The Club - Meeting #264 - Implements

Hi 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 or Wife Led relationships.  

I hope you all enjoyed last week's discussion. Helen's recounting of car spanking interrupted was a good illustration of one of the points I was mulling with that post, namely whether an effort to keep friends for family members from knowing about our DD activities might inadvertently expose them to being discovered by someone else, such as a neighbor or, in Helen and Andy's case, a remarkably forgiving police officer.  (Though as someone whose biggest pet peeve in life is slow drivers in the left-hand lane, I sympathize with Andy.)

The discussion then diverged to the merits of the cane.  It's interesting how much people are into that particular instrument, or at least curious about it.  I have a post from 2014 entitled Caning Tips and Methods, which is always among the top 4 or 5 in all-time popularity.  Ironic, given the problems my wife has had using it effectively.  I'm pretty sure it is among her top two least favorite instruments.  It's interesting the extent to which different instruments evoke different emotional responses.  Alan noted: "Its my impression that many women prefer to use a cane or maybe a strap even though they may actually employ a brush or paddle regularly because that is what works for their boyfriend or husband. Erotically the cane does very little for me but my wife loves the sound it makes and the impact. I also experience punishment with the cane differently than with other instruments. There is much less of the "naughty boy" feeling and more the disobedient or misbehaving husband feeling to it."

Does it work that way for you?  Do particular instruments evoke particular emotional responses, positive or negative? And, are there some you wish were used more and others less? 

While I am not a Brit and, as I said I've never been subjected to an effective caning, there is something about the cane that really does get a response from me.  The whole caned schoolboy thing is such an iconic spanking image.

Same with the belt.  Probably because of some early childhood experiences, the belt evokes a feeling of vulnerability and has a very "parental" vibe.  Until recently, I didn't consider it to be a very effective instrument.  Then I bought a "gun belt," which is basically a leather belt made for sportsmen or others to carry a holstered handgun.  Because of the weight they need to support, the leather is very thick and stiff.  I bought it because I was looking for an instrument we could take with us on trips without giving the TSA guys a thrill.  She has used it on me one time, and it definitely gets the job done.

I own several paddles, but over time I've become a lot less enamored of them.  As I've written about a few times, lately I feel the larger, thuddier paddles are almost "too hard."  The pain hits like a lightning bolt and, instead of giving in to the discipline, the paddle puts me in a very resistant head space.  I also wonder whether my butt has just gotten more sensitive over time, as I swear the spankings just hurt way more now than they did a few years ago. Though, she may just be a much less forgiving spanker now than in the past.  While I don't really love paddles anymore, I probably will keep buying them, as I have a thing for craftsmanship and I still admire the look of a finely crafted paddle made from some exotic, highly grained wood.

For pure effectiveness, I have to go with the leather strap, though it doesn't really give rise to strong emotions for me.

To me, the strap has just the right balance of short and long-term severity.  Depending on how strong she swings, there can be some warm up that gets me in the right, compliant mindset, but then she can really let loose with a very, very painful thrashing.  As I've become more convinced that duration is more effective than pure pain from each swat, the strap has emerged as my personal "favorite" for a truly effective overall punishment.

Now, based on what she uses the most, I think my wife likes the strap but really gravitates toward paddles.  I've never asked her whether there is a particular instrument that evokes a strong emotional response.

Interestingly, one instrument that I think is extremely effective is one she doesn't seem to go to very often, namely the bath brush.

For severity, it is far, far better than any hair brush and rivals many of our paddles.  It also seems to be hard to beat for sheer versatility.  It can be used effectively in any position, including OTK, which isn't really true of a strap or belt or of many paddles.  Also, unlike most really effective instruments, it can be left out in plain sight.  Yet, for whatever reason, she doesn't seem to think of it as a "go to" spanking instrument.

How about you? What instruments get a strong emotional response out of you or your spouse or, perhaps, bring back strong memories of spankings past?

Have a great week.

