The Club - Meeting #386 - Others

“A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.” ― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.  I hope you had a good week.  

 

 

I’m still really loving this time of year.  The trees have mostly turned where we live, and morning walks with the dogs have taken on a whole new luster. Also, is it just me, or did people put up Halloween decorations much earlier this year?  It seems like the Halloween holiday used to be a pretty time-bound event, with decorations staying up for only a few days around October 31^st.  This year, however, in our neighborhood a whole slew of people put outdoor decorations up on October 1^st or thereabouts.  Personally, I love that it and hope people do the same next year. 

 

We have not, however, been invited to any live Halloween events this year – perhaps such gatherings are still victims of Covid restrictions?  We also don’t have many people in our social circle who are into the kind of social events that could make Halloween even more fun as an adult that it was as a kid.

 

 I’m sorry for not posting again last week.  I was busy with some other stuff over the weekend, though in the interests of full disclosure, I also just did not have much interest in posting anything DD-related.  It isn’t uncommon for me to lose all interest in DD and blogging, but it seems like the cycles used to last longer.  I would be intensely interested for many weeks but then might hit a month-long dry spell. This year, it seems like I’m interested for a week or two then completely lose interest for a week.  Part of the issue may be that I simply don’t need DD as much right now, in two related senses. About this time last year, I hit what may have been a big inflection point where dysfunctional behavior was concerned.  I was coming of a hugely stressful period at work, then started setting the stage for a major career transition, and thanks to Covid it was a rare day that someone didn’t schedule a virtual happy in order to foster a continuing sense of “team” while everyone was working from home.  I also was dealing with a painful, chronic health issue.  It all added up to frequent bad behavior that meant I needed DD in the sense of I richly deserved it.  And, since my particular DD interest is heavily driven by accountability and exceeding boundaries, my subjective, internal need for DD and the structure it imposes also was running high. Now, however, the converse is true.  My behavior is WAY better than it was this time last year, so she feels less need to initiate any kind of correction, and I’m not doing nearly as many bad things that would result in me wanting to be held accountable.  Unfortunately, that also sometimes translates into a declining interest not just in DD but in DD blogging.  Anyway, we’ll just have to see how that develops over time.

 

I hope that you all have been tracking some of the developments in ZM’s relationship, particularly that (a) his wife opened up more or less fully to a friend that he is spanked and that it is discipline, not kink; and (b) there is a real prospect of him being spanked in front of a witness at some point.  It has been feeding into him being, as he describes it, “almost obsessive about wanting someone to know about” his DD activities.

 

I definitely understand being obsessed about DD and/or certain DD topics.  When I first discovered the Disciplinary Wives Club, it became an instant obsession, as did telling my wife about it.  After we started experimenting with it, I was probably still feeling some of that obsession when I told one of our mutual friends about it. 

 

 

I don’t think I have quite ZM’s level of obsession with witnesses and others knowing, but I do feel some of it and certainly commiserate with him on how that kind of obsession can drive you. Thinking through some of the issues he’s raised recently, it occurred to me that for me, others knowing has a stronger emotional force than others witnessing.

 

For example, I get very turned on my art that depicts someone seeing or commenting on the after-effects of a hard spanking, but not so much by someone witnessing the spanking itself.

 

 

I also have a thing for a spanking being heard, though not necessarily seen, and even more so to art or pictures that depict or suggest the recipient telling someone that they got spanked, perhaps as an additional part of the punishment.

 

    

I'm not sure why I have more of a reaction to scenes where some third-party knows about a spanking but doesn't necessarily witness it.  Maybe it’s as simple as, sometimes less is more where erotic visual stimuli are concerned.  I’ve always gotten more turned on by pictures of partially or almost nude women than I do at more open displays of full nudity.

 

I also suspect that this may be one of the few areas in which my current interest in DD and spanking may be related to things from childhood.  Corporal punishment was very open in the culture when I was growing up, yet I only really recall witnessing a single spanking.  Given how prevalent it was, I probably did witness a few others, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if others witnessed me being spanked, but I don’t have any memory of it. 

 

What I do remember is knowing that friends or cousins were being spanked or were about to be or just had been.  I don’t really recall hearing those spankings, but I remember being very aware of them.  Hell, for the longest time I thought that the whole purpose of a “cry room” in church was to give the parents a place to take unruly kids for a quick, efficient spanking. So, I think that for me it was the contemporaneous awareness of spanking discipline that was both a deterrent to bad behavior and a source of morbid curiosity.

 

While thinking about ZM’s current situation, a somewhat new angle on the whole topic of others knowing did occur to me.  While for me it doesn't really rise to the level of an obsession, I do get the perverse, almost morbid curiosity that underlies our interest in witnesses and others knowing. Plainly, many are interested in thinking or fantasizing about it.  Yet, very few ever act on the desire to bring their status as disciplined husbands (or disciplinary wives) more out into the open.  Why is that, do you think?

