I am reading and thoroughly enjoying Kenneth Tynan's journals edited by John Lahr (Bloomsbury, 2001). Tynan [ a well known theater critic who put together the once notoriously _s_e_x_ually explicit revue Oh Calcutta!] was a confirmed British hetero lover of cp for which he has gotten much flak from the idiot reviewers of his posthumously published journals. Rather than coming right out and declaring their prejudice against this harmless strain of perversity, they sneer at it as a form of immaturity, a denial of _s_e_x_uality rather than a perfectly pleasurable articulation of one form of it.
Anyway, to get off my soapbox, in a 28 September 1971 entry, Tynan writes: " T. E. Lawrence's [of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Lawrence of Arabia fame] RAF record auctioned yesterday, has the following entry, 'Identification marks: scars both buttocks.' This confirms the story of one of Lawrence's service friends that he regularly beat him. Odd how upper-class British life between the wars was full of dapper men with blazing eyes who took tea in ducal conservatories and then retired to furnished rooms to take down their trousers and be whipped. I met some of them in Oxford after the war [Tynan studied at Magdalene College, and rather improbably, his tutor, for whom he seems to have felt great respect and affection, was that old fart Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis], most of them minor gentry, many of them slightly sinister, planning to buy and operate private schools for boys (an easy thing to do then because inspection of such schools was cursory and infrequent) of which the main function would be to act as laboratories for experiments with the cane."
What a jackass (jackarse?) D. H. Lawrence could be! Lawrence had all sorts of cracked theories about the accumulation of energy and will at the base of the spine, etc. Based on those theories, he pontificated on the value of spanking, transmogrifying a delightful pursuit into a tediously Lawrentian edifying exercise of the will: Tynan approvingly quotes arsinine Lawrence in a 21 July 1973 entry, "The vibration acts directly upon the spinal nerve system . . . The spanker transfers his wrath to the great will centers of the child and those will centers react intensely, are vivified and educated." To which, my rather irreverent reaction is, "I have your will centers (or as the British spell it "will centres") right here!