The Forum #36

Welcome back everyone.  This was a strange week, and it caused me to mull some DD thoughts around a bit.  Step back and do a little self-assessment, as it were.

As you'll see from the posts below, someone using various names kept posting comments that were off-topic and just sort of juvenile.  My reaction was, first to get angry when it kept happening, and second to take my email address off the website and start moderating all comments.  Simple enough and not a big deal, right? Well, as I thought about it more, the exchange with the little pest raised a couple of issues requiring some self-reflection regarding the state of my DD efforts.

First, it became clear that what really lit a fire under me with this particular commenter was that the postings were not just silly and off-topic, they were essentially confrontational and territorial.  This blog is about domestic discipline, but this person wanted to steer everything in a very different conversational direction. That direction included starting to hurl taunts my way, call me silly playground names, etc.  In short, this person was trying to set the tone for my blog.  Reacting to that with some annoyance may have been natural, but here's the thing:  That flare of anger and resentment at someone messing with "my" area is EXACTLY the kind of Alpha Male, Type A over-the-top reaction that I have wanted to rid myself of using domestic discipline.   It is exactly the kind of behavior that has, from time to time, gotten me into trouble and limited my upward mobility in my career.   Someone invades my territory or throws an elbow, and I instantly start seeing red.  They throw a passive-aggressive elbow, and I hit them with a baseball bat.   That's the way it's been throughout my adult life, and mellowing out that need to control everything really was one of the primary reasons I wanted to explore domestic discipline.  In handing control over to my wife, I hoped to reduce my own reactivity and Type A behavior.  Well, my over reaction to a garden variety pest certainly showed I have a long way to to go.

Second, the exchange also served to highlight a distinction I have explored on this blog a couple of times, namely that between domestic discipline and Femdom.  I am obviously an advocate for exploring domestic discipline of the F/m variety, and for extending that to exploring Female Led Relationships.  That means trying to accept my Wife's direction and discipline, and encouraging her to step into that role and take control of me.   But, wanting to submit to the authority of my Wife is very different from some kind of gender-based submission to ALL female authority.  That distinction was evident in spades in the exchanges (all of which have now been deleted) with my little blog stalker.  Although I strongly suspect the poster was actually a man, he/she did claim to be woman, and I at first assumed she was.  When "she" started getting aggressive and demeaning, my reaction was not submission.  Very far from it.  This blog was my thing, my area, and I was damn sure not going to let someone dictate to me the direction it was going to take, whether that person was male or female.  And, while my territorial reaction was indicative of a problem I need to work on,  I'm fairly comfortable with this second aspect of my behavior.  I am very interested in submitting to a woman, namely my Wife, but that is a very different thing from being subservient to some other random person just because they happen to be, or claim to be, a woman.

On a related note, it occurred to me that my suspicion that my little pest is a man is itself little more than a subtle form of sexism.   I have a hard time seeing those posts as coming from a woman because they were rude and juvenile, and most of the females in my life are professional and smart.  Therefore, I just have a hard time envisioning a woman as the author of stupid and aggressively rude postings.  But, of course, men hardly have a monopoly on boorish behavior, though it admittedly sometimes seems so.

So, that has been a very long introduction to this week's  Forum question, which is related a bit to the first issue I pondered above.  Assuming you are in a real domestic discipline relationship, or want to me in one, and your goal is to use spankings and other disciplinary measures to correct bad behavior, what are some of the behaviors you are trying to correct?   You can answer from the perspective of the giver or receiver.  To get the ball rolling, here are a few of my own behavioral issues:

• Generally, letting go of control and being more open to accepting authority and direction from superiors, even when I think they are full of shit.
• Showing my wife more respect, to the point of submitting to her will even when I am convinced that I am right and she is wrong.
• Becoming more self-disciplined regarding some personal behaviors, such as over-indulging at the pub with work colleagues on too many occasions

Have a great weekend.

