"Belle" and Just Checking In

Hi all.  I hope you all are having a nice summer.  It’s a weird one where we live, weather wise.  One day it’s pushing 100 degrees and the next I need to put on a jacket when walking the dogs.  Though here in our area, where vaccination rates are fairly high and life has gotten somewhat back to normal, things have improved over this time last year.

 

I guess I should just be happy not to be in Seattle or Portland.  My sympathies to any of our community who live in the Pacific Northwest and have been suffering through this week without air conditioning.  Unlike some of our fellow citizens, they didn’t even inflict it on themselves:

 

  

On the Domestic Discipline front, there have been a few developments.  Nothing earth shattering, but probably worth exploring in more fulsome post, which I’m not inspired enough to write on this Tuesday afternoon.  But, I did want to check in, and the situation with “Belle” has inspired enough comments that I thought maybe it was worth posting about.

 

First, a little more background, though nothing very illuminating.  On the same day that “Belle” apparently accidentally outed herself as a fake, I got an email from an address indicating the sender was someone named Alex, though in the body of the email he identified himself as Anton “an infrequent commenter and longtime lurker” on this blog.  I do recall some comments from someone identified as Anton, but nothing in particular, and if there is a way to search Blogger for comments from specific senders, I don’t know how to do it.  He asked me to post a link to his new blog in my blogroll.  I did and wished him well with his new blog.  (As an aside, the captioning haters must REALLY hate his new blog, because it not only is all captioned pictures but consists entirely of captioned pictures he has taken from other blogs and tumblrs and then slightly changed the dimensions.)  It was not until the next day that I saw the “Belle” commented posted from the ScoldedHubby profile.  It looks like the comment actually preceded his email to me by a few hours, but I had not been checking the blog regularly while I was taking my little break, so I didn’t catch it until the day after Tomy posted the first comment asking, more or less, "WTF?"  I waited a day to see whether “Belle” would respond or take down the comment, then sent an email to Alex/Anton asking for an explanation.  My “WTF?” was met with the same silence as Tomy's.

 

Reactions from our commenters have varied, and morphed a little, over the last few days. Tomy’s initial reaction was: “Oh no! Our trust is violated and it makes me feel like a real fool for allowing myself to believe those compassionate-sounding words. I feel like my confidence in reaching out and making new connections is set back.”

 

Courandir responded: “Please Tomy, don't feel ashamed or even betrayed by this fake person because his life is wide. I found the DWC in 2000 and learned important things about myself with Real people, and you were part of it! Thank you!”

 

Alan observed: “One must wonder what his point was. Kicks and giggles I suppose. But what a lot of work just to produce a tacky charade. Call me naive but I still believe the vast number of contributors to this blog are authentic.”

 

Brett seemed less convinced that authenticity is the rule and not the exception: “I don't know what's going on here, but I suspect that, with anything sexual in nature, men posing as women online is common.”

 

ZM noted: “Anyway, this is the ever-present danger of these online forums. As far as I know (unless we have some seriously good hackers here!) only Dan knows who I am in real life, and I only know who Dan really is as well as of course KD, who is out there for the whole world to see!  I don't think we should be disillusioned by the occasional poster who pretends to be someone they are not. It is common everywhere else in the online world, and so it will sometimes happen here as well.”

 

My own reaction was, at first at least, fairly blasé.  This certainly isn’t the first time that someone has slipped up here and accidentally revealed something about their assumed identity that wasn’t quite what they purported it to be.  A year or two ago we had the multiple variations of “Helen” and her husband, who may or may not have even been two people and who kept flaming out and then reappearing again and again in different guises.  There also have been multiple times that “real” commenters have slipped up and accidentally posted from their “real” identity’s email account or accidentally used their real name in “signing” their comment.  (I've done the latter myself a time or two.) Whenever I’ve caught that, I’ve scrambled to take it down for them without waiting for them to request it.  Though, those instances of inadvertent identification are hardly the same thing as intentionally misleading people, are they?  As ZM indicates, KD is out there for the world to see, but he is the exception.  Most of us are participating with constructed identities designed to protect our anonymity to one degree or another, and that’s fine. 

