Men and women are incredibly different from each other. I’m not referring to anatomy; nor am I referring to intellect. Intelligence is distributed evenly between the sexes. Given that, it makes sense to assume that the ability to process situational information would also be evenly distributed between males and females. It isn’t.

As a male, I tend to take a direct approach to most things. The idea of having Mrs. Lion in charge is arousing to me. Therefore, I want to experience it. I get turned on at the thought of being spanked. I’m thinking sexually. I’m ready to be obedient, get punished, have my sexual release tightly controlled. Why? Because it’s hot.

That’s male snow blindness. We can only see  the broad, sexy outlines of what we crave. As long as I continue to see those blurry outlines, I am a willing, submissive husband. Metaphorically, I’m being led around by my penis. I see a sexy game. Is that what my wife sees too?

I’ve learned that women have a very different perspective than men. In this case, my wife hears a request that I try to couch as beneficial to her. I tell her I will obey her, please her sexually, and give her the right to punish me. She silently wonders why I think she would want that. Do I think she is unhappy with me as her husband?

Women tend to look at things from the perspective of how an action will make others feel. She’ll consider if this request could hurt her relationship with me. She will also consider whether she can make me happy by agreeing. She may wonder if she wants to go to the trouble of doing this for me. Once she decides that there is no harm in trying all this new stuff out, she will agree.

Since this transaction only involves the two of us, the emotional equation she has to solve is very simple since it only involves her husband and herself. Of course, the more subtle female mind may also analyze exactly what her husband is offering and whether there are subtle undertones in his request.

He thinks she will be playing an exciting, sexual game with him. She’s confident she can do that. But she also sees that he has given her an opportunity he never considered. He’s asked her to use sex and punishment to satisfy a fantasy. She sees that she can help him improve as a man and husband while he plays this “game”

She teases and denies him just the way he fantasized. She also spanks him “just because.”  The spankings start playfully, but get more painful over time. She tells him it’s punishment, shouldn’t it hurt? He has to agree.  Our subtle female is annoyed that he leaves his clothes all over the house. She tells him to clean up his mess and that if he doesn’t put his dirty clothes in the hamper, he will be punished.

He gets turned on. This is what he imagined. He leaves his socks on the floor. His wife has him drop his pants and underwear and spanks him over her knee. He’s hard anticipating this part of the sexy game.  She tells him that she is unhappy he dropped his socks on the floor.

She spanks him. But it’s different this time. She hits full force with her paddle. He yells and tells her to stop. He starts to wriggle away. She gives him several hard swats on the back of his thighs and tells him she will keep hitting him there until he calms down. He screams at each swat, but stops trying to escape. He hates what she is doing. His erection faded after the first few blows.

His bottom is very sore, but deep down he is excited that she took charge and punished him. He hasn’t decided to stop dropping clothes at this point. Spanking is part of the game, after all.

She isn’t fooled. She knows he hasn’t learned anything. He’s still playing the game. She observes that the painful spanking didn’t hurt their relationship. If anything, he’s more attentive. She’s sure it’s because he is deeper into what he thinks of as a role playing game. At this point she can decide to just continue  playing the game, or she can try to get some value out of her new power.

As expected, within a few days she finds his underwear on the bedroom floor. She’s pretty sure he didn’t do it to provoke her. He just doesn’t care. She wonders what will happen if he realizes she expects him to actually do what she says. He’ll probably find it more exciting, she decides.

So, this time the spanking is much more severe. There are tears. After the spanking, she has him stand in the corner with his nose pressed into the wall. He has to stand there, red butt showing, for 15 minutes. Then she tells him to thank her for punishing him. This is followed with a lecture on obedience and picking up his clothes.

He may be in pain, but he is a happy camper. She’s really in charge!

She smiles inwardly. She can make him happy at the same time she helps him be a better husband. She wonders how much punishment she should administer to induce real change. She decides to turn up the volume a bit more next time he drops clothes. She researches discipline on the Web and gets some additional ideas. She decides that as long as he remains happy in his role, she will use her role to help him improve.

She lets him control the intensity and frequency of discipline. Breaking a rule earns punishment. Repeating the same offense earns a much more painful, longer punishment. That’s his game. She’s playing it.

He is responding to the sexual game he imagined. But at the same time, he is learning to be an obedient mate. She keeps her eye on his emotional well being and consistently increases her expectations of his behavior. He is never the wiser.

When it comes to sexual or emotional thinking, we males use a very broad brush. We rarely consider the underlying emotional subtleties in a social situation. It’s not in our DNA. I can be hopelessly naive. I want to believe that Mrs. Lion seriously loves denying me orgasms and that she thinks being able to punish me is, if not fun, at least something she is fine doing.