 

Assuming that you are, like most of us, more or less closeted where your DD relationship is concerned, what is it that holds you back from letting others know? Is there a specific social or professional stigma that leads you to keep it secret from most others?  Are there particular people or groups of people that you are most concerned about finding out?  Why? What do you think would happen if those people were to find out?  Would there be big ramifications, or do we over-estimate how much anyone would really care?

For me, my biggest concern about others knowing was seemingly very practical.  I was in a very conservative, traditional, and competitive profession.  I believed then, and I believe now, that there would have been professional blowback if my status as a disciplined husband were widely known in the office or to others I had to interact with professionally and often in competitive situations.  Also, for a long time I had in the back of my mind that I might run for public office sometime or go for a job that might require a security clearance, and I was pretty sure how something like being outed as a spanking blogger might impact those kinds of opportunities.

 

The thought of family members knowing also makes me squirm and, again, I’m not sure why.  I recall seeing one of my sisters get spanked, yet I would never want her to know I am spanked as an adult (though, in fairness, we don’t have much of an ongoing relationship).   

 

Somewhat similarly, my mother obviously knows I have been spanked, because when I was a kid she did the spanking.  Yet, I would be very embarrassed if she found out I am now spanked as an adult, even if she probably has a lot of insight into how my temperament and behavior might lead my wife to relish taking on that role.   

Finally, I am probably most resistant to male friends knowing, though that one I at least understand a bit. With them, it’s not just a fear of being rejected or scorned but, rather, we don’t really talk about anything related to our sex lives or anything very intimate about our marriages, so it would seem odd to have spanking be the one such thing that was out on the table.

 

 

Will Anne ever tell others? Honestly, I don’t know.  She doesn’t seem to have any friends who would be likely confidantes on that kind of thing, and so far she has never expressed any particular interest in letting others know.  If anything, she is more resistant to the idea than I am.  But, if there is one thing I’ve learned about these relationships it is, as ZM is learning now, never say never.

 

I hope you all have a great week.

No New Post Again

 

Hi all. Happy Monday.  I'm sorry, but this is likely to be another "no post" week.  I have some family commitments going on and, honestly, I'm suffering from an acute lack of DD topic inspiration.

I did want to address one comment from Alan that reminded him of the below meme that I saw recently. Alan observed: "Has anyone noticed that the world has all gone to hell – at the exact same time that I.T. has begun to take over the world? I know that correlation is not causation –but still…"  The meme seems to suggest the proliferation of I.T resources, including the internet, may not be the problem. 

No Post This Week

 

Hi all.  I don't think I'm going to get around to posting this week.  While it's not quite time for Halloween cookies . . .

 

 

I love this time of year, and there's just too much to do out there in the Autumn air to spend any of the available time blogging.  Please feel free to keep last week's conversation going.

The Club - Meeting 385 - Alternative Punishments

"Obedience of the law is demanded; not asked as a favor.” - Theodore Roosevelt

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.  I hope you had a good week.

 

Here, it's finally starting to feel like Fall has arrived, which makes me happy.  Red and yellow foliage.  Crisp morning air.  Oktoberfest and all that entails.

 

 

Mine was sort of – meh.  Not a lot happening, good or bad.  That in itself is kind of a problem.  Work used to keep so busy, I didn’t have time for much else, and I fantasized about all those things I’d do if I had more time. Now I have more time, yet I’m finding I still don’t get all that much done on an average day.  It’s amazing how much time gets chewed up with a few dog walks, working out, mowing the grass, running a few errands, etc. I’m finding that in some ways, leisure and adventure actually require more proactivity, more planning, than work ever did.  At work, a lot of my daily activity just kind of happened, and many of my priorities were set for me.  Leisure and adventure, by contrast, happen only with some actual effort to overcome inertia and get out of the status quo.

 

  

It was a good discussion last week. Though, there were times it seemed like people were talking past each other.  Part of it may be fault.  Perhaps I should have defined “zero tolerance,” but given the context of the specific questions—which all focused on whether particular issues are or might be punished without exception—I didn’t really think I needed to. Yet, I got the impression some commenters were focused on zero tolerance not with respect to a particular issue but, rather, as punishing anything and everything and, on that basis, objected to the whole concept.  Others focused on timing, i.e. not putting off a spanking when “real life” intercedes, though that seems to me to be a separate issue.

 

Personally, although I fully agree that zero tolerance can’t and probably shouldn’t be applied to all issues, I still think it may have a constructive role to play with respect to particular behaviors or failures that are particularly important to the disciplinarian or the recipient.  I got to thinking about it a few days before writing last week’s post because I was frustrated with myself over one particular ongoing behavior issue.  Actually, it really is one single aspect of one behavior, but it’s one that always seems to have an outsized negative influence.  It got me thinking that while I have a lousy record addressing some big issues, it may be possible to zone in on that one aspect of the issue that causes most of the problems or, more precisely, to ask Anne for additional focus—to the point of zero-tolerance—on that one sliver of the overall behavior.  It’s basically the Domestic Discipline version of the “80/20 Rule,” which I can characterize from a couple of different angles, namely “80% of my problems extend from 20% of my behavior” or “80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts.”

