It is incredibly difficult for me to admit that I have this fantasy. The only way I can do it is to be very clear that it is a fantasy and nothing more. It never happened.

It never could have happened, because it is based on a false premise. For the fantasy to be true, I would have to have had an older brother - and I didn't.

In fact, my lack of an older brother is a major element of my life.

The reality is that I was the oldest of several children. The fact that I was the first born - and a daughter, not a son - was an irritant to my father. It wasn't how he envisioned his family.

As a girl I wasn't - and could never be - my father's eldest son. And yet I was expected to fill the role that he had assigned for his oldest child, the child who was supposed to be a boy. It created a whole host of problems for me - expectations that I could never meet.

To be fair, I put some of it on myself, but I can never really parse out how much of it was my own creation and how much was my parents assignment of a role to me.

For example, I took responsibility for my younger siblings, trying to protect them and keep them from getting in trouble. Of course, my parents held me responsible for their behavior, but I embraced that responsibility and tried to make it work.

I took punishments for them when I could - when I was brave enough. I felt like a coward when I wasn't brave enough and I felt like a failure when I couldn't play the system well enough to get punished in their place.

At night, sometimes I would lay in bed, listening to one of my brothers or sisters being spanked and I would cry into my pillow wishing I could be the one getting it. I hated hearing their cries and the sound of a hand - or the almost-silent sound of the hairbrush - hitting them rhythmically.

The cries would sometimes turn to screams and usually begging: "Please Mommy! PLEASE NO MORE!! OWWWWWW!! I'll be good!" Of course, it was to no avail. That was what she wanted. She wanted to hear the crying and screaming and begging.

At times like that I would pray to God to give me an older brother - and it wasn't just on those nights when I heard them getting spanked. I would wish for him when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake. I would make the same wish when I saw the first star at night, but of course my prayers and wishes were never answered.

So, instead, I imagined him. I created him in a fantasy - an archetypal female rescue fantasy, although I hadn't read Jung and didn't know that at the time.

His name was Tony, probably the most unimaginative name possible in an Italian family, considering that I already had a younger brother named Vincent. But I wasn't all that inventive back then.

I would have done anything for Tony, anything if he would have protected us from Mom and Dad, if he would have protected me and the rest of us in ways that I couldn't. As a boy, as the eldest son, he would be able to "stand up and be a man," which I couldn't do.

Sure, he wouldn't be able to protect me every single time, but he would protect me most of the time, and I would have done anything to make it easier for him. That fantasy would sometimes help me to block out the sounds and pain of the spanking - or at least most of it.

And later, in the deepest part of the night, when the spanking was long over and everyone else was asleep, I would turn over on my tummy, put my hands down there, and I would think more thoughts about my mythical older brother - decadent thoughts - thoughts about the meaning of the "anything" that I would do for him.

In those early morning hours, when my eyes were closed and my hands were beneath me, I knew what "anything" meant. For those times, in the privacy of my mind and body, he became real for me, especially when I was eleven and he would have been thirteen or fourteen. At that age, my hormones were raging. The intensity of my feelings and desires was beyond anything I've experienced before or since.

Instead of Marie or Vinny or one of the others being spanked, it would be Tony who stood in for them. He was a boy and could succeed where I failed. He was brave when I was a coward.

It didn't really matter what he was being punished for. It was never fair anyway so who really cared.

For the worst offenses, Dad would have done the honors. Those are the ones I thought about, not the more frequent punishments that my mother doled out.

We would have been sent to bed while Tony was called into Dad's den. He would have to wait for a while until Dad was good and ready.

Meanwhile, I would get the younger ones ready for bed and tell them that Tony was going to be spanked, and why - that he was protecting them and protecting me so we wouldn't get it. What was about to happen was going to save them from having to experience the terror.

I would tell each of them that they needed to be quiet, and if they heard anything from my bedroom that night, they needed to pretend not to hear. I was going to make Tony feel better after his spanking. If I got caught, I would get it too and Tony would get it again.

They would understand and rush off to bed thankful for their older brother and sister. (Yeah, I had some delusions of grandeur in my fantasies, but give me a break. I was eleven years old).

As I headed back to my room to go to bed, I would hear Dad lecturing Tony for what he had supposedly done wrong - probably something that one of us had actually done, but something for which Tony was taking the blame.

He would have to stand in front of the desk and pull his pants and underwear down. He would bend forward and put his hands flat on the wall behind the desk so that he couldn't protect himself. I had learned in school that boys can't stand up out of that position like girls can. I assumed that was why fathers spanked their sons that way.

Dad would take off his belt, fold it over, and swing it with all his strength on Tony's bare behind, again and again, slowly, every few seconds, much slower than Mom spanked, with a loud slap and Tony crying out in pain on each stroke.

At first they would be bursts, "Ah!", "Ow!" or whatever. But eventually Tony would cry. He would break down and cry like a little boy, humiliating himself.

It would break my heart, knowing how proud he was and how hard it was for him to cry. But he had to cry. The spanking wouldn't stop until long after he cried. That was the way Dad did things.

Dad was much more deliberate than Mom was. Where she was full of anger and driven by emotion, Dad was in control at all times. He calculated his punishments to make sure the "message" got through.

I would listen to Tony's cries and Dad's words and the sound of leather on skin and I would be ripped apart by two compelling instincts. On the one hand, the agony of my native empathy would penetrate every part of my body, amplifying the pain he felt and inflicting it on me.

But at the same time, the sounds - with their innate masculine tone - would penetrate me in a different way. The stern voice of my father, the breaking and suffering of an older brother whom I worshiped, and the sound of slapping leather, those were men's sounds. Those sounds would mind-fuck me, forcing my hands to do their dirty work.