The Club - Meeting 496 - Domestic Discipline Spankings for "Big" Issues

“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.” ― Vince Lombardi Jr.

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 Female Led (FLR) relationships.

 

Once again, before we get started, I would like to thank the female commenters who have recently joined us and to extend an invitation to all others who may be inclined to move from “lurker” to “commenter” status. We like having you around.

 

I hope you all had a great week. Ours was pretty sedate, but given our recent medical challenges, sometimes it’s the little things that count.  We went out to dinner this week. That’s obviously not a big thing in and of itself, but it was the first time we’d been out together for anything other than medical appointments in about seven weeks.  Light at the end of the tunnel.

 

 

Fall also finally really committed to coming to our area. Took it long enough.  I don’t know why I love this time of year so much, but I do.  Well, maybe some of the reasons are pretty obvious.  I maintain Halloween is by far the sexiest holiday, as borne out by the fact I have way more Halloween themed spanking art and memes than I can ever use in one season.

 

 

Well, I accomplished what turned out to be my not-so-little project of plowing through all my old posts and the associated comments.  All 608 posts and 72,000 comments.  Although there were no big surprises, maybe a few things are worth mentioning, though I hit on a few of these in the last post:

 

·      I knew there was more female participating in the early years, but I had forgotten just how much more.

·      Many of those female participants seemed to be very aggressively in charge.  We can debate what an FLR is but, however you characterize it, many of those early female commenters clearly exercised, or aspired to exercise, very significant control over their men.

·      I wondered whether there was some change in the blog that drove the women away. Honestly, one big factor may have been way more pedestrian.  There was a period when Google’s “captcha” sign-on verification became damn near unworkable. I remember how hard it was to leave comments on others’ blogs.  Several people complained on mine, and it was right around that time that many of the female comments stopped.  My guess is, being very practical creatures, they had better things to do and just gave up. We also had a couple of serious “troll infestations” around that same time, and it’s possible those turned off some of the female commenters.

·      The political exchanges in 2020 and 2021 were nastier than I remembered.  Although I have no doubt it contributed to total readership falling, it’s hard to detect any impact on actual participation.  I’m staying away from political comments more this election, but not because I give a shit about total readership. I’m just kind of resigned to “what happens, happens” this time around, and I'm perhaps more realistic about the prospects of any discussion changing anyone’s mind.

·      From very early on, there were problems with men masquerading as women and individuals posing as couples.  It was impossible to police back then, and it’s just as impossible now. 

·      Topic interest comes and goes. There were topics I did early on that flopped but did quite well when I tried them again a couple of years later. 

·      It was interesting seeing how certain “features” of the discussion were introduced over time.  I had forgotten that in the earliest posts, I didn’t reply to most of the comments; that didn’t really change for several months. When I started introducing memes and spanking art, at first it was very sporadic, then only one per post, then finally several per post but each tailored to illustrate a particular point. 

·      My concerns about confidentiality and being “outed” were so paranoid, I would fudge the details on big things going on at work or in my personal life so thoroughly that reading them now, years down the line, I can’t even remember what some of them were referring to.

 

Of course, my biggest take away is just how long some of you have stuck around.  Thanks for sticking with it all these years and through so many repetitive posts.

 

Thanks to all of you who participated in last week’s open-ended discussion about how “FLR-ish” our respective marriages are.  My only big disappointment is that I was hoping to get more input from the wives. But, that’s a work in progress.  In the meantime, I felt KOJ (Yah, he’s back!), gave perhaps the best summary, with a couple of caveats, of what this thing we do includes and perhaps excludes:

 

“I would describe your blog as "F/m Domestic Discipline (DD)," with the following definitions:
F/m -- a woman has some authority over a man.
Domestic (for your blog) -- heterosexual, adult, live-in.
Discipline (for your blog) -- Includes spanking where sexual gratification is not the primary purpose.”

 

I think that’s mostly right.  My two primary caveats would be that I don’t feel like the “domestic” in DD necessarily excludes relationships that aren’t “live in” as long as, as Donn later noted, they are “committed,” which I would define as long-term and stable.

 

The other caveat for me personally is, when setting up the blog and managing it over the years, I've never intentionally excluded gay or trans relationships. It just never really came up.  I wouldn’t have a problem having one or both members of a gay couple participate, as long as the dynamic was basically the same as we talk about here, i.e. a domestic relationship with one partner in a lead or "top" disciplinary role holding the other partner accountable by imposing disciplinary measures including corporal punishment. It would probably be subject to a test run to see how in impacted the group dynamic, but I don’t have any reason to think that a gay DD relationship would be very different from a hetero DD dynamic.

