Leniency and Discipline

Someone on FetLife recently asked a question about leniency in training. It would be inappropriate to quote precisely what was said out of that forum, but it was just exactly the question you’d expect a young Dom to ask and I can reference it as a case study without any indicators. Has a young girl as a slave, and she’s failing tasks he gives her. The question makes it clear there are tantrums, and that she has some emotional issues. There is acting out going on and he doesn’t know whether to tolerate it and try to help, or to be intolerant because the acting out is not going to stop until he stops putting up with it.

I posted in response, but then decided to turn the response into a blog post…because frankly I’m not keeping up with my posting here, so maybe recycling will help. The post doesn’t reference anybody in particular, it’s a reflection on the past ten years or so.

At any rate, I think this touches on one of the most difficult elements of acting as a Master. We all want to provide good, consistent, discipline. And for the most part we do not want to emotionally traumatize a slave or submissive.

Even if we do intend to get into someone's personality in that way, likely we mean "only under very specific circumstances where it is planned and controlled."

So a girl comes to you and wants discipline. But she has problems holding things together and there are issues with acting out. Now "by the book" may say that you simply do not tolerate any of this. If your response to an M/s situation is "what would Jack McGeorge do" the answer is probably "not tolerate the behavior" And I'm joking a bit here, not meaning to attribute things to Master Jack he never said. Though perhaps “WWJMcGD” ought to be a S/m bumper sticker or something?

I tend to think that is why a good bit of old school M/s focus says you should not love your slaves or by extension submissives. But then many of us lead complicated lives where our situations extend to people we love, long term partners, and we are not a Slave Training Academy. We look at a girl we care for. She’s nice, and dedicated, but she’s also a suburban American girl. She has a mind of her own and a certain amount of immaturity and rebelliousness. I’m describing virtually every submissive young girl in the U.S. here. She wants and desires to be a good girl, but she was not raised to be chained to a bed and she may crave it, but seldom comes out of the shopping mall ready for it, even if she thinks she is.

So she acts out. And we realize that at this point a certain amount of harsh "my way or the highway" is going to cause her to run away...and she's somebody that we feel really has a lot of potential in the long run, and that we care for, we are going to be more careful. We are not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and do something draconian that she isn't able to accept and that alienates her.

What's the problem with that? Well, let's be honest. At the point where a girl can have a tantrum and cause things to stop, or change, or get reinforcement, she is able to "top from the bottom." She is the one in control, and the power exchange has shifted. And we see an awful lot of situations where young subs who are prone to tantraumatic behavior end up with young Doms who simply are not equipped to deal with it. They engage their Dom in a dramatic game, and get feedback and it is a power struggle not a power exchange. How many times have we seen an attractive sub who was young and immature, and who seemed to have about as much control over their Dominant as vice-versa?

So there’s the line. Behave like too much of an ogre and lose the girl. Behave too leniently and lose control of the relationship.

I have a few suggestions that have worked for me:

1) Understand the concept that everyone needs emotional responses/interactions (“strokes”) and that most of us are conditioned to get our “fix” out of both positive and negative. Some people can get an awful lot of their daily requirement from negative, and this may be a shocker but girls who get a lot of their emotional strokes through negative reactions are not exactly uncommon in a community that specializes in hurting people. Try not to make punishment something that has a lot of emotional content, even negative.

2) There is a concept (Rubel references it in Protocols but I don’t think it’s original with him, and I have seen other sources for it…) of the difference between “correction” (for not completing a task) and “punishment” (for subverting the basic D/s paradigm). Correction should be common, if punishment is common there is a problem in the relationship.

3) Establish that correction and penalties are a privilege. It takes time and emotional energy to maintain a correctional system. Do not take the position that the submissive is doing you a favor by accepting your instruction and correction. Get into the mindset that you are doing her a favor by providing it.

4) Establish that acceptance of correction is a condition of getting it. Many girls (probably boys too, but …my experience…) will *ask* for consequences to be set, and then not really want to accept them. They crave structure, but cannot resist playing a power game to see if they can break the structure. This goes with the point above. “If you refuse this correction or complain about it, I will not do it again.”

5) Real punishments and most corrections should not be fun, interesting, or play. They can be eroticized, but you don’t give a girl a lot of nice thuddy “fun” spanking strokes for failure to complete tasks.