 

In the midst of talking about all this, ZM unknowingly suggested this week’s topic:

 

"And others have mentioned the difficulty of making punishments happen in the midst of busy lives, lack of privacy, etc. I think the answer to this could be found by exploring the use of alternative punishments as necessary. "There is going to be a consequence, and I can't spank you now or soon, so instead...""

 

As I noted, in the past probably the only topic we've talked about here that seems to meet more resistance than "zero tolerance" is “alternative punishments.”  I’ve never quite understood why, though it may be as simple as many of our commenters are highly into spanking and  only somewhat tangentially into discipline writ large.  Well, be that as it may, I’m going to give it another try.

 

In her comments last week, Danielle described an incident in which Wayne kept talking over her and their dinner guests, to the point that she had finally had it with him.  In her words: 

 

“I lost it because Wayne had ignored so many previous warnings . . . I made a real scene, yelling at Wayne for about a solid minute. At the end of my rant, Wayne was red faced and speechless. The other couple were dumbstruck too.  . . . Once we were alone, I ordered Wayne to pull down his pants, and I gave him several licks with the heavy strap, swinging it with the full force of my anger. Then I sent him to bed in the guest room.

 

While it could fall under a topic of “lecturing” or “scolding,” I also see Danielle’s “scene” in front of witnesses as a form of alternative punishment. (Or, since she spanked him too, perhaps in this case it would be categorized as “complementary” form of punishment.) And, it was a form of punishment that not only worked but seemed to work better than the spanking.  Glenmore concurred: “I agree with you 100% Dan, my wife scolding me in front of our friends was way more effective than a spanking to cure me of this habit, although the threat of a spanking still adds more weight to it.”

 

Like ZM, I’ve always been intrigued by alternatives to spanking.  I think there are two primary reasons for that interest. First, I see them as a kind of “zero tolerance” or “whatever it takes” tool that a wife could keep in her arsenal of spanking isn’t getting the job done.   

 

 

Second, as readers here know, I’ve always had a thing for “maternal” discipline, and many of the most common options for we talk about for “alternative” punishments coincidentally are those some of us experienced as kids. In fact, Danielle did a great job of summarizing some of them when responding to one of my posts about maternal discipline several months ago:

 

So, WHAT IF Anne pushed the adult/minor dynamic to its logical conclusion. She has already taken a step in that direction by assigning you chores and warning you not to forget to lock the doors under threat of being spanked. But if she really wants to exercise her authority in a “maternal” way, I think she should consider deploying the full range of disciplinary tools adults employ with minors. In other words, in addition to spankings, she could consider consequences like grounding, loss of privileges, early bedtimes, etc. She could also consider limiting your personal discretionary spending by putting you on an allowance which could be suspended for disciplinary purposes as she deems appropriate. She could impose curfews and require you to get her permission if you wanted to go out for drinks after work. From what you have said previously, I believe you would find those auxiliary measures more truly humbling and embarrassing than simply having your bottom paddled.

 

Let’s push the parent/minor analogy a step farther. If you were really a minor, there would be no reason for Anne to hide her authoritarian status from other people. So, if I was Anne, I would probably let some select group of people (maybe certain friends or family members) in on the secret that she wields real authority over you and expects you to obey her. Speaking to you in an authoritative way in the presence of certain people would certainly humble you, wouldn’t it? Then, if the people were curious, that could lead on to her revealing to them that she disciplines you, and maybe even to spanking you in front of a willing witness, as others have suggested.

 

So, with one comment from months ago, Danielle hit on a whole bunch of issues relevant to last week and this week’s topics and others that have come up a lot lately: doing what it takes to effect the change you want; public displays of authority; letting others know about the disciplinary relationship; and, a nice list of punishments that might complement spankings or be an alternative to them if the spankings aren’t working.

 

 

Are there non-spanking punishments you use or that are used on you?  Are there particular offenses they are used for?  Do they work as well as spankings?  Perhaps better?  Are there particular punishments you haven’t used or experience but would like to explore?

 

Have a great week.

The Club - Meeting 384 - Zero Tolerance

"He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else." ― Benjamin Franklin

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.

 

I hope you all had a great week. Mine was, in a word, boring. I had this vision that, once work was less of an issue, all these other interests would arise and really bloom.  So far, it’s not really working out that way, and last week I found myself spending way too much time bingeing television shows (though, to be fair, TV is pretty damn good these days.  Did you watch the Emmys?  Go Ted Lasso!) and reading books I’ve read before.  I’m not sure what’s going on. The Zen, spiritual side of my brain tells me that I just need to ride it out; that maybe after a couple of decades of being crazy busy, I need to really experience boredom before I can move on from it.  The other side of my brain says this is no way to live and that I need to get off my lazy ass and do something. 

 

 

We did have a good discussion last week about tears, though it seemed to draw less interest than I thought it might.  Maybe it’s one of those topics that fascinate me but not that many others, or it may be that it’s a topic that’s hard to hit from a truly new angle.  In any event, for those who are interested in getting to--or bringing about—tears, the comments seemed to suggest two factors were paramount:

• the wife letting the husband know she wants him to cry; and
• a spanking of sufficient duration that he believes it will never end and, as a result, finally just surrenders to it.

