The Territory Within

Few of us have not read or heard of the increasing number of “discipline groups” that flourish behind locked doors, stimulating sexual appetites and often triggering sexual climaxes through the medium of corporal punishment. Imagine, as has Chaucer Cartwright, an entire society which has structured its family, neighborhood, community and state laws to provide corporal punishment, public and private, for all human failures—from simple family discourtesies, through traffic violations, to incivility toward a superior! In this place, referred to only as “the Territory” and never delineated geographically or politically, there is a pecking order within the family group which involves “both cane and pecker,” as Alec Reddick might readily admit.