 

 

The whole discussion of what factors influence whether a relationship is an FLR did take me in a direction I’ve previously resisted.  We often talk about DD and FLR being a spectrum, but I wonder whether they really are.  It seems to me they represent separate but adjacent lifestyles that overlap to a lesser degree for some and a larger degree for others.  In the past, I’ve been really resistant to seeing DD as a sub-set of any other relationships dynamic, but I do think that, given that there is some power shifting going on in even the most narrow forms of DD, it’s reasonable to classify it as one variant of a Dominance/submission dynamic, and one in which individual relationships incorporate various degrees of dominance. Though, I also can see maintaining that any form of Dominance/submission violates KOJ’s third factor, i.e. that sexual satisfaction not be the primary purpose.  As KOJ said, it's probably impossible to define, and that’s fine.

 

Now, on to this week’s topic. New commenter “Jackson” left this recent comment and topic suggestion:

 

Drinking more than allowed and sloppy behavior has been a continuous, persistent issue. Although discipline has improved it a lot, I think with an occasional pegging and brutal spanking it might be permanently resolvable with FLR/DD alone. Drinking is a large and complex problem, and I used to think those were not really solvable with FLR/DD, but since we have made certain every spanking is a brutal, memorable event with surrender and submission at its end, I think I could be disciplined to moderate drinking. I am much improved already. Maybe pegging is what is needed (but rarely). Dan maybe a topic sometime is “Can FLR/DD solve big complex issues?”

 

So, let’s get into that.  Can the discipline that comes along with a DD and/or FLR relationship solve big, complex issues?

 

I’ll start by observing that what each person sees as a “big” problem is inherently individual.  And, even for each individual, it may be a complex analysis. 

 

Perhaps his forgetfulness around financial issues usually isn't a big deal, but what if it results in her incurring a bunch of extra time or having to deal with a big unnecessary headache?

It also may hinge on particular outcomes, right?  Everyday procrastination might not be a big problem, but what if it results in not paying bills on time, thereby ruining the couple’s credit rating?

 

 

I don't think of speeding tickets as a big deal, but I know others do. And, even I concede they could become a big deal if cumulatively they resulted in a license suspension or a big jump in insurance rates. Or, in today's environment, god forbid a road rage incident got out of hand.

Or, maybe carelessness becomes such a chronic problem that, while one instance may not be a big deal, cumulatively the damages adds up. Or, it could be like what happened with a couple of motorcycle trips I’ve discussed in which I failed to do some basic preparation and, while no disaster happened, it could have and, regardless of whether it actually did, it stressed me out, cost us additional money to fix mistakes, etc.

 

Are those “big” things? In isolation, some might not be. But, they may be part of a larger pattern. And, there is the fact that sloppiness on things that don't matter much still creates habits that can lead to sloppiness on things that do.

 

The best statement I’ve found among our blog comments was this from ZM, which began with an observation about how hard it may be for wives to be strict with regard to “small things”:

 

“I think this is a common problem, especially as wives are gaining experience, because in order for it to be a real punishment for an adult, a spanking must be quite hard and long. This is especially true if the recipient is an adult who may fantasize about spanking. Pretty much EVERY punishment is going to be relatively big, and this doesn't seem quite as fair for seemingly "small" things.

 

It is only by the wife seeing the bigger picture and realizing that by addressing the small things, she is also addressing the bigger issues, that the whole thing seems in any way fair or proportional. Is it fair to spank me to tears because I leave my socks on the floor? Of course not! On the other hand, is it fair to spank me to tears because I continually let deadlines slip past, ultimately jeopardizing our quality of living? Sure. Is it fair to spank me tears because I eat a hamburger and too many fries? Probably not. Is it fair to spank me to help me change my eating habits and massively improve my health, greatly increasing the chances I can live for many more years and enjoy life, family, etc.? Of course.

 

So only by seeing that the small things and the bigger things are all just parts of the same picture can she feel good about consistently monitoring these little day-to-day things and enforcing seemingly minor lapses with severe enough punishments that they can help to effect real change.”

 

Jackson’s question referred to drinking too much, and that is the problem I’ve talked about the most here over the years. It undoubtedly has led to more spankings over time than any other offense. Yet, is it really my biggest issue?  That’s debatable.  To put it in context, in the month of September, I drank only three times. 

