The cartoon at the top of the page had me laughing and prompted me to dig out several other westerner spanking images. Never is the substitution of sex more prevalent than in westerns. In most contexts the caveman brute can only be accepted in movies if the eroticism is treated as comedy. Yet within the genre of westerns the hero can often still spank the girl and raise a flutter.
Where this is true of movies, it goes tenfold for pulp fiction and cowgirl heroines of books right up until the 1960s could expect to get a spanking in every other chapter, such was the insatiable demand for this brand of sex substitution.
I was unable to find an excerpt but one is given to understand that the 1922 novel Saddle Tramp has several spanking scenes, including a bare bottom strapping in the barn. One can only guess at the plot, but apparently spanking is to be found in The Cattle Queen (1936), Lord of the Range, the Marshall and the suggestively named High Hand, to reference just a few.
The source for these claims is an old text file I kept from as far back as the 1990s which was a list of books and movies with spankings or spanking references.
Unfortunately although most movies took up this theme the majority watered down the spanking and few if any early 20th century westerns featured bare bottom spanking. But there were at least two very unusual movies where spanking, it would appear, featured prominently.
One was an early talkie called Cattle Annie, the clip is no longer to be found on Daily Motion. But it shows a very rueful young woman being sent to the barn. She says, “You ain’t gonna whoop me again…?” The stern (but heavily made-up cowboy) replies “I sure am and this time you better get them britches down.”
The other is the even more bizarre Singing Hill (1941) where not only are previous spankings cheerfully discussed but the ‘boss lady’ positively asks for it before being obliged by her butler of all people as can be seen in this clip.
Movies weren’t the only place to find spanking. By the 1950s and 60s spanking was still to be found in TV Westerns. Wagon Train had a couple as did Bat Masterson like the one in this episode called the Brunette Bombshell (1959).
We are told the bestselling erotic spanking novels are in the western genre so it appears that the tradition is not dead.
