Spanking (Page 157)

As you may have read, I managed to rack up a total of nine days of punishment — spankings and other activities I hate. This isn’t for a single offense. I started out earning five days for repeatedly forgetting to remind Mrs. Lion of punishment days. Since I’ve had these days for years, there’s no excuse for not reminding her. She escalated from  three days of spanking, which I got a couple of weeks ago, to the present five days. On top of that, this past weekend I managed to spill food on my shirt. This added two more days. Now the total was at seven. Monday, I spilled food again. Two more days.

I don’t think any of her sentences are unfair. They just seem to be grouping together. In a way, that’s not such a bad thing. She’s getting a chance to perfect her punishment techniques and to try out different paddles. We have a very large collection. For my part, I am learning too. I am learning to take rules much more seriously. Mrs. Lion and I both realize that the rules she is currently enforcing represent trivial matters. She created them to give us both opportunities to adapt to the disciplinary lifestyle we want.

The consequence for a single offense, like spilling on my shirt is relatively small. Under our new policy, I earn two daily spankings. That’s enough to make me think more than twice about repeating the offense. Repeating it within a short time (Mrs. Lion decides how long that short time is) increases the number of spankings I will earn. Fair enough. If I commit multiple offenses, I can end up with a long string of daily spankings. That’s the situation I’m in now.

Everyone seems to have their own image of what constitutes a spanking. Some people see them as long, brutal affairs that end up with the person being spanked bruised and in tears. Others picture it as a BDSM scene, where the net result is a dark red bottom and a sexually aroused pair of players. Mrs. Lion’s spankings are somewhere between those two. They definitely hurt. I’m left with a red bottom that hurts for some time after she’s done. I’m one of those people who don’t mark much and what marks I get, fade quickly.

So far, we both feel good about what’s happening. A little over a week of daily spankings is no fun for me, but it isn’t something that I dread so much I want to escape. I earned them. I know they’re not supposed to be fun and they’re not. But they aren’t so horrible that I’m suffering any lasting physical or emotional damage.

I think something positive is coming out of this. In a weird kind of way, spanking is becoming a “normal” part of our relationship, very much the same way that enforced male chastity has. It’s a little difficult to put into words. To me, at least, it feels like being spanked is an expected consequence of any infraction I commit. It happens often enough not to be notable.  It’s not something to argue about or try to postpone. It’s just what happens if I slip up. I think Mrs. Lion is also seeing spanking me as a routine part of her job as my wife.

She even jokes about it sometimes. I sent her an email on Tuesday that I was concerned about how my boss might feel about some work I’ve been doing. Her reply was:

“And know that I’m behind you no matter what. (Might be with a paddle, but… )”

That sort of inside joke is a sign that there is no stress over our district in every relationship. If you read back in the blog a few years, you’ll see that Mrs. Lion’s feelings about spanking me were quite different. She didn’t consider spanking a routine part of her life and she actively disliked the idea of hurting me. I’m sure she still doesn’t like hurting me, but she understands and accepts that in her role, spanking me, whether it hurts or not, is an expected routine chore.

We have some readers who consider that consider my spankings a form of domestic abuse. It absolutely isn’t. I asked Mrs. Lion to take on this role. Anyone who has read this blog for some time knows that I encourage her to become stricter with me. I am eternally grateful that she has worked very hard to perfect her role as my disciplining wife.

I think you either get it or you don’t. It’s difficult for some people to understand why I would encourage my wife to be a disciplinarian. I think we both benefit greatly as a result of our disciplinary relationship. You may think we’re crazy; perhaps we are. We are happy though. Very happy.

I recognize that it seems peculiar for me to actively promote a situation where I receive unpleasant, painful punishment whenever my wife deems it necessary. I’m not alone. There are many couples who have discovered that serious pursuit of a disciplinary relationship, in our case with the wife as disciplinarian, adds to the happiness of a marriage. Lots of theories exist about why this is true. I’ve written about my ideas. I don’t know if they’re correct. What I do know is that what we are doing works.

What we’ve done is to set up a structure inside our marriage that resolves situations that would otherwise create friction and arguments. I’m not talking about spilling food on my shirt or failing to remind my wife of punishment days. I’m talking about those other things couples can get stuck on. You know, squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube. Annoying, inconvenient problems.

It takes no time to convert a minor annoyance into a rule that will make the problem disappear. We are not naïve enough to believe that just by making a rule, my behavior will change. It won’t. But, breaking a rule gets me punished. The punishment serves to teach me and provides Mrs. Lion with the feeling that she has done something to help me change.

Administering punishment is a great pressure release valve. Believe it or not, receiving punishment has the same beneficial effect for me. We don’t let things fester. Mrs. Lion doesn’t need a rule to punish me. If I do something that annoys her, she can punish me for doing that. She might also create an explicit rule if she thinks it will help me improve my behavior. But it’s not necessary.

Think about how you handle situations like squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube. Chances are pretty good you ignore them and they quietly bubble in the background until one day you get disproportionately angry about something else. I think we’ve avoided that trap. In the process, our mutual trust and love have grown. Five years ago I would have never believed that a wooden paddle would be a symbol of our harmony and love.