Dan

Oops

In my effort to conduct a little pest control (see below), I accidentally changed my settings to make this blog "private" and inaccessible to everyone but myself.  My apologies to anyone who tried to view today and was unable to do so.

Dan

New Comment Policy -- And a Personal Observation

As some of you may have noticed, my blog seems to have attracted the attention of a weird little stalker who on various days calls himself Evelyn, Cheryl, Gretchen, or any number of other pseudonyms.  He's obsessed with panty-wearing and posts about it in response to every Forum Question and at various other places on the blog.  Now, if there was anything the least bit interesting about his comments, I might leave them up, even if off-topic. However, since his postings have the intellectual and grammatical sophistication of something scrawled in crayon on the wall of a truck stop toilet stall, I respectfully decline to let him continue using my blog as the equivalent of said toilet stall.

In addition to the generally annoying quality of his posts, he seems obsessed with the idea that I wear panties. But, while I have no problem at all with that fetish and recognize it plays a role in lots of DD relationships, he is simply wrong that it is part of my particular bundle of fetishes.  My wife and I tried it one time early on in our DD experimentation, and it did nothing for either of us.  It did, however, give me a lot of sympathy for what women go through daily, because in addition to doing nothing for us erotically, the panties were just really, really uncomfortable.  They chafed and scratched and were just generally unbearable to wear.  Of course, had we gone with silky "granny panties" the sensation might have been much more pleasurable, but the visual would have been even less appealing to my wife, so why go there?

So, while I very much appreciate and encourage comments from the rational readers out there who are into wearing panties or are are ordered to wear them by their DD wives (Peter, please keep the comments coming!  Love them and love the conversation!), I have had it with my little stalker and his annoying "hee hee" sixth-grade snickerings.  So, I am reluctantly changing my settings to moderate all comments.  I will try very hard to check the queue each day so there is little delay in approving comments from everyone but my new best friend.

Also, one other change.  I deleted the former User Stories section, which was a separate blog, and replaced it with User Stories section tab at the top of the home page.  Thanks for bearing with me through all these changes and experimentation.


Dan

The Forum - Question of the Week #35

Welcome back everyone.  I hope you had a good week.  Last week I got a little philosophical.  This week, let's go in a much more concrete direction. 

What is your most feared "weapon of ass destruction"?  What implement does the best job of getting your attention, turning a spanking into a real punishment. What implement strikes fear in your heart?  Or, if you are the spanker, which implement do you turn to when the goal is to leave a very strong message.

Hope you have a good week.  As always, please take a minute to say a few words in the Guestbook and please think about contributing something (fact or fiction) to the User Stories section.

Dan

The Forum - Question of the Week #34

Welcome back all.  My last couple of posts generated some interesting discussion.  Some of it was even on topic.  ;-)

I am struggling a bit to characterize the topic I would like to raise this week.  In essence, it is: "What is the goal of Domestic Discipline, and how is it distinct from Femdom?"  But, it's a little deeper than that.  I want to get at, what purpose does DD serve in terms of our development as human beings?

It was, in fact, some of the recent comments that got me thinking about this.  Several have, to my way of thinking, really been focused on very traditional Femdom themes.   Forced chastity.  Humiliation scenes.  None of those necessarily have anything to do with domestic discipline, though some of them can if they are designed to meet some DD-oriented goal.   If it's just part of a desire on your part to humiliate your partner, then whatever it is, it's really not what I think of as DD. 

Now, one can ask, why does it matter?  I am pretty insistent that there not one "right" way to approach DD relationships and I also try very hard to respect other people's kinks, even if they do not necessarily appeal to me.  But with DD, here is why I think motivations and goals matter:  Because, to me the overarching goal in any intimate relationship is to leave the partners mentally and spiritually happier and stronger than where they started.  Dan Savage, in his wonderful Savage Love columns has made that point several times:  The one real "responsibility" we have when dealing with our partners, particularly ones that are vulnerable due to age, experience, emotional issues, etc., is to try to leave them healthier than we found them.

