I posted this thread with the intent of lighthearted banter on a Friday, and didn't intend to get into the psychology of it, but since it's been raised, it might be worthwhile to address it.

I suspect that the correlation between eroticism from spanking or S&M related behaviors in adulthood and childhood spanking has less to do with the spanking itself and more to do with the nature of the control exerted by the person (presumably a parent) doing the spanking.

In other words, it's the sense of *being dominated* or *being controlled* in a particular way as a child, rather than the specific act of spanking, that is likely to correlate to the adult behavior.

It's a similar thing with rape (and no, I'm not trying to connect the two, so please don't flame me.) Rape is not a sexual crime, it is a crime of violence and control, and this has been consistently shown. The typical personality of the rapist is someone who never had control of any kind in childhood, but for whatever reason, instead of seeking a more healthy outlet for the feelings arising from the childhood lack of control (such as, for example, S&M/bondage/spanking, etc) the coping mechanism became one of acting out violence and control fantasies on others.

So, from my view, we should neither blindly accept that spanking will cause aberrant behavior, nor should we assume that it is harmless. My guess is that if I were to find the actual study in the journal where it was published, rather than some newspaper's "pop psychology" interpretation, it is probably a reasonably sound study with conclusions drawn from the data, rather than from the opinions of the authors. My experience in reading psychology studies in college was that oftentimes, the results of a study directly contradicted the assumptions or opinions of the study authors, and they were fine with this... the majority of scientists (well, other than those funded by drug companies and such) are searching for truth rather than trying to justfy a preconceived notion. Studies that don't meet that threshold generally won't stand up to peer review and so rarely get published.