The intimate control dynamic

During my early adolescence, this poem by Edgar Allan Poe held a prominent place in my room, earning a reading from me every night before bed or during times of adolescent turmoil. To this day I think of this late childhood memory, embracing the truth that I am not like others are. I am different. I like adult consensual spanking. Using the Internet, I have sought out others who are the same, to try in some small way to understand the mystery that binds me still.

I have spent several years with my life partner trying to understand what I once considered an unlikely obsession. Why would a functionally healthy, well educated, intelligent adult find so much pleasure in pain? Was I pathological in a strictly Freudian sense and simply unwilling to admit it? Did I have hidden demons, enormous feelings of guilt I needed to purge? Why would I try and purge them through spanking a woman I loved? Did I want spanking because I had some sort of unconscious need to feel castrated? Did I want consensual spanking in my life because I was emotionally deprived during my own childhood, because my parents weren't involved enough in my life emotionally, because I need rules and structure in order to live happily? All these thoughts went through my mind. I read text after text, from mainstream psychological approaches to avant garde treatment in S&M journals, to the fantasy writing in pulp magazines. None of the reasons for this mystery made any sense to me and so I set out to learn my own way, my own reasons through my own explorations. I set out to learn why I could not bring my own passions from a common spring.

What follows is a sort of brief history of what I thought in the beginning of my own journey and how I came to accept this part of myself, how we have developed our proclivity for adult consensual spanking into a bona fide relationship dynamic structure we call Intimate Discipline. We do not claim such a structure or thesis is for everyone. I offer this brief explanation in this article for those readers who may benefit from our experience, our own search for meaning in what we do and how we have used this to establish and sustain abiding intimacy and connection over time.

Previous to my journey into developing Intimate Discipline dynamics for our relationship, I had to answer a few questions about this need. The principle question was this: She was telling me that her need for spanking was a need for discipline. What did she mean by discipline? Looking in the dictionary, I found definitions of discipline ranging from “guidance,” “leadership,” to the more corrective forms of discipline involving punishment. Was she telling me she wanted someone, a man, to control her behavior, to tell her what to do, to punish her if she violated previously agreed upon rules? Did she want me to control the day to day affairs of our relationship, seeming to take away all responsibility from her? Why would this not diminish her as a person? This understanding would never do. I did not want a caged bird. I had to find a different way to understand this need she professed for discipline.

The definitions of discipline were not going to do for this purpose. I asked a number of people what they meant by discipline. One woman friend told me that, for her “discipline is control.” I felt immediately I had something to work with. Looking at other forms of discipline outside our spanking dynamics, discipline in a classroom, discipline of a writer, of an academic, of a doctor practicing medicine, all these examples of discipline in varied forms demonstrated to me that control was indeed an element of all discipline. It also convinced me that discipline was present in virtually all human interactions and, when genuinely healthy, would enrich the lives of all who chose to participate. Control was one element, yes, but also needed for this interaction called ‘discipline’ was another element: Consent. This idea formed the basis of what I call a control/consent dynamic in human interactions which is so founded in giving cohesion to our social structure, our family structure, that it meets all reasonable criteria to be labeled a simple Darwinian selection.

This selection, such as it is, takes on a slightly different form for some of us. Though for the most part the interactive dynamic of control/consent is a behavior choice, not a complete physiological adaptation, I believe this species choice takes the form for some of us as a sexual selection, again in a strictly Darwinian sense. I believe for those of us so ‘wired’ for spanking, as well as other behaviors, this behavior choice (discipline) has been or is being adapted as a secondary sexual orientation necessary to enhance our first selection, often times heterosexuality (considered in this article) or any other primary sexual orientation a person may have. Before I go further, I would like to explain that the ‘wiring,‘ such as it is, would not be for spanking but rather for the control/consent dynamic itself and may manifest in many different behaviors one can read about on many different lists and discussions. I believe we use spanking because it is a culturally adapted behavior, one convenient for us without too much risk and one which, because of its highly charged intimate potential (a woman over the knee is pretty enticing), is a powerful behavior gateway allowing us to sexually express the potential of what is an otherwise fairly common human interactive dynamic. It is also possible, of course, to be more creative in our individual physical expressions, but the sexual expression of control/consent does appear to be enhanced through the ‘right kinds’ of pain such as we gain from spanking. Having someone slam your finger in a car door wouldn't work well, I'm sure, so one simply has to choose what kinds of pain and what intensity of pain is best suited to meet the needs of the discipline interaction.

