If he sneaked off against the wishes of his father to play the game Dominicans love, he ran the risk of being spanked.
The maverick Danish director, who is receiving accolades for his Kirsten Dunst-starring apocalyptic tale "Melancholia," is no stranger to outrageous statements -- in 2005, he said President Bush dreams of being spanked by Condeleezza Rice -- shocked the assembled press with his answer to a question about his interest in the Nazi aesthetic.
He surged forward in his seat, and I thought of what Michael Powell had told me about growing up with his father: "I don't think I have any memory of ever being spanked or hit, but he could scare the bejesus out of you.
But one of the most intriguing theories, and one with vast implications for America in particular, comes from Christian Pfeiffer, the director of the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony in Hanover.Mr Pfeiffer has found a correlation between declining rates of children being spanked (or otherwise punished physically) and subsequent decreases in violent crime.
The Charlemagne blog on The Economist's website explores the question of why violent crime is steadily decreasing in Europe in particular and much of the developed world in general, and concludes that the drop correlates with a similar decrease in the rates of children being spanked.
Elaborate studies of naked women being spanked and thrashed with birch twigs are being turned out with fanatical artistic care by the glacial, deadpan Johann (Sergei Makovetsky) and his sinister, grinning sidekick Victor Ivanovich Victor Sukhorukhovv), as a sideline to their respectable portraiture business.
To that end, Dobson insists, "most of them need to be spanked now and then".
After one Brooklyn artist put up video of her bare derriere being spanked by a friend, the clip got banned never mind, she says, that a movie trailer on YouTube showed much the same thing.
Another Jezebel user countered the assertion that the clipping my might be fake by pointing out that, historically speaking, the idea of spanking women wasn't altogether uncommon: She included a link to The Society Pages, which collected a gallery of images portraying women being spanked in advertisements for films and in comic books.
The picture has its juicy, extravagant moments, like a glimpse of a Hasidic Jew (Peter Appel) being spanked by a large, sexually ambiguous prostitute, but mostly it consists of stilted dialogue from the Off Broadway metaphysical school.
In a typical rendering, one of his characters, who is being spanked by a police officer on a park bench says, "Isn't this kind of drastic punishment for walking on the grass?" Mr. Ward's drawings, on the other hand, were more provocative and alluring, the subjects exploiting the power over men that their sexuality granted.
