One of my partners sent me the following image in a text message:

She said she made her Barbies spank each other.

Now why didn’t I think of that? I mean, I was interested in spanking way before it was okay — as many of us were, I think — and I had a little sister who had lots of dolls. Why didn’t I ever make them spank each other?

If you google “barbies spanking each other” you get plenty of results, but not if you search for “gi joes spanking each other”. Weirdly, this is the only spanking image that came up on the first screen of results:

Those aren’t GI Joes; those are the Real Ghostbusters.

But anyway. I had a bunch of action figures growing up. No GI Joes, but some Star Trek ones, a lot of Transformers, and Starcom, which was one of my favorites. Never once did I make them spank each other. Maybe it had to do with how girls (stereotypically) grew up playing house, while boys (stereotypically) grew up playing war/battle games. (In fact, one of my favorites that I used to play with my friend Joey was that we’d pool together all of our toys/action figures and do a “draft” to determine who was on which team, mine or his. By the time we did the drafts and set up our bases, it was usually time to go in for the night, so we never actually battled. Maybe this is why I like fantasy football so much.) The few times I played house with my sister or any girls I was friends with, spanking never came up, whether we were using toys or acting it out.

I think making action figures do inappropriate things is something that never goes away. About 17 years ago, I used to have a shelf of action figures on my desk at work. I’d taken a week-long vacation, and when I came back someone (I eventually figured out who) had reconfigured all of my action figures to be in sexual positions. It wasn’t until I was almost done undoing them all that I thought to take a picture or two:

And one other interesting thing: when my kid was four, I came downstairs one morning to go to the gym early, before everyone woke up, and I found a couple of her dolls in this position:

She had never been spanked. Maybe it really is genetic… or maybe it’s just coincidence that they got thrown in that particular configuration when it was clean-up time. I guess I’ll never know.