The Club - Meeting 304 - Leverage

“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.” ― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

Hello all.  Welcome back to The Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or interested in being in, Domestic Discipline relationships, mainly of the Female/male variety.  I hope you had a good week.

Sorry for the delayed posting.  I had one of those Saturdays in which you spend the whole day catching up on all those little “to do list” items that have stayed on your list for months and finally built to critical mass, including catching up on some family connections.  So, it was one of those days where I needed to put the blog in its place.  Between yesterday and a busy Friday, I also got a little behind responding to comments on last week’s topic.  Though, in all candor the comments were starting to drift anyway into some fairly BDSM-y and Femdom territory, which I don’t plan to reply to in any event. 

As for those comments last week that were on point, while it was subtle I thought that our discussions about others knowing and participating in our Domestic Discipline lifestyles may have evidenced a slight or not so slight evolution among the group over the last two or three years.  When I’ve raised these topics in the past, there tended to be a very small number of people who had brought others into their lifestyle and were “out” to one degree or another, and a whole bunch of others who categorically rejected the notion of bringing anyone else into this thing we do in any way, shape or form.   

That dynamic among our group seems to have changed a bit, with more people saying they have not done it in the past but might be open to it under the right circumstances.  There also seem to be a larger sub-set who are into extending anonymous discussions on blogs and websites like this into some more open and interactive form of communication, whether live meetings or something less than that but still less anonymous.  We’ll have to see how that develops over time.

Something that didn’t arise from last week’s comments was a clear idea for a new topic.  So, given my own lack of inspiration today, I’m stuck rehashing one from about a year ago.  About this time last year, I brought up an article I read in the New York Times about an “empowerment” coaching movement with a salacious angle.  It began with publicity that a Smallville actress who was arrested for allegedly acting as a recruiter for a sex cult.  I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the initial coverage, but then the New York Times posted a long investigative piece about it entitled The Sex Cult That Preached Empowerment:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/magazine/sex-cult-empowerment-nxivm-keith-raniere.html.  I found it a fascinating read, even though, its title notwithstanding, there was very little discussion of sex.  Admittedly, a lot of it sounded like a pretty typical Amway business model and possibly a pyramid scheme, in which current members were incented to bring in members under them all for the benefit of those on top.  But, as a whole it sounded like more cultish Tony Robbins-like “personal power” guru founding a group comprised of a bunch of "life coaches" and their students, finding new and interesting ways to encourage self-improvement via  personalized consequences and—here is the key—those consequences were designed to be strict enough, hard enough, embarrassing enough to motivate an actual positive behavioral change.  These consequences were often described as pledging “collateral” or otherwise coming up with agreed-upon “leverage” to encourage the member to actually live up to their commitments or achieve their performance goals.

 

 The leverage they created included things like pledging "collateral" in one form or another, such as giving the leaders of the group a letter admitting to some embarrassing or illegal act (it isn’t clear whether these were acts they had actually committed).  If the performance goals were met or the commitment fulfilled, the “collateral” would not be sacrificed and the person would not suffer any detriment.  They also used group consequences for individual failures. For example, if John set a goal of running every day and he failed to do it on Monday, then on Tuesday all the men in John's assigned support group might have to give up their morning coffee.  Knowing that others might pay a price for his failure would presumably give John a greater incentive to do what he pledged to do.  Many of the "motivators" seem to be about raising the consequences of failing to such a high degree that the person was left highly, highly motivated not to fail.

Now, as the trial progressed, it became clear that at the top of the organization, there was a substantial sexual overlay and not a few Dominance/submission attributes, including "Master" and "slave" titles.  And, some of the “collateral” may have been used to enforce submission and service (sexual and otherwise) to the group’s leader, who was convicted after a half-day of jury deliberation.  So, to be clear, I am not condoning any non-consensual activity, let alone anything criminal.  While definitely more extreme that what most of us are doing, however, he parallels to wives using unconventional and sometimes "hard" means to coach and mentor us was intriguing.  Because for those of us who are using DD to try to improve ourselves and accomplish more or break bad habits, that is what DD is about, right  -- gaining sufficient leverage to get over those impediments that get in the way of meeting your goals?

This week’s topic is a little broad but, in a nutshell it is, for those who are using Domestic Discipline to improve their performance, meet goals, eliminate bad habits or foster good ones, what lengths have you gone to—or would you be prepared to go to—to bring about actual change?  Spanking is obviously the “go to” performance motivator for most of our participants, but what if a single or maybe even multiple spankings are not doing the trick?  

What is the solution for making the improvement happen, whether he likes it or not? Or, is his “liking” a condition on the entire arrangement that prevents her from taking it to a level that he might not like but actually would be effective?  What amount of authority do you wives have to crank things up to a level that actually results in real behavioral change?  This additional “leverage” or “collateral” could take a lot of forms.  We talked last week about bringing others into the relationship or telling others that he is a Disciplined Husband. Or, perhaps just a public consequence for a public offense. For those husbands who actually fear such embarrassment, is that an option she can or should explore?   

 Or, maybe there are additional “let the punishment fit the crime” kind of punishments she might impose above and beyond spanking?  Or, is really changing habits or meeting goals within a DD relationship merely a matter of consistency and severity?

As I said, this is a little nebulous and open-ended, but that’s what happens on a lazy Sunday when I’m lacking both motivation and inspiration!

Have a great week.