Spank Holiday Monday

That's right. I'm doing a whole blog post based on a bad pun! And it's not even a pun I came up with myself.

So today is Spank Holiday Monday. This means a day off work, obviously. But most importantly, it is the day that we celebrate the tradition of Spanking.

There is a popular myth that spanking has been around for thousands of years. While it is true that smacking, slapping and other variations of open-hand striking have been around since Biblical times, the earliest documented example of the specific form known as 'spanking' took place in a suburb of Rochester in Kent during the early 1950s.

Prior to the Baby Boom in the 50s and 60s, children were very rare because people had far more interesting things to do than put parts of their body into parts of other people's bodies. Sometimes years went by without a child being born.

Of course after the Second World War came the Depression and people were far too poor to entertain themselves properly, so they copulated instead. During 1956, over thirty babies were born, worldwide.

The world was unable to cope with disciplining this unprecedented infestation of children. The customary method of getting them too drunk to misbehave was becoming prohibitively expensive and the scrap metal drives during the War meant that the iron needed for the traditional cages was in short supply.

Stanley Pankhurst of Elliot Road in Rochester began to research radical alternative methods of ensuring obedience and good behaviour in children. Many non-punitive options such as parent-child communication, empathic reasoning and positive reinforcement of good behaviour were discarded as impractical or 'just too much damn work'.

Eventually, after much experimentation on random passers-by, Pankhurst settled on a solution.

In his well received treatise 'On The Domestic Application Of Open Handed Percussive Contact With The Gluteus Maximus Of Misbehaving Offspring', Pankurst described how he had found striking the backsides of the local children both enjoyable and effective.

The practice attracted much media attention and gained traction amongst parents almost immediately, coining the phrase 'if you don't shut your cake-hole, I'm going to Stanley Pankurst your backside 'til you can't sit down.'.

The term 'Stanley Pankhurst' was shortened to 'spank' by the groovy parents of the Sixties because their LSD addled brains simply couldn't cope with that many syllables.

Stanley Pankhurst died childless in 1973. Although he was never rewarded for his contribution to social buttock science, he was posthumously awarded an CBE. Today is a celebration of this ground-breaking work by Stanley Pankhurst. He was a truly great man, deserving of our recognition and respect.

Celebrate by spanking a loved one!