Is it really still a dirty little secret?

A curious case has hit the news media from a town in North East England.

A guy used the internet to make a date with a stranger who after the briefest of briefest meetings claimed she had secretly filmed the spanking she had given him, and please would he lend her (the equivalent of about) $75 not to post it to Facebook?

He did pay up , but made a discrete complaint to the Police.   The ensuing court case resulted in her getting a one year prison sentence for blackmail.

I kind of suspect that if all they had done was kiss and cuddle, the blackmail attempt would have been equally successful, with a similar final outcome.

But I have a nagging doubt.

Back in the 60's and 70's the biggest threat to military secrecy in the NATO countries was homosexuality.   Not that homosexuals were treacherous cads, but because if the soviets could prove you were of a homosexual persuasion, you would open any safe in order to keep your secret private.

Admittedly, back then, being homosexual was very likely to result in public disgrace and even a prison sentence.   By criminalizing a natural condition, the Western alliance handed the Soviet Union a very strong tactical ploy to learn our battle plans, should it ever come to a shooting war.

Through a different mechanism, we spankos have set ourselves up to be very sensitive about our foible.    Most of us spent our formative years in the false belief that we were the only spanko in the world, and that the worst thing that could ever happen to us would be for our secret to be revealed to family and friends.   Prison was not an option - but maybe a lengthy stay in some mental health institution.

That shared feeling was so strong that surveys suggest that about 80% of us still try to keep our spanko tendencies from all but our very closest and trusted sex partners.  And for 20%, even close partners are never told what really turns one of us on.

There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that the 20% or so who make no secret of the spanking side of their psyche have suffered in any way whatsoever by revealing the fact.

Which suggests that the other 80% of us should not carry what we seem to think is a dirty little secret. It opens us up to blackmail scams, no matter how futile such scams may prove to be in the long term..

Yeah - right.   Having made a case why you should go tell everyone your secret, you might point out that I continue to sit behind a nom-de-plume in order to keep my privacy intact.   And that is not a case of moral duplicity - it is an admission that I also am still possessed by a need for secrecy that I inherited from our shared false belief;  one that persisted and gripped me throughout all my formative years.  Irrational fears are the hardest ones to shake off.

We really don't have a dirty little secret - its just that 80% of us still cannot shake off the notion that it is one.  May be we should set up an annual "Coming Out" day so that we could continue to help each other to put an end to our fears that we have something to fear.  How about July 1st?   As a real one, not one of the prank ones that are floating around the internet...