Those Chinese videos...

I would guess most of the spanko community has seen some of the plethora of Chinese videos that hit the scene recently, mainly on TikTok and YouTube. It started with pairs of players doing the old classic rock-paper-scissors game, where the winner got to whack the loser with an implement - mostly resembling a paddle, a cane or a belt and invariably across their bottom while they bent forward submissively.

The initial torrent of videos may have abated a little but there are also plenty of new ones. It's difficult to reliably keep track of when already posted videos have been reposted from other accounts. There have also been some variations - some great fun and others rather confusing. The confusing ones are particularly those where more than two players take part. So, for example, there are quite a few with two boys and one girl - one boy challenges the girl to the rock-paper-scissors game. If she wins she gets to whack both of the boys but if she loses, each of the boys gets to whack her. It's not rocket science to calculate that each outcome has a 50:50 chance of happening, meaning she is going to get hit twice as many times as either of them. I struggle to see how she is persuaded to agree to that.

Then there have been several videos where they use large elastic bands (resistance bands?) stretched tightly around the loser and then released giving a sharp stinging impact on a quite precisely controlled area. There has also been a bit more variation in targets. Perhaps it's a surprise that sometimes they have been delivered to bare legs, for example, leaving the 'victim' with very publicly visible marks.

Right from the outset, they seem to have played these games with little concern about being overseen by others. However, there have been a handful of video clips starting to appear in very public settings such as a busy shopping district. The lack of intervention by those passing by might suggest that there is, at least in some places, quite widespread knowledge and acceptance of the games.

There have also been a few where, instead of bending forward, the 'victim' is lying face down on a bench or table and they are beaten with what appear to be really large planks of wood. While these may seem strange to the Western eye, they probably reflect a form of punishment that was quite widespread in the past in China.

There have also been some alternative games to replace rock-paper-scissors. The most popular seems to be the use of large dice. Although initial use seemed to be restricted to 'largest number wins' they have mostly moved on to the loser getting the number of strokes reflected by the winner's throw. Sometimes it's not competitive - the boy throws and gives the girl the number he's thrown and then she throws and gives him the number she's thrown. Very occasionally I have seen a loser having to endure six hard strokes - unfortunately, the girls seem to very rarely be able to stay in position throughout the punishment.

There are a very large number of accounts posting - I have counted 38 TikTok accounts (the most prolific being @thutrangcl, @thichdangvd, @qupewss11, and most prolific of all @tieutudi) and well over 60 YouTube channels (most prolific being Girl's funny, Man man, and Funny Brave Challenge). Another YouTube channel called Anokha channel D posted a lot of videos but now seems to have gone a bit quieter - the interesting thing here is that whereas most clips are around 3-5 minutes long, on this last channel their clips are compilations usually running to 11-15 minutes).

One interesting development I've noticed recently is that some TikTok postings have had a warning notice posted on them.

Look right to the bottom of this screen. I would have thought this was rather unnecessary and obvious to anyone. I wonder if there are any people in other countries who are ready to risk disregarding the warning...

Favourite for July

 

Many years ago, I can remember reading a scholarly piece of research into different attitudes to punishing boys and girls, both at school and at home. Sadly, I didn't keep a copy (not a mistake I would make if I came across something like that today!) and I can't remember the exact figures they had come up with. I'll make some fairly credible statistics to illustrate what they found.

There were three main conclusions:

1. Both boys and girls did receive corporal punishment on occasion, but
2. Boys were eight times more likely to receive corporal punishment than girls, however
3. Girls were almost twice as likely to have clothing moved or removed for the punishment

The second conclusion was explained by the view that boys were more likely to do bad things than girls and that even if they did the same thing, people were more reluctant to use corporal punishment on girls than they were on boys. The third conclusion was explained that if a girl was wearing a skirt it was relatively easy to lift the skirt out of the way and that having done so it was also relatively easy to pull her underwear down. With boys wearing trousers it was more fiddly and time-consuming to do something similar. I think there's another issue which, as I remember it, the report authors did not consider. When a person wearing trousers needs to bend over to get smacked, caned, paddled or whatever across their bottom, the bending process simply causes the material in the trousers to be stretched more tightly, thereby making the punishment more effective. However, when a girl wearing a skirt or dress bends over, in many cases the lower hem will actually impede the punishment, thus leading the person conducting the punishment to decide it is necessary to move it out of the way.

In English schools, in the era when the cane ruled the schoolroom, there were, unquestionably, occasions when a girl would be the recipient of a caning. However, as time moved on, there was growing unease about caning a girl's bottom. Some schools changed their rules so that if girls had to be caned, it weould be given across the palms of their hands. Others changed their rules so that boys could be caned across their bottoms, but for the fairer sex, a 'slipper' would be used instead because it was seen as less severe. The 'slipper' in practice was more commonly a gymshoe/plimsoll/dab/sandshoe or whatever it was known as in your part of the country.

And so we come to this month's favourite picture. It's unusual for me to choose a B&W image but somehow it seems to add to the potential believability of the scene. And there is little doubt, that on occasions, a badly behaved schoolgirl would have found herself being told to touch her toes, the schoolteacher realising that the hem of the skirt would impede the punishment, lifting it up and folding it on to the girl's back, and then delivering some hard stinging whacks across her tightly stretched regulation school knickers.