Panty spanking

Panty spanking, sometimes hyphenated as panty-spanking, is the act of spanking a woman or a young girl over the underwear. In contrast to the classic scenario, the female's panties are exposed throughout the discipline, although the bottom is normally left fully covered. Access to the rear is provided by raising or lowering the outer garments (skirt, dress, shorts etc) prior to punishment.

In sequential art and animation, panty spanking was a common visual convention employed in comics and cartoons during the so-called Golden Age. During this period, little girls were usually drawn according to a well-established formula, which included (amongst other things), drastically abbreviated hemlines revealing plain white briefs. As a general rule, images of this nature were meant to be cute rather than risque, although panty-spanking was often used as a form of comedy relief in many better known comic strips, including Little Iodine, Nancy, Little Lulu etc.

In the West
The convention was practiced well into the late seventies in various Harvey Comics titles (Little Audrey, Little Dot et al), but made only sporadic appearances during the eighties. Since the early nineties, traditional panty-spanking images have fallen out of favor with mainstream audiences, due in part to such material being considered inappropriate.

The rise of the WWW has prompted a minor renaissance of panty-spanking imagery amongst online SP communities, although it is generally considered the 'poor cousin' to the more popular BB variant. On the other hand, classic panty-spanking panels are held in high regard by many older enthusiasts for their unique and often nostalgic 'flavor.'

In Japan
The Sixties Although spanking was comparatively rare in old school (pre-1970) anime, panchira was occasionally used in connection with corporal imagery, particularly in cartoons aimed at very young viewers. It is worth noting, however, that 1960s anime spanking was limited almost exclusively to young boys; girls were rarely subjected to physical discipline during this period (despite the rising number of shoujo-related programs). The reasons for this are unclear, but several explanations have been suggested.

Traditionally speaking, girls were perceived as requiring less physical discipline than boys, due to a common belief that females were naturally shy, quiet and retiring (and therefore less likely to get into trouble). This probably accounts for why most animated spanking imagery during the sixties involved only F/m or M/m pairings - girls were more likely to receive a verbal reprimand than a smack on the rear.

In addition, Japanese manga of the 1960s never really developed an analogue of the Naughty Little Girl archetype common to American comics - once again, due to the prevailing social perception of girls being 'naturally' well behaved. Shoujo characters of the classic era were usually represented as kind, virtuous, and possessing an innate sense of justice (there was at least one obvious exception, of course: Astro's sister Uran was at least as naughty as Lulu or Audrey, but paradoxically, she never received a spanking).

The Seventies Whatever the case, panty-spanking was extremely rare in Japanese cartoons until the mid-seventies, when older female characters began to star in their own series. One of the first examples of this shift in content was a well-known scene from episode 51 of Majokko Megu-chan, (Toei Doga, 1974-1975). By this time, fanservice was an integral plot device in many children's cartoons, meaning that the show featured a generous amount of light-hearted panchira. Unlike many of her predecessors, Megu was a teenager rather than a child, meaning that the spanking sequence possessed a mildly sexual content absent from the shojo programs of the previous decade.

Viewed from this angle, the corporal scenes in the Megu-chan series were rather exceptional - earlier depictions usually portrayed the spankee fully clothed. In this case, the fanservice angle was stressed over the corporal element; Megu's punishment was little more than an excuse to expose her underpants. In short, the main emphasis was on the panty rather than on the spanking.

At the same time, however, the combination of panchira and spanking was used to indicate Megu's juvenile status. Despite her adolescent appearance, Megu is spanked over Mammi's knee like a little girl; pristine white panties on clear display. Worse still, her punishment is observed by her worst enemy Chou-san, who delights in seeing her weeping with embarrassment. Comical though the scene appears, it probably struck a chord with the show's female viewers, who could relate to Megu's dilemna - old enough to desire independence from parental authority, yet young enough to be subjected to corporal discipline.

The Eighties This coming-of-age theme was taken up in several later mahou shoujo programs, including Studio Pierrot's Creamy Mami (1983-84). While classed as a lightweight shoujo fantasy, Creamy Mami subtly explored the frustrations of generational conflict. Granted the power to transform into an adult version of herself, nine year-old Yuu Morisawa lives out a common childhood fantasy; "growing up" before her time to become both beautiful and famous (as the teenaged pop-star Creamy Mami). Needless to say, this supposed dream come true had its inevitable drawbacks; Yuu's activities in the adult sphere caused friction in her everyday life.

In her juvenile persona, Yuu was a high-spirited tomboy who constantly squabbled with her friends and family. Sweet but rather wayward by nature, she was often in dutch with her parents and teachers; a situation exacerbated by her double life as Creamy Mami. One of the show's running gags, in fact, was Yuu's mildly adversarial relationship with her mother - a typically 'liberated' Japanese woman with a firm belief in tough love. The series featured three F/f spanking scenes, starting in the very first episode when Momma catches Yuu sneaking home late. The panchira further underscores Yuu's subordinant position in the domestic hierarchy: as Creamy Mami, she may be a successful, talented singer, but she still gets spanked on the panties when she gets home. It might be argued that panty-spanking in 1980s shoujo anime was part of a larger rite-of-passage motif, ie that childish discipline was one of many ordeals any juvenile has to endure on the road to maturity.

The Nineties

The 1990s saw an upswing of spanking imagery in Japanese popular culture. This was almost certainly due to the rise of the World Wide Web at the beginning of the decade: an enormous body of material was suddenly available to Japanese observers via the internet – some of which was virtually unknown in Japan due to censorship laws or simple cultural differences.

Japanese otakus were quick to seize upon the new imagery, and anime-based spanking sites began to spread rapidly across the Nihon-web. As was often the case with this form of cultural assimilation, the Japanese variant was a reinterpretation of an American template, adopting many of the visual conventions present in the original.

Initially, much of it was produced by amateur illustrators and fan artists, but it wasn’t long before Western-style spanking imagery was absorbed by the mainstream manga industry – leading, in turn to its adoption into animated form. The process was quite literally self-sustaining; anime-based spanking fed back into the web, leading to the development of Oekaki sites (such as Mediaspanking). Spanking doujinshi appeared towards the end of the Twentieth Century, many of which were scanned and uploaded to the web – where, ironically, they became available to Western audiences (image).

Trivia

 * At the time of writing, there is no specific term for "panty-spanking" in Japanese. The closest approach would be the phrase panty maru mie no oshiri wo tataku: "spank on the panties."