While I’m going to move on to a different topic for this week, I’m happy to keep talking about “tears” if anyone has any additional thoughts.

 

This week’s topic came up because of a little personal failure I had over the weekend.  I won’t go into details, and it wasn’t a huge problem, but it involved telling myself I’d show some self-control in a particular area, but then I just failed to do it.  Again, it wasn’t a big deal in the scheme of things, but it just gets old when the same old temptations win out time and time again.  It occurred to me that maybe the only way to motivate myself to deny such a temptation when it is presented is – zero tolerance. 

 

 

In fifteen years of doing DD, we’ve never really had a “zero tolerance” issue.  I thought for a while that her issue with failing to lock doors when I left might become one, then she let a couple of incidents slide.  Interestingly, while I often bemoan my lack of willpower, I have successfully imposed a few “zero tolerance” rules on myself.  The example with the most staying power is tobacco.  In high school and college, I was a regular smoker and user of tobacco, and nicotine was my one and only true physical addiction.  I tried to quit several times, and a few times I succeeded for a few weeks. But, I always started again.  When I finally quit, I went cold turkey, and in thirty years I’ve never had another cigarette.  I just can’t.  I know myself well enough, if I had one cigarette on a special occasion, a week later I would be having “just one” a day, then one would become three, then three would become a pack a day habit.

 

I’m not sure “zero tolerance” needs to be for big things, like ending a tobacco addiction.  It seems like it might even work better for small things (like locking doors?), that don’t really involve deeply rooted habits or personal identity issues but are, instead, things that are somewhat important to one or both spouses but are not (yet) front of mind for the offender.

 

 

A few weeks ago we talked about severity and consistency, and everyone seemed to concur that most of the Disciplinary Wives exercise a fair amount of discretion in determining whether any particular offense should be punished. Sometimes they choose to just let things slide, even if some some bit of bad behavior is agreed to be “spankable.” 

 

On the other hand, are there some behaviors that are treated with zero (or very little) tolerance? That result in a spanking every single time?  If there is such an issue in your DD relationship, is it an issue that is important to her, or to you, or one that you both agree should be punished every time?   If she doesn’t treat any issue with such little tolerance, do you wish she would?

 

 

I hope you all have a great week.

The Club - Meeting 383 - Tears

"I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.” - Charles Dickens from Great Expectations

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships. I hope you all had a great week.

 

 

Mine was pretty good, though not without some spanking-related angst. In my last post, I related a recent incident in which Anne spanked me for not locking doors and closing the dog door when I left the house.  As I discussed, I was sore for several days. Though, apparently, not quite sore enough to get the message across fully.   A couple of days after that spanking, I ended up having to leave the house unexpectedly for a quick overnight trip to cover something that neither Anne nor I had on our calendars.  I dropped whatever I was doing, packed an overnight bag, and headed out.  In doing so—I’m sure you all know where this is going—I forgot about the dog door, again.  When I got home, she sent me a text with picture of the open door. My heart jumped, because my ass really was very, very sore from the last session.  Well, as it turned out, I somehow avoided the spanking I was sure I had coming, though she did comment on it at least once during the week.  And, to cap it off, near the end of the week, I left in the middle of the day and left the front door unlocked.

 

 

Now, one could surmise that I just didn’t take the first spanking seriously, but that’s really not the case.  Sometimes, it just takes a while for an unwanted but somewhat unconscious behavior to become “front and center” in your conscious mind.  My favorite story on the DWC website is Even More, which describes a couple getting started with DD. The husband asks the wife to try such a relationship, they agree to a list of offenses, and he promptly forgets to comply with the rule against leaving the toilet seat up, resulting in his very first bare-bottomed disciplinary spanking. 

 

When his wife brings the offense to his attention and orders a spanking, his first reaction is to try to talk to his way out of it, objecting that he had been distracted and just forgot about the new rule. While understandable, she doesn’t let him off the hook. Honestly, that was kind of how I felt about both offenses this week, though the first was more defensible than the second.  The first really did involve something where I rushed out to cover something that neither of us saw coming, and I left only the dog door open, not the front door.  I really felt like I had rushed out to cover something that I hadn’t even known about, so the oversight was understandable.  But, on the other hand, it’s also simply a fact that she is plainly making this one of her priorities, and I am going to have to figure out a way to remember it or risk back-to-back spankings.

 

 

It’s one of those things that kind of brings home the reality of an FLR or “real” DD relationship.  I handed over authority to her. She is now starting to exercise it and doing so on an issue that is important to her but not to me.  But, I can either choose to get on board with her priorities or get a painful spanking until I do so.  I really do have a sense of my autonomy being curtailed in a significant way. And, it’s bringing to the fore the classic contradiction of DD from the disciplined husband’s perspective – I don’t really like being told what to do; I hate being spanked, and I really hate being spanked on an already sore bottom; but, her exercising her authority in a way that I’m not fully aligned with makes that exercise of pure power all the more erotic.

