Posted by the Web-Ed on 11/12/2010
It's difficult to find spanking material appropriate for every particular holiday, so we were lucky to have this in our files ready for Veteran's Day (Nov. 11). Actually, our spanker here appears to still be on active duty, so perhaps we should have saved it for Armed Forces Day (3rd Saturday in May). In any case, we're not exactly sure what point the cartoonist was trying to make - it seems to be a generalized depiction of an army man spanking his wife, for good cause we hope.
We don't recognize the cartoonist, whose signature appears to be "J___ George", nor do we have any record of where we ran across this, which probably means we found it on Yahoo.
12/10/2010 Update: Once again, JS666 has come to our aid with more information by forwarding the complete newspaper story from which the drawing was extracted (see below). The story is a serious one about the problem of returning World War II veterans beating their wives, which is not exactly what we wanted to hear since our intention was to honor our vets; however, reading through it left us questioning its real significance anyway.
First and most obvious is the equation of spanking with wife-beating. Even if a purely disciplinary spanking is given in a technically non-consenting manner by a husband to his wife, we don't think that should be considered wife-beating, especially by the standards of the time (probably late 1940's). We were still spanking our girlfriends in the 1970's, and neither us boys nor the girls getting spanked regarded it as abusive in any way, although we don't think the girls actually liked it.
Second, the raw number of reported incidents doesn't seem particularly high to us - it would appear to be about 1.4%, assuming 1 million returning veterans (a number we just made up and which is certainly a low estimate). If there were 7 million, the rate drops to 0.2%, and it would be even less than that with the spankings removed - hardly an epidemic of spousal abuse. [Note: we could not find a reliable figure for the number of returning vets quickly and easily, which is why we used these estimates.] This reminds us of the "story" a few years ago about returning Iraq War vets committing homicides. Somebody analyzed the numbers, and the vets actually had a significantly lower rate of homicide than the American civilian population!
Third, the story contains a lot of half-baked theorizing as to the cause of this phenomenon. One view was that exposure to cultures in which women were clearly subordinated affected the soldiers, while another doctor blamed it all on the wives! Even the reporter seemed unconvinced by these guys, referring to them as "experts" with quotation marks. So we're not convinced there was much of a story here, and we actually wonder if it was a human-interest piece inflated with a sensational "spanking" angle.
