The Club -- Meeting 468 -- Cultural Influences on Spanking Instruments

“The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” - Charles Darwin

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly meeting of men and women who are in, or interested in being in, Domestic Discipline and/or Female Led (FLR) relationships.

 

Once again, before we get started, I would like to extend a specific invitation to any of our female readers, if they still exist, to move from “lurker” to “commenter” status. We miss having you around.

 

I hope you all had a great week.  Mine was OK.  I obviously failed in my goal to post on Friday instead of waiting ‘til the weekend.  I had done some writing in another area earlier in the day and was, honestly, a little burned out.  Though, my enthusiasm was rejuvenated later in the evening as I was re-watching the streaming series Weeds on Hulu and came to this scene from season 4, episode 7. 

Later, you see the main character admiring the lingering hand marks in the mirror. There are a couple of other very explicit spanking scenes in that series. One or more of the writers or showrunners have a spanking thing for sure.

 

We missed our scheduled check-in under our new “performance improvement” system, but we now have committed to doing them weekly, as opposed to my original plan for monthly meetings. I’m still not quite ready to do a full post on it, because we haven’t been operating under it that long.  I will say, however, that Anne seems uncharacteristically enthusiastic and committed to it.  I say “uncharacteristically” not as a dig, but simply in recognition of the fact that we have talked and talked and talked over the years about her really taking over our whole DD process and stepping up the overall level of control and strictness.  In the past, all the talk never gelled into persistent change. This feels . . . different.  

 

I don’t know why, but it may be as simple as she has more time and fewer important distractions than she had pre-retirement.  But, the attitude itself seems different. Maybe it’s like KOJ’s wife dramatically asserting herself once she was no longer concerned about her dominance negatively affecting her career. Or, maybe it’s just the confidence that comes along with age?  Who knows, but I do feel like it’s an interesting transitional period we are going through.

 

 

It was a good discussion last week, though I don’t have much to highlight from it.  I didn’t go back and tally up the responses, but it seems like the group is fairly evenly split between those who would fulfill their fantasies if given the opportunity and those who prefer to keep the fantasy and reality separate. At least with respect to Glenmore’s specific example of a group spanking with multiple spankers and spankees.  There seems to be a similar split on the broader fantasy of witnesses.  I do wonder why that one fantasy is so prevalent, but it clearly is.

 

This week’s topic is going to be pretty succinct, because (a) I’m doing a bunch of other stuff this weekend; and (b) I couldn’t think of a broader topic or a good way to expand this one.

 

It comes from an off-line discussion with Al about some of our instrument preferences, which led to some observations about how prevalent certain instruments were when and where we grew up.

 

It does seem like certain cultures prefer certain instruments, and I’m not sure whether any instrument is ubiquitous across cultures.

 

 

While the ebony hairbrush is, to me, perhaps the most iconic instrument among DD enthusiasts, I don’t think hairbrush spankings were common where I grew up.  I can’t recall knowing about a single instance in which a hairbrush was used for spanking purposes, though of course we were all embarrassed by the spankings we got—even though they were pervasive—and we didn’t go around talking about the details.

 

In the communities I lived in, the almost universally used instruments were paddles and belts. But, while both were ubiquitous, they were used respectively in two very distinct contexts.  

 

At home, the most common instrument by far was the leather belt, wielded with authority by both moms and dads.  However, it usually was dad’s belt that was used, and since it was a cowboy culture, they tended to be thick leather western-style belts or heavy work belts.

 

 

At school, it was the paddle, to the exclusion of every other instrument.  But, as far as I know, paddles were virtually never used at home.  I’m not sure why that bifurcation existed, but it did.  Maybe the absence of paddles for home discipline came down to the fact that most of the men wore belts daily, so there was almost always one readily available, so why invest in a paddle?

 

 

Al and my discussion focused on switches.  They were part of the childhood experience for both him and his wife, but not at all for me.  Perhaps because of the differences in our experiences, switches are still used for adult discipline in his relationship, while I’ve never been switched.  I wonder if this is another example of how geography matters.  I grew up largely in the dry Southwest and sort of the Midwest depending on how you define that. There weren’t a lot of large bushes around, so “Go cut a switch and bring it to me” really would not have worked.

 

Canes seem to me to be a very culturally-dependent instrument of correction.  They are iconic to the English, but are they very prevalent in the US in any non-adult setting, and perhaps, while used for DD, mainly among the BDSM community?

 

 

My impression is that in other parts of the UK, including Ireland and Scotland, straps and tawses are more prevalent than the cane, but I welcome correction by any of our UK commenters.  Given the geographic proximity, I wonder why canes seem to be such an almost exclusively British thing. 

 

I also wonder whether the preference for belts in my early community was because so many of the non-Hispanic population in those areas were of Scotch-Irish descent and the belt was the closest corollary to the strap or tawse?  But, there were also many of British descent, and yet caning was unheard of.

 

 

Although I think that the cultural-based instrument preferences I observed growing up influenced my emotional reaction to certain instruments, they don’t seem to have had much influence on what we actually use. Anne used to use straps a lot, but seldom anymore, and she’s used belts only very rarely. She rarely wears belts, and maybe that's unfortunate. Is there anything as sexy to men wired like us as a woman taking off her belt?

 

Paddles have been more frequently used recently, but not nearly as often as one might expect given how common school paddlings were when we were growing up.  Increasingly, we seem to have settled on the ebony hairbrush and the bath brush, with the latter being by far Anne’s “go-to” instrument, even though neither played any role in our early disciplinary environment. 

I do wish sometimes that canes, while not a part of my upbringing, were part of our adult discipline repertoire.  As time has gone by and having received dozens and dozens of hard spankings, I don't mark or bruise much anymore. And, like the character in Weeds mentioned above, I admit I liked lingering over the marks of Anne's labors, including raised welts from a hard strapping or caning.

How about you?  What were the most common instruments for disciplinary correction where and when you grew up?  Were there certain instruments that were more prevalent in your culture/geographic area?  Do what extent did those early cultural instrument preferences influence your preferences, positively or negatively, as an adult?

 

Have a great week.