 

Anyway . . . on to this week’s topic.  It’s an offshoot of something ZM brought a couple of weeks ago, noting:

 

By the way, one of the most interesting things I have noticed is that we have had openness as a theme or at least a subtheme for quite a bit of the last year. It keeps coming back. Yet even so, we keep finding new angles on it, like last week it was kind of how it might affect the witnessing party. It makes we think we could take almost any topic, like tears, and go for a lot longer than you would expect before running out of new insights.

 

It is interesting just how often our discussion spins off into various tangents regarding openness and others knowing about our DD lifestyles.  It’s clearly a topic that holds a lot of fascination—morbid or otherwise—for our little group.  I don’t have anything else to say about it this week, though I did coincidentally come across this Paula Meadows drawing on the subject.  The look on recipient’s face is priceless!

 

 

But, while I’m happy to continue to talk about openness to the extent people have something new to say about it, instead of trying to come up with something new to say about it myself, I’d like to take up the other repeat topic that ZM called out – tears. 

 

As long-time readers know, this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart.  In fact, when I try to put my finger on what exactly it was about The Disciplinary Wives Club that hit me so hard, I’ve always thought it was the prevalence of tears in so much of the advice and in so many of the stories.  For example, in her Tips & Methods section, Aunt Kay advised:  

 

When handling discipline issues be firm but fair, strict, demanding, aloof and unyielding. Don't be afraid to degrade and humiliate, and above all, when that bare bottom is turned upside down across your knee waiting for the paddle or hairbrush, don't disappoint him. When you let him up, his eyes should be wet with tears, his knees should be quivering, and it should be obvious by looking at his bottom that he is displaying the marks left after a GOOD session.

 

Similarly, in the very first fiction story on the website, at the beginning of their very first disciplinary spanking the wife announces:

 

Now this is going to hurt more than you can imagine. I am going to give you a much longer and harder spanking than any you have ever had. I won't stop until you are crying, but don't worry. I won't stop when you start crying.

 

Then, this interaction during the course of that first spanking:

 

"Now be a good boy and don't try to resist. It will be better for you if you don't. " Smack, whap, whack, the spanking continued, and I began to cry, I mean really cry; I had been begging for mercy for several minutes, but now I was in tears. "Good boy" I heard, "You are crying. I like that. " Becky continued to spank me, it seemed harder than before. I wasn't resisting anymore. I was lying over her knee, accepting what she felt must be given without movement or plea. I don't know how much later it was, perhaps two or three minutes of continuous spanks, until she finally stopped.

 

Then, there was this from the story titled Even More, written by our own regular commenter, Al:

 

David was lost to all but the searing, burning pain of the wood against his skin. He had tried to be strong and resist it, but it was too much. Finally he gave into it. Tears turned to sobs as the paddle continued its seemingly unending dance across his severely tormented bottom.

 

And as David began to sob, Susan decided he had learned what a real spanking was all about. She knew this had been his fantasy, and she also knew that he was surely shocked by the reality of what he had asked for. His bottom was a solid red, spotted with purple bruises. He had kicked and screamed, begged for her to stop, and now was sobbing openly. Certainly, he must have had no idea of the truth behind his fantasy.

 

Now, these stories appear under the Fiction section of the DWC website.  I don’t know how prevalent spanking is in “real life” but here are the stats I got in response to a question I put in a 2018 poll (before Blogger got rid of its polling feature) about commenters’ experiences with crying from a disciplinary spanking:

 

I have not but want to:                                            46%

I have not and do not want to:                                12%

I have but only a few tears:                                    17%

I have, including crying hard or sobbing:               22%

 

For the fifteen or so years that we have been doing Domestic Discipline, I have been among those 46% who have not cried but want to.  Or, at least, I think I want to.  As I said, I think the prospect of crying was probably the most significant driver of the emotional reaction I had when I first discovered the Disciplinary Wives Club. Although those stories undeniably did turn me on, it was WAY more than that and far more complicated.  Stories of men being brought to tears over their wives’ knees fascinated me, but it was morbid fascination.  Those stories left me with butterflies in my stomach, though that is a huge understatement.  I couldn't sleep.  I could think of little else. It really was an obsession, and one I felt like I had to act on.  And, the decision to bring it to her attention was one of the most nerve-wracking I’ve ever made because, as I said in response to a comment last week, unlike the character in the Even More story, I didn’t try to pass it off to my wife as just some titillating bit of kink I’d stumbled across.  While I’m sure my words wandered all over the place, I think I was reasonably clear that this was something I was asking her to seriously consider doing. In so doing, I was absolutely cognizant that I was asking for something that might result in a very humbling spanking, one that might involve breaking down into real tears.  In fact, I was naïve enough at the time to think that my spankings would be exactly like those fictional DWC spankings and that, once taken over her knee, I would at some point surrender to the pain and to her authority and dissolve into heaving sobs. It scared me like nothing else ever had, or has since.

