Spanking (Page 151)

As Mrs. Lion wrote in her post yesterday, this has been a very difficult year for us. I’ve had several physical challenges which I’m sure you have read too much about. Our two parrots died about a year apart, and we’ve had to move to a different house. All of this happened in the space of just 10 months.

Through most of this we have managed to keep up our enforced male chastity and our Female Led Relationship with Discipline (FLRD). I give her a lot of credit for being able to actually do this in the face of so many challenges. It’s a tribute to our love for one another that we’ve gotten through so much difficulty still loving each other more than ever.

We have had a moratorium on spankable offenses. I spilled food on my shirt the other night and Mrs. Lion told me that she wouldn’t be adding any more spankings for spilling until she caught up with the ones I’ve earned already.

I’ve been reading about how other couples in disciplinary relationships manage. One of the biggest challenges facing us is understanding the process that allows new things to earn me spankings. I realize that seems a little unclear. Bear with me.

In the past, Mrs. Lion has been careful to announce rules that she plans to enforce. I think this is a bit burdensome for her. Other people use a kind of early warning system. For example, let’s say I start acting bossy. Mrs. Lion could say, “That is a spankable offense,” when I begin. She doesn’t have to use those words, she could just give me “that” look.

The point is that she has the opportunity to warn me if she feels I may not understand how close I’m getting to thin ice. He also has the nuclear option of telling me I’m about to be spanked. I think providing warning when she feels that she doesn’t want to drop the bomb, offers her a simpler way deal with my behavior.

Another area of concern is the amount of time that elapses between committing an offense and the punishments starting. For example, it’s been several weeks since I spilled food on my shirt several times and earned 10 spankings. There is no question that I will have a problem connecting my misbehavior with spankings delivered weeks later. However, I am owed to spankings and it’s only right I get them.

Should spankings have an expiration date? If Mrs. Lion doesn’t get around to punishing me within a certain number of days after the offense, why get a pass?

There are good arguments for adopting this policy. Even an adult can lose the connection between misbehaving and being spanked if the distance between the two events is too great. There is universal agreement that the closer the spanking is to the offense than earned it, the more connection will be made between the two.

Mrs. Lion proposed forgiving the 10 spankings since I earned them so long ago. I was reluctant to agree because it feels like I got away with something I shouldn’t. On the other hand, I barely remember what I did to earn them. Maybe a good compromise is to give me one severe spanking so I know I didn’t get away with anything and let the other nine go.

That makes sense to me. The simple fact is that I really can’t sense a cause and effect relationship between spilling and spanking if the punishment is postponed for more than a short time. In my experience, I learned the most from spankings that occur extremely close to the offense that earned them.

The reason I’m reluctant to agree that all of my current backlog of spankings should be forgotten is that I think I need the grounding being spanked will give me. We’ve known for some time that I get a sense of stability when I feel Mrs. Lion’s control. One of the strongest depressions of this control is when she spanks me. It’s 100% unmistakable.

One thing Mrs. Lion and I make a point of doing several times a day is letting each other know how much in love we are. It’s always the last thing we say to each other before we go to sleep. I’m a little superstitious that way. If I should die in my sleep last words I’ve spoken were my declaration of love for my lioness.

Over the years, there have been times when we went to sleep with Mrs. Lion angry at me. At some point during the day or evening I had done something to piss her off. This was before we began our disciplinary relationship. It doesn’t happen anymore. Don’t get me wrong, Mrs. Lion doesn’t rise up, get her paddle, and spank me if I say something that annoys her; at least not up to now. But she lets me know that I did something she didn’t like. That’s a big step and appears to relieve enough of the tension to restore our loving behavior.

We’ve both wrestled with how to handle things that genuinely upset her. Even if she was inclined to punish me on the spot, she has yet to work through a concern about spanking me when she is angry. She’s worried that she would really hurt me. I don’t share that concern. In my experience, people are a great deal more controlled than they imagine they are. Mrs. Lion has been known punch walls (not with me, but her ex) and do other angry things. She’s said that she worries she might be as out-of-control when giving me an angry spanking.

