Ludwig's Story: Awakenings

Before we close down Rohrstock-Palast next spring, I would like to share with you how I became a spankophile. The whole story, starting with how I first discovered my kink many years ago, all the way to the point in time when I created this blog. The prehistory of Mad King Ludwig, if you will. It is one of the things I would like to wrap up before we finish.

Actually, it rather goes against the vision I originally had when launching the blog back in 2008. Back then, my plan was to focus on movie reviews, philosophical ramblings and dark, tongue-in-cheek humour. There would be plenty of myself in the writing, but I did not want to talk too much about personal stuff. Truth be told, I found most of the blogs which focused on a kinkster's personal life rather self-indulgent and boring. I did not want to write another blog like that. I wanted to write a blog about the things that interested me, i.e. spanking movies and intellectual wankery, but not about myself.

Of course, things never turn out as planned. Only a few months after launch, I was putting out videos with Niki Flynn, which meant that I was now writing about my own adventures and even putting my face out there. Still, the writing did not delve too deeply into personal matters. That started to change, too, when I met Kaelah in 2009 and we became a couple. As you all know, Kaelah soon joined as a co-author and brought her own, more communicative style to Rohrstock-Palast. As a result, my writing became more personal as well. I sometimes joke with Kaelah that my initially cool porn-and-sarcasm project turned into "another lame couples blog", exactly the thing I once loathed. But seriously, I think it is great how it all developed. Now, together with the porn, the sarcasm and my aloof philosophical ramblings, we have shared some intimate personal stories as well, which has given the blog a whole other side.

Moreover, now that you have gotten to know me for a few years and shared all these adventures, telling you my story feels less like an ego trip and more like something that people will hopefully, genuinely be curious about. Who knows, maybe it will even inspire some still-in-the-closet kinksters to gather their courage and start living out their fantasies, as I once did. That would be awesome.
 

I will start at the very beginning, when I first discovered my kink. In my case, that was at the age of eight or nine, a long way back indeed.

Why are people into BDSM? As usual with such matters, psychologists have all kinds of theories, but no consensus. To start with, there is the fundamental question of nature versus nurture. Are people born with a disposition towards sexual sadism and / or masochism, or are these personality traits entirely caused by the environment in which we grow up? I have read essays arguing for both sides. It is not a question that keeps me awake at night - at the end of the day, I am who I am, and I am happy with that. But it is interesting to speculate. I will do some of that speculation while I write about my beginnings as a spanko.

One often voiced theory asserts that people who are into BDSM were beaten or abused in some other way as children and are now reenacting these experiences. I believe that theory is now largely discredited in psychology, but laypeople still like to bring it up. I never put much stock in it myself. I know a few kinksters who were beaten while growing up, and I know many more who were not, but are into BDSM nonetheless. The theory does not explain the latter. I was never once spanked as a child, and yet here I am, a spanko. Whatever the cause is with me, it certainly isn't parental abuse.

I had parents who gave me love, care and security. My father had to travel a lot in his job, but we had a great relationship and he was always supportive when he was around. My mother, the main attachment figure responsible for raising me, was very loving and caring. She pampered me and I was something of a "mommy's boy". My parents were opposed to the use of corporal punishment. When my mother had to reprimand me, she did it with words or, at worst, by not allowing me to watch my favourite TV series that day. She did not have to do it often. I was generally a very well-behaved child, easygoing, sensible and dependable. I rarely had to be admonished to do my homework or come home in time after playing with the other kids.

I can't say that my childhood was entirely free of corporal punishment. There were a few isolated occasions when I, uncharacteristically, was really acting out and my mother, just as uncharacteristically, lost her temper and gave me a mild slap in the face. Her hand "slipped", as the saying goes. This was extremely rare and unusual, it happened no more than three or four times during my entire childhood, and it was the only experience of CP I ever made. I mention it here for the sake of completeness, but I don't believe it had any part in forming my kink. I'm into spanking after all, and I was never spanked at home. It would have been utterly unthinkable.

I heard about other children getting spanked, though. This was the 1980s, when spanking wasn't as much of a no-no as it is today in Germany. Some of the neighbour kids I knew and also some of the kids in my school class told stories of how their parents would sometimes put them over the knee. One boy even reported that he was thrashed with a wooden cooking spoon when he had behaved really badly. These stories made me feel uneasy, but for some inexplicable reason, I also found them fascinating and exciting. So much so, in fact, that I once asked the boy in question to show me the wooden cooking spoon (which he did).