The danger I see with DD, and with anything involving dominance, is it can be used for good or ill.  And, I do believe there can be a very dark side to dominance-based relationships.  Ideally, a healthy relationship should be about empowering both parties to grow as people and to help them expand their capacities and personal power.  For my wife and I, that was our explicit goal for the very start.  She was not especially good at asserting herself and tended to let people walk on her, while I often got myself into trouble by being too aggressive, too assertive, and generally too Type A.  Our goal was, and is, to use DD to bring things into a better state of balance, with her becoming increasingly comfortable with wielding power and authority and me increasingly willing and able to submit to power and authority because I really do need some boundaries to feel secure, yet I generally suck at imposing them on myself.

Where I get concerned about the possible dangers of DD and other dominance-based relationships is when they seem to be taking unhealthy personal dynamics or attributes and emphasizing that already dysfunctional dynamic or trait.  If someone already lets the world treat them as a doormat, in my opinion we do them no favors by encouraging a relationship in which they are the submissive.   How does bossing around, disciplining, and possibly humiliating someone who already lets people walk all over them make them healthier?  And, if you already create problems in your life by being too pushy and antagonistic, is it really good for you to enter into a relationship in which your role is to be the dominant and bossy party? 

Our culture tends to emphasize "doing what comes natural," but I am just not convinced that such a philosophy makes any sense at all if our overall goal in life is to grow as human beings, overcoming our weaknesses and gaining new strengths.

Sorry if this sounds preachy, but the tone of a few of the recent comments made me feel it was important to clarify that what TTWD is, for me,  is about encouraging healthy relationships and personal growth.  If it is something else for you, that's perfectly fine, but it's not what I do, not my goal for myself or my relationship, and not the focus of this blog.

Thoughts?

Caning - Tips & Methods??

I usually do not do mid-week questions, but I had one that came to me as a result of recent DD session.  For reasons I will not go into, last night I received what was supposed to be a very bad disciplinary spanking, as retribution for some significantly bad behavior.  And, it was quite bad in most respects.  She lit into me with the Loopy Johnny, which is an implement that she loves and I hate, in equal measure.  She gave me hard strapping, and finished with a long session with the bath brush.  All of those hurt -- very much.  The issue is with the implement with which we began the session -- the cane.

We have tried caning several times, and it just doesn't seem to work.  By which I mean, it just does not hurt that much.  The same thing happened last night. I had bought some new canes, and we gave it yet another try.  She swears that she was swinging with a lot of force, but it just did not hurt very much.  Now, I contrast that with videos I have seen of the cane causing bruising with what seem to be not even full force strokes.  Given those videos and photos, and the numerous descriptions I've read, it would seem to be one of the most devastating instruments available.  But for us, it just is not like that?

Does anyone have any thoughts on what we might be doing wrong?  Thoughts on how to deliver a truly nasty caning?

I know that for some it may seem odd to be requesting something even harsher than what I already get, but we really are trying to use spanking for discipline.  When I've done something wrong, the goal really is to make me pay for it in a way that makes me think more than twice about doing it again.  So, any thoughts from readers--the disciplined and disciplinarians alike--would be most appreciated.

Dan

The Forum - Question of the Week #37

Hi all,

I hope you had a good week.   I really thought we might get a little more interest in last week's topic regarding how to get started in a DD relationship, but I guess we are just leaving all those poor Disciplined Husbands in Waiting to their own devices.

I also hope the fall off in comments last week was not related to the changes I made to the design of the blog.  I wasn't sure about it myself when I first changed the color scheme, but it's growing on me.

This week's question involves consequences, and our all too human tendency to try to avoid them.  Have you ever tried to cover up your bad behavior in order to avoid being disciplined?  Lied about how much you had to drink with colleagues after work?  Forgot to tell your spouse about that speeding ticket?  You may not always confess to them, but please tell us all about it!

As always, please take a moment to visit the Guestbook or add a story (fictional or non-fictional) to the User Stories section.  They are accessible by the tabs at the top of this page.

Dan - Disciplined Hubby