The Perfect Paddle

After much consideration, I have arrived back in the same city as my partner (though not yet in the same household, we're not quite ready for that) with the intention of staying through the summer to see how things develop between us, both in Domestic Discipline (DD) and in the rest of our relationship.

As is par for the course with us, getting back into the rhythm of DD is not without its bumps and hiccups -- though this time, I'm happy to say not because of any reluctance of his part or mine. On the contrary, he's embraced the DD lifestyle with a consistency and enthusiasm heretofore unseen in our relationship.

A week or so before I left, I happened to find a paddle at the local thrift store. It was one of those paddles that's clearly not a cheese board or a game paddle, but a bona-fide spanking paddle meant for the infliction of corporal punishment.

The paddle looked to be perfect and my heart gave a bit of a flutter when I picked it up. It's just thin enough to sting, not thud (stinging being my sensation of preference), wide enough and long enough to fully cover the area in need of correction, with a good solid grip suited for a man's hand. It's made out of hardwood, so despite its thinness, it's not likely to break at an inopportune moment.

The first time I was asked to "Go get the paddle," I presented it proudly, imagining how much richer our DD experience was about to become.

And as soon as I felt it on my backside, I knew I was right. We'd found the Perfect Paddle.

By "perfect," I mean that it felt just right. And by "just right, " I mean that it hurt exactly as much as I imagine in my head that a spanking will hurt, and it hurt in exactly the way that I imagine a spanking will hurt. For the first time, my real-life spanking experience matched almost exactly the spankings of my fantasies.

Spurred on by my enthusiasm, my partner has subsequently used said Paddle of Perfection on a regular basis in an effort to get our relationship back on track.

It's failing miserably.

The Perfect Paddle feels "perfect" and "just right" in imagination and application. But it fails in every really important way. It leaves no marks or bruises. The pain stops as soon as the spanking stops. There is no day after (or as before, week after) soreness to remind me of the session. Heck, there's barely even a "minute after" -- two minutes after the spanking (before corner time's even started), it's as though the spanking never happened.

I expect it's different for everyone, but for me at least, the psychological benefits of a spanking come largely in its aftereffects. Every time I see the bruises or sit down and feel the twinge of pain and ache on my backside, I get a little jolt of that miraculous DD-juice -- self-confidence, personal power, a wonderful feeling of being loved and cared about by my partner. I go a week or so -- minimum -- on a spanking like that and still feel empowered, loved and a bit like I'm walking on air. But without those aftereffects, the power of DD, at least for me, is nonexistent.

And yet.... that paddle feels so perfect....

It's an interesting lesson for me on the difference between sexual fantasy and reality. Fantasy is wonderful, but it's rarely the key to personal growth.

The spanking of my fantasies, so long craved and searched for, carries little to no power in real life. And the thicker, "thuddier" paddle that wields such power on my psyche in real life rarely appears in my fantasies.

I expect a lot of things are like that, especially in the DD and D/s world. The perfect DD partner of our fantasies might well be completely ineffective and disappointing in real life and the guy you'd never think knew his way around a paddle might be the most effective disciplinarian we'll ever meet. And of course, I've had any number of D/s scenarios that seemed wildly exciting in my head turn into a big snore when tried out in the real world.

The Case of the Perfect Paddle is a valuable lesson in remembering that DD, when practiced between two living, breathing people, is about reality, not fantasy.

And it's an even better reminder that DD is a living, fluid thing, and that there are dangers in clinging too much to how we imagine it ought to go. In having overly specific or rigid expectations of how DD "ought" to work, we may miss out on experiences and nuances that are richer and more valuable to us than the scenarios in our imaginations.

And so it's with a heavy heart that I will request, humbly, that my partner set aside the Perfect Paddle (except for in future potential play situations, which we haven't yet explored) and once again take up the dreaded thicker paddle that strikes fear in my heart, but creates those lovely bruises, aches and pains that seem to hold the key to my better and higher Self.

But maybe I'll wait until I've had just one more spanking with it... :-)

Hamlet Needs a Spanking: DD and Indecision

When I was in high school, I was fortunate to have one of those wonderful teachers who genuinely loved and understood Shakespeare and knew how to get her students to love and understand it as well.

As a result of her teaching, I'm one of the those fortunate few who laughs at all the right places during Shakespearian plays not because the person next to me does, but because I actually get the jokes -- a gift I'm forever grateful for.

The tragedies were my favorite and I was fascinated at the idea of the fatal flaw that undoes the classic hero. I understood about Othello's jealousy and Macbeth's ambition, but when my teacher suggested that indecision was Hamlet's fatal flaw, I was stumped.

How in the heck could indecision rank up there with jealousy and ambition as something that could wreck your life?

