For about a year, I ran a blog documenting some of the behavior I'd observed on Facebook. A social network that large will attract people who are turned on by a variety of things. There were a number of "pain players," and some of them seemed to have very blurred boundaries.
The conventional wisdom is that there's nothing sexual about adults spanking children. So it was surprising how many obvious fetishists were displaying images showing children getting spanked with their pants down. "Trip Delta" seemed to get off on telling stories about his mother doing this to him when he was a child, and I wondered how his mother would feel if she recognized herself in some of the prurient posts. Below is one of many such images he posted. How many parents who insist that there's nothing sexual about spanking would really think it was OK if they found their adolescent son collecting images like this? I'm guessing not many.
One poster, "Jamie Blue", comments under the image about getting spanked with his clothes off as a child. We see Jamie again openly trolling for videos of children getting spanked. Although he's probably a pedophile, he illustrates an interesting double standard. Collecting photos or video of kids getting spanked that way is likely to be considered child pornography, which could result in prison time and a sex offender jacket. Doing it to kids in real life is often considered "discipline" and doesn't involve any legal consequences at all.
A large Facebook group called "My Parents Didn't Put Me in Time-out, They Whooped My Ass" attracted an interesting mix of conservatives and spanking fetishists. It got really bizarre when they seemed to be singing from the same hymnbook. But some of the fetishists seem to get off on showing up in real parenting groups and offering advice about "disciplining" children, which almost always involved spanking on bare skin. "Becky Chandler" was one of the most notorious, but there were certainly others.
Perhaps the notion that spanking isn't sexual contributes to the problem, because it makes it easier for adults to rationalize very inappropriate behavior. It's also potentially confusing to children. One site has a page entitled "The Best of Voy" that contains a disturbing collection of users sharing childhood memories. Most people would consider the images hosted on the site to be quite disturbing. What parent would want a child to turn out this way?