[A guest post from Daddy]
In my experience, there are three categories of men involved in discipline: 1) spanking fetishists who leverage the intimacy, humiliation, and regressive qualities of discipline as a form of erotic foreplay 2) S/m players for whom discipline provides a rubric for the administration and receipt of pain and 3) spankers and spankees who wish to exchange discipline as an historically masculine form of care-taking.
I fall into the last category. The first time I took a boy across my knee, I was a boy myself – no older than 13 – and he was a classmate of mine with whom I would fool around, experiment, fuck and discipline until we graduated high school.
Most of the time, we would take out my parents‘ copy of The Joy of Sex, and choose a page at random; he would take the girl’s role, I the man’s and we would execute whatever the prescription. As the years went on, he formed around me as a submissive bottom and I around him as a dominant top. But there was something different about spanking.
Both sets of our parents were late baby boomers – Dr. Spock enthusiasts who dared not touch their children in an aggressive or angry or “corrective” way. As a result, neither of us had been exposed to spanking as children; we came to it on our own, as two young men in the throws of adolescents. That may seem counterintuitive and it certainly voids any prevailing bullshit about kink players having suffered some sort of trauma in their childhoods. In fact, it is precisely the fact that our parents were hands-off that allowed for such pure and unbiased experimenting when it came to corporal punishment.
The boy (whom we’ll call Jack) was having trouble keeping his act together both at school and at home. Sharing a secret as dangerous as gay sex in the early nineties midwest also meant that we could confide in each other extracurricularly, and, in confidence, he told me that his behaviors and truancy didn’t make him happy. On the contrary, he felt out of control of himself and his situation. Would I help?
I was in love with Jack even – no, even more so – as a flame-hearted teenager. Inflicting pain for pain’s sake made me uncomfortable. What I learned over time was that I didn’t understand what he was asking for. As we experimented, as I went from smacking his butt across an awkward lap to disciplining him, I realized he wasn’t asking for pain, he was asking for attention – and intervention.
The intimacy of spanking – of undressing a young man, exposing him, and bringing him close while exacting precise control of the situation – was a physical turn on. But the experience unlocked a mental turn-on: effecting a transformation of behavior; helping my friend on a fundamental level; seeing him bend, break and rebuild in a form that befitted his goals and aspirations. I wasn’t administering pain for pain’s sake at all. I was in his service.
And from those early experiences with Jack, I wished to be the kind of man sufficiently responsible, intelligent, careful, caring and imposing to set boys alight: there heads, their hearts, and, by extension, their butts.
Being the instrument of change and a rock of stability for guys came naturally and, that is to say, with tremendous work. There were rules to learn, or rather, to develop: To never discipline out of anger or malice; to take the goals of a boy more seriously than he may be willing to; and to fulfill an obligation of regret, to be willing to discipline even when the person you love would prefer it otherwise. Because they’ve asked you to. Because it is your responsibility.
Heavy is the head who wears the crown; heavier still is the heart of the man who swings a paddle. But when a man, your brother, asks you to take him to task, then you must steel yourself against your own protests even more than his. Even though it’s difficult. Even though it’s hot.
When discipline is requested and administered for the real benefits of change, the bond between two men grows deeper and takes on a special color that reveals itself through no other exchange. It is unique, it is enormous, and it is fragile. A boy’s acquiescence is earned by leading an example of a well-discipline life. A top’s hand is earned by the desire for improvement and offering the trust to allow him the privilege of effecting it.