I don't know where that teacher is now, but if I did, I'd email her and say, "Oh, I get it now." No wonder Hamlet's the most famous of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. I'd take jealousy or ambition over indecision any day.

After yet another long separation, I spent the last two weeks with my partner. Predictably, despite all our problems and my doubts about the future of our relationship, all it took was about five seconds in the same room with him and I fell in love all over again (and predictably, suffered total amnesia about all of our problems). And all it took was one "welcome back" spanking for me to remember why I'm going through all this trouble to keep this relationship in the first place. We may suck as a contemporary couple, but we kick *ss on the DD front when we're doing it right.

But it's becoming more and more clear to me that, at least for us, this long distance thing isn't going to work. I suspect a couple has to be much further down the road with DD, and have a much more solid foundation of trust and good communication, for long-distance DD to work. And as regular readers know, we've got anything but that.

So I'm now faced with the decision: to stay where I am, snug in my little mountain hideaway, safely distant from the everyday dramas of a relationship that may not work out but without the possibility of using DD to make things better, or do I go back and try to work through that murky pit of past trouble that I wrote about in a prior post.

And that's where I began to realize the perils of indecision, because of course, every time I decide one way, I realize what I'll be giving up and so I swing the other way. I've been doing that for weeks now, if not months. It's driving him crazy, and honestly, it's driving me crazy, too. (too bad spankings don't make me more decisive)

As I was shifting back and forth (and back and forth) again this afternoon, trying to figure out what to do, I realized with abrupt clarity how many of my decisions are motivated by a need to avoid pain. And in the next instant, I realized another reason why DD is such a potentially healing and powerful force in my life.

The trigger that causes me to swing one way or the other on this decision and other major life decisions comes when the excitement of the positive parts of the decision momentarily give way to the mourning for whatever it is I'll be losing. And that pain is so scary that I immediately swing the other way to make it go away. Which is does, for a little while, until the relief of having reclaimed what I had lost goes away and the pain of the loss on the other side seeps through. Then it's back the other way I go. (For those of you who are wondering, this will eventually lead back to DD.)

Looking back, I'm realizing only now how much of my life has been mismanaged out of a desperate desire to avoid pain -- irresponsible spending ("I have to have it now!"), quitting school - twice ("School is boring."), walking away from worthwhile projects and professional opportunities ("This is taking way too long and I hate getting up early."). But the end result of avoiding short-term pain is suffering far greater long-term pain -- be it too much credit card debt or unfulfilled educational or career goals.

And that's where DD comes in. (See, I told you I'd get back to the topic.)

DD is all about experiencing short-term pain to avoid long-term pain. Spankings and other discipline hurt now, but they keep things from building up, both personally and in the relationship, that will hurt a lot more for a lot longer if they're not dealt with.

And predictably, even though I know this to be true, I dread discipline of any kind, and when the time comes to accept it, I'll do whatever it takes to stall and avoid it. (My partner, to his credit, is beginning to figure out that he's not doing me any favors by allowing me to get away with these tactics.)

To have the life I want, I have to learn to let go of things, to make sacrifices for long-term goals, to do all the things that, in short, grown ups know how to do, but that I was never taught as a child because no one ever discplined me when I got lazy, put things off or quit when the going got tough.

I believe that, whatever the problems in our relationship, DD will help me to learn those things. Often, I think I focus too much on whether or not DD is helping the relationship, and I forget how much it's helping me.

Tonight, I'm pretty sure it's time to go home -- largely because I want to be the person that I am when DD is in my life, and I can't have that where I am now. Tomorrow, I may feel differently. But DD is teaching me that the ultimate decision needs to be based on what I want overall in my life, not on avoiding the inevitable short-term pain that comes with picking one option over another.

Boundaries: Finding the "Sweet Spot"

I received an email from a regular reader today who was having trouble posting comments to this blog. He emailed me (and I hope I'm not violating any confidences here!) that he'd tried unsuccessfully to post in the past and when his comments failed to appear, he thought perhaps I'd rejected them because he was male and didn't want men's opinions on the blog.

For the record, this is not the case! In fact, just the opposite is true. I see a serious lack of the male perspective in online DD material, and would love to have much more input from the male/dominant point of view.

In light of this unfortunate misunderstanding, I've revised the email policy posted in the sidebar.

My reason for the initial "no emails from men" policy has been that I tend to have a serious problem enforcing personal boundaries. Particularly in the areas of sex and relationships, I tend to ignore those helpful instincts that tell me when a situation is unsafe or unhealthy until it's far too late to safely extricate myself from it.

