Corporal Punishment

Corporal Punishment

It’s a set of words that seems to fire strong reactions from many.  It comes up in about every book or guide about Femdom that I’ve had the opportunity to glance.  Often when it comes up on Fetlife, you’ll see a lot of comments like “I never hit in anger”, “My sub is a grown up, not a child”.  On other boards, it swings the opposite way to comments like, “needing a strong hand”, “Keeping him in his place”.  There are suggestions that abound along the lines of chore boards and punishment schedules… and it all makes me wonder how much thought people actually put into all of this.

For the record, I maintain a corporal punishment dynamic and I enjoy it immensely.  While my boy does enjoy the heavy hand and it works well to keep him in his place… I’d be lying if I say I wasn’t smiling while doling out his punishments, and that’s exactly why it works so well.  Those silly lines, “this hurts me more than it hurts you.” yeah... complete bullshit in my world.

Early on, it wasn’t always that way though.  When we first started, my ignorance led me to follow the options laid out in the books I read.  I made my list of rules, assigned the punishments for breaking each one and off we went… except we didn’t.  It took less than 3 months before I knew it wasn’t working.  It wasn’t just one reason that made it not work… more like a collection of them.  For one, I’m just not big on rules and protocols... so there wasn’t a lot of motivation on my part to really keep track of what he did wrong.  Add to that my empathetic and sympathetic nature often had me making excuses for why this action didn’t warrant punishment and that action made me feel like I needed to lessen them.  My actions in turn signaled to my boy, the bratty switch that he is, that I didn’t care enough to demand his submission.  So I dropped it all together.  

After dropping the above, there really weren’t any rules for him to break, all I asked for was final authority, a level of respect as the Domme, and enough kinky play times to keep me satisfied.  We floated along for a while, doing pretty well most of the time.  He is just naturally pretty attentive to me and eager to please, so it was easy to just sit back and enjoy it.  I’m not one to make many demands, so when I did; there wasn’t much real fuss to comply coming from him (playful complaints... but not fuss).  When he would get a bit cheeky, I enjoyed throwing him over my knee to give him a better sense of perspective.  It was a very simple corporal punishment dynamic.  It was easy to see why this was the way most Dommes tend to prefer things.  It’s simple and easy at face value.  I say, he does.  Period.  

But we human beings are NOT simple creatures at all.  When I say it worked most of the time, it highlights that it didn’t work "some" of the time.  The major problem was that those times it didn’t work were usually when we needed it to work the most.  Those moments when both our lives were running us ragged and there was no time for me to tell him what I needed, no time for him to focus and ask me what I needed, no protocols for us to fall back on.  It left us rudderless, and it frustrated me at such an unbelievable level... I would literally snap. 

When the snap happened in December, I knew I was at the end of my rope.  We had to find something better.  We argued a lot during that time; at times it was pretty ugly.  We found some peace in the decision that we both agreed we had something too special to let an issue like this get in the way.  We calmed down, and we talked.  We talked for days, until the days turned into weeks.  Somewhere in all the mess, it dawned on me that what we needed was a steady rudder to keep the dynamic alive when neither one of us had the strength to be the oar.  I needed ways to keep him attentive when I couldn't actively ask for it.  Those rules and protocols I often scoffed at were exactly the type of rudder we probably needed.  I think deep down I knew this for some time, but was fighting it based on past experiences.  So I made the decision, which I could tell my boy was very happy to see.  It took nearly another two weeks and lots of thought to build the “rules”, and I still ended up with barely half a page.  But my desire is that this simple list will be just the rudder we need, yet avoid the pitfalls we’ve dealt with before.

Of course only time will tell if this will do the trick.  It's been a little over two weeks since the "rules" were put into place.  It’ll take time for us both to acclimate, and then of course we have to wait till hit one of those moments to see how well it steers us.  Though I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the thought of “helping” my boy learn the new rules kinda excites me and my paddle quite a bit!