Some will read this so far and exclaim, “But it's not sexual for me!” I can understand how this would be true for many and will address this concern now. Women who want spanking will normally be pretty specific about what gender they wish, there is usually a fairly narrow window of pain tolerance (from the very mild to the quite severe) but being within this window is important... not too hard, but hard enough. Many will specify even age qualifications. Many others will be fairly specific about social-economic backgrounds, educational levels, political beliefs and the like. Most will require some sort of emotional connection with the disciplinarian before they are willing to expose themselves so vulnerably. I have learned what most will mean by ‘non sexual“ is in reality what I would call ‘non-erotic.‘ Many intents in what we do definitely have the potential for non-eroticism, as much as fairly intimate discipline being non erotic (possibly even non sexual by some understandings) in our everyday interactions with others.

One example of non-erotic discipline happened to me recently when I went to visit my doctor. I have a female family doctor because I really think she is a good doctor. She was examining my prostrate (alive and well, thank you), an obviously fairly intrusive physical exam. I didn't feel any eroticism in this nor would I presume to think eroticism was at all intended. Was this interaction, so clearly described as discipline of a doctor taking control with my consent, at all sexual? Well, to be honest, I didn't feel it was sexual and sexuality again was clearly not the intent of either of us. But what about our other interactions, as she was asking me questions and explaining medical things to me? It seemed to me at the time that I used language I would not use with a male doctor, even though the intent and knowledge of two different doctors may be the same, She described some procedures to me giving her own husband as an example, saying “This is what my husband does.” It struck me because it would have been appropriate for her to use herself as an example, or to use the more general, “This is what other people have done.” When we start introducing unnecessary gender specifics, it is my belief we are introducing sexuality into the interaction whether this is our intent or not. Still, the interaction between my doctor and I was clearly non erotic and yet is was discipline.

The difference between the discipline inherent in our interaction with our doctor and what we do with spanking seems to me to be the context of one being a way of finding sexual connection and the other trying to find out if your healthy enough to live for another few years. One is the behavior choice of virtually all humans while Intimate Discipline using techniques such as spanking imply a sexual selection making the whole thing work. This ‘sexual selection“ does not in any way imply a necessity for pronounced eroticism, though it certainly may be present. I would suggest most of us go through our everyday lives washing dishes, doing the laundry, picking up the kids dirty socks, and such with no real thought of how we grapple with the specifics of our lives is erotic. We give our family cohesion and solid foundation, a connection, which must be loosely sexual but otherwise not erotically attractive.

From this basis, considering our use of discipline in the form of spanking with control is for us a secondary sexual orientation, the rest of this article will discuss how we use this awareness of who we are sexually to design our relationship around this basis both in the bedroom and how we interact in grappling with the particulars of everyday life. How do we form our internal structure keeping in mind that how we best relate is different for us than many other people? We don't have much of a model because, as far as we know, our parents weren't like us. So how do we design our family with the intent of enriching our couple intimacy and sustaining our marriage over time?

We are an equal Intimate Connection. By this I mean we are both equal in our responsibility to each other and we have absolute equality with respect to our individual connection to our relationship. Our power structure, as such, is fluid and dynamic in all areas of our lives. She will pretty much take care of some things where she is most knowledgeable, I will deal with other things. She watches over our diet, for example, and I watch over the car. Even in areas where one of us has a clear power advantage, there is always consent from the other. We specifically use the control/consent dynamic inherent to our sexuality because we do exchange power as we go along and consent is how we balance that power. We try as much as we can to outline our individual strengths and our individual weaknesses in different practical areas, allowing each other to meet our personal needs, always communicating to keep each other on the right track, recognizing that one of us has control only when the other has given consent.

