# Myths about spanking, corrected > The claims people arrive believing, corrected one at a time: what the surveys found, what the law in England and Wales says, and where the beliefs came from. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/myths-about-spanking/ - Section: Why we want this - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. Most of what people think they know about this came from pornography or from a newspaper, and both have reasons to get it wrong. Here are the claims I hear most, each with the correction underneath it and a link to the page that argues it out properly. --- ## In short - Surveys put the interest at around a third of adults. Joyal and colleagues (2015) found 36.3 per cent of women had fantasised about being spanked or whipped, and Herbenick and colleagues (2017) found spanking among behaviours at least 30 per cent of a representative US sample had done. - No reliable evidence links this interest to abuse. Wismeijer and van Assen (2013) found practitioners no worse than a comparison group on psychological wellbeing. - The DSM-5-TR keeps sexual masochism, a preference, separate from sexual masochism *disorder*, which additionally requires distress or impairment. - Consent is not a defence to actual bodily harm in England and Wales. See *R v Brown* [1993]. General information, not legal advice. Everything on this page concerns consenting adults over 18, and these are the beliefs people arrive with. I have had most of them said to my face, one by a doctor. Each gets a short answer and a link to the page that takes it apart at length. ## It is rare, and hardly anybody really wants this Joyal, Cossette and Lapierre put 55 sexual fantasies to 1,516 adults recruited from the general population and published the results in the *Journal of Sexual Medicine* in 2015. Being spanked or whipped came out as a fantasy for 36.3 per cent of the women, with the men close to three in ten. Herbenick and colleagues, working from a nationally representative US probability sample of 2,021 adults, found spanking among the behaviours at least 30 per cent reported having done. Attach the caveats before you quote either at anybody. Both are North American, the first recruited volunteers rather than sampling at random, and the second asked only whether a thing had ever been done. Somewhere around a third is the honest reading, and nowhere near rare. Fuller picture on [how common is spanking](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/how-common-is-it/). ## Wanting it means something bad happened to you The folk version of this argument forgets the control group. Difficult histories are common across the population, so gather several hundred adults anywhere, a play party or a parish council, and you will find plenty. Wismeijer and van Assen compared around 900 BDSM practitioners with a comparison group in 2013 and found the practitioners no worse on psychological wellbeing, which is the opposite of what a damage model predicts. Full treatment, including what that study cannot do, at [does wanting this mean I was abused](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/does-wanting-this-mean-i-was-abused/). ## People who want it are weak, damaged, or cannot cope with real life The DSM-5-TR keeps two things apart that this belief runs together. Sexual masochism is a preference. Sexual masochism disorder additionally requires clinically significant distress or impairment, and the manual's own definition of mental disorder says a conflict mainly between a person and society is not, by itself, a disorder. Having the interest and being at ease with it is not a diagnosis. My own observation runs the other way, and I hold it loosely because it is an observation rather than a finding. The people who most want somebody else to decide for an hour tend to be the ones making the decisions nobody else will make for the rest of the week. See [stress relief](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/stress-relief/). ## It is the same thing as abuse Photograph a negotiated session and a violent marriage and you may not be able to tell which is which, which is why the photograph is a useless test. What separates them happened before the room, and would show up the moment she said stop. Agreement from somebody genuinely free to refuse, and the ability to end it tonight without paying for it later. Both of those have to hold, and neither one rescues the other. [Is spanking abuse](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/is-spanking-abuse/) is the page I would send anybody to first. ## The person being spanked has no power in the arrangement Almost backwards. She sets the limits, says which implement, decides how far it goes and ends it whenever she likes without justifying herself. The person holding the implement is working to a brief somebody else wrote. More at [power exchange](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/power-exchange/). ## It is always sexual A great many arrangements involve no sexual contact whatsoever, which is the subject of [does spanking have to be sexual](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/is-it-sexual/). Some people want the ritual and the formality with none of the erotic charge attached. For others it is thoroughly part of sex. Most sit somewhere along that range and move about on it. What causes real damage is two people assuming opposite defaults and neither saying so. ## It is always about the pain Ask people what they were after and pain comes some way down the list. Relief from deciding is the one that comes up most, by a distance, and it has almost nothing to do with how hard anything lands. Pain is the mechanism a lot of the time and much less often the object of the exercise. [What it is actually for](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/what-it-is-for/) takes the mechanisms one at a time. ## A safe word makes everything safe It makes stopping possible. Safety is the larger claim, and it covers things a word cannot reach: where the strokes land, and whether the person holding the implement has any idea what is underneath. Speech is often the first thing to go when somebody is deep in it, so I want a non-verbal signal agreed as well, an object held and dropped. And the word only works if using it costs nothing. A top who sulks after a red has answered every question you had about him. [Safe words](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/safe-words/), including why amber matters more than red. ## The person giving it has the easy half The authority points one way and the labour points the other, which is the argument at [dominance is a service](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/dominance-is-a-service/). Reading somebody who has stopped talking is the work, along with deciding when to stop rather than when to carry on. The proposing falls to the top as well, and so does the