I know she wouldn’t. Even in red-hot rage, people somehow manage to understand what would be too much. At least most people do. You read about the people that don’t in the news. I am not advocating punishing while angry, at least not on a regular basis. There are plenty of good reasons to avoid that. What I am suggesting is that it can be appropriate, even valuable to express anger in a permissible, physical way.

A great deal of the lexicon of appropriate punishment behavior is drawn from parenting experience. The longer I’ve been in a disciplinary relationship the more I realize adult discipline is very different from the sort you learn to do as a parent. That’s not to say that I don’t act like a toddler sometimes. I do and Mrs. Lion’s quick to let you know about it in her posts. Nevertheless, punishing me for being a toddler is different than punishing a real toddler.

All I find on the web that addresses adult punishment, stresses the need to do childish punishments which serve to humiliate as well as punish. I agree with that. But I don’t think that’s really the important part. In my opinion it isn’t what you do when you punish an adult, but how you do it.

Obviously a 200 pound man is going to be capable of receiving substantially more sensation than a little kid. Similarly, he will understand what’s happening to him and why. This suggests that adult punishments in the context of our Female Led Relationship with Discipline (FLRD), or as some call it domestic discipline, has to have a very different flavor.

For one thing, it can’t be mistaken for BDSM play. This sort of play can be very intense and painful. It’s welcomed by the people who bottom. I am one of them. If Mrs. Lion is to effectively punish me, I have to understand on a visceral level that this isn’t play. That can be challenging for her.

Over the years I have heard lots of people offer suggestions on how to differentiate between, for example, a play spanking and a punishment one. We’ve written about this over the years as we struggled with trying to discover how to make this distinction. One of the initial thoughts was to make a punishment spanking hard and fast. The first swat would be as hard as possible. This didn’t work for us. Mrs. Lion could no more than get seven or eight swats in before I rolled away trying to escape.

After getting some very helpful advice, Mrs. Lion adjusted her technique. She starts with “warm-up” swats, the kind you could mistake for play. I would make that mistake if I didn’t know what was coming next. After the warm-up, the swats come harder and faster. There is no mistake in my mind that I’m being punished.

The adult spanking goes on and on. The objective is to make it so painful and unpleasant that the unlucky recipient will avoid making the mistake that got him there in the first place. There is no sure way to know how much is needed to make that point. Apparently it takes a lot to get it through my head. Mrs. Lion’s spankings have been getting harder and longer.

Part of the problem is that I need to learn something about spanking as well. I have to learn to stay in place regardless of how much it hurts. This isn’t so much a conscious decision as it is training. Mrs. Lion started out by giving me a series of 10 hard swats on one cheek, then pausing for 10 or 15 seconds and doing the same thing to the other. She would repeat this until she felt she had made her point.

The stops and starts gave me time to settle from the need to escape after each burst. Over time she’s shortened that waiting more and more. As of now, she barely pauses as she delivers bursts to different areas. I’m probably at the point where she doesn’t have to pause at all. After a while, she delivers very hard single swats about one or two seconds apart. She has been increasing the number and intensity of these. I expect that my next spanking will have a great deal more of these particularly painful swats.

I also think that as we learn to manage our roles more effectively, the pause between those very hard swats will grow shorter and shorter and the number I received will become larger and larger.

There is a tricky issue here. Do my spankings continue to get more and more severe forever? Is there some point that represents an optimum punishment for me? If there is, how will we know we reach it?

I don’t know the answer to this. Some people say that when the person being spanked produces tears, it only takes a few more swats to complete an effective spanking. I’ve never cried as the result of spanking. Of course, I’ve only been spanked as an adult. I don’t agree that tears represents the sure sign of spanking success. Maybe knowing when a spanking is truly complete is like an orgasm. You will absolutely know when you have one.

Meanwhile, I am hoping that Mrs. Lion continues to dial up the severity of my spankings. I’m not asking for this because I like the idea, I don’t. I think that if we are going to do this, we owe it to each other do it right.

Monday night ended two droughts: Our rules are back in full force and I got my first orgasm in our new house. Both are welcome additions to our lives. I did point out to Mrs. Lion that now that we are sleeping in our new house, she has yet to find the box containing her paddles. She replied that she can always walk out to our camper and get one from there.

