Delayed laundry and its consequences for one's bottom

I'm on Adaline Rain's comfortable couch today, talking about The Count's Discipline!

(We're continuing from here. Charles and I had just come up with a unique take on domestic discipline.)

And the controversial "maintenance" spankings? Yes, please. While Chloe (fictional birthdate, um, 12/13/04) was very small, we could get away with spankings, and the inevitable "comfort" sex (really, brutal, dominant, do-you-feel-womanly-yet? sex) that followed, Saturday afternoons, our old training time, but as she grew, and as she was followed by John (3/10/07) and then by Ethan (1/12/09), maintenance happened in the wee hours of Sunday morning, and we both tried to bank sleep ahead of time, no easy feat during those years, as every parent (every modern parent, at least--I often found myself envying my Victorian forebears with their nannies and governesses!) can attest.

But I should return to the time before Chloe was born, because such matters as the unique pleasure of changing diapers while being punished by wearing a diaper of one's own will find their place in due course.

From the beginning of our unusual DD regime the most difficult--but also the most diverting--part was negotiating the boundary between when I was asking for a spanking and when Charles decided that I "needed" one. I put "needed" in inverted commas because the whole strange thing rested upon the underlying idea that of course I was an autonomous individual woman--indeed more of an autonomous individual than a great many other people, but that to make me feel completely fulfilled--or at least, shall we say?, asymptotically fulfilled, I needed (or, rather, wanted) to be guided towards the light of my best self.

You can call it voluntary infantilization, if you like; I'm not sure that's particularly far off. The real point is that it had a dimension that went just far enough outside the erotic that it made the erotic feel like it had more traction--like it had the traction it really deserved given how Charles and I felt about our particular way of sex. Always waiting in the corner of our days, whether while I was making dinner, wondering whether I could earn a spanking for putting in too much salt, or not enough, or while we were jogging, knowing that Charles liked me to finish hard, and liked to spank me if I didn't.

It was play, and it was serious, and it made things more fun, and more erotic. Eventually, we found a sort of equilibrium, according to which there were certain well-defined areas where DD applied. Exercise was one area where I was very grateful for the help of Charles' firm hand, and the physicality of the exercise activities themselves went very well with the erotic parts of the discipline. Then there was the range of traditionally feminine activities, like cooking. Cleaning was the big exception. To be spanked because Charles had found dust on the bookshelf would have felt to me too much like a vacuum-cleaner commercial from the 1950's. Laundry, on the other hand which I had elected to do, but which I often forgot to get going, was fertile ground, and I actually welcomed the reminder. Also, there was our social life--for example messing up our schedule, which I'm unfortunately prone to do, earned me a trip over the spanking stool.

Through it all, the womanliness dynamic was our guide. Did it make me feel womanly to have Charles in control of that part of my life, or did it make me feel icky and subjugated? I realize of course that many feminist thinkers wouldn't distinguish the two: that lovely, problematic feeling of erotic femininity clearly has something submissive in it; is it wrong to distinguish submission from subjugation this way? I don't think so, because submission is voluntary, and subjective, while subjugation need not be voluntary, and is objective.

The question then becomes whether erotic femininity is something that can be experienced involuntarily--which is ridiculous. It makes you feel silly when you look too closely at it, I suppose, but non-consensuality is only hot when it's consensual. We authors elide this bit most of the time, of course, even when we're writing DD scenes, which is why DD fiction will garner reviews that call DD abuse.

Beyond that point lies the thorny question of whether when I ask to be beaten I'm really not exercising free will at all, but am instead so overdetermined by patriarchal culture that I need to be taken care of by a feminist and perhaps reconditioned to be a better custodian of my soul. This is all old ground in the feminism wars, to be sure, but it was ground that I needed to cover in new detail, now that I had requested that I be disciplined for, say, double-booking dinner on a Saturday night.

But once I put those ethical dilemmas behind me, it was a pure pleasure to re-engage with my erotic life this way. There had always to that point been a sort of layer of irony between me and my submission. For as many times as I had said "This is who I am: a girl who wants to get fucked in the ass by a man she can call 'Master'," there had nevertheless been a feeling that it was not natural that I should be so. But now I gave into the idea of complementarity, without letting it change me ethically: as a woman, as a member of the sex whose most important genital organ receives, rather than gives, whose body curves, softly, and yields enticingly, I should (I let the thought creep in, so as to make me warm and wet in my receptive chora, my feminine charms) be spanked, thrust into, made submissive.

Let me give an example. It was 5pm on Wednesday, one of my usual laundry days, and a day on which I work from home. Charles arrived home from school to find to his understandable annoyance that I hadn't started the laundry. He came to my office (which is really just an alcove off the kitchen--that's how I like it) where I was finishing up a call. He was carrying our laundry hamper. He put it on the floor and waited for me to turn around, which I did at the sound of the soft thud. Needless to say, I recognized the look in his eyes. He made his "wind it up" gesture.

I did wind it up--but here's where it gets interesting: I didn't wind it up because he told me to. I wound it up because I knew the laundry needed to be done, and because if I didn't get it going then, it would have made a million things more difficult than they had to be. I wound up my call at his command, but not because of it. Rather, I wound it up because of the need for good order in our house.

I frankly don't know whether this way of thinking applies to anyone else's DD relationship, but if that call had been of truly great importance, I would have held up my hand at the wind-up gesture, not in anger or, still less, in defiance, but with the understanding that Charles would gather that the call was very important, and we would talk about the laundry later ("talking" would also of course, we both knew, include me being spanked for having waited to start it).

In the event, though, the call was not important, and I would it up quickly with an "I have to go; I'll call you tomorrow," and stood up to meet my fate.

"I'm sorry, Sir," I said.

"Over the hamper," Charles said. "Jeans down."

I grimaced, and complied (it's one of those tall wicker hampers). Charles put his left hand on my waist, and with his right gave me twelve hard spanks, over my cotton panties, four on each cheek and four in the middle.

"I think it will have to be my belt next time. This is getting out of hand," he said. (I had forgotten the previous week, too.) "Now get going."

I had not intentionally delayed doing the laundry in order to earn a spanking; I have much more reliable (and hot) ways to do that. My fate, such as it was, was purely a matter of domestic discipline, but the way DD works, for us, is to take something (like laundry) that would be at best a minor annoyance in a couple's life, and at worst a serious point of friction between them, and make it an occasion for play--more, for our very favorite kind of play.

If we both didn't have spanking things, it would be a complete non-starter, of course. But because we both do, and we're both generally kinky, it works both to take tension out of things like delayed laundry and to make our daily lives a lot more erotic than they might be otherwise.

Need I add that Charles telling me "Now get going" got me even wetter than the spanking had?

That's where the infantilization part comes in, and I'm not going to apologize for it, because to apologize for it would be to apologize for my entire sex-drive, which has produced, among other things (such as wonderful times with my husband and hilariously embarrassing moments with my butt-plug), three awesome kids. I like to feel like a little girl. There, I said it. I like to be told to get going, to do the laundry, or to cook dinner.

Would I like it if Charles were a different sort of a person? If he were someone who really thought that women should do his laundry and cook for him because he has a penis and they don't? I hope I never have the chance truly to find out, because that version of Charles might well wake up missing that penis, and then I'd probably go to jail.

(If you like these stories, try the Companion to EXPLORATIONS!)

(Caroline's Rocking Horse [Mf, ageplay, anal] and The Count's Discipline [medieval, spanking, anal] are available at Amazon!)