whichever of these sounds most like you. Each one is three to six pages rather than forty, and you can stop after the first if that is all you needed.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything here concerns consenting adults over 18.

Most people arrive at one specific page from a search, read it at an unsociable hour, and never see the rest. That is a reasonable way to use the site. This page is for the other case, where you want a route rather than a single answer, and where the sheer number of pages is itself off-putting.

Nothing below needs to be read in one sitting, and I would rather you did not. Two pages properly is better than fifteen skimmed at two in the morning.

If you have just worked out that you want this

The commonest arrival. Nobody knows, you have told no one, and the question underneath everything else is whether there is something wrong with you. There is not, and the first three answer that between them.

1. Am I normal?
2. How common is this?, which has the actual research and its limitations
3. When did you first know
4. Does wanting this mean I was abused?
5. The myths, corrected

Nothing in that list asks you to do anything. If it turns out that reading was all you wanted, that is a complete outcome and a common one.

If you want to ask a partner

1. Asking a partner you already have
2. How do I bring it up?
3. Couples and existing relationships
4. What if they are not interested?

If your partner has just told you

You are not here by choice, and one page was written specifically for you rather than for them.

1. Being asked, and what to do with it
2. Am I normal?, which is about them rather than you, and answers the thing you are probably assuming
3. Am I hurting someone I love?, if you have decided to try

If you are looking for somebody

Read these before you message anyone. The physical risks of spanking are modest and manageable. Meeting the wrong person is the risk that actually matters.

1. Finding a partner in the UK
2. What to write in a first message
3. Vetting a partner, before you meet anyone
4. Red flags
5. Scams, sextortion and blackmail
6. Meeting safely

If you are about to do it for the first time

1. Your first time
2. The first session checklist, which gathers the rest into one page
3. Negotiation
4. Safe words
5. Aftercare and getting home afterwards

If you are the one holding the implement

1. How to spank, the whole sequence
2. Where it is safe to strike, which is the one page I would make compulsory
3. Warm-up, the single biggest lever there is
4. Topping for the first time
5. Reading your partner

If something has gone wrong

1. When it goes wrong
2. When the skin breaks
3. Consent and coercive control
4. If the law gets involved
5. Getting help and support, which has the helplines

The rest of it

Beyond the routes above there is a section per subject: why people want this, safety and practice, positions, implements, scenes, discipline, questions, UK law and scene, and an A–Z of the vocabulary.

There is also fiction, which is invented and clearly labelled as such, and exists because the reference pages cannot convey what any of this feels like from the inside, and a bibliography of novels, plays and films by other people. If you would rather see the whole thing laid out, every page on this site is indexed in one place, and the search box at the top is quicker if you already know what you are after.