Domestic discipline (Page 12)

I have been tired this weekend. I don’t know why, but I am. We’ve both gotten good sleep, yet here I am on Sunday afternoon, nodding off at my desk. I’m also feeling grumpy. I started reading blogs I follow and found myself growling at the authors’ stubborn single points of view. I know it isn’t them. It’s me.

Since I mentioned it, I am feeling a bit put out by the orthodoxy some people assign to their kinks. Domestic discipline in particular, appears to have advocates who are very sure that they follow the only right path. These men insist that spanking is, for them, purely disciplinary without any sexual roots. They also adopted a pattern that closely resembles maternal punishment.

This pattern has been advocated since the 1930s when the “Spencer Spanking Plan” of marital discipline was published. That plan advocated both spouses spank each other for offenses. In the early days of the Web, the Disciplinary Wives Club site offered a concept of wives spanking husbands. You can still find the site though it hasn’t been updated in many years. The DWC offered good advice on how to spank a man along with lots of sexy stories and disciplinary advice.

The DWC plan is an exact model of maternal punishment down to how to scold the errant husband and the correct position for spanking him. I loved that website. It also provided key advice that helped Mrs. Lion become a more effective disciplinarian. Mrs. Lion is certainly a proper DWC disciplinary wife. Well, almost. She doesn’t scold me.

The big departure between the orthodox DD’ers and me is that I freely admit the sexual roots of my interest in spanking. The idea of being spanked turned me on as long as I can remember. That means, according to the orthodoxy, our practice of domestic discipline is just BDSM sex play. They insist that sex has no part in their interest in DD.

That’s entirely possible. It seems to me that there can be more than one path to domestic discipline. Mine originated with sexual arousal. Some, I am sure, arrived at it because of childhood spankings. Others may have different origins.

Apparently, those who arrived via the parental/maternal punishment path are offended by those of us who got aroused thinking about being spanked. We are impure. I suggest that the reality is that it makes no difference at all how we view DD. I’ve presented lots of photographic evidence that I receive very strict spankings when I break a rule. My behavior has changed for the better since Mrs. Lion started punishing me. Isn’t that what DD is about?

Also, a lot of guys write a lot of words about their domestic discipline without mentioning sex. Instead, they talk about offenses, frequency, and degree of spanking, scolding, etc. They like to talk about it. Me too. I also like to talk about the bait that lured me into DD. They like to discuss the process of discipline. Why?

My point is that there is more to this practice, even for them than simply learning to be better. There is a desire to celebrate the process. Maybe we should all look into why we want to do that? How do we feel when we read and write about it? Is any of it arousing? Fair questions, I think.

It is true that I’ve been sleeping a lot. I don’t know why. I hope Mrs. Lion will take out the massage table for some fun. The other night she played with my penis under the covers. It felt good for a while; then she started rubbing the tip. My urethra was sore for hours after that. I’m not complaining. Today, Saturday is only six days since my last orgasm. No urgency–yet.

My bottom is still a little sore in spots from my spanking three days ago. Mrs. Lion prides herself on improving her spanking skills. Her take on spanking me is very different from mine. It needs to be. She sees spanking me as a service I asked her to perform. I don’t mean that in the sense of giving me a BDSM spanking, though she’s done that a lot in the past.

I asked her to help me improve by using domestic discipline. It took her a while to buy into the concept that she should monitor my behavior and punish me when I need correction. If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you’ve witnessed the process. I think she’s reached the point where she can comfortably catch and punish me for things beyond the simple rules she’s made in the past.

It’s been my fault that it has taken so long for her to reach this point. I presented domestic discipline in the context of giving her more control in the marriage. She never wanted that. I kept pushing along that role-changing path. To her credit, Mrs. Lion never bought it. What she did buy was the idea that I wanted her to punish me for things that annoy her. That was a big mistake.

The problem with that is it is a loaded request. Mrs. Lion has to consider two very different things. First, she has to observe the behavior that she feels needs correcting, like interrupting. Then, she has to decide if I’m the source of her annoyance or maybe something external upset her. Being a very sweet woman, she almost always decided that she was annoyed by an external issue. Worse yet, she started to protect me by leaving gaps in her thoughts when she sensed I was about to interrupt. That way, she never had to deal with the issue at all.

The result was that I never got spanked for interrupting. We finally figured this out. I should say I finally realized the trap I had set. The correction was simple. First, I had to stop insisting that domestic discipline was a way to put her in charge. She likes the way we are and doesn’t want to change it. Second, she understood that punishing me for interrupting had nothing to do with how my interruption made her feel. She wants me to stop interrupting anyone. Therefore, if she catches me, she punishes me exactly the same way she does when I forget to set up the coffee pot. The context of the interruption is irrelevant.

It’s taken all these words to get to the central point of how our domestic discipline has to work. Context is our enemy. For example, short of yelling, “Duck! A rock is falling!” any interruption, no matter how trivial, is going to be punished. Period.

Obviously, she will have to exercise some judgment, the same way she does when I’m sick, and she doesn’t punish me for forgetting the coffee pot. But we both agree that only rare exceptions will get me off the hook. All this time, the problem has been context. It’s entirely my fault. For us, at least, for domestic discipline to work we need to remove any emotional loading. Everything, whether it is my behavior or a chore, is handled without emotion. If I break a rule, I get punished.