 

But, it definitely feels different when we learn that someone was not just hiding their identity but actively lying about themselves and their their DD dynamic.  It’s not just covering up something.  It’s wasting people’s time and engaging in the conversation in bad faith.  I don’t go quite as far as Tomy’s initial reaction of feeling betrayed, but it is annoying to me precisely when it comes from people I found myself kind of gravitating to on the blog.  I liked engaging with Belle and was glad when she showed up and started adding more “female” perspective to the blog.  Similarly, some of the longer-term commenters may remember Peter and Anna who, near the end of their tenure as commenters, also slipped with a post that indicated to me they were pulling something over on me. I had liked "them" a lot, and it was disappointing to discovery that a lot of what I saw as a relationshiphad been BS.

 

It’s hard not to get a little riled up when you feel like you’ve been duped or had your time wasted. But, overall, my reaction is somewhere between Alan and ZM’s.  I do think that most of our long-term commenters are more or less who they are and in the dynamics they describe, but exceptions are going to reveal themselves from time to time. It seems to me that assuming pretty much every “woman” who shows up on the blog is a sham would be counterproductive to getting more women to participate and I’m also, in the end, just not willing to lead my life being skeptical of every new commenter just because a few will successfully dupe me for a while.  In the final analysis, I probably have less invested than the folks who hook up through on-line dating sites and discover their new companion bears little resemblance to the handsome professional from the Tinder profile.

 

And, really, what is the alternative? Tomy has noted to me that Aunt Kay solved the problem on the DWC by requiring live telephone calls with the wives who wanted to participate.  I haven’t quite gotten to the point of being willing to reveal my own identity by having live conversations with everyone who wants to participate here, and it definitely would drive away some of our commenters who I do believe are real and whose participation I value.  I also think that women might have been willing to talk to Aunt Kay live but likely would be more reticent about talking to me, a man.  Most of us here seem to guard our confidentiality more or less tightly and, while at times I actually would prefer a much smaller but more openly participatory group, I think the current balance is about the best I can achieve right now given my own anonymity preferences. (However, it’s interesting how my “circle of trust” has expanded a bit as time has gone by.  ZM notes that I’m the only one he has revealed his identity to.  I think I am now up to five who know who I am or have had some direct contact that would allow them to easily figure it out.  And, two out of the five are women and have morphed into genuine friendships over time.)

 

Anyway, while it has irked me a little, I’m not going to change my attitude or practice much as a result of Belle’s little deception and, in any event, I tend to believe what goes around comes around.

 

I hope the rest of your week is fun and relaxing.  For those in the U.S., I hope you enjoy this Independence Day weekend and that is it is filled with many genuine interactions with family and friends.  

 

 

Short Update

 Hello all.  Anne and I made it back safely from our recent travels but, unfortunately, I ran out of day today before I got around to a weekly post.  I'll try to get something out later this week.  In the meantime, I hope your summers are off to a good start.

Dan

Short Break

Hi all.  I hope you're all having a great weekend.  For the first time in over a year, we are heading out on a little adventure.  I don't plan on posting while we are out and about, so talk to you all in a couple of weeks.  

Dan

The Club - Meeting 377 - Authority & Obedience

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline. - Barbara W. Tuchman

 

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 finished better than it started.  I reported a couple of weeks ago that after making some substantial progress on the behavior front, particularly with respect to over-indulging, there had been some troubling signs of backsliding.  Unfortunately, it happened twice over less than two weeks, with Anne present at both. The first was a work event that turned into a total booze fest.  Anne and I left by 10:00, and the party was still in full swing.  Then, last Sunday we had dinner with friends, and the husband was very diligent in refilling glasses.  The result was a painful Memorial Day.  In more ways than one.  I’ll explain in more depth, as it relates to where I am going with this week’s topic.  It also serves as a bit of a follow-up to last week’s topic as well.

 

Anne wasn’t mad at all about the first incident.  I really wasn’t drinking much more than others we were hanging out with, and at no point did I get out of control or do anything embarrassing.  So, it really was a “problem” only in that I really have been trying to learn to moderate, and there was not much moderation on display that evening.  She wasn’t mad about the second event either.  I wasn’t really drinking more than the other couple—or at least the husband, who was the one who kept pouring—and I again didn’t get out of control.  But, when we got back home, I decided I wanted to stay up and listen to music, which is always a bad idea for me and almost always results in even more drinking (alone) and a very tired and painful morning.  Therefore, she insisted I come to bed.  I eventually did, but only after a fair amount of initial resistance.