risk of a flat no, which is more exposing than people assume. Tops get their own comedown afterwards and almost nowhere to take it. Nobody warned me about that either, and it is why [top drop](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/top-drop/) has a page of its own. ## Consent makes it lawful in the UK This is the one that surprises British readers, and I am not a lawyer, so take what follows as general information rather than legal advice. In *R v Brown* [1993] UKHL 19 the House of Lords held that consent is not generally a defence to actual bodily harm inflicted for sexual gratification in England and Wales, and it is still good law. In prosecutors' charging practice, transient redness and minor bruising generally sit below that threshold. Lasting or extensive injury may not. In practice, prosecutions of private consensual spanking between adults are vanishingly rare, and the cases that reach court almost always involve serious injury or a dispute about whether consent existed. That is not the same as permission, and the person holding the implement carries the exposure. Position in full at [is consensual spanking legal in the UK](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/uk/is-it-legal/). ## Fifty Shades is a reasonable model to copy It did one enormous thing, which was to make this discussable in a work kitchen, and I will not sneer at that. The method is the part to leave behind. A limit treated as an opening position. Reluctance read as shyness to be worked through. Both of those are how real arrangements come apart, and nothing you sign in real life removes your ability to stop anyway. My longer argument, in both directions, is at [Fifty Shades, and why I am not a fan](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/fifty-shades/). ## Everyone who wants this is a woman, and submissive in the rest of her life Two beliefs bolted together, and neither survives a munch. Joyal and colleagues put the men close to three in ten on wanting to be spanked, not far behind the women. Women also do the spanking, and the shortage in this world is of people who want to give rather than of women. As for the rest of the life, the correlation people expect is simply absent. See [do women do this too](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/do-women-do-this-too/) and [switching](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/switching/). ## Where all of this came from Almost nobody forms a view of this by meeting people who do it, because those people are not mentioning it over the garden fence. The picture gets assembled from two sources instead, and both select for something other than accuracy. Pornography selects for what films well. Extremity, speed, no negotiation, and nothing of the fortnight of messages beforehand or the cup of tea afterwards. It is made to be watched, and it is a poor manual for the same reason a car chase is a poor driving lesson. Newspapers need a frame, and a consensual evening between two adults who both enjoyed it is not a story. Coverage attaches instead to a court case, a death or a scandal, so the available frames are damage and danger. Then one novel supplied a template that fifteen years of journalism has treated as documentary. Why that matters, if you are the person trying to work out whether you are normal: you have been measuring yourself against a picture built from the worst examples and the most photogenic ones, and finding yourself odd against a standard that was never true of anybody. A verdict reached on that material was reached on bad evidence. What evidence there is, weaknesses attached, is on [am I normal](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/am-i-normal/). > ### If any of this has brought something up > > > > Samaritans, **116 123**, free, any hour, and you do not have to be in crisis to ring. Mind has plain information on shame, anxiety and finding a therapist at [mind.org.uk](https://www.mind.org.uk). If the worry is about your own relationship rather than about a belief, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is **0808 2000 247** and the Men's Advice Line is **0808 8010 327**. More on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page. ## Read next - [How common is spanking?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/how-common-is-it/) - [Is spanking abuse?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/is-spanking-abuse/) - [Am I normal?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/am-i-normal/) - [Is consensual spanking legal in the UK?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/uk/is-it-legal/) ## Sources 1. Joyal, C. C., Cossette, A. & Lapierre, V. (2015). "What exactly is an unusual sexual fantasy?" *Journal of Sexual Medicine*. [doi:10.1111/jsm.12734](https://doi.org/10.1111/jsm.12734) 2. Herbenick, D. et al. (2017). "Sexual diversity in the United States: Results from a nationally representative probability sample of adult women and men." *PLOS ONE* 12(7): e0181198. [doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0181198](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181198) 3. Wismeijer, A. & van Assen, M. (2013). "Psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners." *Journal of Sexual Medicine* 10(8), 1943–1952. [doi:10.1111/jsm.12192](https://doi.org/10.1111/jsm.12192) 4. American Psychiatric Association, *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders*, 5th edition, text revision (2022). Sexual masochism disorder criteria. 5. *R v Brown* [1993] UKHL 19, House of Lords. [bailii.org](https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1993/19.html) ## Common questions ### What are the most common myths about spanking? The ones I meet most often are that an interest in it must have been caused by abuse, that it is rare, that it is always sexual, and that consent makes it lawful. Research has never established the first, the survey figures contradict the second, and a great many arrangements involve no sexual contact at all. The fourth is the one that catches British readers out: in England and Wales, R v Brown [1993] established that consent is not generally a defence to actual bodily harm. ### Does a safe word make spanking safe? It makes stopping possible, which is a smaller claim than safety. A safe word does nothing about where the strokes land, and speech is frequently the first thing to go when somebody is deep in a scene. It only functions if using it costs nothing, so a non-verbal signal and a partner who keeps checking matter as much as the word does. ### Is spanking always sexual? No. Plenty of arrangements involve no sexual contact at all, and some people want the ritual and the structure with none of the erotic charge. Others want it as part of sex, and both are ordinary. The usual problem is two people quietly assuming opposite defaults, which is why it has to be said out loud before anything happens.