6) Establish that while correction and lower level punishment may be corporeal, high level punishment is not. It is not a “fun” scene, it is having a serious talk, the most serious element of which is “do we wish to continue this relationship.” This can be problematic with someone who seeks out drama – some girls would intrinsically be drawn to having a dramatic and intimate fight rather than sceneplay, because the emotional payoff is bigger. Disengage. Do not make your response dramatic. Insist on speaking slowly, logically, and clearly, state your issues and what you expect and be firm about it.

7) Give warnings. Make it clear you will give warnings, and that this is not a sign of weakness, but how you operate. “I have been supportive of you now. But if you have a tantrum during our next session, I am going to stop the scene, and that will be it for the night.” Make it clear that the fact that you tolerate a behavior now does not mean you always will.

8) Do not commit to any consequences unless you plan to follow through on them. But do not feel obligated to establish consequences in every case. “You may be corrected” is perfectly adequate. Do not allow yourself to be goaded into setting strict penalties if you are not certain you can or will follow through on them. It is better to be open-ended than wrong.

9) Avoid brinksmanship. You do not want to end up in a position where a submissive can force you into making a choice of disciplining them in such a way that they leave or are broken, or backing down. So don’t create situations that lead to that. Estimate what punishments the submissive can reasonably accept and keep most punishments well inside those limits. Remember that you are in the Driver’s seat. It is not the submissive’s responsibility to keep you from doing something that challenges or destroys the relationship. That’s what they pay you the big bucks for.

10) Set test cases. Find small tasks that are very easy to do. Discipline yourself enough to check up and support them. If the problem is with passive-aggressively not doing the tasks to get attention, the test cases will fail. If the problem is workload the test cases will succeed.

11) Be serious about change. Do not continue to indulge the same behaviors over and over again. This WILL require a test. If you are supportive the first time a girl has issues, she will do it again. The idea is that you warn her, and warn her seriously enough that she’s expecting the consequences and when they begin to come instead of being blindsided and just lashing out defensively, a part of her mind says “oooh…he WAS serious…” and is more prone to back down without a nuclear confrontation. But you WILL be tested and you MUST stick to your guns. Require change and do not consistently indulge the same unacceptable behaviors.

12) Confront problems head on. If you think that a task was not completed as a passive aggressive test of your authority say “did you really not have time to do this, or are you passive-aggressively testing my authority.” Do not accept a histrionic response…come back to the question, calmly and authoritatively.

13) If you cannot succeed, fail. If you end up engaged in an endless conflict of wills, you have lost anyway. It may come down to either ending the D/s component of your relationship, or if that was the relationship, ending it entirely. You must be willing to embrace this as a real possibility. As long as you do not, you are effectively “trapped” and cannot really speak with any force of will.

14) I cannot overemphasize the need to be and stay calm and chill.
I am not saying these are the best guidelines for being a Dominant. I am saying they are practical compromises that I have worked out between the fictional world of Chateau Roissy and the real world of the American suburbs where girls go to school and have jobs and you don’t have a castle to chain them in. I know there are Masters who are more demanding. But the best Masters I have seen make it clear that they do deal with emotional trauma, and they have to make some allowances for it. What they allow and how they allow it obviously differs. Being flexible is not being topped from the bottom. But it can lead to it if you do not assert yourself and act with real strength

I’ll just add here that I do think that for very serious problems mental counseling is important. Do not ever come between a submissive and her medical provider, and respect mental health issues. Joint counseling through a Kink Aware Professional could give you insight into what is a “real problem” that she cannot control and what is simply an issue of poor discipline that you must address.

The Crucible Empty

So I've been a very faithless correspondent here the last few weeks. Where "few weeks" is almost exactly two months. Two months. I have not posted in two fewking months. Or talked to anyone, or been very good about getting back to people about fetish stuff. Short notes..."I'll be back around in mid-October..."

Excuses...Uhm...I was redeployed to Mars?

So seriously, I was on the road nearly solid for a while there, and then the last two weeks have been a huge home project aimed at bringing the other big component of my life, my drama activities, into line. I've been acting as a props storage dump for the past ten years, and with my mother's death, things finally got out of hand. Theatrical props overran the house. Not just small props but big chunks of sets, walls, etc. The place became choked with furniture and unlivable. The solution was to take the cellar which was frankly an underutilized trashpile, and build rack shelving for 144 Rubbermaid storage tubs and assorted other things. But in the long run this was a huge project, and it's absorbed all my time and energy.