Every time I offer suggestions that make Mrs. Lion more effective in spanking her husband who happens to be me. I get feedback wondering why I would want to make things worse for myself. It’s a fair question. Certainly, during my more severe spankings I wonder what I was thinking. The truth is I did the right thing.

The fantasy is that my disciplining wife arrived in my life as a practiced spanker and punisher. How many of these do you think exist? Ding! Ding! Ding! That’s right, almost none. There’s a good reason for this: The overwhelming majority of women have never had either the desire or opportunity to punish a man, or anyone else for that matter. Even if they were strict mothers who spanked their children, they are still unprepared for disciplining a grown man.

Fantasies aside, you would be very hard-pressed to find a club or class for disciplining wives. In a way that’s too bad. There is technique involved in administering spankings, for example. Surprisingly, 20 years ago if you lived in a fairly large city, there were workshops readily available on many of the subjects a well-trained disciplining wife needs. I have attended and taught many spanking workshops. I’ve also attended workshops on anal activities, cock and ball torture, as well as many other useful topics.

Almost all disciplining wives are largely self-taught when it comes to spanking and other punishments. It’s not rocket science. For example, you really don’t need to know much to effectively use a paddle on a man’s bottom. Once you understand the safe zone between the center of his butt and the center of his thighs, you’ve had your safety training.

The much harder topic is how hard and how much? Many spankers answer this question by judging how they feel during spanking. This is probably why it took years for Mrs. Lion to become a truly effective spanker. She loves me and doesn’t want to hurt me. Sometimes she needs my encouragement to push past her current level.

I believe an effective spanking has to go past the point that I’m willing to accept it. It has to demonstrate that I have absolutely no control over what’s happening to me. It has to be bad enough to deter me from repeating an offense. The problem for the spanker is that if she doesn’t go past that point, essentially it’s a play spanking; one that I would want as opposed to one that I am getting because I earned it.

The objective isn’t to injure me. It’s to send and educational message. I will only get this message if the spanking is long enough and hard enough to make me truly wish I wasn’t getting it. It’s very difficult for the spanker to judge when this line is crossed. In easy cases, the man produces tears. That’s generally a good indication he has surrendered to the punishment and any spanking he gets after the tears begin will be perceived as true punishment.

I’ve never cried during the spanking. A lot of men are like me. I don’t know why, but that’s how I am. That makes Mrs. Lion’s job more difficult. She knows she needs to spank me until I realize I am being punished. She doesn’t want to spank me so much that she’s being abusive. In fact, she would never be abusive for spanking me since it is something completely consensual. It still begs the question about how much is enough?

Saturday night, she upped the ante. The spanking was longer and the swats more severe. If you look at the picture she took after she finished, you can see that there were two main target areas, one on each side of my bottom. There was relatively little marking between them.

In a real sense this is a lost opportunity. From the markings it’s obvious that Mrs. Lion did a very thorough job on to relatively small areas of my butt. A much larger part of my “sit space” shows no marking at all. This doesn’t mean that Mrs. Lion’s spanking technique is poor or needs improvement. It just suggests that she has a lot more opportunities to make her point.

Typically, she’ll apply 10 or 15 hard strokes to one spot (e.g.: the left side of my left cheek) and then repeat on the other side of my crack about the same distance from center. With all that available real estate she has another three opportunities on each side to repeat those 10 to 15 swats. She has two on each side close to my crack running down vertically from the top. She has at least two more areas on each side directly below the existing marks.

When she uses one of her small-headed paddles she can easily localize her striking area and extend into this new territory. If she uses one of the larger paddles it may be a little more difficult, but she can use the changing color of my cheeks to guide her.

This suggestion will allow her to greatly extend the amount of time she swats me. As I’ve noted before, I am very aware of how long a punishment goes on. I am less aware of the intensity of each swat.

Most of us who get involved in a disciplinary relationship where punishment is involved, like our Female Led Relationship with Discipline (FLRD), start out because the disciplined partner has at least some erotic connection with spanking. My interest in being spanked stretched back many years before I was aware there was such a thing as a disciplinary relationship. I enjoyed BDSM scenes that included spanking me. At times, this was a little difficult because I was an active top. I suppose the correct term would be “switch”.

In our case, my interest in a power exchange that included punishment came out of enforced male chastity. I enjoy Mrs. Lion’s sexual control and feeling it got me thinking about extending it to something much wider. Other people find their way to disciplinary relationships via many diverse routes.

Once there, there is a common path we seem to follow. The first, and most obvious step, is some sort of agreement about what behaviors need to be corrected. In our case, I didn’t have any glaring behavioral issues. Mrs. Lion wisely chose “problems” that I would most likely have on a frequent basis. The idea was to train both of us in giving and accepting punishment.

