Spanking can be carried out with the bare hands or with implements such as gloves, a ruler, hairbrush, paddle, switch, belt (clothing), cane, crop, birch, martinet or whip (see Category:Spanking implements). It is sometimes combined with sexual roleplaying and/or ageplay. It is often delivered on the bare buttocks, and sometimes the spankee is fully nude, for additional humiliation and arousal.
Positions for spanking include:
Those interested in giving or receiving erotic spankings are sometimes known as spankophiles or spankos. Examples include the poet Algernon Swinburne and the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Many people with a sexual interest in spanking draw on historical corporal punishment techniques used in homes, schools, courts or prisons. However they are generally careful to distinguish their consensual sexual activities from their views of child-rearing, education and public policy. Punishment spankings and erotic spankings are sometimes hard to separate, see domestic discipline.
For straight men who like to be spanked, their spanking fetish is sometimes accompanied by a leg/feet and nylon fetish as well – but not always. Some men who enjoy spanking (whether giving or receiving) like women to wear some combination of a skirt, high heels, garter belt, nylons, and fancy panties; and may involve the spanker role-playing the part of a strict father, boss, aunt, wife or governess. When men spank women they also often like them to dress up as schoolgirls – a popular fantasy scenario – or play the part of a nurse, maid, niece, daughter, or secretary.
Despite contrary notions, spanking fetishism can often be found with people who were never spanked as a child, often coming out later in life as repressed role playing/wish fulfillment.
These fetishes can take on many varieties. In the erotic fiction of this type, spanking is seen as natural as a reflex as sitting on a chair or making dinner. Other types include "spanking between friends", "parent-child spankings", "sibling spanking" and authoritarian school disciplines. Spanking enthusiasts often keep at hand collections of spanking implements such as paddles; not infrequently, in real life these will be kept on display (such as hanging together on a wall), either in a more or less private place, or occasionally in a more public display (such as in many fraternities and sororities). The least personalized and least overtly erotic are usually the authoritarian school discipline stories and pictures, which are less popular in the United States, where this tends to vary from state to state. (It is also not unusual for a paddle to be hung on display in the parents' bedroom as a purported reminder to the children of potential punishment, when in fact it is primarily used for erotic paddlings given by one spouse to the other.)