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.

The Club -- Meeting 467 -- Fantasies and Things That Should Remain Only That

“Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.” - Carl Jung

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'm posting a little early this week, as I'm going to be tied up much of this weekend. I may start shooting for more Friday postings, as our comments seem to wind down earlier in the week, and I seem to have fewer things going on Fridays. While I think posting on the same day every week did help build up the blog, I find that in retirement I'm just not very into keeping an inflexible schedule on any front.

 

I hope you all had a great week.  There’s not much to report here.  It was a pretty sedate week, with no major drama.  Although, there was one thing vaguely FLR-related worth mentioning. It was a minor thing in and of itself, but it’s another indication that Anne may be in the early stages of a transformation similar to what KOJ has described in which his wife became far more open in her displays of authority after she retired.

 

 

We were visiting my parents.  Anne was telling some story, and I interrupted her with a somewhat snarky comment.  Without missing a beat and without even turning to acknowledge me, she said very firmly and directly, “Excuse me. I’m speaking,” then went on with her story. Again, it sounds minor, but her demeanor was totally in command, in a way that I’m not sure she would have displayed even a couple of years ago.  And, the fact that she was that comfortable with a confident display of authority in front of my parents, plus two of my sisters, also seems to me to speak volumes about her increasingly in-charge mindset.

 

 

We had a pretty good discussion last week, on what I thought was a very narrow topic.  It’s notable that several of you didn’t accept the underlying premise that DD could be a deal-killer in a future relationship, preferring to take the positive view that it probably would not prove that hard to find a woman who was interested in it or to persuade a partner to try it. And, as Al pointed out, it’s almost certainly a case of “nothing ventured, nothing gained”:

 

“It often seems to be a truism in the F/M DD/DWC community that it is usually quite difficult to convince a wife to take a disciplinary role. However, it is probably even more true that most men are so concerned about the possibility of rejection and looking foolish (weird, unmanly, sick) that they never bring it up (it took me a few years to do so, and even then it was while we were both drunk and swapping sexual fantasies - when I confessed to a "mild interest" in being spanked). This is certainly a very understandable concern, and yet, what I have often seen in spanking forums such as this over the years is that once a wife was approached, they were quite often willing to give it a try to some degree, and many quickly came to enjoy their role as a disciplinary wife.

 

There were different, and somewhat opposing perspectives on the best timing for approaching a future partner about your disciplinary needs.  Mike represented the view that it may take some time to develop the kind of relationship in which one would feel comfortable admitting to that kind of need:

 

I guess it always depends on the person I would be dating. If she had a strong “take charge” mentality and I sensed an authoritative vibe coming from her, maybe I might open up. But it took me 10 years of marriage and being in a very emotionally vulnerable place to finally open up to my wife about my spanking need. I don’t know if I would have that level of trust and vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship.

 

Alan took a different view regarding timing, and I really liked his spin on DD as a “deal-maker” rather than a “deal-breaker”:

 

DD is definitely not a deal breaker at the beginning of a serious relationship, but it can be a “deal maker” and has been for me in my two DD relationships. The depth and intimacy that DD offers make it impossible for other women to compete with a woman who adopts loving female-led discipline. In earlier relationships, I always found myself searching for something missing. What was missing, of course, was discipline and spanking. With it, I am emotionally fulfilled.

 

However, I think waiting is not the best strategy. One reason is simply it is unfair not to tell her of needs that are so deep that might later sabotage your relationship. But a better reason is that early in a relationship is the interval when she may be more open to exploring unfamiliar (to her) aspects of sexuality—and it is also the time she is going to be motivated to show that she wants to meet your needs. What I am suggesting probably actually happens rarely. But in today's world –with the increasing honesty about sexuality (especially for emerging generations), it could work.

 

There was also an unexpected diversion into the topic of pre-spanking erections.  Maybe I’ll do a full topic on that in the future, though we covered it pretty thoroughly in the comments.

 

As the week was winding down, I got this topic suggestion from Glenmore, along with two of his drawings:

 

 

Just another potential suggestion for your blog.  I have attached a couple of scenarios that are likely fantasies for many of us, but my question is how many of us would actually do this, and how would we react if this really happened?

