The 1955 committee members' bantering exposed a deep current of shared cultural convictions concerning crucial differences between men's and women's bodies. Furthermore, it raised the issue of who should and who should not witness the infliction of corporal and capital punishment. It was one thing for male guards and prison officials to attend to their distasteful duties but it was out of the question for respectable people, particularly women, to gaze upon the punished body. As Garland observes, ideas about punishment are "enmeshed with wider belief-systems and mentalities, deriving their sense and credibility from their ability to resonate with established ways of thinking and understanding." Conversely, some ideas seem intuitively to be nonsensical or incredible jokes. In this instance, acknowledging the sexual undercurrent of physical punishment was taboo because modern penal mentalities turned (in Eliasian terms) on privatizing disturbing or inappropriately pleasurable events and on preserving containment fields for male and female bodies. Even opponents of whipping felt too uncomfortable to address the possibility that the pain of corporal punishment could be twisted into witnesses' sadistic pleasure.

The Joint Committee members confronted the pornographic qualities of physical punishment again when members debated the prospect of observing an actual whipping.

Ms Anne Shipley, one of three women on the committee, shocked her fellow members when she argued that watching lashes and whips in action would be more instructive than merely gazing at them and listening to prison officials describe them. The warden of the Kingston penitentiary politely declined her request, protesting that the prospect would be "very embarrassing" (to whom, he did not specify).

After so much bantering, it came out that women officers did indeed routinely cane male prisoners.

It was eventually agreed that the ladies would be permitted to observe a series of male prisoners undergo routine demerit canings, and it was arranged for two women officers to administer punishment in the presence of the ladies.

One by one, several male prisoners with excessive demerits tallies for the month were brought out.

The woman officer then pulled down the culprit's underdrawers in full view of the women present, and proceeded to cane his naked buttocks.

Afterward viewing the initial demerit punishments, the ladies, far from being shocked, expressed interest in witnessing further prison canings.