The Club - Meeting 263 - Woodsheds, Cars & Other "Private" Places

"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts." ~H.L. Mencken

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 or Wife Led relationships.  

I hope you all enjoyed last week's discussion.  A wide variety of opinions were voiced, though it is interesting how few of them saw "undeserved punishment" as a major problem.  Though the reasoning differed.  For some, it was not much issue as a practical matter, because they hadn't been subjected to punishments that weren't, in fact, deserved.  Others looked at the question more as a matter of balancing the scales, recognizing that even if every once in a while she might make a mistake in exercising her power, there are far more times when we get away with something that merited a good hard session with the paddle, strap or brush.  KD emphasized consenting on a spanking-by-spanking basis, thereby negating the possibility of an undeserved spanking.  Others saw consent as being to the DD relationship and not to each spanking and saw any resistance as undermining her authority.  Interestingly, there was very little concern voiced over the severity of a spanking being out of proportion to the offense. 

Other than a good conversation here on the blog, last week was fairly boring.  No travel.  No significant behavioral problems.  This upcoming week could be more "eventful."   The "semi-" qualifier on our semi-empty nesting status will be mostly removed for a substantial block of time.  Hopefully substantial enough for us to make up the ground we lost over the last few weeks and for her to regain the momentum she was building before her progress was interrupted.  I definitely need it.  While last week wasn't too bad, my behavior has been pretty out of control the last couple of months, and it's definitely been taking a toll. Workouts have been sporadic.  Exercise and meditation are prerequisites to any hope of sleep, and I haven't been doing either with any regularity.  Travel always seems to result in poor dietary choices and even more disturbed sleep patterns.  It all adds up.  As have the tally of offenses meriting a good, hard spanking!  Once the kids depart and we have the house back to ourselves, it is time for a serious "personal improvement" effort along the lines of the one ZM's wife has been helping him with.

Having our empty-nester status temporarily revoked did get us to talking about how to preserve momentum next time it happens.  Some options included:

• While there may be times a spanking must be delayed, other forms of punishment are available and can be imposed immediately.  Grounding, chores, etc.  Corner time also is an option, if she sense me to an isolated room with a locked door, such as the bathroom.
• She could send the kids on errand, such as a run to the grocery store to pick up a missing ingredient for the nightly dinner.  Then, take care of business quickly but severely while they are out. 
• She and I could go off-site ourselves.  One somewhat risque possibility I thought of was meeting at my office shortly after working hours, when most of the residents of our office building have left for the day.  My office won't accommodate a private spanking, but what about taking care of it in our car in a private corner of our underground parking lot?
• I've also been contemplating a shed-like addition to our existing garage. It could be accessed from the backyard, and would be isolated enough that the kids would be unlikely to hear anything if she took me out there for a quick spanking after they were in bed.

What steps have you resorted to in order to try to get some privacy for a well-deserved spanking?  Has it included being spanked in a car?

Or perhaps in a garage or barn out of earshot of the rest of the family?

 As I was contemplating building our little private "woodshed," it occurred to me that in making it less likely that our kids might overhear a spanking, we might inadvertently make it more likely that our neighbors or someone walking by might overhear one.  Perhaps, but maybe it's a risk we should take if we really want to keep things going and progressing.

I hope you all have a great week.

Late Posting

Hi all.  I'm tied up on some things this morning and will be post either late in the day or on Sunday.  Have a great Saturday

The Club - Meeting 262 - Undeserved Punishment

We need to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what you do to someone; discipline is what you do for someone. - Zig Ziglar

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couple's Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women in, or who would like to be in, Domestic Discipline or Female Led relationships.  I hope you all had a good week.  Mine was another in which my bad behavior left me in a tired and cranky state.  My wife had set a punishment for Thursday, and I knew I deserved one.

Fortunately for my ass but unfortunately for my long-term emotional health and balance, one of our kids stayed home unexpectedly.

    

As I've said, I am learning that "empty-nesting" is more a process than an event. Perhaps at some point in the future, the presence of others will not result in a well-deserved spanking being deferred, let alone forgone, but that's not where we are right now with respect to being "out."