 

·      Would it be worse if you did or didn't know the other men and women?

·      How would you feel about being spanked by the other women, and would you have a problem with your wife spanking the other men?

·      Do you like it but would prefer it just remained a fantasy?

 

Just a few thoughts and I'm sure you could add a few more.

 

Glen’s illustrations centered on multiple spankers and spankees coming together for a disciplinary session.  I’ll answer his questions on that specific scenario, but I’ll also broaden his question a bit to include: “Are there DD or FLR-related scenarios you fantasize about but probably would not actually do if given the opportunity?”

 

My answer to Glen’s specific questions are:

 

“Would it be worse if you did or didn't know the other men and women?” I don’t have a real opinion on which would be “worse.”  But, I do think whether I knew the other men might have a big impact on whether I would ever fantasize about, or be attracted to, such a scenario in the first place.

 

For me, “authenticity” is a big driver of my DD interest.  If there isn’t some element of real accountability/punishment in it, I don’t have much attraction to it.  If a session involved only men and women I didn’t know, I think it would feel like a game or party.  I wouldn’t say I have zero interest in ever attending a spanking party, but whatever level of interest I have is quite low.  So, while I think the scenario is very unlikely to ever happen, any fantasy I would have about it would probably be limited to it happening with someone I actually know.

 

“How would you feel about being spanked by the other women, and would you have a problem with your wife spanking the other men?”

 

Being spanked by another woman isn’t a huge fantasy for me, but I admit to being more than a little intrigued by stories Aunt Kay’s husband has shared about being sent to another woman for a session. There are also stories on the DWC website—like “Military Duty Calls” in which a female soldier going on deployment sends her husband to her mother for a spanking—that I am attracted to, as long as there is a strong, real disciplinary component.

 

As for whether I would have a problem with Anne spanking the other men in Glen’s joint scenario, the simple answer is no.  While it’s hard to know for sure, I honestly don’t think I would have any problem with Anne spanking any man in any real disciplinary scenario. I’m not sure whether I would want to see it happening, but I don’t think I would have any problem at all with her doing it.  In fact, although I think the chance of it happening is virtually nil, I would have tell her to go for it if the situation ever presented itself.

 

“Do you like it but would prefer it just remained a fantasy?” Glen’s specific scenario doesn’t really rise to the “fantasy” level for me. But, I could see it being something I would be open to exploring under the right scenario. I think it probably would have to be limited to one other couple. I would need to have some kind of personal connection to the other husband, though that could include someone I’ve known only electronically through this blog.  Even though I see other men naked in the gym almost daily, I suspect the full nudity would be at least as embarrassing as the spankings.  Would I do it if Anne ordered such a thing?  Undoubtedly yes.  Is it a scenario I would actively pursue in real life? Probably not.

 

As for my own question as to whether there are DD or FLR-related scenarios you fantasize about but probably would not actually do if given the opportunity?”

 

It may seem odd for someone who spends as much time writing about DD as I do, but I don’t have that many fantasies about it. And, I suspect the ones I do have are not the least bit appealing to most of you.

 

I’ve often commented on how envious I am of JR’s woodshed stories, and I do have a thing for both woodsheds and barns and would very much like to experience a real disciplinary spanking in one.  There’s nothing controversial or even all that interesting about that fantasy, of course. 

 

 

However, many of the stories I’ve read that include those elements involved male spankers. There are no shortage of stories out there about being taken to the woodshed by a father or uncle.  Although the woodshed/barn scenario is appealing to me by itself, the M/m aspect of many of those stories also appeals to something deep within me. 

 

In fact, the photo immediately above is one I came across a long time ago as part of a spanking story that involved a dominant male who was in a D/s sort of relationship with a couple.  The husband had done something the dominant male and the wife agreed should be punished, but the wife kept blowing off phone calls to schedule it. So, the dominant male interrupts a dinner party the couple was hosting and lets the husband know he will make a scene if he does not accompany him to a horse barn on the couple’s party.  Once there, he whips him to tears before letting him go back to the party. That story is one of the first in the spanking genre that I recall having a very strong reaction to.  A big part of my DD need is rooted in wanting to have my will overcome such that I am held to account even when I don't want to go along with it.

