How common is spanking?

Almost everybody who arrives here has already asked some version of this, usually at two in the morning and usually phrased as whether they are the only one. The numbers are reassuring. They are also weaker than the people quoting them tend to admit.

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. This page is about research into adult sexual interest and behaviour, and what that research can and cannot tell you.

The two studies people actually quote

There are only two that get cited with any regularity, and it is useful to know what each of them did, because they are answering different questions.

Both land in roughly the same territory, which is a third or thereabouts, and they arrive there by different routes. That agreement is the strongest thing about the evidence. Two research teams asking different questions of different populations in different years came out at a similar place.

What the numbers do not tell you

The Joyal sample was recruited from the general population rather than drawn at random, and people who volunteer for a survey about sexual fantasy are not a neutral cross-section of anybody. That pushes the figure up by an unknown amount. Herbenick is the more solid of the two on sampling, being a proper probability sample, and the trade is that it asked a much blunter question.

And blunt is the word. Spanking, as a survey item, covers a hand on a backside during sex and a formal caning with a written agreement behind it. Those are separate activities that share a verb, which is the same confusion the page on erotic and disciplinary spanking exists to untangle. A single tick from someone who was once slapped playfully in bed counts exactly as much as a tick from someone who has structured a decade around it.

Fantasy is also not behaviour. A great many of the people in the 36.3 per cent have never done anything about it and never will, which is its own kind of useful information for anyone who assumes everyone else has got on with it.

Both studies are North American. I have looked for a British equivalent with the same methodological standing and have not found one. If it exists I would like to know.

The number nobody has

How many adults are in an ongoing negotiated arrangement, the sort most of this site is about, is simply unknown. There is no register, no survey item that captures it, and no sampling frame. Anyone quoting a figure for that has invented it or repeated somebody who did. I have seen numbers passed around the scene as though they were established and traced none of them to a source.

Whether any of this should reassure you

Partly, and only about one specific thing. If the fear is that you are peculiar in a way nobody else is, the research answers that directly and in your favour. Interest in being spanked sits among the more common things people report, and Wismeijer and van Assen found practitioners doing no worse than a comparison group on psychological wellbeing, which handles the follow-up worry about what wanting it says about you.

What the numbers cannot do is tell you whether the arrangement in front of you is a good idea, whether the person offering knows what they are doing, or whether you will like it. Commonness is not safety. Plenty of common things go badly, and the questions that decide how this goes for you are on vetting a partner rather than in any journal.

I would rather give you two studies with their weaknesses attached than one confident statistic. The confident statistic is how most of this subject gets written about, and it is not doing readers any favours.