I was a little nerd. As soon as I had learned to read, I devoured tons of science and history books. In the history books, I would sometimes read about a scene of corporal punishment. That fascinated me, too. I particularly remember one story about adolescent boys in the ancient Greek warrior state of Sparta, who were whipped for punishment and sometimes simply for "inurement". That story really stirred my imagination, and I would fantasise about being one of those boys. There were also a few depictions of spankings in Donald Duck comics at the time (featuring Huey, Dewey, and Louie), but it was hard to get excited about anthropomorphic ducks. The history books were better.

Then there was television. Some children's series or films featured the occasional over-the-knee spanking or school paddling or caning. Usually, the punishment happened off-screen or was merely threatened, and even when it was shown, there was not much to be seen. But I would use these scenes as fantasy fodder and amplify them in my head. Old pirate films from the 1950s had whippings in them, which also caught my attention. I remember that I was once watching such a film with my parents when a whipping scene came on. I was secretly getting excited by it and, not wanting anyone to notice it, I walked out of the room. My mother reassured me afterwards: "You don't have to be scared by the film! It's just a film, those whippings are not real!" Little did she realise that I had not walked out because I was scared, I had walked out because I had become aroused.

I never talked to my parents about this fascination of mine, or to anyone else. Obviously, I had no clear concept of what it was. I had never heard the term BDSM or sadomasochism. I was only a kid! I hardly even knew anything about "normal" sex. My parents had explained to me how babies were made, but I had no clear picture in my mind of how that worked in practice, and I was not interested in it at the time. But I was interested in spanking despite having never experienced it. I realised intuitively that the arousal I felt while thinking about spanking was somehow "adult" in nature. It was probably related to this sex thing in some strange way. I also realised very quickly that this was unusual, because I observed that none of the other kids seemed to show a fascination with spanking when the subject came up. It seemed to be something only I had. All in all, I deemed it best to keep my thoughts to myself and never talk about them to anyone.

I do not remember the exact year(s), but all of the above happened while I was still in elementary school. I could not have been older than eight or nine. Many years later, when talking to people in our community, I learned that it is not uncommon among us spankos to be able to trace the beginnings of our kink back to before puberty. I have heard similar stories from gays and lesbians. One knows that one is different somehow before one even has an interest in sex.

Why am I into BDSM? I believe it is extremely unlikely that there is only one single cause. It seems more plausible that it would be a mixture of "nature" and several different "nurture" influences. As for the nurture part, there isn't anything that fits the usual amateur psychology clichés. I had a very happy childhood. I had great, loving parents. I was never spanked. Actually, maybe that is precisely one of the reasons in my case: maybe I became a spanko precisely because I did not know spanking and it thus had the allure of the unknown. And maybe having never been spanked at home and thus never been traumatised by it enabled me to fantasise about spanking as something that was scary, but not too scary, so that I could see something exciting in it as well.

I did have an interest in horror stories and horror films from an early age. Perhaps my awakening curiosity about spanking stories I heard and whipping scenes I saw in films was just another instance of my curiosity about "scary things" in general. Actually, my mother had that exact thought. When I told her as an adult that I am into BDSM, she threw her hands up and sighed half-jokingly: "It's because I let you watch too many horror films when you were a child!" I don't think that it is quite that simple, but there is probably some merit to the theory. It's unlikely that horror films caused my interest in spanking (after all, no one was spanked in them), but my fascination with them seems to illustrate an aspect of my personality into which my fascination with spanking fits as well. I believe that my kink might be somewhat similar to Niki Flynn's in this regard, which would explain why I gravitated towards her and we became friends in the Scene many years later.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Back then, at the beginning, I only knew that I had a strange fascination which no one else around me seemed to share. I never talked about it to anyone, and for a long time, I wondered whether I might be the only person in the world who had it. Until one day, I found indisputable proof that there were others like me. It was one of those life-changing moments. But that is a story for the next post in this series.

In the meantime, feel free to share the story of how you discovered your kink, if you like. Do you remember when and how you first became aware that you are interested in spanking and CP? And do you have any explanation for why you became a spanko? I am curious to hear about your memories.