You're saying that the plot line of "Love Crimes" didn't need the spanking? You've got to be kidding. The release version of "Love Crimes" was a disaster, both with the critics and at the box office. But if you watch the film critically, you'll see that the Sean Young character, an assistant D.A. named Dana Greenaway, was fighting demons in her own personal life at the time she was stalking the bad guy, played by Patrick Bergin.
When he abducts her and holds her captive, she remains the tough, intrepid prosecutor, out to nail this criminal. But when he thwarts her attempt to stab him, Bergin grabs her, puts her over his knee, and gives her what I would call a very realistic spanking, over the knee and by hand. There are exactly 23 swats, all of them visible on screen. Throughout the spanking, Greenaway is screaming, then, towards the end, she begins to cry. Real tears. And she murmurs, "I'm sorry."
Now, although the audience doesn't realize it yet, Dana Greenaway has regressed psychologically to being a submissive little girl. The man takes her and puts her in a soapy bath, then washes her naked body himself, with a father's tenderness. Now Dana has been completely submerged -- not only in the bath water, but her identity has been submerged into that of a meek, dependent little girl.
So what does the MPAA do? Those Nazis at the ratings board slaughtered the film by ordering the spanking scene stricken from the movie... to appease the PC police, no doubt. And in so doing, they robbed the audience of the film's most important catalyst. How to explain the sudden change in Dana's attitude? Certainly not by cutting out the one scene that makes it believeable!
It's even worse than that. If you've taken the trouble to examine the two separate versions of the film -- the R-rated version that made it into the theaters and onto cable TV, plus the "unrated" version available only at video stores -- you'll notice that in the bath sequence there is another critical omission: In the "approved" scene, Bergin's character is absent while Dana bathes, making it appear that she is taking her own bath, instead of being dominated by him as her temporary father figure.
Don't get me wrong, "Love Crimes" is not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination... but it could have been SO MUCH BETTER if the MPAA Nazis had let the director's original vision stand. Oh, how many more great scenes will get hacked to death by these fascists, before Hollywood finally awakes from its overlong PC nightmare?