I took my life into my hands on Monday night when I suggested we have dinner at the local Mexican restaurant. I’m happy to report that I didn’t get anything on my shirt despite the fact that I had lots of chips and salsa. That’s a very good thing since I am still owed seven spankings for two accidents over a week ago. I’m sure Mrs. Lion will locate an appropriate implement and begin catching up on her backlog.

Little by little she is making dents in the massive number of boxes piled everywhere in our house. Mrs. Lion spent most of yesterday at the old house. The junk removal company came back to remove the final load of unwanted stuff. When we moved here from the East, the corporate movers sucked up everything in our house like a giant vacuum cleaner. They then deposited it in the house we had rented. We’ve been in that house for 13 years. During that time, we’ve managed to accumulate even more stuff. It’s taken four truckloads (large trucks!) to dispose of all this stuff. The junk removal people will donate anything we are giving them that’s still useful to charity. They will also recycle appropriately. It’s nice to know that we aren’t simply contributing to landfill.

Today housecleaners are coming to the old house to get it ready for us to turn it over to our landlord. It will be good to finally close the book on that location.

I was really happy that Mrs. Lion was willing to end my orgasm wait. I noticed at dinner that she was carefully watching me in case I let some food hit my shirt. This may sound silly and trivial to you, but for us it’s significant. Moving is the third most stressful event, only exceeded by death and divorce. I think we’ve been doing remarkably well. Restoration of our normal routine — abnormal to many people — is a very healthy sign.

Stressful situations like moving can cause permanent damage to a relationship. I’m convinced that our power exchanges provide unique communication channels that keep us emotionally healthy.

We have a self-imposed framework to cope with two of the most difficult areas to keep normal in difficult times. Our Female Led Relationship with Discipline (FLRD) is like a pressure release valve on a pressure cooker. When things get stressful, Mrs. Lion and put her foot down and stop escalation with a single hard stare. If necessary, she can follow that up with a spanking. As I’ve said before, the value of the spanking is twofold: It provides a break in whatever situation provokes it. And it reestablishes our pecking order in a very graphic way.

We’ve both had a hard time articulating how valuable these punishments are to us. It’s difficult to see past the obvious physical discomfort spanking creates. We get lots of people wondering why I encourage Mrs. Lion to make her punishments memorable. The reason is almost visceral. A memorable punishment helps condition me to correct the behavioral problem the punishment addresses. It provides Mrs. Lion with positive closure to the event that upset her.

Prior to beginning our disciplinary relationship, spanking was a welcome BDSM activity. It’s no secret that I like to be spanked. This creates both the benefit and the challenge. The benefit is that I get sexually aroused thinking about being spanked. This assures that I will be willing to get into position or my punishment without complaint. The challenges that this is sexually exciting to me when I think about it. The punishment has to be severe enough to assure that I will understand that it isn’t being given plus I find spanking exciting.

Trust me, Mrs. Lion’s spankings are absolutely not exciting to me. Yes, I get turned on thinking about them, but when she starts, any sexual thoughts disappear after the first few swats. By the time she is done all I feel is a burning bottom and regret for provoking it. We both believe this is as it should be.

We’ve had a few conversations about all this. We agree that we could probably get the same result without physical punishment. We also agree that the physical punishment is necessary for us. I really can’t articulate exactly why we feel this way. I mentioned a couple of reasons, but I’m not convinced there is something deeper going on as well. We both miss it when we have to suspend punishing me when needed.

I’m not trying to convince you that a disciplinary relationship is what you need. It makes no sense to try to convert people. Because we value you as a reader, we want you to understand how these pieces fit into our marriage. With or without FLRD, we will stay together. With it, we function better.

I have to give Mrs. Lion a great deal of credit. Before she met me she had no idea that people did the sort of thing we are doing now. I introduced it to her. Acting purely out of love for me, she gave these alien, seemingly-crazy practices try. She persisted even though it was very difficult to do in the beginning. Now, it’s second nature to her as it is to me. We are both very happy that we stayed with it long enough to make it an integral part of our marriage. I think it is our most significant stress reliever.