So, I may have once again gotten out of a well-deserved punishment.  But, let's take this week's topic in the opposite direction.  We've talked about "undeserved" punishment before, but it's been a couple of years, and it came up in a comment from KD yesterday.  (I'm feeling lazy and have some other things going on today, so the content below is pretty close to a verbatim ripoff of our last discussion of this topic.  It's not plagiarism if I'm copying myself, right?) 

Have you ever been given a disciplinary spanking for something you felt you didn't deserve?  Perhaps "caught" doing something you really didn't do? Or someone else was the real offender? Or, maybe you did something that wasn't contrary to any clearly set rule, but it was something that annoyed or aggravated your HoH, so they disciplined you for it unexpectedly?  In those circumstances, how did you react?  How did it make you feel?  Humbled?  Resentful?  Respectful?

I can't think of a circumstance where I have been punished for something I really didn't do or something that I didn't know was a problem for her.  The closest I can think of is a situation where I repeatedly left a chore undone, or done half-assed, and she finally had enough, ordered a spanking, and delivered a very, very hard one that evening.  It was not that it was "undeserved" per se, but this chore was not so much something assigned to me under some express rule, but something I have just always done.  Moreover, giving  a very hard spanking for not doing a chore was not a direction either of us had taken things in up until that point.  So, perhaps the right word is "unexpected" as opposed to "undeserved."  There was also one time when I expected a fairly light "maintenance" session, but what I got was a full-blown punishment spanking.  In both cases, there was perhaps some resentment as I pulled by pants up over my very sore bottom that night, but there was also an offsetting respect.  Admiration is another good word to describe it.  I felt proud of her for addressing a situation that was pissing her off, and doing it strongly and decisively.  That reaction was one indication I had that we might have approached a fork in the road, going from something purely DD to something more FLR-oriented, with her setting the tone and direction and taking action where she thought appropriate, not just to address a violation of some rule we had expressly agreed to.

It speaks very well of my wife that in well over a decade in this lifestyle, I really can't think of an instance in which she was really "wrong" to spank me.  If anything, perhaps it indicates she is letting me get away with too much too often! 

I don't disagree with anything KD observed about the potential for "tops" in a power exchange relationship to abuse their authority.  I definitely don't think these power sharing relationships are without risk, particularly if the "Top" isn't a well balanced and well meaning person. And, no one has an obligation to submit to such a person. Though, in that situation, you have to ask why you are in any relationship with such a person, let alone a DD relationship.  The bottomline for me is these relationships, like any other, require common sense, and the "right" approach is seldom binary. If a Top makes a mistake now and then or there is a disagreement about whether discipline was earned, that is probably to be expected every once in a while. Each "bottom" has to figure out whether to submit in those circumstances, recognizing that (a) the top may be wrong, but it's also possible the bottom is the party in the wrong and just doesn't have that perspective in the moment; and (b) refusing to submit may undermine her confidence and the relationship as a whole. So, while the top has a responsibility to think hard about when and when not to discipline, the same applies to the "bottom" regarding whether to refuse to comply.  KD's perspective follows from a very bad experience, and I totally understand why he is concerned about the possibility of a Top acting abusively.  I, on the other hand, can truthfully say that on the rare occasions that my wife and I have had a really serious fight, at the time I was 100% sure I was right, but often a few days later I would start to see things from her perspective and realize that I had been a dick.  In those cases, I could have done real damage to our overall DD relationship had I refused an "undeserved" spanking.

It also would be more than a little disingenuous for me to get too upset about being punished for something I didn't deserve given that, as this week illustrates, on balance I have engaged in way more bad behavior that has gone unpunished that I should not have gotten away with.  So, being punished where not strictly deserved could be looked at as just a balancing of the accounts.

I hope you all have a great weekend.

Club Meeting #261 - You Have to Want It

“Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.” – Allan Bloom

Hi 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 or Wife Led relationships.

