Spanking Pace (continued), plus What Aare You Thinking While Being Spanked? (Club meeting - 531)

“To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.” - Garrett Hardin

 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, a Domestic Discipline relationship.  I hope you all had a great week.

 

I’ve said many times how much I love the fall season, and this year is no exception.  We passed peak leaf season a week or two ago and have entered the part of the season where things get quite a bit cooler and quite a bit more gray.  But, there’s been enough nice weather that people could do their pumpkin gathering.

 

 

And, the weather was nice enough yesterday that I was able to get most of our outside Halloween decorations up.  We live in a very suburban neighborhood, so nothing even PG-13 for ours.

 

 

As you know, I took this past week off from posting.  There was no specific precipitating event, but I just started feeling very frustrated by the amount of time I was putting into on-line activities. Honestly, I'm still kind of feeling that way, but I had this post mostly written anyway, and while not posting one week is no big deal, twice in a row starts feeling like a trend.

 

Anyway, two weeks ago there were some interesting happenings in our household on the DD front and in ways that relate to some recent, or relatively recent, topics.

 

We’ve had some stumbling starts and stops on this, but Anne and I are trying to get back into weekly check-ins.  It’s a conscious effort to both increase her sense of control over my behavior and the disciplinary aspects of the relationship and also to generally improve our communications and organize our calendars and to-dos so we’re better coordinated on things like planning future travel or joint activities.

 

 

We both see a value in the meetings, but that hasn’t seemed to translate into doing them with any regularity. We’re trying to change that by adding some formality, like actually putting them on our respective calendars, requiring me to submit a report and a journal entry to her before the meeting, etc.

 

I’ve posted various drafts of the report template here a few times before. Here’s the latest version:

 

The latest updates are designed to do a few things:

 

• Making the bigger offenses a simple, binary check-off. Did it happen or didn’t it, without an attempt to quantify the seriousness.
•  Noting expressly whether she’s already threatened or ordered a spanking for something, which serves two purposes: remind her that she’s not supposed to be letting things go like that, and make a “catch up” spanking to take care of such matters a foregone conclusion after the check-in.
•  Requiring me to state what I think should happen as a result of the behavior.  In effect, if I objectively deserve to be spanked, I need to say so. It also may be that, in some cases, she may not see something as a big deal, but I’m feeling the need to be held accountable for it.  In effect, if I think I deserve or need a spanking, the form forces me to face up to it.

 

It seemed to work pretty well in our recent session, and the discipline it dictated leads me to recap some things from previous topics.

 

First, although I hadn’t had any very big behavioral fails, there had been at least one incident that she cared about enough to comment on it unfavorably, and there was another incident that I saw as an issue.

 

The first involved some comments I made over a dinner with some one of our kids’ in-laws.  The drinks were flowing pretty freely and, while I didn’t drink any more than anyone else, I made a couple of comments that Anne thought were a little too off-color, describing it as “regressing to frat-boy humor.”  I don’t fully agree with her assessment, but that’s not the standard.

 

 

The other issue involved a neighborhood potluck.  I had wine on an empty stomach. There actually were no behavior problems associated with it, and even commented that she was surprised I saw it as an issue since I’d behaved myself throughout the gathering. But, I felt like I’d consumed too much and had been irresponsible in not eating more.  Basically, I felt like I needed her to impose a bit tighter boundaries around alcohol, not because it’s been a big problem lately but, to the contrary, because it had improved quite a bit and I didn’t want to see that progress reverse.

 

Because I had identified two different and independent incidents, when answering the “What should happen” question, I was honest and said there should be two separate spankings.  She agreed.

 

 

That gives me an opportunity address the recent topics of (a) the pace of spankings; and (b) multiple spankings.

 

Regarding pace, the first spanking began as a pretty typical OTK spanking with the bath brush.  But, I think she must have read last week’s blog post with the discussion of the pros and cons of a rapid-fire pace.  In addition to lots of swats at her normal pace, she gave several super-fast volleys, delivered at what had to be close to the fastest pace she could do swinging the bath brush.

 

The second spanking came three days later, and it was in a position we seldom use – laying flat on the bed with her swinging from above.  

 

She used a combination of instruments, including the London Tanner’s DD Strap, a wooden paddle, and a short leather paddle with holes, which I got from Aunt Kay’s husband. Her pace was slower and more deliberate, and overall the spanking lasted longer.