 

Yet, here we are so many years later, and I still have not cried, even during spankings that plainly fall into the "severe" range.  So, while I think the intensity of the spanking matters, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. What are the other pieces? Here are a few thoughts. 

 

 

First, the last time we addressed tears as a topic ZM made the point that he got there after a spanking in which his wife more or less announced that she wanted to make it happen.  It does seem to me that it is far more likely to happen if the wife has announced that she wants it to.  Her verbalizing it may be important for a couple of reasons. First, if you’ve been conditioned for some time to accept her authority, I think you are more likely to cry in direct response to that authority being expressly aligned with the goal of bringing you to tears.  Second, I would think that her making some pronouncement about it in advance would relieve concerns you might have about whether seeing you cry might scare her off of the entire arrangement.

 

Second, and relatedly, is the role of embarrassment.  The above quote from Aunt Kay makes it clear that, in order to serve its purpose, a spanking probably should be embarrassing. Yet, I have no doubt that the prospect of being really embarrassed is one reason I resist crying.  I have to think that a wife announcing she wants you to cry has to take at least some of the edge off the prospect of embarrassment, or at least would make it subservient to the fact that she wants you to cry, even if that does entail wanting you to experience the embarrassment that goes along with having your bottom blistered for bad behavior.

 

 

Third, I have become more and more convinced over time that severity/intensity of the swats is probably a very distant second to duration when it comes to getting a husband to really surrender to the spanking and to the whole situation in a way that will open him up to tears.  As ZM related after the first time his wife brought him to tears:

 

I don't think she punished harder than usual, but certainly longer, and plus she had said before that the next punishment would certainly result in tears, so I think she set the stage for it and that helped me to get into the proper state of mind. Anyway, the tears took it to a whole new level of "real" feeling for us.

 

As I said, fifteen years into this DD relationship, I have never cried.  So, I don’t hold myself out as an expert on tears or how one might bring it about.  I also don’t have a more focused topic in mind than whatever thoughts any of you may have on crying and tears.

 

Finally, one housekeeping matter.  Google must have implemented some technical change in its spam detection algorithms, and it seems to be more than a little klugy.  Some comments are being flagged as spam even though they are from identified commenters, and often with other comments from that same commenter let through with no problem.  There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason for why a particular comment ends up in the spam folder, and Blogger doesn’t give any notice when a comment has been identified as spam and is in the folder awaiting review.  So, if you try to comment and it doesn’t post right away, chances are it was flagged as spam.  Hopefully, Blogger will fix the problem soon, but in the meantime I’ll try to check the spam folder more regularly.

 

 

The Club - Meeting 382 - Her Direction, FLR, etc.

Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships. I hope you all had a great week.

 

Mine was pretty sedate compared to the preceding week. Of course, that one had both set a high bar and required some significant recovery time.  One thing did happen this week, however, that illustrates some points we talked about last time. 

  

Last week, I talked about a little solo adventure I went on earlier in the week,  Something I didn’t talk about was a text I got from my wife the night before.  As background, I had been in a little bit of a hurry the morning before my adventure, packing up and generally getting ready to take off to where I would be staying overnight. In the process, I forgot to lock the front door to our house. I took the dogs with me, but failed to shut the dog door to our backyard as well.  My wife had a work event that evening, so she came home to a dark house, with two unlocked points of potential entry, and no dogs around to guard the place.  She was furious and sent me a text saying she would be spanking me as soon as I got home from my adventure.

 

 

Now, she and I look at these home security issues from very different perspectives.  She sees her reaction as a matter of carefulness and prudence.  I see her caution about personal security as borderline paranoia.  Yet, given that she is the one wielding the paddle in our relationship, and having a virtually unlimited charter to do so for whatever offenses she chooses, in the end her view is the only one that really matters.

True to her word, shortly after I got home, she took down my pants, took me over her knee, and gave me a long, hard spanking with her new favorite bath brush, after lecturing me about locking the door whenever I leave the house.

 

This was a concrete example of the difference between a rules-based approach to DD and a relationship-based approach.  We’ve never really had a rule about locking doors or home security.  So, it is not true that I consented in advance to that particular offense being “spankable.”  Rather, from the beginning I’ve been clear that from my perspective, she has the authority to use her judgment and to, in effect, create rules on the fly.

 

 

It also illustrates an area in which I disagreed a bit with something in this comment from Danielle:

 

In the case of my husband, the fantasy is more than a tool. I don’t think DD would work with him in the absence of the fantasy. He accepts discipline that is “completely genuine and real” because he has a craving for the fantasy to BE real. I see the kind of DD that Dan talks about as quite different. If a man asks his wife to spank him in order to reach behavioral objectives he sets for himself, he isn’t “submitting” to discipline the same way my husband does. It’s more like self-discipline with the help of his wife. It seems to me that Dan’s concept of DD shouldn’t be that embarrassing if properly understood. But maybe some people would have difficulty understanding why spanking, which seems inherently humiliating, would be the preferred form of discipline if there is no sexual thrill involved.

