If I physically assault somebody there's blood usually associated with anger, if I spank my child it's for correction and there's never blood and I don't spank when I'm angry.
hahahahaha
I am so glad you brought this up.
My parents hit me when I was growing up- all of us actually. (I am the eldest of 5). Sometimes I would do something particularly offensive to my mother, and she would throw something at me while uttering a curse. Sometimes I would just insult and disrespectfully talk to my father and he would just punch my arm hard. Or the finger poke- he lost the tip of his middle finger as a kid in a bike chain, so his middle and index finger were the same length, and that was a mean jab to the pecs.
They were volatile, mediterranean people- my father explained that as a kid, his dad's family from the old country (malta) would visit, and he saw BOTH PARENTS
bite the shit out of their daughter over knocking a ball in a neighbor's yard. His own father was an abusive drunk. So, they just had mad rage in them. (haha I don't know what my mother's problem is- her father is a very civlized opera-listener/oil-painting piano player and her mom was pretty mellow- I think her oldest sister is a violent psycho though). It was multi-generational; as a little kid I was aware of this, that it just gets passed along.
But, that was an understanding of angry violence, which is entirely to this day, eminently rational to me. If one angers another more powerful than himself, one is
inviting hurt. That is a property of dealing with anger and what I am glad to have learned from my parents hitting me.
haha so anyway, for years, I thought that this is what people meant by spanking, and I defended spanking kids, thinking it meant swatting the upstart cubs with restrained claw in moments of heat and tension.
I was like 18 though when I read desmond morris, and he discussed school-spanking, and even older when I saw depicted on television that you are talking about- dispassionate, "not angry" spanking. Policy spanking! LOL
THAT seems thorooughly wrong, warped, and twisted to me. I think that would be way more damaging than internalizing not to fuck with the aggressive one.
How do you not feel very uncomfortable with the sadistic sexual element of it? Do you imagine that your child is not learning twisted sexual lessons from it? So fuckin' weird. Ew it creeps me out to envision. When i learned that this is what people meant by spanking! haha fuck that- I am an anti-spanker.
But I do think that a house should have a jail-house, clan-of-the-cave-bear curriculum dimension to it, in order for one to grow up capable of defending themselves and recognizing threatening situations/body language.
