Thought for the day: why is BDSM acceptable and spanking not?

According to Raven Red a South African clothing outfit ran an advertising campaign under the slogan of brand spanking new and used images of male and females in poses which suggest that they have just been spanked. Needless to say all hell promptly broke loose, with various liberal types all screaming about  women being abused, whilst completely ignoring the images of submissive men. Raven wonders what was going on and concluded that hypocrisy just ran wild.

That's true but there is something else going on as well. Let's face it, BDSM has become mainstream and legitimate whereas spanking is now a perverted kink that a lot of illiberals want to criminalise. I am convinced that the reason for this is that the former often involves the male as submissive, whilst with spanking we are in our traditional normal role.

For the ideologically pure at heart, BDSM is seen as a post-modern and satirical commentary on the phallocentric hegemony and part of the challenge to it that all good liberals must wage. And the BDSM crowd wear such edgy clothing to boot...

Spanking on the other hand is all about reinforcing the patriarchal stereotype of what constitutes actually existing society,  abuse in other words, carried out by men who cannot accept that the 1950s are over. As for those women who actually rather like a traditional man, well they are obviously suffering from a variant of Stockholm syndrome, and must  be weaned away from the destructive lifestyle that their abusers have forced them into. In other words they are brainless bimbos who cannot think for themselves...

Modern liberalism owes nothing to John Stuart Mill and everything to an illiberal belief in using the coercive power of the state to ensure that we - the rest of us - are forced to accept their vision of how society should be run. Thus BDSM is only one of many practises and lifestyles that are judged to be acceptable in illiberal eyes, whereas spanking is not. It is certainly hypocritical, but it is also a downright pernicious ideology that is at work here.