It has indeed, it seems, always been a child’s game, and even an amusement of older persons, to play at smacking each other’s nates.  In The Presbyter’s Lash in 1661 a young woman is represented as stating that she had done this as a child, and in ancient France it was a privileged custom on Innocents’ Day (December 28th) to smack all the young people found lying late in bed; it was a custom which, as Clement Marot bears witness, was attractive to lovers.

    If we turn to the histories I have brought together in Appendix B
    we find various references to whipping more or less clearly
    connected with the rudimentary sexual feelings of childhood.

I am acquainted with numerous cases in which the idea of whipping, or the impulse to whip or be whipped, distinctly exists, though usually, when persisting to adult life, only in a rudimentary form.  History I in the Appendix B presents a well-marked instance.  I may quote the remarks in another case of a lady regarding her early feelings:  “As a child the idea of being whipped excited me, but only in connection with a person I loved, and, moreover, one who had the right to correct me.  On one occasion I was beaten with the back of a brush, and the pain was sufficient to overcome any excitement; so that, ever after, this particular form of whipping left me unaffected, though the excitement still remained connected with forms of which I had no experience.”

Another lady states that when a little girl of 4 or 5 the servants used to smack her nates with a soft brush to amuse themselves (undoubtedly, as she now believes, this gave them a kind of sexual pleasure); it did not hurt her, but she disliked it.  Her father used to whip her severely on the nates at this age and onward to the age of 13, but this never gave her any pleasure.  When, however, she was about 9 she began in waking dreams to imagine that she was whipping somebody, and would finish by imagining that she was herself being whipped.  She would make up stories of which the climax was a whipping, and felt at the same time a pleasurable burning sensation in her sexual parts; she used to prolong the preliminaries of the story to heighten the climax; she felt more pleasure in the idea of being whipped than of whipping, although she never experienced any pleasure from an actual whipping.  These day-dreams were most vivid when she was at school, between the ages of 11 and 14.  They began to fade with the growth of affection for real persons.  But in dreams, even in adult life, she occasionally experienced sexual excitement accompanied by images of smacking.

Another correspondent, this time a man, writes:  “I experienced the connection between sexual excitement and whipping long before I knew what sexuality meant or had any notion regarding the functions of the sexual organs.  What I now know to be distinct sexual feeling used to occur whenever the idea of whipping arose or