 

When I look at the big picture, there is a strong argument to be made that other behavioral failings, such as procrastination, carelessness, inattention to detail, and a reputation for being difficult to manage were much bigger limiting factors where work success and overall quality of life were concerned than drinking ever has been.

 

But, of those three drinking occasions in September, two of them involved “a few” becoming “a few too many,” and that’s been an ongoing problem for me. And, I've always recognized that it's not really the over-consumption that itself is a problem but, rather, the potential impact on other commitments or goals.

 

So, while perhaps it’s not the biggest issue, it’s still big enough.

 

So, can DD help with big issues?  Personally, I believe it probably can but it may require bringing the whole panoply of disciplinary tools to bear.  That could include cranking up the frequency and severity of the spankings, giving more preventative spankings, doing more check-ins and monitoring, and exploring alternative punishments.

 

To illustrate, one big problem with using DD to root out my particular issue with binge drinking is that the problem isn’t consistent, so it’s hard to say more consistent spanking alone would help.  As I said in reply to Jackson:

 

I've come to doubt whether DD will do much for it, though in fairness (a) I do think it has some modest role in imposing some guardrails, even if I crash through them every once in a while; and (b) we've never achieved a really high degree of consistency and certainty. In some ways, that reflects the nature of my issue. I'm not remotely close to a daily drinker. It's just that when I do drink, it can turn into a binge. Since the drinking is so episodic, the spankings have been too, only more so.

 

In other words, while consistently spanking for each instance of excessive drinking might help, it’s hard to see how consistency would have resulted in more than an incremental improvement when the problem itself is so inconsistent.

 

But, maybe that isn't the primary consideration when judging efficacy.  Maybe more consistency would have imposed some real limits and guardrails, even if the problem still occurred episodically.

 

On the other hand, let’s look at something like smoking. I started using chewing tobacco in high school, graduating to cigarettes in college, and eventually came to use both in copious daily amounts. I tried to quit many times, but I was very, very physically addicted.  I eventually did kick the habit cold turkey, but only after multiple failures.

 

It's probably not a coincidence that my successful effort to quit happened after Anne and I got serious, even though that was a decade before we started DD. I knew she hated the smell and taste of smoke, and that disapproval may have given me the extra incentive I needed.

 

In that case, and maybe paradoxically, because my dependence on nicotine was displayed multiple times a day, I do think that had we been into DD at that time, it might have made one of those earlier failed attempts successful if, and only if, Anne had been determined to take consistent action to root it out.  If her mere disapproval helped me kick the habit, how much more so would disapproval combined with a severe paddling each and every time have helped? My guess is . . . a lot.

 

So, the nature of the “big” issue may be very important to how amenable it is to solving with Domestic Discipline.

 

It also may be the case that, despite the numerous serious spankings Anne has given me for over-indulging, there hasn’t been enough of a “whatever it takes” approach.  As I've confessed here, when I go out with a friend for happy hour, after the second drink I sometimes forget all about the possible consequences. But, would I forget if I knew that one binge incident might result in a week’s worth of daily spankings? Here is an older comment from “DWC Fred” that suggests that the wife's level of sheer determination and willingness to be extraordinarily strict do matter:

 

“Ann has only spanked me for “big” things three times in recent years. [Once was] for being upset with her and expressing myself and carrying on badly. A couple of days later I apologized, and we spoke about it. I was in tears because of how I had spoken to her and made her feel. After our discussion she sentenced me to a spanking every day, for four days.

 

They were horrible. From day two on I was crying as I pulled down my pants and had difficulty calling Ann to tell her I was ready.

 

Four days in a row is a whole new ballgame, both from an emotional perspective and the pain perspective. Anticipating the increased pain and the additional embarrassment of crying from the time I pulled down my underwear, and getting even more out of control by the time Ann was done spanking, made days 2,3, and 4 successively worse.

I’ve never repeated any of those offenses.”

 

I also strongly suspect that my failure to think of likely consequences might be reduced substantially if some consequences were imposed in advance via preventative spankings.  

 

So, while I do think some “big” things may be resistant to a traditional “one regular spanking per one offense” approach, that doesn’t necessarily means spanking is inherently insufficient to address serious problems. Rather, maybe the seriousness of the sanction needs to be cranked up to match the seriousness of the offense or the number of times it has recurred.

 

How about you?  Have you used to DD to address “big” issues?  What worked? What didn’t?  If they haven't worked, was it a matter of spankings' inherent limitation, or more a lack of will and determination to make them effective? Are there things that could be added to DD spankings to make them more effective in resolving bigger issues?

 

Have a great week.