You've perhaps read news coverage about Booneville High School Principal Steve Halter, a subject of some difference of opinion on the School Board, which recently bumped him to an administrative post in the district. He'd gained notoriety, too, for his practice of paddling misbehaving students. He proudly allowed TruTV to film episodes on his use of corporal punishment, complete with interviews with those paddled. No paddling was depicted on screen, but thwacking audio accompanied the board of justice at work.

Wouldn't you know it? Clips of the TruTV episodes landed on YouTube. And then, they were quickly picked up by websites devoted to paddling fetishists. One paddling fan even struck up an e-mail conversation with a Booneville girl who received a paddling from Halter. The paddling fan provided a link to the student's photograph. The talk of paddling of teen girls apparently sent a shiver through the sites visited by spanking fans, including readers of “Spanking Model Speaks: Musings on the science of artistic suffering.” That site includes ads for, among others, a website said to offer “the most extreme spanking caught on video!” Halter's reassignment, by the way, had nothing to do with the fact that his preferred discipline of Booneville teens produced worldwide web titillation.