I recently received a lot of heat because I wrote that sexual fantasies often inspire men to ask to be spanked. The complaints centered around the idea that if sex is one of the reasons that men ask their wives to spank them, that means domestic discipline for them is a BDSM scene. Somehow the purity of domestic discipline is offended by tying sexual motivations to it.

I think I understand the reason I offended some. Domestic discipline is supposed to provide help and education to the men who receive it. That’s absolutely true for me. Since we started it, even when Mrs. Lion’s spankings were mild, my behavior changed if she consistently punished me when I offended. As she’s said, I learn if she spanks me when needed. I hate admitting that I need to be spanked to make me change, but it’s true. Mrs. Lion is convinced and is committed to expanding the use of her paddles to help me improve the way I relate to her and others.

I have a lifelong interest in being spanked. Thinking about it turns me on. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. I can’t say how other guys came to domestic discipline, but for me, the bait is the arousal I feel when I think about being spanked/punished for breaking a rule. Does that make our domestic discipline merely a disguise for BDSM?

I don’t think it is. Mrs. Lion doesn’t think there is anything sexual about it and makes no attempt to feed into my sexual thoughts about spanking. In other words, she is happy that I willingly mount the spanking bench when she wants to punish me. She doesn’t care why I do it. Once I’m riding the bench, any sexual thoughts disappear almost immediately. She has me there to help me learn. Her job is to make the experience as unpleasant as possible. The more I dislike the experience, the better I learn. She knows this and has become very good at her task.

Here’s where the purists get unhappy with any generalizations I might make. I acknowledge the sexual origin of my interest in domestic discipline. They don’t like this assumption. They prefer to dwell on other aspects like what it might be like if others witness their spankings. They wonder if that would benefit them. I never gave that sort of thing any real thought. Mrs. Lion is a private person, and I’m sure she isn’t interested in sharing her disciplinary practices with others who she knows in other areas of her life. That’s not the point. What does it mean to want to be spanked in front of friends and relatives?

I’d argue that this is a sexual humiliation fantasy. It has nothing to do with the only transaction that domestic discipline is about. I think that the entire point of DD is behavior modification. Right? It isn’t about humiliation, substitute spankers, rituals, etc.  DD is negative reinforcement. We’ve learned that it works incredibly well for me. That’s why Mrs. Lion works hard to provide it.

That doesn’t mean all those other possibilities are wrong. Humiliation, arousal thinking about spanking, imagining scenarios with substitute spankers, and all that other stuff provide mental fodder that helps us accept a spanking docilely. Mrs. Lion doesn’t care what I think about DD. She is uninterested in erections that thoughts of spanking may give me. She cares about the positive effects that she can provoke by spanking me when needed. She’s observed the changes I make when she strictly enforces my rules.

That was the point I was trying to make when I talked about the sexual roots of spanking for many of us. A spanking for breaking a rule or misbehaving helps me avoid errors in the future. How I choose to think about it has no effect on that. I learn. I think it is silly to claim that sexual fantasies about spanking and punishment invalidate domestic discipline.

It doesn’t matter if we want to debate having our sister-in-law spank us or talk about getting an erection thinking about her doing it. All that matters is that our wives spank us when our behavior requires the application of her paddle. I imagine that Mrs. Lion is happy that I sometimes get aroused when I think about being spanked. She knows those thoughts help me accept painful punishment when I need it.

I hope your week is going well. I just finished updating our websites. It was one of those technical things that only has to be done when a major component of the system goes to a new version and support is ended for the old one. I put off the work as long as I could. Now things are where they need to be, and everything works.

My health is good despite the scary incident a couple of weeks ago. My MRI showed no evidence of a stroke or other damage. In fact, some “white matter” that had shown up two years ago is almost entirely gone now. The white matter is believed to be related to dementia. The amount I showed a couple of years ago wasn’t big enough to be worrisome. The fact that it’s gone now is mysterious. The neurologist has no explanation. There is a good chance that the incident that started all this was caused by dehydration due to my stomach problems at the time. Anyway, all is well.

starting our new domestic discipline phase

We have been talking about expanding DD to include behaviors that need correction. Mrs. Lion has given a lot of thought to one in particular: interrupting. In her post on Tuesday, “Clamming Up,” she talked about anticipating an interruption and pausing to let me talk. She wondered how that fit with strictly enforcing the no-interrupting rule. My thought is that if she finds herself pausing because she anticipates an interruption, that should count as me interrupting her. Her pause is a way she compensates for my rude behavior. Instead of calling me out for it, she graciously makes it seem like a natural pause in the conversation.

That’s a good example of the reasons why I haven’t been punished for interrupting or other behavioral problems. Mrs. Lion compensates rather than confronts me when I commit them.  Combine that with my saying that I wanted her to punish things that annoy her, and you get a very solid chance that I would never be punished.

Now that we have agreed that every infraction, including times when Mrs. Lion feels herself compensating, will be punished, enforcement won’t require any judgment calls. It’s all black and white just like my other more-trivial rules.