Sorry for the late posting.  I had a short Saturday diversion that turned into a very long one. Earlier this year, I had many months of working weekends.  It's nice, though a little disconcerting, to go into a Saturday without a bunch of work left over from the week.  The late posting may become the new norm, by the way.  Sometimes these posts take longer than you'd think, and I sometimes watch the better part of my morning slip away.  Yet, almost no one posts on Saturday anyway.  So, I may start pushing the posting into the afternoon or evening. We'll play it by ear.

Last week, we talked a little bit about how to judge effectiveness.  That led, perhaps inevitably, into a discussion about the extent to which changed behavior is only part of what we mean by "effective."  As I said in reply to ZM, when we first started DD and for several years thereafter, I didn't really appreciate the "communicative" aspect of DD. Oh, I got that it took great communication to make it work, but it took me a while to really get that the spanking itself is a form of both communicating about a problem and of addressing it. By that standard, it is WAY more effective than the communication we see in many vanilla marriages.  How many marriages fail because they simply drift into both silence and inaction?  One party, or both, may be very unhappy and regularly annoyed, but after a while it just becomes easier to stay silent. So, they do, and from there it's all downhill.  I recently read a book that described the results of such passivity: "Every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire. . . . All she—he—they—or we—must do to ensure such an outcome is nothing: don’t notice, don’t react, don’t attend, don’t discuss, don’t consider, don’t work for peace, don’t take responsibility. Don’t confront the chaos and turn it into order—just wait for the chaos to rise up and engulf you instead." Disciplinary Wives who are on their game do notice, do react, do attend, do discuss and, most importantly, they make HIM take responsibility.  Even if his behavior remains less than perfect, DD ensures the channels of communication remain open, at least from her to him. 

In discussing effectiveness, both ZM and Helen brought up the subject of motivation and commitment.  Not hers -- his.  As ZM put it: "Just looking at outcome isn't necessarily the answer. While ideally discipline would result in immediate and permanent change, some habits, attitudes, or behaviors are very entrenched and may take a significant amount of time to change, and that is of course assuming that the person even truly wants to change."  Similarly, Helen observed: "As others have mentioned, another crucial factor is that the husband has to want to change the behavior. He can want to because it is good for him (like losing weight), he can want to because it helps him achieve his values (such as stopping swearing), he can want to because it pleases his Disciplinary Wife (such as remembering to take out the garbage). But if he thinks there is nothing wrong with the behavior and he shouldn't be punished for it, then being consistently caught and severely punished is probably not going to be enough to be effective."

That all makes sense.  Regardless of severity or certainty of punishment, we're going to do a better of changing our own behavior if we too want it to change; the fantasy of a dominant wife imposing on us only those rules she personally wants notwithstanding.  In our reality, most of the rules my wife imposes were arrived at more or less jointly.  

But, there definitely are some that she cares about more than I do.  Or, at least, she doesn't balance pros and cons in the same way I do. The best example is probably drinking.  We both generally agree that over-consumption of alcohol has been an ongoing problem for me, and it does definitely cause some issues from time to time.  But, deep down inside, I'm not really ready to give up the benefits it provides with respect to career development and, frankly, I like socializing and talking and alcohol is my set's social lubricant of choice.  As de Sade put it: “Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.”  So, when push comes to shove, she may command no more than two drinks, but if the guy across the table wants a third, I'm probably going to have a third. 

 On the other hand, we do have success when she addresses things like respect or work habits.  Because, I do want her to feel respected, and her rising feeling of her own power and authority are attractive and motivating to me.  

And, I really do want and need to elevate my game at work giving some of the challenges that are coming up.

 Do these examples resonate with you?  Are there some areas where DD has proven particularly effective because her desire for change is in alignment with your own?  Are there others where DD has not been effective, in whole or in part because the change she is trying to bring about is something that you are, deep down inside, just not motivated to do or, worse yet, downright resistant to changing? In those circumstances, has she found ways to motivate you to change anyway?

Have a great week.