It's only recently that I've begun to realize I have not only the power, but also the obligation, to keep myself safe by enforcing personal boundaries -- hence the prior "no email from men" policy (and the trouble in my current relationship...). But erring on the side of overcompensating isn't healthy, either -- hence the correction to the policy. So provided I don't become inundated with strangers emailing to ask me what color underwear I prefer, I'm happy to accept emails from any and all.

But the whole incident got me thinking about something very related to DD: boundaries.

As I've explored a bit in the past (see"When I'm Angry"), the biggest weakness of DD seems to be that the dominant partner has the ability to enforce personal boundaries and the submissive partner doesn't. And in many cases, the dominant partner also claims (largely erroneously) the right to decide what the acceptable boundaries are not just for himself, but for his partner as well.

Like many women passionately committed to living a DD lifestyle, I've done back flips trying to rationalize why either A. this isn't the case, or failing that, B. this isn't a problem.

Putting aside for a moment the possibility of discipline going both ways a la the Spencer Plan (the subject for another post), the flat out truth is here is very simple:

A. it is the case and B, it is a problem. At least for me.

The issue of boundaries is, unfortunately, fundamental to why my current DD relationship seems to be imploding at lightning speed.

As long as I don't enforce my boundaries, we're blissfully happy. When I do call attention to something in the relationship that violates my sense of self, he gets angry. If I press the point, I risk discipline. And because I know that there is always the possibility that I will be disciplined for defending my boundaries, my need to protect myself keeps me (rightly) from being able to submit fully to his discipline.

Fundamentally, while I completely trust that he won't abuse his power during the actual disciplinary process, I don't trust his judgement when it comes to determining who's at fault for an "incident" -- me, him or both of us. And trusting the judgement of one's disciplinarian is so fundamental to the feeling of safety and love that healthy DD creates that the experience doesn't hold up long-term without it.

Interestingly enough, I was fully aware of this weakness (minefield? powder keg?) in our relationship before I even suggested DD. In fact, it's one of the reasons I suggested it in the first place. I decided that if I was going to have to back down most of the time anyway to keep the peace, I may as well fill the emotional need I had for DD in the process and turn a negative into a positive.

Wanting my partner so much, and wanting DD so much, I naively thought that the benefits would be so overwhelming that they would make up for this deficit in our core relationship, and that in a sense, we'd both get what we wanted. He'd get to be "right" most of the time, and I'd get the safety and security of DD.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

There is no benefit, DD or otherwise, that is powerful enough to make up for a lack of respect or a diminishment of self. If there were, there would never have been a women's movement (or a civil rights movement or an organized labor movement). Women would have been happy to be cossetted, protected and cared for in exchange for putting up with being talked down to, excluded and dehumanized.

But it doesn't work that way. The innate human need for self respect is too powerful.

Am I then suggesting that DD is, after all, inherently abusive and sexist?

Absolutely not!

I continue to believe that, when it's in the context of a healthy, mutually respectful relationship, DD speaks to a basic, archetypal need in those who seek it -- first, to fulfill unmet childhood and developmental needs, (see "DD as a Reaction to Me Generation Parenting") and second, to balance the male/female archetypal energies that our culture has twisted beyond recognition. (I really need to get around to finishing that post...)

But because there are no external forces checking the behavior of the dominant in a DD relationship, the only check on the system that prevents abuse is self-control, an internal responsibility on his part and a willingness to admit freely when he's wrong. Lose any of those and the relationship -- and the woman specifically -- are in dangerous territory.

As Ollie wrote so beautifully in his comment on "When I'm Angry," (and I'm paraphrasing here), power corrupts. And in a situation where one human being has ultimate say over right and wrong, few of us, male or female, could resist the temptation to avoid taking responsibility for our mistakes.

This is all too human an impulse. In fact, I think it's safe to say that most women attracted to DD are attracted precisely because we recognize our urge to avoid responsibility and want to be forced to accept it.

I imagine myself with a paddle in my hand, and while I'd like to think I'd be fair, truthfully, I doubt it. If I were that good a disciplinarian, if my judgement were that sound, if I were that emotionally balanced, I likely wouldn't have such strong need for an external disciplinarian, and my interest in spanking and discipline would likely revert to a strictly sexual one.

Fundamentally, then, the issue of boundaries goes back to the prior post -- it seems that for a traditional non-reciprocal DD relationship to work, the trust has to be firmly established prior to the introduction of DD. The respect of boundaries has to go both ways -- and his way is harder, because he has to do it of his own free will. Otherwise, there's simply too much temptation to abuse the privilege of power.

Perhaps the ongoing attempts by myself and others to negotiate a successful DD relationship can be compared to finding that "sweet spot" during a spanking -- it hurts in all the right -- and none of the wrong -- places.