 

I’ve also recounted that, while I seldom dream about spanking, a particularly vivid one I did have involved being taken from a party at work to be spanked by a male office manager, with everyone in the party (including Anne, my mother and my dad) knowing it was going to happen. 

 

Are these M/m stories and dreams something I might fantasize about but would never do in real life?  I don’t know.  I think that much of my DD attraction is rooted in power dynamics and parental authority, including both maternal and paternal authority.  My morbid desire to have discipline imposed is less gender-specific than it probably is for most of you.  And, in the very unlikely event that Anne was to order such a thing, would I go along with it?  Almost certainly yes.

 

 

There is a sense in which Anne's recent assertiveness, and the "goal achievement" and procrastination check-ins we recently implemented, has been a long-term fantasy, and one I could come to regret.  Just like the M/m and woodshed spanking scenarios appeal to me because they involve being literally and psychologically taken to a place outside my "control zone," a lot of what Anne and I are exploring involves her increasingly setting the rules, enforcing them when and how she sees fit, and generally empowering her in ways that I may have less and less control over as she explores these more aggressive and assertive parts of her personality.

 

 

Most of my other DD-related fantasies are pretty pedestrian and involve being spanked in unconventional or risky places, like the backseat of a car or in the woods.  I definitely would go along with anything like that if Anne wanted to.

 

 

How about you? How do you feel about Glen’s scenario and his questions about it?  Is it something you are attracted to?  Is it an attraction you would be game to pursue in real life, or is it one of those things that is better as a fantasy? Are there other fantasies that fall into that category?

 

I hope you have a good week.

The Club - Meeting 466 - Is Domestic Discipline a Deal-Killer?

“Women marry men hoping they will change, and men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.” - Albert Einstein

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.  Ours was interesting.  I’ve mentioned a few times that I had talked to Anne about the possibility of using DD to give me some additional motivation to overcome procrastination, move forward on some bigger life goals, and basically get past some of the stagnation I let myself drift into in 2023.  Somewhat surprisingly, she has not only been open to the idea but downright enthusiastic about it.  We had our first face-to-face, in-depth discussion about it this week, which I think makes it premature to talk about it in detail so soon.  But, stay tuned.

 

 

Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful week.  The only hiccup was I’ve been getting involved in some local political issues, and it’s easy to get frustrated with that kind of stuff.  We live in what has to be one of the most highly educated counties in the U.S., yet I often feel like I’m surrounded by stupid people.  I think that not keeping my temper may have to be an actionable item in Anne’s new performance improvement plan.

 

We had a good discussion last week regarding why we continue DD even after we know what a real DD spanking entails, though I’m not sure we arrived at any answers.  It is such an individualized question and inevitably get tied up in discussions of our individual DD origins and what drove our interest in the first place. But, I never get tired of hearing origin stories, so even if we didn’t get too many answers it was interesting.

 

A couple of the comments hit on something I wrote down as a possible topic a few weeks but couldn’t quite figure out how to develop.  Honestly, I still can’t. This is going to be one of the shortest posts since the beginning of the blog, as I can’t find a single meme, drawing or photo that relates to it, and I don’t have a whole lot to say about the topic myself. But, here goes . . .

 

Norton kicked it off with this comment:

 

Mike's story was a lot like mine, including the desire to have your wife spank you, and the stress relief you get from spankings. Describing your "need to submit" and the turn-on you get from "the threat of a spanking from an authoritative woman", resonate with me. My wife couldn't really embrace F/M DD, and that was a huge issue for us. After we split up, and I finally got what I always needed, life got much better. Like Dan said, hopefully your wife is just going through a pause. For me, however, I finally have had to accept that my lifelong obsession with F/M spanking is simply never going to go away. At this stage, I would not consider being in a serious relationship with a woman who wasn't into F/M spanking as well as DD. It's just too important to me.