 

My quibble with the quote was only to the extent it implied that my interest in DD is only about my own self-improvement goals and remedying my self-identified failures.  Yes, it is about that, but from the beginning she’s had a much wider charter.  She just hasn’t really chosen to use it much before now.  From the very beginning, I saw DD as addressing some recurring issues with my behavior, but also about equalizing power balance by empowering her and disempowering me.  It’s true that the main driver for me at first was probably around the idea of being held accountable, with real punishment for real offenses.  But, I didn’t give a lot of thought to who defined the offenses and that I might be held accountable for an offense that I didn’t really agree merited punishment.  It wasn’t that I thought our arrangement wouldn’t include those kinds of ad hoc rules that she determined on her own. Rather, things just kind of moved in a direction in which the things that got punished were things we both had agreed were problems.

 

Yet, I wonder now whether the idea of being punished for things I did not see as problems or priorities was always part of the attraction.  Over the years, when I thought about the Disciplinary Wives Club and how it inspired me, I did tend to think about it in terms of rules and punishments and accountability, but no so much as about role definitions and gender-based power structures.  Yet, when I looked back at some of the stories on it a few weeks ago, a significant number of them do have a very FLR-like vibe.  In fact, the first two stories in the Fiction Stories section have some very FLR-heavy themes.  In those two related stories, the wife imposes the disciplinary relationship on her husband. His first spanking comes after his wife decides to spank him for leering at a friend’s legs.  He isn’t given any choice (or not much of one beyond passive submission to her decision) about accepting the new form of relationship; he doesn’t play any role in deciding whether his conduct was punishable, and it’s clear he won’t be given much of one in the future; and, part of her authority includes letting him be spanked by other women if she so chooses.  A few excerpts: 

[From “Pretty Legs I and II” stories]

“Lowering myself across my wife's lap is one of the most difficult things I have ever done, especially since I knew that this would be the first of many spankings and that as of that evening, our relationship would be completely changed.  After I was over her knee, she began:’As I said before, I shall discipline you whenever and however I choose; when decisions are to be made, discussion will be permitted, but once I say that the discussion is over, you will be very well advised not to try to continue it. Do you understand?’ I heard myself saying, ‘Yes, honey’ and was told that during my punishment sessions I was to address her as ‘Ma'am. ‘Yes, Ma’am' I said.”

[After his first spanking was over, his wife had a phone call with the friend he had leered at, who had been the one to recommend spanking for discipline]

“Oh, and in case you didn't hear my discussion with Glenda on the phone; when we go over there tomorrow evening for you to apologize, if she wishes to spank you too, you had better not object and embarrass me. As a DWC woman, and my friend, if she wants to punish you, she has my blessing.  On the way to the bedroom Becky said "I told you your life was going to change, and after tonight there are going to be a lot of changes. Honey, believe me this will be good for both of us and it will make our great relationship even stronger.”

 [As she is taking him to see the friend who he had leered at, a few days after his first spanking . . .]

We walked out to the car and Becky surprised me by walking to the driver's side. She waited with a frown on her face until it dawned on me that I had better open her door for her. Without a word, I went to the passenger's side. Becky smiled, ‘You learn very quickly, dear. From now on I shall do the driving and you will sit right where you are. I'm glad to see you are adjusting to seeing me as the boss, and as your disciplinarian. You do see it that way, don't you?’ Her clear blue eyes showed steely resolve. My mouth was dry as I replied ‘Yeah, Becky, you are the boss in our home.’ She chuckled, ‘And?' she asked. For an instant I did not know what she wanted, then I said, "And that is the way it should be." She raised an eyebrow, and I added, ‘And that is the way I want it.’ She put the car in gear as she said, ‘That's a good boy. When we get to Glenda's house she is going to punish you and I want you to cooperate well. Remember, whatever she decides to do, she has my blessing.’” 

Now, in real life, there are a lot of elements that, if conveyed by a new commenter here, would make me call “likely bullshit” on the story, including: (a) the wife initiating the DD relationship; (b) the wife moving quickly into the Head of Household status with little experience or learning process; and (c) the all-too-easy and cavalier bringing of others into the relationship.  Whenever a new commenter here starts telling tales that sound a lot like the above, my first reaction is there is a 99% chance they are full of shit.  But, like I said, on the DWC website the story is plainly labeled as fictional.  And, while I prefer other stories there like Even More, because I think they are more true to life, the fact is that many of the stories involve a bilateral process in which the husband is humbled and disempowered, while the woman discovers a previously unknown, or at least unrevealed, penchant for leadership.

 

The first night I told Anne about finding the DWC website, I specifically told her that I envisioned DD as a way of her gaining confidence and exploring her own power. Over the years, I think that did happen to a significant extent, but it’s really been only over the last year or so that it really seems to be taking on a life of its own.  Her punishing me last week for something that was an issue to her and not to me, is only one reflection of her moves in that direction, but it is a significant one and an instance of her really exploring her power and authority.

 

Have a great week.

 

The Club - Meeting 381 - Inevitability, Openness, Etc.

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be." -- Lao Tzu

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships. I hope you all had a great week.

