You say deviant like it's a bad thing. Study shows that spanking kids makes them more likely to grow up to be kinky.

You've probably seen a link to this story already, it's being widely made fun of by perves. I would just like to note: I was not spanked as a child. My mother was (and still is) a progressive, New-Age, hippie-type. She was in total charge of our childhood discipline, and she certainly didn't believe in anything as retro as spanking. Neither did she allow us to eat processed sugar - which may have cut down on her need to discipline us - or watch TV, or have war toys, like toy guns, et cetera. Because they encouraged aggression.

This, even though my father was actually an officer in the military until I was six. And he collected guns - real ones. He taught my brother and I how to shoot when I was a kid. And didn't my hippie mom have a fit when she came home from her pottery class and found all three of us in the back yard, blasting away at a target on a tree? I was eleven. I'm thinking if she could spanked my dad for that incident, she would have. (I am often amazed they stayed married as long as they did, really - until I was 17.)

So yes, on the one hand, I have New-Age mom, who gave me time-outs when I was bad, or - when I was older - talked to me about disappointed she was in me. On the other, my ex-military dad, for whom guns are a way of showing affection. Right before I moved from Georgia to Seattle, I went to visit my dad out at his place on the beach. We sat on his porch with the ocean breeze on our faces, and got rather drunk together, and then he squinted at me thoughtfully and said, "So you're really driving all the way across country? You should take this." And after some rummaging through cupboards, he gave me a handgun. It was clearly not new, but he showed me that it was in excellent working order.

"This one, you see - this one is not registered to me. Or anyone, really. So, you know, you could just throw it in a lake or something if you had to."

I had to laugh. I love my dad. He certainly seemed rather conservative when I was a kid. (He worked for IBM, for god's sake.) But he has let some stories slip out over the last few years that show me where my outlaw streak comes from. I suspect it's only the tip of the iceberg, and that my dad is actually far more of a outlaw than I will ever know about. I wonder if thinks the same thing about me?

"So, you're telling me I could shoot someone with this and ditch it and it can't be traced to you? That could be handy. Where'd you get it?"

"Took it off some fella we threw out of the bar one night. Back in Florida." (My dad owned a nightclub when I was a little girl, and I'm told the patrons often got rather boisterous.) "It's been sitting in a drawer all this time, you may as well have it."

"I'm really hoping to avoid having to shoot anyone along the way, Daddy, but thank you."

"Well, yeah. I mean, no. I mean, I'm just telling you. Here's, here's a box of ammunition."

So you can say I have a very equally balanced set of parents, neither of whom spanked me. And yet, here I am, a flaming pervert. And quite happy about it, as a matter of fact. So raise your kids how you think is right. Some of them are going to be kinky anyway.