I've also been working towards my final estate transaction, in which I lose over $100k. Now wait for it. That's the good part and I count myself happy about it, because in the current realty market, that's pretty good. Cash has been tight, and that keeps me busy. Not a lot of luxury time. Never has a man been happier to have a disastrously bad transaction occur.

Still it's been a while since I've written. Where a while is approximately one sixth of a year. I have a vanity as an author, I don't like to write until I have something good to say, and apparently I'm not brilliant enough to have something good to say twice a week. Or in two months.

So we return with a funny story. It may be lame, but at least I'm typing.

Recently went to the Crucible with M. Wasn't a big trip or anything, we had a weekend date, and found there was an open club night decided to go. Her apartment is not ideal for play, and we were staying home for budgetary reasons dealing with the aforementioned real-estate transaction, so it was a chance to mess with equipment a bit on an off night.

The club as empty. I don't mean "well it was a light night." I mean it was us and the staff. And they outnumbered us.

Eventually I think two other couples were there. One couple was a solitaire who was waiting for her partner, so there was a loooonnnngggg....period when it was just us and about three to four people who were on staff.

Positive side. They were mostly people I knew at least to talk to and are great people. Negative side. They were mostly people I knew at least to talk to.

You wouldn't think so, but it's kind of daunting to do a scene in the middle of a warehouse-sized open space with about five people who are basically working, and who you vaguely know.

I wanna stress that the staff was great, that’s why this is funny not disastrous. They were cool, encouraging, and nonchalant. But…it’s still just plain weird to have an entire sex club the size of a decent-sized High School Gym pretty much to yourself. To be one of the only four people in DC who decided to be kinky that night.

That's not normal, Likely other stuff drawing people off, and Saturday was expected to be big, there were already preparations underway for the crowd. Didn't look at the calendar to see what else was up, but I know there was "stuff."

So…normally it’s “what equipment can we get.”

But suddenly it’s like “well, of all the equipment in the club, what do we feel comfortable using in a large open space.” It’s a wet dream for an extreme humiliation player or an intense exhibitionist. “Just so you know, we are absolutely the ONLY THING to watch here, other than the clock, so let's stand here in the middle of this big open basketball court space...” No pressure.

It was just funny. Because of course there was no reason to have sudden performance anxiety. And in the long run, we didn’t. We played around downstairs, did some training routines, went upstairs, generally made use of the place. But…there was just this kind of niggling feeling of…it being weird. I think it’s sort of like rehearsing a play. It’s fine to be doing the play in front of a packed house. And it’s fine to be doing it in front of your Director and crew. But doing it in front of six or seven people who you kind of know and are there doing other work…is just kind of weird. Like smoking when nobody else is, or drinking when nobody else is and it isn't your tab.

“Scuse me, mind if I'm violently kinky…”

I once knew a guy who had a response to "do you mind if I smoke...it makes me more comfortable." His response was to start unzipping his fly and say "not at all...do you mind if I jerk off...I find it makes me more comfortable..."

No matter how kinky we think we are, we have some social wiring that says "uhm...dude...what the fuck..."

In the long run it was actually a nice low-key night and the staff folks were great and courteous and friendly as always.

To make things weirder, a very normal looking guy…not at all fetish, showed up and was looking around. He wasn’t your standard club gawker…the sort who stares your scene and maybe decides to masturbate (hey, be fair, you’re playing in public…you’re there to entertain if somebody chooses to whack off). Though at the risk of digressing, the guy at Power Exchange in San Francisco who got obtrusively close to a scene with S. and began making rather loud “cock-a-doodle-doo” noises may have been kind of over the top.

But this guy was fine. He was pretty normal seeming, and looked a little out of place, kept a respectful distance. Once I realized he wasn’t with anybody and wasn’t setting up stuff for tomorrow night, I tried to put on a bit of a show for him. Honestly it was kind of fun.

He’d actually already gotten disappointed (any other night dude, I have NEVER seen the place that dead, even on a Friday…just coincidence), and was heading out, but couldn’t seem to get a cab to find the place. He was from out of town, and was kinda disappointed as he’d wanted to see a real live sex/fetish club. I was glad we’d performed a little. We gave him a ride back to Navy Yard as he seemed harmless enough.

So, the next time I’m at Crucible on a Saturday and trying hard not to curse under my breath because the only toy I can find open is that one ubiquitous spanking bench that there are like seventy of and is always the one thing you can find open…I’ll remember the most recent trip and….be glad that there are a few other people to blend with. There is safety and anonymity in numbers.