 

GH responded:

 

Same here, Norton. It really is an obsession, and even though my libido declines with age, the obsession with spanking never decreases. That’s why I am here, I suppose. My wife is very sporadic about FLR and DD these days, and sometimes I wish I could just let it go. But I can’t, so I need to talk about it. Like you, I couldn’t imagine getting into any new relationship that wasn’t female led and that didn’t involve DD.

 

So, the topic for this week is: If, god forbid, you found yourself contemplating a new relationship, whether due to loss of a spouse or from divorce or break up, to what extent would DD be a deal-killer for any future relationship?

 

For Norton and GH, it sounds like it would be.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking to Aunt Kay’s husband since she passed, and while DD isn’t a deal-killer for him in any future relationship and, in fact, he seems resigned to accepting that he’s unlikely to find anyone who would be into, it’s clear that he still has a strong interest in it and having someone fill that need would be a strong preference.  KOJ did lose a spouse, I but I don’t recall whether he’s addressed this in any of his comments, and I hope he’ll share any thoughts he has about it.

 

For me, I think I would feel about it much like Aunt Kay’s husband does. In an ideal world, it would be something a new partner would be into, but it wouldn’t be a deal-killer by any means.  I got along fine for the first decade of married life without even knowing there was such a thing as domestic discipline and, honestly, that probably was the period in which I could have used it most. 

 

Would I like it to be a part of any theoretical future relationship? Yes.  Could I move on and live without it? Yes.

 

If I were, god forbid, to find myself looking for a new relationship, would I tell potential partners about the DD aspects of my marriage?  Almost certainly.  I know myself well enough that I’m 100% sure I wouldn’t be involved with a prude in the first place, and I have 0% ability to keep my mouth shut about much of anything in any intimate relationship. I am very sure that I would bring it up, though probably not at the beginning of the relationship.

 

I also stick to my belief that there are very few women out there who have a present, known interest in DD or know they want to be in an FLR.  I believe that in real life, in the vast majority of cases Disciplinary Wives are made not born.  If I wanted DD to be part of a future relationship, I’d probably need to do what I did this time around – tell my partner about my interest, describe it at a high level, refer her to resources that are out there like the DWC website and this blog, and see where she takes it from there.

 

 

How about you?  Is DD a deal-killer for you for any future relationship?  This is an easy one to address from the perspective of the disciplined husband or the disciplinary wife.  For the husbands, would you be OK with a future relationship that did not include domestic discipline? For the wives, now that you’ve experienced the benefits and empower that DD and FLR bring, would you be OK doing without them in any theoretical future relationship?

 

I hope you all have a good week.

The Club -- Meeting 466 - Why DD? Why even after very hard spankings?

“And oftentimes we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure.” — Epicurus

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.

 

We had a good discussion last week, even if it was a narrow topic, about a particular piece of DWC fiction. Thank you to “al.” for giving us the background on his Even More story.  It was a good learning experience for me, even though I've read the story a dozen times, as I didn’t realize until last week that he wrote it before he had experienced a real-life DD spanking.

 

I did enjoy some of the back-and-forth about the “toilet seat” aspect of the story.  I seem to be in the minority in not having that much sympathy for our wives on this one.  This meme sums up my own attitude pretty well:

 

 

As noted in the post, I’ve always loved the Even More story, in part because a lot of it reflects my own DD origins, including all the atmosphere around finding the DWC, being morbidly fascinated by the DD concept, bringing it reluctantly to one’s wife, the thrill (or relief) of her agreeing to it, quickly followed by terror at the reality of her agreeing to it.

 

However, what the story doesn’t address is the “why.”  Why did David have that craving for extremely painful punishment spankings?  Why was that craving not nipped in the bud after that first DD spanking taught him the difference between the fantasy and the reality?  Why did he know he wouldn't walk away from it even though Susan had told him he could?

 

In reflecting on the story, TG had some of those “why” questions:

 

I certainly recognize some parallels to myself in the story. Like many on this blog, I discovered the DWC website twenty plus years ago, but as I remember, I never really spent any time in the fiction section, so I haven’t read this before. It does however get me thinking about one of my perennial conundrums. A real disciplinary spanking is a very painful experience and couldn’t be described as “fun” or “play.” Yet the emotional or physiological need for it far outweighs the unpleasantness of actually receiving it. Yes, I know, it lets us move on with the air cleared and so on, but I’ve never really been able to understand my own need for this, which I know goes far beyond just wanting to clear the air and move on. My impression is that others may have a similar lack of self-understanding. This could almost be a discussion subject in itself, if you could find a coherent way to launch it.

