The English vice is spanking. Why, exactly, is uncertain, but where the Angles lack the continental appetite for passion and amour, the English vice serves as a substitute for that messy, intimate act between the sheets.

Englishmen – of a certain class – would rather be rowing or riding, playing cricket or wallowing in the mud of a rugby field, something sweaty, mindless and performed with other men.

Englishwomen are so enamoured of their roses and begonias, when summer makes its brief appearance – like a cameo in opera – they dress in flower print dresses that match their curtains, couches and gardens, the ultimate camouflage.

English girls submit their buttocks (the favoured word) for spanking, not because they find it sexy or sensual, but with the impulse to 1) not make a fuss; and 2) be a good sport. It’s imperative to keep a stiff upper lip, although, when it comes to the English vice, it’s more likely that the lower lips stiffen as the horny hand comes clapping down ‘for England!’

The English vice is sometimes confused with the English disease, which has lent its name to ale-swilling football hooligans in St George’s Cross tee-shirts who, the dark mirror of their upper-crust compatriots, would much rather be pummelling the wogs, frogs and waps in Spain, France, and Italy than cuddling up to the cellulite thighs of their better ‘alves back in Blighty.

According to Uncyclopedia, not to be mistaken for Wikipedia, the English disease is characterised by egomania, a superiority/inferiority complex, delusions of grandeur, and natiokleptomania – a strong desire to steal other people’s countries.

The superiority/inferiority complex could explain England’s partiality for the English vice, not that the English coined the phrase. Needless to say, it is the work of the French, ‘le vice anglais,’ perhaps in revenge for what the English call the French vice: syphilis.

The French also gave us the striking new word sadism, from the Marquis de Sade, the French nobleman with a keen eye on bottoms crying out for a spanking; while the word masochism is the gift of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian with that peculiarly Germanic taste for being spanked.

The Italian vice was first used as a euphemism for homosexuality in records from 1658 when Philippe Jules Mancini, the Duke of Nevers, ‘corrupted’ his namesake, Philippe, the Chevalier de Lorraine. The Greek vice is buggery, in use since the time of Helen of Troy; while the American vice refers to the vice-president and can proudly claim as a nation to have no other vices.

The English vice returned to the spotlight when actress Keira Knightly – photographed above – was cast as mental patient Sabina Spielrein in A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s film about the bond between CG Jung and Sigmund Freud. There are scenes where our half-naked English rose is tied to the bed for a spanking by Jung, played by Michael Fassbender (which doesn’t sound so awful).

Ms Knightly had to overcome her doubts about playing the role because she thought the explicit scenes of flagellation would attract too much attention. She was right. Or at least partly right. The European press didn’t dwell on the erotic content, while the English tabloids went at like mad dogs in a slaughterhouse spewing out enough column inches to decimate the forests of Finland.

‘It got mentioned all the time,’ Keira told The Daly Telegraph. ‘I don’t know what that says about us. We obviously like spanking.’ And she poses the question: ‘Why are the English so besotted with spanking?’

It is not easy to find a comprehensive answer. Boys who attended the best public schools (meaning private schools) would suffer beatings on their bare buttocks from both masters and older boys, preparing them to show no mercy when they became seniors and, later, went overseas to administer the Empire. Having been beaten, there were those who would have acquired the taste to continue the practise, both as givers and receivers.

Unruly seamen in the days of sailing ships were routinely flogged with the feared cat o’nine tails by officers of the Royal Navy – scenes captured in the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, while in the holds of ships stealing slaves across the oceans to the Americas, the English chose the whip to keep their payload submissive. Winston Churchill, mixing his vices, once defined the traditions of the Royal Navy as ‘rum, sodomy, and the lash.’

The English vice flourishes today in telephone boxes up and down the country where prostitutes stick postcards advertising ‘Victorian Punishment’ and ‘Strict Mistress’ for men feeling the need for chastisement, something of a role reversal, but well within the bounds of the English vice.

There is certainly a national fixation with the English vice. A man saying on a whim to his girl, ‘I’m going to put you over my knee and spank your bottom,’ is more likely to be received as the promise of sexual action than impending discipline, the line between the two, for the English, remaining something of a blur.

I have a personal theory that it is the word spanking that has made the English vice so popular. Spanking tastes delicious in the mouth and rolls like honey from the tongue: spanking, spanking, spanking.

You can join my website (click above somewhere) and download a free copy of Flight 69, and you can click here to get a copy of my novel Katie in Love – now 100 reviews at Amazon.com xx Chloe 

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