The Club - Meeting #272 - Sex and DD

"Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.”- Marquis de Sade

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 and Female Led Relationships.  I hope you all had a great week.

We had a good discussion last week regarding proactively preventing bad behavior, versus simply punishing it.  Several people shared their experiences with preventative spankings, and there seemed to be a general consensus that such spankings can help actually prevent bad behavior.  This week, I was reminded that some punishments can both punish and prevent.  My wife grounded me as punishment for night that involved a little too much carousing with work people, and the punishment was that I am grounded and banned from drinking for a week.  So, the punishment both addressed the bad behavior and directly prevented further misbehavior by removing me from the situation that keeps getting me in trouble.  

Our conversation last week also took off on a slight tangent into whether self-reporting and taking the initiative of bringing her the belt or paddle moves the DD relationship forward or, conversely, undermines her authority.  That one may be worth a topic in the near future, though we've done variations of it before. 

For this week, let's talk about sex.  Do I have your attention now? Of course I do.  Yet, one of the reasons for this topic was an article I read this week that indicates that at the same time that attitudes toward sex are increasingly liberated and sexual imagery and content is more available than ever, Americans are actually having much less sex than in the past.   http://time.com/5297145/is-sex-dead/. It’s a fascinating read, and I encourage you to go through the whole article, but the following gives a sufficient summary for our purposes: "According to the General Social Survey, a profile of American behavior that has been gathered by the National Opinion Research Council at the University of Chicago since 1972, the fraction of people getting it on at least once a week fell from 45% in 2000 to 36% in 2016. One study of the GSS data showed that more than twice as many millennials were sexually inactive in their early 20s than the prior generation was. And the sharpest drop was the most recent, in the years 2014 to 2016." 

The only age cohort fighting the trend was, interestingly, the one that seems to be among the largest of this blog's readership: "Only the 60-somethings are bucking the trend—possibly partly with a little pharmaceutical help. Unlike the retirees who came before them, they’re putting the sex back in sexagenarian, with an average coital frequency that is slightly higher than in two decades earlier."

I also ran across this fairly fascinating Politico article that compares the sexual fantasies of our two predominant political parties.  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/27/sexual-fantasies-republicans-democrats-politics-221919.  The survey it addresses found that, although Democrats and Republicans fantasize at similar rates, the content of those fantasies differs sharply. According to the author, “Republicans were more likely than Democrats to fantasize about a range of activities that involve sex outside of marriage. Think things like infidelity, orgies and partner swapping, from 1970s-style “key parties” to modern-day forms of swinging. Republicans also reported more fantasies with voyeuristic themes, including visiting strip clubs and practicing something known as “cuckolding,” which involves watching one’s partner have sex with someone else.  By contrast, self-identified Democrats were more likely than Republicans to fantasize about almost the entire spectrum of BDSM activities, from bondage to spanking to dominance-submission play. The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism, which involves deriving pleasure from the experience of pain.”

The author postulates that the difference may be explained by the fact that people most want what they can’t have.  The Republicans stress “traditional family values” and the sanctity of the nuclear family, so their fantasies drift to scenarios involving sex outside the traditional marriage context.  While the article doesn't discuss it, one can see how that kind of discrepancy between fantasy and reality might create some "problems":

Democrats, on the other hand, stress equality and egalitarianism and, hence, fantasies about extreme power differentials are inordinately appealing.  Perhaps when the sex is most egalitarian, fantasies involving exercising power come to the forefront:

While interesting, the theory does seem a little simplistic.  I’m also not sure it does a great job of explaining why Democratic men would be interested in being on the receiving end of a DD relationship, or why Democratic women might be attracted to being a Disciplinary Wife.  To the extent it’s true that Democrats more actively promote "women's liberation" and helping women break those glass ceilings, then if this author’s theory were correct wouldn’t those of us who are Democrats be attracted to empowering men and dis-empowering women, since our party’s bent is the opposite?  And, while Democrats are fantasizing about BDSM wouldn't their fantasies more naturally drift to sadism and not masochism, given their rejection of "might makes right" and relative aversion using physical violence and power for political ends?  Or, perhaps it's that a lot of the Democratic party-line comes from elites in powerful institutions (professors at Yale, Harvard, etc.), and those people are pretty well-off,  well-educated, and don't lack for independence; hence, their fantasies run to being dominated and controlled?

It's all very interesting though very complicated.  But, taking it down to a personal level, I have no doubt at all that I crave yielding up control to someone else, because in most of my life I have control and authority in over-abundance. Perhaps it's not just that we fantasize about things that we can't or don't now have, but also perhaps about things that we think we missed out on, like strong maternal discipline or boundaries.

With those observations in mind, I’ll leave you all to make whatever comments you can make about them.  The one concrete suggestion I have for a topic is, does practicing Domestic Discipline lead to more sex?  I’m not sure what impact it has had on our own batting average.  I do think that Domestic Discipline contributes to the overall level of erotic energy in a relationship, and I do think that both the “Top” and “bottom” can find the power exchange very erotic.  And, some of our Disciplinary Wives admit candidly that they come to be turned on by exercising power even if it felt unnatural at first. I don't know whether power always corrupts, but I have no doubt it can be addictive.

  

 On the other hand, I have seen instances in which parties tied discipline and sex too closely together, such that he would get spanked only after a hard spanking, which seems like a great way to make him adverse to sex in general.  Or, if the couple adopts a “no sex after discipline” rule, does that result in less sex? Or perhaps could it result in less discipline?

I look forward to hearing from you all.  Whether Republican or Democrat, don’t spend so much time fantasizing that you forget to vote!  Well, if you’re a Republican and intend to vote that way, I’m personally fine with you getting a little carried away and forgetting to cast that ballot. 😉