One apparent obstacle to accepting spanking is that people associate it today only with punishing children. Some people never punish children that way, but it is still firmly associated with it in their minds anyway. It is sometime asked as an innocent yet serious question, and other times as an attempt at ridicule, whether spanking is not for adults because it is for children. The reasoning is that I am an adult, and not a child, and therefore I should not be spanked. Even couples who practice spanking have often had that thought before. Let’s examine this topic, despite the ease at which many overcome the objection.
One thing to think about, is that adults do things children do all the time. As far as events, adults play sports, and children play sports, but we do not demean adults for playing sports, or accuse them of being immature. Children celebrate birthdays and adults celebrate birthdays, but let’s see how many people want to object to adults having cake on their birthday just because children do. Any takers? Adults at times suffer other similar punishments to children. Children might have their favorite things taken away as a form of punishment. Adults might have their money, or their possessions taken away as punishment too. There may be unique elements to the equation with adults, but it is basically the same punishment. Is the government treating adults as children if they confiscate a drug kingpin’s mansion and sports car? Adults and children further have the same responsibilities very often. They both make their beds, for example. If U.S. Marines have to make their beds, and children have to make their beds too, are the Marines being treated like children? I hope not. Please don’t tell that to the Marines. This all means that children and adults share similarities in their activities all the time, including in how they are punished.
The idea that spanking is only for children is in part a result of corporal punishment being cleansed out of other parts of society. What is left now in the West is only a portion of homes in which children are spanked, and a corporate cultural memory of the practice. However, adults historically have been punished similarly, whether criminals, or badly behaved slaves, and the Bible certainly endorses it for adults as well. They may not have suffered an over the knee spanking, but they suffered a flogging, a whipping, or a caning. Clearly corporal punishment can be used on adults, and at many times in history, throughout the globe, it was the norm for adults to be punished this way. You do not have to go very far back in U.S. or U.K. history to see flogging and other forms of physical punishment dished out to adults. There were distinctives for adults that may not have been present for children — such as much greater severity — but it is in essence the same punishment. Wives have been spanked as well for thousands of years, and those who do it today are not really innovating anything. Nor are they imitating the bdsm movement, since that movement has not invented the practice, but only adds certain modern theatrics. They continue in an age-old practice both of using corporal punishment to correct wives, and of using corporal punishment on adults in general. Perhaps if we brought it back in other areas of society, it would not seem so peculiar.
The punishment of a wife is unique in itself. It is neither the punishment of children, nor of criminals or slaves. In terms of severity of her spanking, we could say it lies in the middle between the two. She’ll have to deal with significantly more pain than a child would, but it is not of the extreme variety, nor could it leave her laid up in bed for weeks, as a severe civic caning could. In terms of how the spanking is usually applied, it is also multifaceted. Her position usually is more like that of children, including being over her husband’s knee, as he gives her a fatherly spanking. In other regards it is very different, as it may include full nudity, and she may need to perform sexually for her husband as well. The wife further has more understanding than the child, so she not only can understand more deeply why she is being punished, and the kind of remorse she ought to feel, but further have more adult communication with her husband, as they discuss her wrong, and as he lectures her. She can engage and receive a correction on more levels than a child ever could.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand, is that there’s nothing really wrong with being a bit childlike. The Word of God calls us to be like children. That is not in our immaturity, but in our simple faith, and looking up trustingly to Christ to lead us. We should have a humble heart, as a child often does. Being so humble is good for us, especially at a time when we need correction and guidance. We need to look up to the person who will give it. In terms of the wife, that is her husband. She should receive her correction with a simple trust in him, and without fighting against the shame. She needs to turn any power she has over to him.
The associations we make between receiving a bare bottom spanking and childhood, in fact, can aid in the discipline process. That association can help a wife realize her own need to be somewhat childlike, and help her see her husband in the way a child sees the parent: as one to look up to, and even be in awe at. That heart of a child will help her be malleable, express her remorse, and pour out her tears, as she is relieved to be called to account and to be cleansed from her wrong. Stripping off her pride, and her vestiges of maturity, just as she strips off her clothes, helps her in becoming humble, and learn the lesson of the correction. She doesn’t get to be big and prideful now. She has to be fully under the power of a strong fatherlike figure who corrects her. Just as Christ chastises His people as a loving father punishes a child, so a husband lovingly corrects his wife, who is as trusting and vulnerable as a child. Women, like all of humanity, need that strong and loving father. A basic childhood association to spanking, then, is a rightful part of the process. We all have an element of the child in us, and the purest of human hearts appear childlike.
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