Tanner,
Interesting story about being in the laundromat while the
Flintstones paddling was going on! My guess is that nobody witnessing the scene understood why you were so interested in the program - at best they might simply have concluded you were a T.V. addict. Offhand, the only similar incident in my own past I can recall was back in the 60's at a relative's house when
Look For the Silver Lining was being broadcast. The spanking scene certainly riveted my attention to the screen!
I'm going to come back to the "exposure" question in a minute, but to answer your question - "how do we know that she is being spanked for not wearing panties?" - I got that from Nelson's brief explanatory notes over on
DeviantArt. This was a commission, so it was presumably the commissioner's idea.
Dan,
Your point about what I'll call "the exposure question" is not unreasonable, and you've made me revisit this question and the series of issues it raises. I admit that as a purely personal reaction I shy away just a little from these myself. If I were an artist, I very well might try to choose camera angles and positions that tended to shield this portion of the female anatomy from view, although given my predilection for holding-ankles paddlings, sooner or later I'd have to show it, in a tasteful manner I would hope. You and I are both a little old-fashioned in some ways, I think, and perhaps that's not a bad thing in a decadent world. I remember reading an article in
The Comics Journal many years ago in which the author was lamenting the fact that Jack Kirby's male heroes never showed any "bulge" up front, and commented "No wonder super heroes can't hang on to their girlfriends." I thought that Kirby had the better part of that argument, and that the writer's concern with the "bulge" bordered on the unhealthy. And yet if a completely realistic portrayal were Kirby's goal, the writer had a point.
And that brings us to the question of how realistic the anatomy needs to be in a spanking drawing. First, about clothed vs. bare bottom, while both can be esthetically pleasing, I generally prefer to see a spanking given on the bare. As great as they were, I don't consider the example set by the "old masters" like Zack Mosley or Dan DeCarlo to be dispositive of this issue, because as
Tanner points out, they worked in a totally different era and they were drawing for mainstream publications. You couldn't even show a bare bottom before about 1957 (judging from
Playboy), something I was considering recently with regard to the Humorama "spankers"), and mainstream comics didn't have full-frontal nudity until (I believe)
Dr. Manhattan discarded his pants for
Watchmen (1986). In fact, given his willingness to do nude sketches late in his career, I have to believe that DeCarlo would have drawn at least some of his spankees with bare bottoms if he could have gotten away with it back in his Humorama days (I admit that the "exposure" question is more dubious).
Can we tell anything by looking at the works of modern spanking artists? I did a brief survey just now, and interestingly, they are divided on "exposure". On the "yes" side of this question we have the
Palcomix group (M?),
Julius Zimmerman (M),
Cc (F),
Paula Meadows (F), and
Kamitora (M) (who takes "exposure" a little further, by the way, and in a manner I don't care for personally). On the "no" side we have
hugob00m (M, and as you mentioned),
Arkham-Insanity (F),
SP Anka (F), and
Congolike (M). I have included each artist's gender so you can see it doesn't break down along those lines. Again, I'm not trying to evade my editorial responsibility to make judgments, but these are all spanking artists of some stature, and since they don't agree about "exposure", maybe the rest of us as readers and critics will have to agree to disagree also. If that's not sufficient, let's go into it a little further.
Assuming bare bottom,
arguendo, I think the "exposure" question is esthetic rather than moral, except perhaps where we go beyond spanking into more extreme BDSM material (which, you'll notice, I don't have at
CSR). I think that "exposure" can be handled tastefully or not, but it's difficult to avoid entirely. As Tanner put it,
a portrayal of a bare bottom otk spanking realistically can be expected to have female genitalia exposed"
. So, is Nelson's Supergirl (and all of Julius Zimmerman's stuff in the Doctor Cylon gallery, for example) tasteful? People are always going to disagree about matters of taste. That of course does not absolve me of the responsibility to exercise editorial judgment regarding the material that appears in the pages of
CSR. With Nelson's Supergirl, I noted the "exposure" and regarded it as a slight negative (old-fashioned, as I said earlier), yet in the end I decided the positives (principally good OTK positioning and the fact that Supergirl was the spankee) outweighed the negatives and went ahead with it. I would never present something I thought was truly terrible, but remember that if I "nix" a drawing, there's a good chance that most of
CSR's readers won't see it elsewhere and will be deprived of the opportunity for making up their own minds about its worth.
Generally, then, if I feel a drawing has artistic merit, I will post it even if I have some reservations and let the readers render their own decisions about it, just as you have done here. (And I value your opinions, by the way. You don't have to "shut up" about this or any other topic that concerns you, and I certainly have no objections to legitimate criticism of what I do at
CSR. This is a
discussion forum, after all, and if everyone kept silent, we wouldn't have much to talk about!)
. If something is very badly drawn I would omit it on esthetic grounds; if it really crossed the line by showing a woman being hurt or abused I would suppress it on both esthetic and moral grounds no matter how well-drawn it was. This is why, as mentioned above, I don't do hard-core BDSM stuff even if it has a spanking component.
Looking ahead (which means into my files), you'll probably be glad to know I have very little more superhero stuff that crosses the "exposure" line. For example, we're going to be seeing some more of
Congolike in the near future. I can't promise an absolute prohibition on future "exposure", but I'll carefully consider every item and I have in fact suppressed some things in the past for various reasons. I don't post everything I run across, honestly!
CSR may show full nudity, but we won't be doing hard-core BDSM or explicit sexual acts. I hope this explanation is satisfactory, or at least helps a little.
[07/19/2011 Update: this subject has come up in at least two other places, and since it has its own topic now I posted
some further thoughts there, just in case there's someone I hadn't wearied enough with this piece.]
. i only knew of one for sure so that is a pleasant surprise. i am hoping that many of them will be kind enough to make comments not only about the drawings posted in the resident artists but also about the results of your weekly updates. ok, on with my comments about this week's updates. i liked your observation about the kirt stiles pic where she is looking in the files. things have changed greatly between then and now...............instant lawsuit indeed. in the husband/wife business drawing you mentioned that it would make sense if the husband were spanking his wife. i have a hunch in light of her error that would be the next order of business 
. i think they missed a sure bet by not doing a sequel to this one 
. i've spanked her for such things as not putting a new roll of toilet paper on the holder 