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This is the most unusual time of my life. I suppose I should count myself lucky, but I haven’t had any serious physical issues until quite recently. I’m used to being independent and capable of handling almost everything that comes my way. At least for now, I am extremely dependent. I can’t read my email and struggle to make sense out of what’s on TV. I’m not whining. Just stating the facts.
It seems that Mrs. Lion and I keep getting presented with new challenges. So far we’ve been successful. Our Female Led Relationship with Discipline (FLRD) took us a very long time to embrace fully, but we both persevered and you can observe by her posts that she is in all senses, my disciplining wife.
Of course, we also adopted enforced male chastity and for at least the last four years it is a solid part of our lives. But that’s different. Male chastity is a sexual power exchange that, for the most part, is fun for both of us. In many ways so is FLRD. Being spanked for spilling food on my shirt or forgetting punishment days, while painful for me, still has a rather light tone. There’s nothing relationship threatening about a very sore butt because I got spaghetti sauce on my shirt.
All this was intentional. We both decided that if we were going to adopt a disciplinary relationship, we had to first build the habits that support one. Mrs. Lion needed to learn to critically observe me. She had to learn how to meaningfully punish me. For my part, I had to learn to accept whatever punishment I was given and not question it or the reason I earned it.
If I found it relatively easy to accept my punishments, we both reasoned they were probably too mild to make the level of impression needed in FLRD. It was important that I understand the difference between BDSM, which can be quite painful, and disciplinary punishment. After three years, I think we finally have a good understanding of what that means.
To be meaningful to me, it has to be more than just painful at the time. After all, I do like being spanked. Mrs. Lion has learned to make spankings quite unpleasant. She still working on turning up the volume a bit, but she knows how to make me yelp when she paddles my bottom. This is half of the solution. The other half is to make me dread being punished. The principal value of punishment is to act as a deterrent against future bad behavior.
The solution, at least for me, is to make punishments a series of disciplinary spankings. I’m a soldier my way through the first one, but by the second or third I’m actively hoping Mrs. Lion will forget. By assigning a number of consecutive spanking days, Mrs. Lion can assign relative severity based on my offense. For example, my minimum is apparently three daily spankings. If I get food on my shirt or forget punishment days, I earn three days of disciplinary spanking. Presumably, if the offense is more serious, such as interrupting or acting like a know it all, the number of days climbs from three. If I break a rule before a series of spankings is over, the new sentence is simply added to the end of the one in progress. Also, if I don’t learn my lesson and repeat an offense, Mrs. Lion simply adds more days. So, if I spill something on my shirt only a few days after the first spill, I can look forward to five or six consecutive spanking days. The theory is that my behavior indicates when a punishment for a given offense is sufficient.
Mrs. Lion wrote about putting together a “torture book”. Her idea is to photograph each spanking implement along with a description of its effect on me. The other night she told me that I am to tell her if the given implement stings or thuds as well as rate it in terms of pain delivery. I know she won’t forget this project.
So far, she tends to use a different implement for each spanking. From my perspective, her most fearsome paddle is the spoon shaped paddle. It’s made from a heavy, imported wood. The striking surface is quite small and it has a long handle which gives her increased leverage. I don’t like it when I see her taking that one into the bedroom.
Another really nasty one is the small “tenderizer”. This paddle is flat on one side and has points on the other. We have two of them. One is considerably smaller than the other and made of a relatively light wood. The heavier one has a nice thud which, if I had a choice, I would prefer over sting. I really hate how that light one feels. It’s pure sting and misery with every swat. I suppose a spanking given with a combination of those two paddles (the spoon and light tenderizer), is my current worst nightmare.
Oddly, I want to help her become even more effective. The less I “like” a spanking, the more likely I will work harder to avoid another. Since I know that even the mildest offense earns three spankings, and those spankings are miserable for me, I think my learning process will be accelerated. For example, the level of discomfort hasn’t risen to the point that I would change my restaurant order to avoid things I might get on my shirt. I do work hard to avoid dropping food on my shirt, but I don’t really consider changing what I eat. When I begin to do that, I think it signals that I really don’t want to risk three spankings.
If all this seems odd to you, it’s because you probably haven’t entered into the kind of partnership Mrs. Lion and I share. In my mind, it makes little sense to be in a disciplinary relationship if the discipline isn’t severe enough to make me consciously work to avoid it. It’s not that I want more pain. I just know that severity has to reach the point that I consciously will sometimes sacrifice something I like to avoid the risk of the dreaded spanking.
This shouldn’t be too surprising. Children who are spanked work very hard to avoid getting caught and having to suffer through the punishment. Adults, like me, have a more advanced view of this. I can weigh the relative pain/pleasure of an offense. I may be willing (actually I am) to risk three of Mrs. Lion’s current spankings for chance to eat salsa and chips. The day that I pass them up is a positive sign that in my mind food on my shirt is too expensive to risk.
I have no idea what level of discomfort is necessary to get me to that point. I am very sure that it is worthwhile to find out. The reason has nothing to do with salsa. It has to do with things that truly bother my lioness. She hates it when I interrupt her. My internal risk/reward calculator has to make the risk high enough that I will think carefully before I speak. Just like with the salsa, the disciplinary spankings will condition me to edit my utterances.
Other guys who are in disciplinary relationships attempt to cure much more difficult issues. Many couples get into a disciplinary mode because the man has a drinking problem. He gets punished if he drinks too much. I’m not sure this works. Substance abuse is a special category of offense. It may be possible to control with liberal application of the paddle. But it is way more challenging than the issues Mrs. Lion wants to correct.
We’ve gone through a number of disciplinary techniques. One that didn’t work for us at all was assigning points for offenses. Then, on a punishment day, the points would be converted into number of swats. It was just too abstract for both of us. Our current system punishes one offense at a time. The intensity of the spanking is not related to the offense. The number of days I get spanked for that offense is related to the level of the offense I commit. So far, this is been really effective. There is no such thing as a “light” spanking. Spankings are all, at least theoretically, equally intense.
I’m sure we will evolve further as time goes by. The idea, in my mind at least, is that any spanking is fearsome. It has to be something I dread. I don’t think that Mrs. Lion will go to some other form of punishment. She may add time on the punishment stool, or soaping my mouth, but I think we’ve both settled on spanking as her primary disciplinary tool.
