Karin Slaughter’s 2019 crime novel The Last Widow opens with auburn-haired Dr Sara Linton wondering ‘if there would ever come a point in time when she was too old to be taken over her mother’s knee’. Sadly it’s only a metaphor: Sara is not really being spanked by Mom. But how the metaphor works is germane to our subject today. What’s actually happening is that Mom is declaring her opinions about Sara’s lifestyle and behavior, and Sara is in a state of complete abjection, unable to defend herself or retaliate. That is, here, the metaphorical meaning of being taken over her mother’s knee.Large claims used to be made about the efficacy of spanking as a way of beneficially changing behavior or transforming personality – and I don’t mean just by idiotic kink-justifying fetishists. Physicians and psychiatrists prescribed it from time to time, advice columnists wrote, in all seriousness, about ‘the magical effect of spanking’ and an early newspaper review of The Naughty Flirt (1931) declared,...