Women who want to be owned and punished like me, have no illusions that their partners do what they do for their own amusement. They understand it is a service to them. Even so, they can get into the role and believe it on some level. Guys don’t see behind the curtain. Women know this. If being a keyholder and disciplining wife is fun at all, it is because it comically shows up how her male actually believes the very mythology he created.

That doesn’t mean that none of this is real. It is very real. It’s just not real in the sense guys think it is. I see the sexy game. I learn to obey because I don’t like the consequences of failing. It never occurs to me that this is all of my own doing and that I can just refuse. Why not? Because I believe that if I do such a thing I will lose all the happiness and security I have.

Despite all I have written, just like all the other males, I need to believe that what Mrs. Lion and I do is 100% “real”. My happiness depends on that belief. I guess my male mind needs to know that I am completely under the power of my lioness. I can believe I started this as a fantasy, but I “know” that what we have now is completely real. I painted over any possible cracks in this story.

It’s clear to me that women are in touch with reality and consider FLR, DD, and enforced chastity first as things they can do to make their partners happy. Over time, they see it as a process they can use to improve their husbands as well. We males drink the Kool Aid and over time become more and more ensnared in the fantasy we brought to life.

If you have read my posts, you know that I completely buy in to the power exchanges. Even though I know on one level that the way I look at all this isn’t the same as the way Mrs. Lion sees it, I’m still fully engaged.

I know that Mrs. Lion has been concerned that if she goes too far and hurts me too much, I will be angry and she will lose some of my love. She worries that my attachment to the game can be broken by too much domination. It’s fair. I get it.

The fact is, at least in my case, the opposite. The stricter she becomes, the more I feel her involvement and interest in me. If she should upset me more than she expects, it’s really easy to make things right. If a particular beating made me cry and feel horrible, some nice hugs and snuggles and sweet words about how good I was to take my medicine will make me feel better. I’m really a simple creature.

I can see you women rolling your eyes. But if you have any serious experience with strict control of your husband, you know I’m right. The minute you put yourself in my shoes, you start to lose. We don’t think the way you do. We process your punishment differently than you may imagine.

The best way to play the game, at least for me, is to make your power useful. Use it to manage real life issues. Women have a great sense of fairness. I know Mrs. Lion does. I trust that she will always try to be fair to me. My job is to convince her that being fair doesn’t mean giving me the benefit of the doubt. It means judging what she requires fairly.

It’s fair to make me do things for her. I ask for that. It’s fair to expect obedience regardless of the situation. It may not be fair to make me do 100% of the housework, or to give up everything I like just to prove I am submitting. I totally trust her.

Last, I think it’s super important for both men and women to recognize that they are different. Nowhere is it more obvious than in FLR, enforced chastity and domestic discipline. Take advantage of the differences. We’ll thank you for it.

The silly Lion has informed me that he thinks eating raisins would be preferable to soap in his mouth. It makes perfect sense. But why admit it? Silly boy. He’s also asked about my previous plans to do more anal training. I think when we’re both feeling better, we might just start up again.

I’ve also been thinking about a new rule for Lion. It’s similar to his rule for interrupting me. When we got the new cage, he was in a hurry to try it on. Can we do it? When can we do it? Then he wanted to try it with the plastic lock rather than the padlock. He came around to my side of the bed so I could swap them. Right that second. When I asked him about it later on, he said he wasn’t in a hurry. He rarely comes around to my side of the bed. That, to me, signified that it was in a hurry.

Before I’d even talked to him about it, I was trying to figure out if it should be a rule. Now that I have talked to him, I’m still wondering. Maybe he really wasn’t rushing me. Maybe he didn’t realize he was rushing me. If he doesn’t realize he was rushing me, I think it needs to be a rule. We’ll have to talk about it more to see if a rule is needed. I’ve just been mulling it around in my mind.

It’s difficult for me to find new rules that are actual problems. Lion would have an easier time finding rules for me. Fortunately, for me, he’s not allowed to give me rules. He’s only allowed to nag me to do things for my own good. Damnit! When I find a rule like rushing me, I’m leaning toward instituting it. It’s an actual rule as opposed to spilling food on his shirt. We’ll see how it goes when Lion and I talk. In the meantime, I will continue to think about new rules for him. There must be other things he does that drive me nuts.

