Jezebel does it again. They’ve gone rummaging through film archives and compiled a collection of clips that expose the mainstream attitude towards women: they are like children, and deserve to be spanked by a strong man.
With the camera rolling or not, stories coming from Hollywood studios presented a consistent message that spankings were a healthy part of a woman’s life. At the same time, all across America women were getting spanked by their husbands—and taking them to court.
To many American women, a spanking was the fruit not of charming adoration but domestic tyranny. Sometimes these spankings were precipitated by violent behavior on the part of the wife—but just as often it was for her failure to be a docile servant.
It got me wondering…was there ever a scene in an old movie in which a man gets rude or uppity or deserving of discipline, and another man grabs him, flings him over his knee, and starts walloping his butt with a hairbrush? Ever? And wouldn’t the public have been horrified at the impropriety of such a scene, with all its implications of ownership, disrespect and disregard, and sexuality?
I’ll bet there have been, for comedic effect, and forcing one into the demeaning role of a female character. Doubling-down the misogyny of the industry.
Probably there was – but the victim was likely a man of color and the attacker probably not.
Lou Costello got slapped a lot, but I don’t recall him getting spanked, Though Marjorie Main could have done it in “The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap” 8^)
Or a woman? Probably never…
I’m guessing the answer to your question is yes, but probably not in a movie you would see at your neighborhood, family movie house. Perhaps the little theater that used to be on 17th Street near Castro, behind the gas station, set back from the street, almost invisible.
I remember when I was younger and barely even aware of feminism, I saw a John Wayne movie where he spanked a grown woman and it horrified me. The scene was supposed to be lighthearted, but all I could see was a monster assaulting another human being.
Maybe in Louise Brooks’ private collection.
Played for a particularly nauseatingly offensive form of ‘laughs’, there probably are such scenes. As noted above by slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) @ 1, it could easily have been deployed to amplify the misogyny by casting a low status male character in the role of a woman to further denigrate him, or as nathanieltagg points out @ 2 the subtext of ownership and domination could have played into toxic racial politics onscreen.
Equally, a woman spanking a man in this way would either appear in a… let’s just say ‘certain kind of production’ with a very specific intended use, or again deployed as an attempt at a kind of misogynistic comedy, likely used to depict a weak and emasculated man being oppressed by some kind of ‘ball breaking harpy’, a scene intended to allow the male viewer to experience contempt for the male character for his notional weakness while either casting the female character as not really a woman for her behavior, or alternatively defaulting to that most odious and longstanding of Hollywood’s misogynistic tropes; the notion that the villainous behavior of a female character, especially toward men (and even more in the case of it being applied to children, though that also plays into a separate trope of ‘unnatural womanhood’ that casts any woman who doesn’t love kiddies with every fibre of her being as a total monster), is a product of sexual frustration born of the fact that she craves sexual domination she is not receiving.
Cue the ‘ultra manly man’ (because brutish gendered violence is the purest measure of functional masculinity, dontchaknow) who dominates her on screen in terms of dialogue and often through casual physical violence such as the much favoured back handed slap across the face that was so hideously popular in mid twentieth century cinema (and it is implied sexually dominates her off screen, since according to Hollywood if you don’t show the actual sex act then everything is fine, no matter how corrosive the attitudes toward sex you promote may be), and she promptly reverts to the archetype of the silver screen’s ideal of womanhood, in other words submissive, obedient, and (usually indicated through implication rather than openly stated) sexual availability, with the strong suggestion made all the while that this is her natural state that she is all too relieved to be able to return to.
As for being ‘played straight’ in a fashion that was intended to be dramatic rather than notionally ‘comedic’ – almost certainly not.
Tabby Lavalamp,
Oh yeah, I remember that happening in westerns. It just utterly confused me whenever I saw that.
My parents never spanked me, but I was aware that other parents did that to their kids and that it was (considered) normal. But spanking an adult woman? What the hell?
I appreciate that the article didn’t gloss over a fact that a lot of people tend to ignore: (nonconsensual) spanking is very much a form of sexual violence. The whole phenomenon is inextricably connected to both implied and explicit sexual domination and aggression. Which just makes this gross on even more levels.
I read the article a couple of days ago…yeah it’s mostly gross. But, as a small counter point, the article conflates consensual kinky spankings with the (nonconsensual) misogynistic trope. Now to be fair the trope itself conflates this, but I feel the article could have been more carefully constructed to not throw sexual minorities under the bus while condemning toxic masculinity and misogyny.
I remember a movie I saw as a child where an upper-class Englishman threatened an adult American man with his riding crop. The American guy then beat him up in a fistfight.
That was more of a class based thing, though. The all-American guy was clearly more than a match for the pompous caricature of an English toff. Of course, this was a Hollywood movie.
I remember Ricky spanking Lucy on the sitcom, “I Love Lucy”. This link purports to show evidece:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qup9lOPQfg
Flipping through channels, I came to a b&w film perhaps set in the late 1800s with a male school teaching class of, maybe 5th graders. The door opens a kid enters followed by a big bruiser with a vest and bowler which seemed too small for his head. The kid raises his arm and points at the teacher. The bruiser walks briskly up to the surprised teacher and without a word grabs him, puts him over his knee, and,wails away with the school teacher’s paddle. (I think there was a paddle). He releases the teacher and leaves without a word. I don’t remember if the kid said anything or stayed. Another male, perhaps the head teacher, asks if he is alright, wants to continue or something. The teacher croaks that his is fine and continues teaching. I then flipped the channel never to see that scene again.
I think they had American accents. No idea of the date or name of the film nor any of the actors.
BTW: I saw this about 1972.
The notorious scene Tabby Lavalamp @5 mentions is in the John Wayne movie “The Quiet Man”. The whole movie is full of stereotypes. This scene is probably the most offensive. Strange to think of it today, but Director John Ford won his fourth Academy Award for Best Director.