From time to time, this dynamic will become weakened and show up as some sort of disruption, an argument or an unacceptable behavior choice from one or the other of us. If the poor choice is from me, the male, normally she is able to correct this through normal communication channels. If the poor choice is from her, then (usually) it seems to reflect a general breakdown in our communication or dynamic structure. This observation in our practice is quite consistent with relationship studies done by John Gottman and others who all point out that women are normally better communicators than men. In Gottman's description, he observes that men will generally withdraw at the first sign of criticism from his wife while the wife will not withdraw until there is outright contempt. Based on many of these quite reasonable observations that the woman is emotionally better suited for communication in a marriage, it makes absolute sense to give an automatic correction in our actual internal structure by specifying the husband as Head of Household or Head of Relationship, stabilizing the power balance through consent. This is what we have done and for this practical reason. Many couples will have other reasons for this, but in the end I think it comes down to stabilizing what would otherwise be a mismatch in communication ability.

Relationships fail for a lot of different reasons, but mostly they will fail because a couple is not relating through the same path. They are not moving ahead, advancing to different levels of growing intimacy. They can become hostile, arguing and being critical without mercy, or they can be hostile yet emotionally detached. During a ‘good’ period, the wife may say something to the husband like “Hey, hon, I really do think we are talking better now.”

“Yeah,” he could reply, “but I sure do wish we didn't always have to talk about how much it rains.”

“Well,” she replies, “it rains a lot around here. People talk about that.”

“Yeah, well I'm tired of hearing about it. It's depressing.”

“I have to have someone to talk to.” The wife will retreat from the subtle contempt, the husband thinking he made some sort of point.

I also think this couple may be missing the point.

Or the wife could fix what she wants to be a nice dinner. The husband, grateful for the dinner, nevertheless remarks “It's good but too much salt!” normally after he has emptied the salt shaker onto his peas.

These kinds of interactions happen in marriage and relationships all the time. Eventually, they will deteriorate into one not really caring what the other is doing. Oh, they love each other enough, but the love is not enough by itself to sustain the marriage. Soon, they will fall out of love because they did not learn to relate well and to correct problems and interaction issues as they cam along. The couple was not willing to build their marriage one step at a time and so for want of a nail the house is lost.

We try something from the beginning which allows us to build our relationship as we decide, to proactively choose how we are going to relate to each other. I, the man, am specifically given the right and responsibility of HOR. This allows me to actively intervene when I sense our interactions have deteriorated to a point of either hostility or emotional distancing. We have discovered that the best way for us to build the house is through our sexuality of control/consent, apparent in all human interactions but powerful for us because it is so much a part of who we both are as humans. Our behavior gateway is spanking, discipline spanking with my control. As explained earlier, spanking with control will enrich not only my HOR selection but also her feminine expression. She will feel enriched with, as she wrote once, “an abiding sense of trust and protection.” The idea of this discipline spanking is not to ‘blame her’ for our relationship woes, but to correct how we are relating at that time. It could very well be that it is my behavior that was initially at fault, such as fault will be, (too much salt on the peas, blaming the cook!) but this matters little because she is able to either correct this initially through communication or the problem will show up in her behavior soon enough. We want both our behaviors to change and they will through this dynamic exchange of control and consent just as happens in all other cases of discipline throughout life. A doctor will change, perhaps the change is subtle, after treating a patient, a teacher will change after a classroom of talented students. Discipline will affect all who participate mutually and it is no different in what we do.

There are a lot of areas of interest possible in these dynamics of discipline. This article describes only the original intent of many who come to the Internet to incorporate spanking or intentional discipline into their marriage as a way of trying to recover lost love and restore the intimacy they once cherished. It also suggests a way of building a relationship from the ground floor up, taking care to put each nail in its place. Our practice is how we use our very real secondary sexual orientation of control/consent to enrich our otherwise heterosexuality. Intimate Discipline, for us, is how we use who we are as a way of choosing how we relate in the man/woman dance of connection.

Frank Nelson

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