 

Mine was an odd combination.  Grueling. Exhausting. Life affirming. Centering.  A little more on that later.

 

That was a great conversation last week.  I like it when our group gets into a genuine conversation and takes things in a lot of different directions.  Indeed, it’s kind of what I hoped for when I decided to try to become a little less topic focused.  The conversation just seems to work better when it’s more like riffing on a theme, just kind of throwing out some thoughts and seeing where it goes.

 

On the public aspect of punishment, Caged Lion noted that people are uncomfortable with just about any level of public punishment or even rebuke.

 

It's the act of disciplining someone. I think it is uncomfortable for people to witness scolding. No matter what your personal beliefs, watching punishment isn't necessarily comfortable for spectators. 

 

 

ZM didn’t disagree but he noted some of the benefits of public punishment, or at least public knowledge a punishment was or would be delivered.  He related this to school punishments, noting: ZM

 

Public punishment wasn't uncommon for much of recorded history, and at times it was even a source of morbid entertainment. Going back to the school punishments, I think that the whole system benefited from the discomfort that everyone felt when someone was sent to the office; even those who were amused were a little jarred by it knowing that it might be them next.

 

[As an aside, ZM and I both seem to be quite attracted to school punishments, even though (and perhaps because) we were more bystanders than participants.  Interestingly, I did get sent to the principals office a few times assuming that I would get paddled, only to go back to the classroom with an unspanked bottom. I guess I was good at talking my way out of consequences even back then.]

 

I agree that the openness of punishment growing up did seem to create a kind of collective deterrent effect in which the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. And, I can’t help but wonder whether we all are now are reaping what we’ve sown with our aversion to discipline in general and certainly to any kind of public shaming.  Fights breaking out on airplanes and in airports at unprecedent levels. Parents and patrons at stores feeling free to rip masks off the faces of teachers and employees.  Really unprecedented levels of public rudeness. I really do wonder how much of this can be traced back to a couple of generations in which unfettered freedom is emphasized over discipline and public decorum and where there is seldom any serious public shaming for bad behavior.

 

 

While I share the group’s ambivalence about openness and public shaming, it seems to be pretty hard to deny that it might be darned effective at actually changing behavior.  ZM noted how embarrassing it would be for acquaintances to know about our punishments:

 

For me the thought of guys knowing, especially friends, is generally harder than the thought of women knowing, but I am not sure exactly why that is. Also, it is interesting that in general I think it would be easier to tell guys that I was grounded (though she has never done that), and it would be easier to tell women that I was spanked. I am not sure why this is, and in fact only realized it as I was sitting here writing.

 

I think for me personally, it would be hard for both male and female friends to know about both spanking and grounding.  I suspect that knowing that Anne would, or even might, tell others about a particular punishment would give me a very big added incentive to behave. And, it wouldn’t even have to be people we were very close to.  

 

  

Al talked a bit this week about being spanked by others, and Tomy has talked a bit about times when Aunt Kay sent him to another woman to be spanked or other women sent their husbands to Aunt Kay for a session.  I admit that something about those stories turn me on, but they also really do scare the hell out of me. I think I would react to being sent to someone else to be spanked exactly the way I reacted when sent to the principals office, i.e. with a sense of dread that far outweighed the actual likely physical pain from the spanking.

 

For me, I think it’s not just the public nature of a spanking by someone else, or witnessed by someone else, that makes it particularly gut wrenching.  It’s also about inevitability.  That has always been a really big part of the mystique of corporal punishment for me.  If Anne sent me to be spanked by another woman (or man), I would know on the trip there that it was actually going to happen, period.  Something about that kind of inevitability – knowing that I can’t and won’t be able to avoid it -- causes a really powerful reaction in me.  Somehow, making it public that a spanking or grounding will happen makes it seem more inevitable, and making a past or current punishment public makes it seem, somehow, more real and—maybe surprisingly—less erotically motivated.

 

 

The power of inevitability hit me this week, in a context that had absolutely nothing to do with DD but perhaps did have a bit to do with self-discipline.  I took on a physical/athletic challenge that I knew was going to be hard, but in the end I discovered I had totally underestimated just how hard it would actually be.  There came a point where pulling out really wasn’t an option and even if there had been some way to quit, there was going to be a huge amount of effort and discomfort involved in getting back to where I started.  It was an odd feeling – wanting something to end so badly, yet having no way to avoid not just the current discomfort but a lot of discomfort to come. There was a point where it was really, really miserable.  Yet, I felt really odd when it was over.  On the one hand, there was some satisfaction in having gotten through it and in gutting it out, yet I also recognized that there had come that point at which I really made it through because there had been no other choice.  It wasn’t really pride or satisfaction but, rather, just a certain weird peace of mind in knowing that I got through something that had at some point become inevitable.  There was a strange sense of peace or freedom in being in a situation in which I had little control, particularly control when it came to quitting.

 

Right about the time I got through this ordeal, I found this meme that really sums up my ambivalence about motivation and extreme performance. I hope you find it as ironically amusing as I do.

 

 

I hope you have a good week.