 

TB comes at it from the opposite angle, accepting the reality without asking the “why”:

 

“GH writes about being obsessed with the ‘why’ - I gave up on this a long time ago and just accept that it ‘is’ the way I am. I believe that most if not all people have some sort of so called ‘kink’. Some embrace it & put it to positive use (as many on the site do). Others repress with often damaging consequences. Others are afflicted with socially unacceptable ‘kinks’. What we do is consensual and my ‘vanilla’ wife has accepted & embraced my spanking interest to positively impact our relationship.”

 

I’m somewhere in the middle.  Like TB, I’ve mostly given up asking why.  Or, more precisely, I’ve given up on asking the why question and expecting any real answer. But, because I don’t feel any self-judgment about it, answering the “why” question likely wouldn’t change much for me.

 

Yet, that doesn’t make the answer irrelevant.  Like many, I am my own favorite topic of inquiry. I’m endlessly curious about what makes me tick. 

 

Moreover, my wife is curious about what makes me tick.  Maybe her knowing the "why" shouldn't make much practical difference, yet it kind of does.

 

In the past, her unanswered questions about the “why” of my DD desires made her tentative about fully committing to her role.  She says she went years without fully committing to it in her head because she couldn't understand why any man would want this and, thus, she always had a nagging suspicion that I would decide I didn’t want it anymore and would pull out. 

 

 

TG’s question also isn’t just the typical “origin” inquiry about how we each got here.  It also invites those who receive very harsh spankings to think about not just why we had that initial desire for DD, but how that desire remains and even grows after we’ve experienced the reality of spankings that we really, truly would like to avoid.  I don’t think “David” in the Even More story has a real answer to that question. I know I don’t.  I know that I crave discipline. I know that I crave a maternal-style hierarchy. I know that I want her to be strict and consistent.  

 

 

But, why do I want any of that, especially knowing what I know about how all those things really feel in the moment?  After twenty years of self-reflection, I still don't know.

 

The Disciplinary Wives Club philosophy itself seems to be agnostic on the “why” question.  Aunt Kay offered this piece of advice regarding the attitude the wives should take when their husbands were over their knees:

 

If you feel the least bit sorry for him during all this, remember, a submissive man does not want a weak or lenient woman. He wants someone very strict and dominant. If he wanted anything different, he wouldn’t be over your knees in the first place. This isn’t a small child you are holding over your lap by force — this is a grown man who needs and wants a hard spanking. Give it to him and pay no attention to his cries for mercy. The longer and harder you spank, the more he will love you for it.

 

Aunt Kay and those who contributed to the DWC assumed that the husbands wanted the lifestyle even if they hated the spankings. But, I don’t think anything on the DWC website answers the “why.”

 

There were a couple of large polls posted on the DWC website, with granular analysis of the participants’ histories and motivations. But, there were some problems, in my opinion, with the structure of those polls, including that while there were several questions (directed to both Disciplinary Wives and disciplined husbands) about their relationships with their mothers, their relationships with their fathers went almost wholly unexplored.  p

 

That’s a mistake, in my opinion, and interesting in its own right. Why the automatic assumption that it's our relationships with our mothers, and not our fathers, that feeds the latent DD interest?  Maybe just the pervasive Freudian interest that has since been widely criticized?