 

 

How did they compare, and was CalSpankee right in his proposition that
“slower and longer” is more effective?

 

Honestly, it wasn’t really a fair test of his proposition.  Her pace during the second spanking was slower but not what I would call truly slow.  Also, the position was, for me, not very effective.  For whatever reason, laying flat on a bed has never worked well for me.  The strikes always seem to hit the two glutes very unevenly.  I also tend to get anxiety about swats hitting too high.  I’m also always breathing into the mattress or turning my head to the side uncomfortably.

 

So, in this case, no, the slower pace was not more effective. But, as I said, it also didn’t seem like a fair comparison. For me, a real head-to-head competition would probably involve a standing or bent-over position, with a single instrument—probably a heavy wooden paddle—with the 15 to 20 second pauses between swats that CalSpankee recommended.  If done long enough, I still think that could be more effective.

 

 

I think there is one more factor, however, that would have to be apples-to-apples, and that would be that each would have to be a single spanking for a single offense, with one offense happening after the other and the first spanking intervening between the two.

 

This relates back to some concerns Alan has raised about multiple spankings for the same offense.  Alan’s concern (he’ll correct me I get this wrong) is that spanking more than once for the same offense delays the typical “cleaning of the slate” that is one of the major benefits of DD.  His advice is, if there is a desire for a more serious spanking to reflect an especially serious offense or series of offenses, consider a post-orgasm spanking instead of multiple spankings.

 

Now, my situation this week was not exactly “two spankings for one offense”. There were multiple offenses, and my request for two spankings reflected that each should be punished.  But, spanking on two different days created (for me) a problem somewhat, though not exactly, like Alan’s concern about delayed cleaning of the slate.

 

See, after the first spanking, my need for accountability seemed fully satisfied. There was no feeling of needing to wipe the slate clean. Instead, the second spanking felt totally superfluous. 

 

That’s the second reason that the fast-paced first spanking versus the slow-paced second spanking isn’t an entirely fair comparison – I wasn’t in a similar mental/emotional state. 

 

CalSpankee favors the slow-paced session because the gap between swats gives lots of time to think about why you’re being spanked, what you could have done differently, exploring feelings of guilt, etc.  The problem was most of the feelings that lead to those kind of thoughts had been expiated with the first spanking.

 

 

I’m not sure this means that making sure that each offense gets its own punishment is wrong. But, it might mean that the multiple sessions need to come very close to each other in time, like a single, long session broken into two parts, with some downtime in-between.

 

I also have a few observations about the two respective spankings.

 

Regarding the first spanking, which included super-fast volleys, they were surprisingly effective in one respect: They seemed to have the ability to cut through some numbing and/or through the somewhat diminished response that seems to happen when I’ve been spanked for a significant amount of time. I was surprised at (a) how much more the faster volleys hurt; (b) that the pain-level stayed consistently high from the beginning to the end of each volley; and (c) how, even after numbness had started to set in, a fast volley would cut right through it.

 

Regarding the second spanking, my primary observation is that counter-intuitively, it didn’t really hurt any more than usual, even though it took place just three days after a hard one.  Was I surprised by that? Not entirely. 

 

Although intuitively it seems like a spanking so soon after another serious one should hurt substantially more, on the rare occasion when I’ve gotten two in one week, and even on the even more rare occasions when I’ve gotten two in successive days, the second did not hurt more than the first.  I’ll be curious to hear from you whether my experience is atypical.

 

For this week, feel free to address any thoughts that arise from the above observations.

 

Plus, and relatedly, CalSpankee suggested this:

 

“As a spankee, what things are you thinking about when you are getting spanked?"; and,

 

"What type of spanking does or does not get you thinking about those things, and why?"

 

For me, that’s a hard one.  Honestly, I’m not thinking that coherently while I’m getting spanked.  I often start out counting the swats as they land, though it’s not an intentional thing; I just kind of start counting.  But, I also almost never keep counting throughout it.  If it’s been a while since I’ve been spanked, I’m sometimes shocked by just how much it hurts, and I may even think about begging her to stop, though I almost never do. Sometimes, if the spanking is especially hard or has gone on a long time, I may feel some resentment that she isn’t bringing it to an end, but then I’ll almost always mentally acknowledge that I got myself into it.

 

That’s about it. As I said, I’m not thinking all that coherently when being spanked.

 

I hope you all have a great week.