![]() To McHale’s Navy (1964), with Jesse Jacobs and Susan Silo: In film and television there are memorable instances from The Cowcatcher’s Daughter (1931) with Andy Clyde and Marjorie Beebe… The first task requires only the presentation of a potpourri of examples from a range of different media. What we can do, however, is demonstrate that father/daughter spanking is a widespread trope, then attempt to identify the extent of its historical currency and finally assess its status as a social and cultural norm for at least some of that period. Last time we saw several examples indicating that when a man spanks a girl, he’s undertaking one of the traditional duties of her mother but as Morgan expresses it, in much the same terms, spanking is a paternal job, so that when somebody else does it, they’re being ‘fatherly’.Īnd that, I guess, reinforces the view that it’s best not to over-generalize. When their father (Raymond Walburn) tries to speak up for them, Morgan retorts that it’s mostly his fault: ‘You might have been a good mother, but you’ve been a pretty crummy father.’ His sidekick (Eddie Foy Jr) adds, ‘What those kids need is a strong hand.’ ‘And I know just the spot for it,’ finishes Morgan, and the outcome is as follows: We can glimpse the other half in the buildup to the spanking in the 1944 musical And the Angels Sing, about four sisters who create difficulties for bandleader Happy Morgan (Fred MacMurray) by refusing to perform together, which makes them, as Morgan puts it, ‘four silly brats who don’t know when they’re well off’. We saw last week that it was often presented as a maternal responsibility, but that’s only half the story. Spanking is a privilege that can be taken away as a punishment – implying that, back on Earth, being spanked by her parents is a normal, if unwelcome, fact of a teenage girl’s life, especially if she gets a bad report card. As for parents and their teenage daughters… well, this panel from the December 1961 edition of Adventure Comics tells us what we need to know: In the Superman universe, the Bizarro world is a topsy-turvy planet where all human norms are inverted: postmen bark at dogs, lawyers try to get their clients into jail and nobody, but nobody, wants ever to suffer the dreadful fate of becoming rich and famous.
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