Other people have very serious reasons for entering into a disciplinary relationship. It could be something as devastating as overuse of alcohol and drugs, for example. It could also be a wish on the part of the disciplined male to be helped losing weight or correcting other lifestyle issues. Or, it could be things that Mrs. Lion wants me to learn like not interrupting her, accepting what she says, and obeying her.

Until very recently, I didn’t think a lot about how these problems are different in terms of punishment. They are the same in that we, the disciplined males, explicitly consent to whatever level of punishment is needed to correct these problems. In other words, it’s up to our disciplining wives to use punishment as a way of extinguishing our negative behaviors.

In the beginning, my behavioral problems were limited to spilling food on my shirt and eating before Mrs. Lion. Each time I committed an offense, I received a spanking. As she improved as a disciplinarian, the intensity of the spankings increased. To both of our surprise, the behavior she was punishing almost completely disappeared. That proved to us the effectiveness of a disciplinary relationship in terms of improving my behavior.

Of course, the offenses were trivial and I had no deep-seated investment in persisting in breaking the rules. Over the years that we operated at this level (about three), we discussed how to deal with bigger problems or with persistent offending. My thoughts were that the intensity of the spanking could increase if an offense is repeated or if it were more serious. Mrs. Lion agreed to try that. Frankly, I didn’t get a strong message from spankings she said were more intense. In fact, I realized that spanking should probably be at one intensity. I asked her to work to increase the intensity to make them more memorable.

That left us with the problem of dealing with repeated offenses for one thing. Most recently, in a four week period I forgot to remind her three times of our Saturday punishment day. It’s my job to remind her every Monday, Thursday and Saturday that it’s punishment day. These are days we set aside to be sure that punishments were administered even if we were very busy doing other things. Obviously, being spanked for missing reminding her wasn’t working.

About a month before this problem cropped up, she was frustrated that even after her new, stronger spankings, I felt the pain for a very short amount of time after she finished and I stayed red for a minute or two at most. She decided to overcome this, for each offense I would get a minimum of three spankings given once each day. That way punishment would be memorable because it was repeated.

It worked very well. I’ve written about that in the past. The point is that we had stumbled on a way to add intensity to punishment without resorting to extreme beatings. So, when I forgot Saturday punishment day for the third time, she sentenced me to five consecutive daily spankings. That was absolutely no fun.

An offense and its consequence represent a pair of actions that form a transaction. In other words, forget something once and it costs three daily spankings. Forget it twice and the number goes up to five. Each day’s spanking is a full-scale punishment spanking. It’s impossible for me to ignore the extra cost of behaviors Mrs. Lion considers more offensive.

I went to boarding school during my high school years. The disciplinary system there worked with points. You started out with 100 points. Each rule carried a point cost if you broke it. Skip a meal, five points; late to class, five points; skip class, 10 points. Go below a total of 70 points and you’re grounded. Each week you didn’t lose any points you got five back until you were at 100 again.

This is the same sort of system we are using for adult punishment. Spill on my shirt, three spanking days. Break a rule twice in a short time, five spanking days. You get the idea. Mrs. Lion has not created a master list of offenses and punishments. She’ll work them out as she goes. The point is that there are two factors that determine how many daily spankings I get for breaking a rule: The first is the seriousness of the offense. Spill food on my shirt, three days. Act disrespectful, more days.

If I repeat an offense in a relatively short period of time, Mrs. Lion interprets that as meaning her original sentence wasn’t severe enough to deter my behavior. Therefore, the repeat offense will have additional spanking days. She may decide that a new first offense will catch the longer sentence since I’ve demonstrated that’s what I need. It’s very risky for me to repeat something wrong.

Take relationships where the problems being handled are much more serious, like drinking. I would be very surprised if a single spanking is a sufficient deterrent to doing it again. The disciplining wife decides what a first offense will cost. She might also let her disciplined male know that a repeat within, say three months, will double or triple the initial penalty.

She has no real way to know how severe she has to be to effect change. But she will find out as she raises the price for subsequent offenses. A similar strategy works for weight loss. Maybe start out with two days spanking for each pound or fraction gained. Perhaps make it four days if the gain repeats the next week.

At some point, he will get the message. It will become just too painfully expensive to break a rule. Other punishments can follow a similar pattern. The idea is that a single offense will always earn multiple punishments. Stubborn refusal to learn will learn many more unpleasant punishments.

I don’t know why this never occurred to me before. Somehow I imagined that one offense should equal one punishment. Repeat offenses or breaking more serious rules should earn more severe punishments. Now that I’ve been in a disciplinary relationship for a while I realize that’s not possible. Punishment intensity should always be high. There are no gentle spankings. If an offense is serious, the cost is day after day of painful spankings. Sooner or later the number of daily spankings will get large enough to be more than breaking the rule is worth.

Each male is different. Some of us are very stubborn and will need long periods of daily spanking to finally get the point. That’s the beauty of the lion spanking system. We, the disciplined males, determine just how much we have to suffer. Quick learners are rewarded with shorter sentences of daily spanking. If we are stubborn, the days can stretch into weeks. It’s all up to us. Our disciplining wives will follow our leads until we finally learn to do what we are supposed to.