The other day, Julie commented on the writing of Camille Paglia. Here’s what she said:

“I have been reading Camille Paglia recently. One of her quotes stands out, ‘They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives. The agony of male identity springs from men’s humiliating sense of dependence upon women. It is women who control the emotional and sexual realms, and men know it.’ ”

I resist this concept since it means my dependence on women is an inescapable defect of my gender. I can be a strong, independent lion, the king of the jungle, but even the smallest lioness can control my most basic needs. I use the lion reference only partly because it is my persona. In fact, I have observed actual lions demonstrating what Ms. Paglia observed.

One day I was visiting the National Zoo in Washington DC. There were two lions snoozing on the grass in their spacious area. The lioness woke up and the male heard her. He got up too. Clearly, he was horny. He walked up to the now-standing lioness and began licking her back; apparently his version of foreplay. She tossed her head and growled. He walked away and went back to sleep.

Sound familiar? It does to me. It’s the lion version of, “Not now, dear. I have a headache.” The female of the species clearly has control of male sexual release. Ok, we can masturbate. That’s the generic “we”. I can’t. But let’s face it, a life of jerking off is not a very pleasant prospect. So yes, I have to agree that our wives do indeed control our sexuality.

Her second point is even more disturbing. She claims that we are also emotionally dependent; first on our mothers, and then on our wives.. I spent a lot of time considering that one. Yes we are. At least I am. I am miserable if I believe Mrs. Lion is unhappy with me. I want to please her and get her approval. I also wanted that from my mother. Unfortunately, in my mother’s case I never managed to get it. I wonder how much of how I am now is the result of that emotional neglect.

Ms. Paglia also claims that our knowledge of this dependence is “agony” and “humiliating.” If emotional support or, for that matter, sex is withheld, it is agony for me. I spent a lot of money on counseling trying to get over my mother’s lack of interest. My emotional weather is highly dependent on how I perceive Mrs. Lion’s satisfaction with me.

I admit that just as Ms. Paglia said, I am aware of my dependence. In my case, I have increased my sexual and emotional dependence through enforced chastity, FLR and DD. Even if my relationship were vanilla, I could hardly escape knowing how dependent I am.

Is this humiliating? In a very real sense it is. I would be incredibly humiliated if I had to admit to other men of my dependence on a woman. A woman! We men promote the illusion that we are fierce, independent creatures who need no one. Admitting that a female actually controls whether or not we are happy is horrible. Even worse is admitting that she calls the sexual shots as well.

I can’t think of anything more humiliating than to admit to the guys in the office that my wife has my sex organs locked in a cage and that I can’t even get hard without her permission! Or, admitting that she spanks me and subjects me to degrading punishment whenever I don’t do what she wants. Oh boy!

Yes, I know I wished this on myself. But that is only partly true. Take away enforced chastity and FLR and I still depend on Mrs. Lion for emotional and sexual happiness. I would be very surprised if every other married man doesn’t feel the same way. Maybe this is why I love it when Mrs. Lion says, “Good boy.”

I’ve spent all morning trying to remember something I thought of last night. I think it would have made a good post. Unfortunately, my brain is still mush from this cold. I’m heading to the doctor later to see if I can get anything for it.

Lion is a few time zones to the east. There were tornado warnings for him last night. Scary stuff, especially at night when you can’t see them coming. Luckily none of them hit near Lion. He just had nasty thunderstorms. And today he has sunshine. I wish I was with him. Neither of us do very well without the other. Obviously, we can function. We just don’t sleep well. And we’re lonely. At least I have the luxury of ordinary days. The only thing missing is Lion.

The only real news I have is that I found the other stash of Ivory soap from when we thought it would be interesting to use it in Lion’s mouth. I don’t know if it really matters that we have three other bars. How many can you use? I haven’t even decided if we’ll use them at all. When I give it any thought at all, I think making him eat raisins would be more of a punishment than soap in his mouth. He hates raisins.

Another thing Lion has been asking about is using a blindfold. We probably have several of them around. I guess there’s really no reason not to use one. I can’t think of a reason I’d want to, but I guess the fact that he wants to is the real reason. I think he might want to be careful, though. Who knows what I’ll do to him when he can’t see me coming. Tiny clothespins. Menthol rub. Lots of nasties. Although, I really like the look on his face when he does see me coming with mean things. It’s sort of a mix of dread, panic, and pleading. But I’m sure I can think of something to do to him while he’s wearing a blindfold.

I’ll have to go poking around in the dungeon to see where the blindfolds are stashed. Then I can make some plans for Lion’s homecoming. I can’t wait.

[Lion — As I recall, the most amazing experiences were when I was blindfolded. In one, I felt a really exciting ball massage. Then my balls started burning. I couldn’t see that the nice massage was really Ben Gay being rubbed in.]