Domestic Discipline

I met D 5 years ago and he has been living with me for 3 years. In that time I've been getting all sorts of mixed signals about whether or not he wanted a domestic discipline arrangement. They were mixed enough that we never tried. He would talk to me about personal behaviors that bothered him and recite fantasies about being taken in hand, but when I would try to negotiate reality with him he would recoil in fear.

So yesterday we ate dinner and then had a session with a wonderful female top D had just met in a spanking chat room. She made it clear that she does not like role play and would rather discipline over real stuff. D was so turned on that he let me rattle off a list of "real stuff" and when we got to our home the punishment commenced. One of the bones of contention was D's unfillfilled promises to exercise. He is in his 50s and there is a good gap between us in age. Both of us want him to be around and spankable for lots of years to come. My parents had decided to get rid of some exercise equipment about 2 or so years ago and so we had hauled a bowflex for me and a stationary bike for him up the stairs. And the bike sat and got used as a clothes drying rack. He wanted to use it and agreed to it before we hauled the 200+ pound behemoth up the stairs--but then it sat.

So he got corner time, his first mouth soaping with some leftover Ivory soap from the SL weekend, and a good OTK paddling. After his paddling he was dispatched to the exercise bike to sit. Instead the man started to exercise, right there, sitting on his red behind!!! So we let him go for awhile and peeked out the door of the bedroom to see him diligently exercising with his red shirt and almost equally red caboose.

And I was scared. I was afraid this was going to backfire, that he would have a bad reaction, that he would feel the way he felt back at some NY clubs in the 80s.

And in that 10 minutes all the reasons that have kept us from taking this leap went through my mind. D had to join the BDSM scene some 20 odd years ago because there were no spanking only options. The scene was far more "Old Guardish" then than it is now. So he got spanking and a lot of stuff that just does not work for him. On one occasion he was simply sent to the corner and ignored while his lady tops whooped it up elsewhere. He did not want to be a slave, jumping to commands. He did not want to be treated as an object, sitting in a corner until needed for service. Other folks there had those needs, but not D.

Unfortunately this experience and others put the filter in his mind that said: discipline=objectification. To have rules meant that he would automatically end up at the extreme and become an object whose sole purpose was to serve it's owner. We had talks about it, but I did not know what the heck I was doing either. I had no DD models and the M/s ones kept steering us in a direction we did not want to go when I brought this up. I knew D needed discipline and structure without the slavehood, but I had no good map of what that looked like.

I did find some DD sites on the web--and here is where my hangups kicked in. I am not a psychotherapist, but I do work in the social services field. I have to provide lay counseling on a regular basis for folks trying to meet vocational and other goals. There is a particular set of techniques for that, none of which include punishment. I was taught punishment was Bad, would lead to other maladaptive behaviors, and just Never Works. You could have natural consequences. You could put a kid in time out until he quit knocking holes in all the walls of the house. But no punishment.

I am quite open minded and not well domesticated in a lot of respects. ;-) I dove into BDSM into both feet, tried everything I could manage from both ends, and did not feel a tinge of guilt--until I contemplated DD.

Yesterday I read a post on Radspace (see blog list) about disciplinary spanking and a light went on in my head. I had done it a few times with people other than DD despite my misgivings and it had really turned my crank on a lot of levels. At that moment I realized that it is a kink, silly.

Non-consensual slavery is illegal in this country and condemned by most. It is so condemned that those who practice the consensual version have a lot of problems when they try to describe their interest to outsiders. I have all kinds of problems describing it and usually get met with some form of "that is just wrong."

No it ain't. It is a need. Slavery is outlawed because it does not work for *most* people and because doing things non-consensually is Just Wrong (now, I am not talking here of consensual non-consensuality). This does not mean that there is not a subset of the population for which slavery fits and fills a deep identity need.

And last night both I and D groked that adult discipline is a need too, for a small subset of the population. D woke up this AM, cuddled into me, and told me he felt more like himself than he has for a long time. He had deeply feared this, jumped off the cliff anyway, and apparently has landed someplace he has always wanted to go. He loves the "little boy" identity and feels it today, with a difference. He wants to be not the little boy that wants to escape adult life, but the little boy who wants to follow rules he agrees are good for him, better himself, and remain a good partner for me. The discipline works because it is a need, not just something imposed from the outside.

I mentioned to the lady who visited us yesterday that she was like a kinky angelic Supernanny. I think that is more true than not.