 

 

So, the next morning she announced that I was going to get spanked that night.  I didn’t really argue or try to get out of it.  In my mind, I deserved it for failing to moderate my drinking on not just one, but two, recent occasions.  But, in announcing that I was going to be spanked, she did not link it to the over-indulgence.  In fact, she said she wasn’t concerned about my behavior at dinner the night before. Rather, she was going to spank me because I didn’t mind her when she told me to go to bed.  I was to be spanked for disobedience and for not complying with something she told me to do or doing so only after first resisting and evading.  

 

 

I thought about trying to get out of it for at least a day, as I really wasn’t feeling great most of that day. But, I also kind of wanted to take my medicine and get it over with.  As with the last time she spanked me, she used the vintage hairbrush, and this time we also tried it OTK.  For someone wired as I seem to be, it was a pretty powerful combination, emphasizing her feminine, maternal authority.  OTK with a hairbrush is about as iconic as it gets where maternal spankings are concerned, and adding to that dynamic in a major way was the fact that I was being spanked specifically for not minding her when she told me to go to bed.  We talked about it after it was over, and she agreed that the position added to the dynamic and reinforced her feeling of authority. 

 

 

She also noted that using a single instrument that was readily available (we had been leaving it in open view on the bathroom counter) and a simple position, with her sitting on an ottoman that was already in place, just made the whole thing easier for her.  In the past spankings have always been kind of a ritualized event, with me going upstairs, setting up the ottoman in the middle of the room and putting pillows in it to elevate my butt.  Then, I’d get out a suitcase in which we keep her tools.  I would disrobe.  She’d come up and lecture, then tell me to get in position, then she would work her way through a variety of tools. . ..  It kind of went on and on and on, taking a lot of time and preparation.  I had suspected for a while that all the ritual might be getting in the way of consistency, because if each spanking was such an event, it might come to seem almost like a chore.  It sounds like she is now seeing it that way as well, as she commented that this simplified process will probably make it more likely for her to spank more often and more immediately after the offense.

 

 

I don’t really have a set topic for this week and welcome any comments on the above or any thoughts that it raises.  In preparing to write the post, I looked back at past posts that might touch on similar themes. I was a little surprised to discover that even though we talk a lot about authority, obedience and related themes, I really have not devoted many actual topics to them.  This week’s spanking puts authority issues—maternal or otherwise—front and center in my mind.  There definitely was an added emotional element connected to the fact that she was spanking me specifically for not obeying her instructions.  For not “minding” her as the parents would say in my part of the country.  Some of these authority issues were also plainly on the minds of our commenters last week.

 

I think the routine we have established of paddling him every Monday (except when the kids aren't in school) has been good for Art. He knows what to expect. And it is good for me too, to remind myself of the authority I now hold in our marriage. I don't have to and won't accept his arrogance any more. Maybe we both need weekly reminders of that!

Liz

 

  

Belle’s comment about Jimmy not liking the idea of preventive spanking suggests another benefit of the practice that I hadn’t really thought about. But it teaches obedience especially when a husband initially thinks the spanking is unfair or unwarranted – but still submits to her authority. Thinking back I have probably learned more about obedience in those situation where I have been punished despite disagreeing with her reasons. As I have mentioned before and several other husbands have also recounted, it is amazing how often a guy moves from resisting a punishment before it happens to admitting it was necessary afterward. My feelings before a spanking are completely genuine but a brush or paddle (or strap) are great persuaders as well as great truth serums.

Alan

 

Alan’s comment nicely ties together last week’s “preventative” spanking topic with this week’s emphasis on authority and obedience.  As a short follow-up on the former, after drafting that post I thought several times about asking Anne to spank me prior to both gatherings where I ended up over-indulging.  One would have been logistically difficult, but one would not.  I honestly regret not following through, because I do think that a preventative spanking would have helped me make the alcohol consumption more mindful, i.e. I would have thought more as I was drinking instead of just feeling the ill effects after the fact.

 

On a non-spanking topic, the world continues to open up, thanks to increased vaccination rates.  Thanks to this new freedom of movement, we may be out and about—and largely offline—for a week or two.  So, I may not post for a couple of weeks; I intend to play it by ear.  By the way, for those on the fence about whether to have kids vaccinated, this from Benjamin Franklin.

 

[Those who have tried to politicize vaccinations, sometimes citing the Founders’ supposed superior devotion to personal liberty, might want to do some reading up on George Washington’s use of smallpox vaccinations on his soldiers during the Revolutionary War.  There is a pretty good argument that we won that war not because of Washington’s superior battlefield acumen but, rather, because he did a much better job than his British counterparts in responding to the pandemic with vaccinations and social distancing.]

 

I hope you all have a great week.