This morning I got a dose of pure kinky pleasure out of reading an entry by Indy about the Cowboy and the Schoolmaster – the two models of dominant character that find their way into spanking stories in the US and the UK respectively.

This part in particular made me squeal with glee:

…the Schoolmaster story isn’t inherently gendered.  The Schoolmistress can surely wield a cane with sufficient skill to bring an unruly student to order, and girls can find themselves on the receiving end, too.  Indeed, even though the vast majority of school corporal punishment was inflicted upon male students in real life, that fact has been purposely and gleefully ignored by many of the finest practitioners of the Schoolmaster story.


Cowboy stories, on the other hand, are gendered by definition.  I suppose it would be possible to write macho gay M/m cowboy stories, too, and no doubt there are a few of them somewhere on the internet.  In general, though, Cowboys handle other men with fist fights, but they deal with their women by turning them over their knees like children. They may want a partner in life, but she is clearly in a subservient role.  In short, the Cowboy is the quintessential Alpha Male.

My own experience with both types of story began with mainstream literature: I met the Schoolmaster in “David Copperfield” and the Cowboy in “Firestorm” (a romance novel I read at school looking for the sex bits).

Dickens was a classic, but he convinced me that the only people who got spanked were boys. In Firestorm, I liked neither the heroine, nor the ridiculous macho hero, but she got spanked – and so, I began to believe, could I be. So it’s the gender-stereotype-enhancing romances that helped me reconsile with the fact that I was a spanking-crazy girl. Yet, if I were to choose between the two, the Schoolmaster gets my vote and my devotion.

Now somebody needs to write an essay about the Daddy. And it won’t be me, so any volunteers?