Spanks for the Memories

There's no orgasm to fake here, just actual pain, as Masterson and his employees thoroughly advise the hundred or so local models they've hired over the past six years.

The harsher the spanking, the more realistic the shrieks of pain, the more true the tears -- and the more enthralled members are that this is as authentic as it gets without actually being real. Pierson credits Real Spankings with making the worldwide spanking industry sit up and take notice. "They've really changed the scene," he says. "They're young and creative, and they took an industry that was old and tired and brought in a new voice. Today I think they're the number-one company in the world. Everyone's caught the wave. Even the L.A. scene is looking to Denver for cues."

The summer before Michael started junior high, his family moved to a small city in Texas, where it wasn't unusual for kids to get a whuppin' from Mom or Dad as a punishment. In his blog, he describes how he tried to get neighborhood girls to talk about the times they were spanked. "While always trying to appear uninterested and casual," he writes, "I pressed them for as many details as I could get without seeming like a pervert."

One of his friends had a younger sister who showed him the little wooden paddle her father had made that was kept on the fireplace mantle. Her mother always did the spanking, which could vary from five to twenty swats, depending on the offense. "It was the first time in my life that I had touched an implement that was designed and used for spanking," he recalls on the blog. It was really just a sanded-down wooden stake, but it looked like it would hurt if used hard enough. He asked the girl if she ever cried during the spankings.

"Hell, yeah," he remembers her replying. "Wouldn't you?"

In high school, Michael was a studious and contemplative young man who enjoyed reading and the outdoors. His school was full of rednecks who always gave him shit for the long hair he pulled back in a ponytail. But he had plenty of friends, and he never confessed to any of them that while they were ogling a pretty girl walking by, all he could think about was giving her a harsh spanking.

Michael went to college at a state school in Texas, where an English professor introduced him to the greats of American literature. His list of favorite writers grew to include Walt Whitman, Ayn Rand, Sylvia Plath, and especially Kurt Vonnegut. As he sought to understand the roots of his strange desire, he cultivated an interest in the inner workings of human behavior; he was fascinated by the relationships and rituals of these spanking rites.

So naturally, he joined a fraternity that provided a platform from which he could explore his hidden intrigue. He subtly prodded sorority girls for accounts of their paddlings -- not a form of discipline, but a fun-filled voluntary ritual meant to bond the pledge with the member doing the paddling and the group as a whole. Although by then he knew that the discipline aspect of spanking excited him most, he compiled details about who in the sorority held the paddle, the size of the paddles, how many sisters looked on. And did they swing with one hand or two?

At a party at his frat, he met a fellow student who would become his wife -- and later, the woman who would be widely known in the spanking world as Ms. J. They began dating and soon realized that they were both into the darker aspects of sexual play. As their relationship got more serious, they slowly began a bedroom education in various S&M endeavors. Sometimes she would be the submissive and let him spank her; other times they'd switch roles and he'd be on the receiving end of a dominant female.

It was good fun -- but in many ways, this experimentation was also an extreme exploration into the complicated depths of sexuality and the human psyche. That fit with their educational choice: Masterson and his wife earned master's degrees in psychology from a private university in Texas and began Ph.D. programs to become psychology professors themselves.

In 1997, they were both working on their dissertations (his focused on motivation in a work environment, hers on attitudes and stereotypes) when they decided that daycare wasn't a good environment for their young daughter. They wanted to hire a nanny, but for two doctoral students, money was in short supply. Still, they had something in abundance: a healthy interest in spanking.

While spanking was something they'd lovingly administer to each other in the bedroom, they'd agreed on a no-spanking rule for their child -- a policy they extended when they had two more children. "My kids do not even know what spanking is," Masterson says adamantly, a sentiment he reiterates numerous times on his blog. "Spanking sucks as a way to raise your child. I don't think spanking is an effective form of discipline; time-outs are much more effective."