Do You Recognise This Bottom?

Familiar? There can’t be many Spank Statement readers who haven’t seen it before, because it belongs to none other than Maggie Gyllenhaal star of the movie Secretary.

I did a double take when I came across this still from Sherry Baby, because it looks like she’s about to get spanked (again!). Her pose is submissive, and the guy, Danny Trejo, could be preparing to wind up for a swat. I haven’t seen this film, but I presume he’s actually just admiring her rear.

And well worth admiring it is too. After all, it’s arguably the most famous bottom in spanking cinema history. It’s four years since Secretary hit our screens and the repercussions are still reverberating.

In the movie Gyllenhaal plays Lee Holloway who has just been released from a mental institution. To integrate herself back into society (and to escape from her flawed home life), she decides to look for a job.

Luckily, geeky lawyer E. Edward Gray played by James Spader is in need of a secretary. Lee can type and is not pregnant or trying to get pregnant, so she gets the job. Everything goes along beautifully – until she makes a typo. As punishment, Gray bends her over his desk and spanks her in a scene that according to one reviewer ‘is so hot it will require you to shoot a fire extinguisher into your loins.’

So hot in fact that a poll voted this scene the sexiest of all time. Quite a coup for a small independent film about spanking. Can mainstream directors have failed to notice this? We’ve already had 5ive Girls which seemed to want to cash in on the sudden trendiness of spanking. Will there be more such graphic scenes to come in the near future?

It took the director, Steven Shainberg, two years to cast his lead characters. “Every name actress you can think of turned the film down” he said. A series of name actors had also declined to play the sadistic boss including originally James Spader himself. But according to Shainberg, he changed his mind after seeing Gyllenhaal’s audition tape, about which Spader commented:

‘I think I would have quite a time spanking the hell out of her.’

It was also reported that the actress:

‘declined to use a body double, even if the joys of being spanked began to pall by the fifteenth take’.

I rewatched the movie recently and I have to say that one of my favourite scenes is the one where Gyllenhaal takes a hairbrush from a drawer and spanks herself. There’s something so intimate about it. I’d never seen self-spanking depicted in a film before of any kind. I found it touching, amusing and arousing all at the same time.

But Secretary is more than just a kinky love story. It’s also a film about how it’s healthy to seek personal fulfillment, even if society deems your chosen road to fulfillment freakish and wrong.

In an interview Maggie Gyllenhaal summed it up with words that could amount to a rallying call for a BDSM/alternative lifestyle:

I feel like it was saying that it has to be okay for a woman to be able to desire whatever it is she desires, whether or not it fits into the idea of what a feminist or an interesting, smart, powerful woman is supposed to desire.

And Shainberg said:

It is ultimately a love story and a movie to go to with your date. After it you’re going to say, ‘We’re going to have to talk about US. Who do you think is in control of our relationship?’ It wouldn’t surprise me if it encouraged people to experiment sexually. I hope it might make them feel less self-conscious about what they might like.

Now those two quotes are what I would truly call ‘Spank Statements’. But whatever you think about this movie, you have to admit that it was a pleasure to get reacquainted with that beautiful, and very important, bottom once again.