 

 

Personally, I suspect that my relationship with my (step)-father was a necessary ingredient in the psychological recipe that led to by DD interest.  I have no real idea why I became so obsessed with DD and attracted to FLR, but I think it’s probably some combination of:

• a mother with a strong but erratic personality 
• a (step)-father who also had a very strong personality and was very anti-authoritarian and confrontational
  
• a permissive teenage environment in which the lack of rules paradoxically led to feelings of overwhelming personal responsibility
• growing up in areas of the country where corporal punishment was very prevalent
  
• my inborn personality/temperament that gravitates toward both achievement and risk-taking

 

Putting it all together, I was born with a personality and temperament that embraced risk-taking and unrestrained behavior. Yet, I'm also very goal-oriented.  I undoubtedly modeled my father’s anti-authoritarianism and aggressive, risk-taking behavior.  But, I get pissed at myself when those behavioral tendencies lead me to "step on my own dick" or make it harder to achieve my goals.  My mother’s personality was strong enough that she could have imposed some checks and balances, but her own behavior was erratic and, by my teenage years, she had more or less given up on imposing rules or holding me accountable for anything.  So, I exited my teen-age years a risk-taker and anti-authoritarian who nevertheless had a strong sense of responsibility and a need for achievement but lacked parental discipline to mitigate the risk-taking and support the goal-achievement.

 

Of course, while some of that may offer insights into my DD origins, none of it really answers even the origin question, let alone why DD has remained so attractive to me even after I’ve experienced hundreds of very, very painful sessions.  A partial answer may be that, while some of my motivations are subconscious, I also consciously know and accept that I need the guardrails that DD provides and that, being a grown man, a certain amount of harshness is required for me to get the message we both know I need.

I also don't know why it suddenly became "a thing" for me in my late 30s. Maybe the tension between the goal-orientation and my recognition that lack of personal discipline was frustrating those goals, and impacting my personal relationships, had to reach some threshold level.  And, the universe working the way it does, the DWC came along just as my angst at my own behavior started to boil over. 

 

There is a Zen saying that is apropos: "When the heart is ready, the teacher will come."  In a very real sense, Aunt Kay and Jerry were the teachers I found at the point I was finally open to their lessons.

 

So, unlike TB, I am still curious about origins and the "why" question,  though the sheer variety of experiences we bring to this convinces me that I'll probably never find "the" reason for any of this. I'm endlessly fascinated by the fact that we all come to this lifestyle from such different backgrounds, including some who were subject to strict discipline as kids and some who weren't. Some went to schools where corporal punishment was prevalent. Some didn't. Some had strong, disciplinary mothers or fathers. Some didn't.

 

For the wives, I don’t know whether it makes sense to ask the “why” question at all if we’re talking about what drives them to adopt the lifestyle, given that in most cases they weren’t driven to it at all. Rather, they initially accommodated their husbands' wants and needs but found that doing so also benefitted them.

 

But, KOJ recently suggested a topic question that I think dovetails nicely with the discussion above, namely:

 

What are the benefits of DD for the wife that she has spoken of, and what are the additional benefits for the wife -- as perceived by the spanked husband -- that she has NOT spoken of (and how the husband has identified those unspoken benefits).

 

For some possible answers to what the benefits may be, instead of answering the question again for myself, I’d recommend people read this article, which was mentioned in a couple of comments from last week and apparently was written by JR’s Dev.  I didn’t realize they had a website focused on F/m domestic relations and encourage all of you to check it out.

 

Regarding KOJ’s distinction between the benefits we think our wives get versus those they say they get, interestingly, most of Anne’s comments about the benefits she gets hinge not on relationship things like “cleaning the slate” and ending arguments but, rather, on her perceptions of her own power vis-à-vis me. She likes telling me to get ready for a spanking and watching me comply. She likes ordering me to do things, but the part she really likes is watching me struggle with my desire to tell her fuck off and do it herself.  She likes that I don’t like being bossed around and that I struggle to submit.  She likes making me nervous about what she might do with an “anytime, anywhere, for any reason” grant of open-ended authority.

 

 

That all serves to explain why her inability to intuit why I would want this kind of relationship inhibited her ability to fully commit to it.  The power dynamics in her favor are her biggest perceived benefit, yet the shift in our power dynamic is precisely what would be yanked out from under her if I were to decide that my unknown “why” no longer outweighs the downside of extremely hard spankings.

 

I know many of the long-term commenters have answered, or tried to answer, these “why” questions before, but I hope you’ll give us the benefits of your wisdom again. And, I invite the Disciplinary Wives to weigh in on any of this and tell us in their own words what benefits they get from DD.

 

I hope you all have a great week.