How Anna Likes It(continued)

Need I add that these fetishes —the uniforms, the implements of punishment, corporal punishment itself—have no direct connection to my schooling? The scene of learning, the one I crave now, is not remembered but produced. Its iconography is British; its conventions are alien to me. What British spanking porn, and all schoolroom spanking scenarios, hold for me is not a simulation of the classrooms of my youth but that tantalizing admixture of realness and artifice that is celebrated in Jean Genet’s The Balcony as “the authentic detail and the fake detail.”

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