Sex advice: I spank my wife for her pleasure, not mine

Not surprisingly, men who display a greater than usual propensity to being oppressively dominant often display sexual urges that include fantasising about or actually inflicting physical suffering or emotional humiliation on their partners. They frequently team up with women – or, if homosexual, with men – who have complementary urges to be dominated.

These people have often had a difficult childhood, lack self-esteem and feel unworthy. In later life they want to be beaten, smacked, humiliated, bound, urinated or defecated on, treated as an animal or child. Potentially masochistic people may indulge in hypooxyphilia, a dangerous desire for partial asphyxiation.

Spanking is a common practice that should be diagnosed only as sadistic or masochistic when there is a real desire to inflict and suffer considerable pain. The late Dr Anthony Storr, an Oxford psychiatrist who studied sexual behaviour, went as far as suggesting that it was “always possible to detect sadomasochistic tendencies in anyone”.

Often foreplay includes play-acting, with spanking as a noisy simulation of beating. Your wife’s desire to be spanked wouldn’t qualify as representing a masochistic streak in her personality unless it was well established, of at least six months’ duration, and unless the spanking produced obvious evidence of sexual stimulation. In extreme cases, masochistic people are unable to be aroused, let alone to have an orgasm, without suffering pain.

If your wife is truly masochistic, she is relatively unusual in one respect. Research has shown that 95 per cent of sexual masochists are men and that only 5 per cent of women derive sexual pleasure through pain. Even this minority isn’t always entirely masochistic; one in three of them is occasionally sadistic, often biting and scratching more vigorously than is usual.

Whatever your sexual habits, asking a third person to share them often leads to trouble. Have you thought of the consequences if your wife preferred to be smacked, and whatever else may follow this, by your guest, rather than by her husband? Sex with a new partner may seem to her exciting for a while, but by the time boredom with a new lover has set in, she may have left you.

Your observation that you derive a thrill from seeing your wife spanked by a friend is interesting. Psychologists teach that sadomasochism in its various guises could stem from the pleasure in childhood, long since forgotten, that the person may have experienced when seeing others punished.

Dr Thomas Stuttaford, The Times doctor, spent many years working in a genitourinary clinic

SUZI GODSON

A I am trying to think of the last time I was spanked by a friend in front of my husband as a joke. Hmm. Nope. Not a sausage. It’s just not the kind of thing that crops up in the circles I move in. When my husband and I get together with friends we have drinks, dinner, even a bit of middle-aged dancing if we’re at a “do”, but no public spanking, jokey or otherwise. I don’t wish to cast aspersions on your wife’s good character but, between you and me, to lie across a person’s lap and have them rhythmically beat your posterior is an act of such great intimacy that I wonder whether you have considered the possibility that the incident might not have been a joke at all?

As a woman, my immediate instinct on reading your letter was to question whether your wife, a self-confessed spankophile, might not also be ten steps ahead of you when it comes to third-party involvement. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It simply means that not only will she greet your suggestion with enthusiasm, she probably has a volunteer lined up already.

Many dating agencies, such as Passion.com, offer “couple looking for” as an option in their search engines, so finding an extra pair of hands for a threesome has never been easier. However, although your wife is clearly an excitable woman, before you give this idea the green light, I would urge you to consider how you will really feel if you expose your marriage to sex with a third party.

The threesome is an appealing and enduring fantasy but not one that translates easily into reality. Even when all three participants are consenting and fully aware of the consequences, jealousy frequently sabotages prospective liaisons or damages the primary relationship. If you are deeply attached to your wife, it may be difficult to watch her being intimate with another person and even if the third party is a woman, the potential discovery that your wife has bisexual tendencies may feel even more threatening. And if the person involved is a friend, the friendship, and the marriage, could be ruined.

Although countless women engage in threesomes, the majority of those who propagandise on behalf of the joys of m?nage à trois are male. Men are better able to dissociate sex from love and a brief trawl through any chatroom tackling the subject of threesomes reveals that most of the casualties are female. Women get involved in threesomes for all sorts of reasons but often it is either a way of pleasing/holding on to their partner, or a way of masking the dwindling of sexual desire within the relationship. Rather than face facts and address the cause of the sexual lag, they agree to a dash of “stranger sex” and hope that a temporary solution will cure a more permanent deficiency. Needless to say, a relationship that is on shaky ground anyway will almost certainly hit the rocks under the added weight of a third party.

From your letter I can’t tell whether you and your wife have a solid relationship, but if you do, I’d advise you to keep your naughty little fantasy to yourself and, as your penance, buy your lovely wife something that she will enjoy. Coco de Mer’s Teach me a Lesson wooden ruler, £6, springs to mind (www.coco-de-mer-shop.co.uk).

Suzi Godson is author of The Sex Book (Cassell, £16.99) and The Body Bible (Penguin, £16.99)

E-mail your sexual dilemmas to body&soul@thetimes.co.uk or write to Body&Soul, The Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT