The Club - Meeting 431 - Preventative & Maintenance Spankings

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." -- Benjamin Franklin

 

Hello all. Welcome back to The Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly on-line gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, a Domestic Discipline or Female Led Relationship.

 

I hope you all had a good week.  Mine was pretty uneventful.  I spent part of it trying to gather all our tax information to submit to our accountant.  Somehow, it always seems so much more complicated and time-consuming than I anticipated.  I thought with Anne working only part of the year and me not working at all, it would be simple, but there are the complications of retirement income from investments. Silly me thinking “I lost a buttload of money all year” would make things super simple.  It just seems like there should be an easier process.

 

 

Anyway, despite the insinuations by one commenter that Anne’s recent pickleball injury renders her an invalid who I should be hovering over instead of leveraging the situation for a topic on surrogates . . . sigh . . . she has brought up the issue of discipline/spanking a couple of times recently.  A couple of days ago, she asserted that I was owed a spanking for some bad behavior from a week ago. I retorted that she had “waived” the issue by not dealing with it closer to the offense.  (We have no such “waiver” rule, though I’ve thought from time to time that maybe we should, and it at least was worth trying.)

 

Instead of rejecting my “waiver” argument directly, she went all argumentative aikido on me, attacking my proposition indirectly from another angle.  Her retort was something to the effect of, “Well, it doesn’t really matter. We have a social event coming up, so we can just treat it as a preventative spanking.”

 

The spanking didn’t happen, or at least it hasn’t yet, and we still have one social eent to go this weekend.  It did, however, at least give me a topic to write about this week.  It’s been almost two years since we’ve done one on preventative spankings and, in the meantime, we’ve added some regular commenters.  Also, honestly, I was all out of inspiration for anything better.

 

So, let’s talk about what I call “preventative” spankings.  Let’s also talk about another form of “unearned” spanking, i.e. maintenance, though I admit my personal level of interest in that topic is not high.

 

Preventative Spankings

 

I’ve also seen preventative spankings referred to as “precautionary” or “prophylactic.” The basic idea is they are spankings that are delivered before bad behavior has taken place, in an attempt to head off that bad behavior and perhaps prevent it from happening.

 

 

I used to be a skeptic about whether preventative spankings had a legitimate role in DD relationships.  It didn’t seem to qualify as real punishment and also didn’t seem to be about being held accountable.  It also seemed to me to be more than a little unfair, since it seemed to involve punishing for something that hadn’t actually happened and might not.

 

Over the years, while Anne has done it only a couple of times, I’ve come around to the concept.

 

As I said, one of my basic objections to the idea of preventative spanking was that they seemed downright unfair.  I think there are at least two answers to that.

 

First, when we’ve discussed this topic in the past, it seemed like in most cases the wives who used it were responding to situations in which there was a well-established track record of misbehavior. It might be drinking too much at a party. It might be getting into political arguments at holiday dinners. Whatever the particulars, in most cases it appeared that the wives were well-justified in believing these particular contexts resulted in misbehavior.  So, while there might be a little unfairness in presuming bad behavior would happen, the husbands seemed to concede that the wives’ predictive power was pretty good.

 

 

Second, and closely related, the alleged unfairness of preventative spankings seems to be at least somewhat mitigated if they are seen as a precursor to the much worse spanking that will be avoided if the preventative spanking actually works. 

 

So, it’s not strictly true that a preventative is “unearned.”  Rather, it’s been earned over, and over, and over again.  She’s just trying to keep you from earning another, much worse one.

 

Do preventative spankings work?  As I said, Anne has done them only a couple of times.  Once was before a graduation party, with a group of friends who have a track record of encouraging excess boozing.  I recall sitting there, on a slightly warm but still stinging butt, very aware of each drink I took and on what came out of my mouth. So, in that instance, it definitely worked.  I don’t remember anything about the other time she used it, other than it was at least somewhat effective then, too.

 

 

My example fits well with a comment Alan made on one of the other occasions that we addressed this topic:

 

There is a lot of discussion on this blog about the mental, emotional, and sexual impacts of DD. But preventive spanking, while having its mental and psychological effects, is primarily for me not mental, psychological, or sexual but instead about the physical memory of being spanked, i.e. a warm bum -- and the constant reminder it gives me.

 

It’s been remarked how well behaved a guy is after a spanking. There is a reason for that beyond the mental and psychological effects of being punished. And that reason is the condition of your bottom. How long that lasts probably depends on how severely you were spanked. For me it seems to be around three days to a week.

 

So it’s much easier for me not to lose my temper behind the wheel or have that extra glass of wine or refrain from telling Uncle Carl that he should read a newspaper once in a while if I have been recently spanked. What stops me is not the abstract thought that she might spank me, but the all too vivid physical memory that she has already spanked me.”

 

Maintenance Spankings

 

I don't know whether there is an accepted definition, but I think of maintenance spankings as "reminders" or "just because . . ." spankings. While I guess they don’t necessarily have to happen at pre-set intervals, my impress has been that our couples who use them seem to do so on a pre-scheduled basis, like once a week, once a month, etc.

 

My primary issue with maintenance spankings was basically the same as my concern about preventive spankings, i.e. was it really discipline if it didn’t involve punishing a particular action or failure.  I always wondered whether it was just an excuse for someone with a spanking fetish to get spanked more often, while for some reason needing to call that “disciplinary.”

 

I don’t feel that way about it anymore, though we still don’t have any plans to do them.  Also, as I went through some old comments to prepare for this post, I realized that while I’ve always seen “preventative” and “maintenance” as distinct categories, I’m now not so sure.

 

One of our past commenters “Liz” had this to say about what some here call maintenance, though she preferred another term:

 

“We do weekly spankings whether or not there have been any transgressions, but we don't call them maintenance. We consider them “motivational”: Art gets paddled every Monday morning to remind him to keep his arrogance to a minimum. I do believe in DD that is proactive in addition to reactive. Maybe that's what some couples mean by maintenance, but I don't care for the term. It sounds weird to me. I'm not his maintenance department. But yes, I like restricting DD to one day a week so it is not a dominating thing in our lives.”

 

Her husband Art offered this:

 

“I also have come to believe in preventive DD. Liz paddles me every Monday morning as a reminder to curb my arrogance. She spanks hard enough that sitting is uncomfortable for 2-3 days and I can even feel it as I walk. That discomfort serves as a constant reminder to be humble and keep my mouth shut when I want to make sarcastic comments. As the discomfort fades, so does my humility. All of my recent incidents of arrogance have come toward the end of the week.”

 

Liz and Art’s comments show a blending of the concepts of prevention, maintenance, and punishment.  Liz’s references to “proactive” and “reactive” were echoed by Danielle, who liked the term “management”:

 

 “If spanking is viewed purely as punishment, preventative spanking doesn’t make sense. But I view it as “behavior management,” rather than just punishment. I have used it in a specific context with my husband in the past. The men in my husband’s extended family have epic political arguments during family dinners. I have always found that annoying, especially when my husband gets involved, which he often does...or rather used to. Therefore, I have, on a couple of occasions, spanked him before going to a family dinner to heighten his consciousness of the behavior I expect of him. I also couple the preventative spanking with the implied threat that if I have to intervene in an argument during dinner, I just might "forget myself" and remind him of the consequences of misbehavior at the dinner table. I have found that it works. That’s the important thing to me.”

 

Liz also had an issue with frequency and the need to repeatedly discipline deeply rooted, ongoing habits.  Her husband’s issue was arrogance, which he apparently displayed more or less daily when she first took up the paddle after their marriage hit a very rocky place thanks to his behavior.  She did not want DD to dominate their lives and was unwilling to spank only for particular contemporaneous acts of arrogance, as that would entail spanking him nearly every day.  For her, spanking him once a week was both a kind of “catch up” covering all the issues during the week (including arrogance at work, which she wouldn’t necessarily learn about) and also a reminder for the following week.

 

In this sense, maintenance seems to perhaps be kind of a sub-category of preventative, though I guess you could also say that preventative is a sub-category of maintenance if maintenance equates with “management” or “proactive.”  It may address accumulated bad behavior that has gone unpunished, while also serving as a reminder to behave in the future.

 

There is another sense in which I see maintenance as having a role that is totally distinct from preventative spankings, namely “role affirmation.”  Power exchange relationships like DD and FLR may require undoing a lot of deeply-entrenched power dynamics and hierarchies.  If a woman was raised in a patriarchal environment, or if her marriage was itself an example of such an environment in the past, just like he may need periodic reminders to behave and that he’s now subject to her authority, she may need to periodically remind herself that she indeed has that authority.

 

In that sense, I think that preventative and maintenance spankings—and that relationship management function Danielle referred to--may also be indicators that the marriage has progressed from something confined to DD to something more like an FLR, with her taking on a more proactive role in managing conduct instead of just punishing it.

 

Liz summed up all these various roles for maintenance and preventative spankings nicely in this single quote:

 

“I'm not sure if there has been a Monday morning when there was NOTHING to punish Art for. So we start with that. Then we move on to the upcoming week, though there really is no noticeable transition. On many Mondays nowadays there are more swats about the upcoming week than there were for the past week. To me that is a sign that our DD is working because he had a good week last week. But he admits that he needs a paddling to remind him to keep it up. If he completely stopped being arrogant, maybe the reminders would stop. But that's all speculative since his arrogance is unlikely to go away completely. I think the routine we have established of paddling him every Monday 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 anymore. Maybe we both need weekly reminders of that!”

 

Do you practice preventative and/or maintenance spankings? What role do they serve?  Have they been effective?  In what sense?  Also, I’m curious about the mechanics.  Is a preventative or maintenance spanking less severe than a punishment spanking?  Is the duration shorter? Do you have a pre-set schedule?

 

 

I look forward to your thoughts on this. Have a great week.