Obedience training

I spent the best part of Sunday stuck on a blog in tumblr. I deserve credit for achieving a massive amount of laundry but in amongst that, yes, I was absorbed in the world of a man who presents as a very strict Dominant. He is not, he says, a boyfriend. He's a Dominant. He's good enough to explain how it came to this moment in time and he's perceptive about his inclinations and mindset. He knows what he wants and he knows that many women want to give him what he wants. He is not wanting, it appears, a permanent situation, and having a wife, kids and a house in the suburbs is very far from his mind, as far as I can tell. He's urbane; a sophisticate; an educated man, interested in the Arts; creative.

I think he's real. I really do. I am less gullible than I used to be. For goodness sake, one of the people in my writing class has set up a blog not unlike this to benefit his writing practice and create a character, so anything is entirely possible. Even so, I think the man in question is pretty genuine. He's very, very consistent. So, let's assume, for the sake of the argument that he is entirely genuine.

If I could use only one word to describe his philosophy about the power exchange relationship it would be 'obedience'. No matter what else he might be asked by readers or what he might write, it all comes down to this word. In an ideal world, he writes, he would never have to punish a girl because she would be completely obedient. Since it is probably not possible for someone to be obedient all the time, and especially at the beginning of a relationship, his view is that you make sure that the first time she disobeys you the punishment is completely detestable  to the submissive. So, she might enjoy a spanking. Make sure the spanking is awful; something that she never wants to experience again. Whatever it is, make sure she hates it. It might be 1000 lines or kneeling in the corner for an hour. So long as it is a completely distasteful experience.

This sort of writing is where I began years ago in my reading. I located somewhere a man that said that as a Dominant you have to be a bit like Fonsie; create a persona of being tough, be tough once and then the power arrangement was forever clear. The man yesterday with the tumblr blog said that he'd never had to repeat the same lesson with the same girl; that thereafter he had her obedience. I wonder about that. Yes, an unpleasant experience will be memorable but will it be remembered forever? Perhaps so.

Somehow in my mind there's a difference between being in fear of someone and being quite sure of what the consequences will be for certain behaviors. This is where the (brutal) punishment spanking idea worries me as a philosophy. I can completely come to terms with being pushed beyond my limits for a spanking that is done outside of the punishment realm, but I'm not at all sure how I'd feel later about a man who took me to the realms that this tumblr blogger is suggesting he has taken girls because they were disobedient. There is a part of me that says that disobedience is a break down of the agreed dynamic of the relationship and that this must be sorted but that there are many ways to a skin a cat and many ways to get the dynamic back where it should be, for both your sakes, without having the fear button kick into place in her mind. (Or, am I being pedantic?)

Technically speaking, a harsh spanking is okay, except for the fact that I worry about the repercussions. I'm not sure how I would feel, if my feelings would be forever changed; not just my feelings about ever disobeying again and doing that thing again, whatever it may be, but my feelings about the man. That's the thing. I've been spanked soundly for being naughty (can't remember what I did) and my feelings didn't change but that's because, I think, that I wasn't spanked so soundly that I'd never do another naughty thing ever again. Maybe it would have done me good to have that sort of spanking where I forever feared another one. I'm really not sure about all this at all.

Generally speaking, my experience is that any disobedience or break down in the power dynamic is going to lead to a breakdown in the relationship overall. This tends to mean that communication is thwarted, giving me an opportunity to decide how I feel about things. And, how does that make me feel? That makes me feel that I've made a mistake and that I want to get things sorted and back to normal. It makes me want to make up and say that  I am sorry. It confirms the submission. Every mistake ultimately makes the power more present and predetermined. Every mistake makes me wanting to make no more mistakes, until one day I stop making mistakes. Until one day, viola, I'm trained! I'm the submissive, the girl who obeys and he's the Dominant, the man who has the power.

Yes, you can spank them unmercifully or you can do the hard yards and let time take it course (which is not to say that a sound spanking isn't part of the deal, by the way). If she has a genuine submissive nature, and the Dominant holds his nerve, she'll eventually see obedience as a very natural thing; a turn on; the way she desires to live.