From a very old conversation of bottom’s profound satisfaction in the experience of being punished.
For me, as a male submissive, obedience and punishment are one of the main things they make play satisfying.
For me, in order to be satisfying obedience has to involve doing things that I dislike at least a little bit or find difficult. If I’m simply being asked to do things that I have no problem with, then I have no sense of the dominant having power over me.
It’s not hard for a dominant to learn to dance to this rhythm. If she asks me to wash the dishes, then I will certainly do it, but for me this is a case of safeword “beige,” because I really don’t mind washing dishes. If she wants to make it a little more exciting (not that everything in a scene has to be exciting), then she can say, “Wash the dishes and when you’re done, come and kiss my feet.” No big deal, but it gives me a little bit of satisfaction.
For me, for obedience play to be satisfying, there must be punishment, or at the least a very credible threat of punishment.
I believe that punishment needs to be in some way satisfying for both partners.
For me, for one thing, this means that it has to be real, not pretend. It has to be something that I really do dislike and will make an effort to avoid. The ideal is for punishment to be something I’m afraid of. In any case, the most important thing is that it needs to be effective. If my attitude is something like, “Oh, I know I’ll get whipped for doing this, but I don’t mind,” then the integrity of the play is lost and there’s no satisfaction in it for me.
It’s very exciting to me to show up at a femdomme’s place and know that I am going to be required to do something that will be very difficult for me and that some specific very dreadful thing may be done to me if I don’t manage to do it satisfactorily.
Even a “smart-assed sadist” scene, where the dominant has puposely set things up so that I will inevitably screw up no matter how hard I try, will to some extent fall flat unless the punishment is to some extent genuinely unpleasant. That’s what makes it fun, after all, the dominant knowing that she gets to do things to the submissive which he really doesn’t like. That’s what gives her the satisfaction of being more than merely the life-support system for a whip. And it’s also what gives me satisfaction.
Something like whipping or caning can actually be okay for punishment, but if so it needs to really hurt. As I said before, it should be an *outrage*, so that my inner thought is something like, “Goddamn it! You really hurt me!” It doesn’t need to be really heavy duty though or draw blood.
One of the things about DS that is most exciting for me, in fact, is a woman who is very good at figuring out the things that I hate and then doing them to me.
And yes, for me, punishment should sometimes be exciting. Exciting and also unpleasant and effective. I don’t find these at all contradictory.
Corner time won’t do it for me, because for me that’s just boring and it’s not something I will make a big effort to avoid. Holding a dime pressed against the wall with my nose makes it a little more satisfying, because there’s an element of humiliation in that. Humiliation is, for me, a very good thing to include in punishment. Ideally, to be punished is to be shamed. There is a shame in the fact that I have been bad or forgetful or whatever and am being punished for it.
Writing lines is something I don’t think I’ve ever actually done. It might work, depending on the content (it should be something stupid and humiliating) and the attitude of the dominant. If she just takes a quick look at it, then I think this would not really be good, because it would be too easily for me to think, “Okay, so I have to write ‘I will be a good slave’ a hundred times. Boring, but I can do that easily enough.” But if she examines it closely and punishes me for all the places where I left out a word or misspelled it or my writing was illegible, then that might work.
When I played for a while with a woman who really liked water sports, I eventually learned to be willing to drink piss. But I still find it quite distasteful, and for me there’s something very oppressive about having a water bottle filled with piss sitting nearby and knowing that any time I screw up a little I’m going to have to drink a swallow of it.
Oppressive is good. That’s the feeling of compulsion that really makes a scene work for me. The feeling that I have no choice but to do what I’m required to and to do it perfectly.
Licking a woman’s boots is no big deal, as far as I’m concerned. Not difficult and not exciting. But I was once playing with a femdomme when there was a male top present, and after ordering me to kiss her shoe, which I had no problem with, she ordered me to kiss his boots. (This was a woman who really knew what all my buttons were!) And I was very very happy when he objected because he had just very thoroughly shined the boots, so she had me do something else instead. So I think that requiring me to give a male’s boots a thorough going-over with my tongue would be a punishment that I would do everything possible to avoid.
One can make the punishment fit the crime. If a sub forgets to put the toilet seat down, for instance, then have him hold his head over the bowl and shove it in, holding it down in there for maybe half a minute. He’s not likely to forget again. (Obviously this is not a good thing to do if you use one of those cleaners that colors the water blue.)
For me, anyway, a really good scolding can be a very effective punishment, if done well. The sort of scolding that belittles the person. A thorough “dressing down.” The sort of scolding that an army drill sargeant would give, although it doesn’t need to be done in a loud tone of voice.
Obviously TammyJo and I are attracted by very different kinds of play. Now let me comment more specifically on a few things where from my perspective she has missed the point.
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A dominant can inflict on me even the most drastic sort of punishment just because she wants to, and it’s very exciting to me to know that she can do such a dreadful thing to me merely for her amusement. Of I might even pay her to do that, because I want to know what the experience is like. But that’s different from punishment.
The prodomme who ordered me to brush my teeth with soap didn’t do it as a punishment. She had told me that she had often had fantasies about washing a slave’s mouth out with soap, but had never felt that it would be okay to do. And I told her that I would be okay with her doing that to me. So the next time I saw her, she did, and I was glad to have the chance to find out what it was like, but it was quite dreadful and experiencing it once was quite enough.
If I’d gone on seeing her, and if she started doing that frequently, I would not have liked it. I would have dreaded it. Every time I went to see her, I would have been thinking, “Oh, God, I hope she’s not going to put soap in my mouth again,” because, as I’ve mentioned, it takes about half a day to get rid of that damned soap taste. But it would have also been exciting to know that she had the power to do something to me which I hated that much. But in order for something like this to work, I have to know that the dominant is really getting off on doing it. If I start getting the feeling that for her it’s routine, just a part of her shtick, then I start thinking, “Why should I let someone do something like this to me?”
But that’s different from punishment. The excitement, for me, in punishment lies in being punished, not in the physical sensation or psychological distastefulness. It’s the excitement of knowing that I have no choice but to obey.
If this same dominant had ever punished me for speaking out of turn by soaping my mouth, that would have been 100% effective. From that time forward, I would never have spoken a word during one of our scenes unless given permission, now matter how much I wanted to say something. And knowing that I was so completely controlled in this way would have been very satisfying to me.
But if I did, some time in the future, speak even one word out of turn and she had let that pass, then some of the energy would have been lost from our relationship.
I was once in a relationship with a woman where we did a certain amount of DS. She whipped me from time to time, very painfully but not nearly often enough (less than once a month), and sometimes I complained about the fact that she didn’t whip me more often.
One evening she gave me a thorough whipping, and afterwards asked, “Do you know why I whipped you tonight?” I had no idea, and she said, “The other day you were sitting in your chair reading a magazine and I was talking to you and you just kept reading your magazine. I don’t like that. When I’m talking to you I want your one hundred per cent attention.”
Now even though this punishment was no different from many other times I had been whipped, and even though I actually would have preferred her to whip me more often, it was still totally effective. From that time on, any time I was reading and she started talking to me, I put the magazine face down on the floor.
Now to tell the truth, to a large extent I was creating my own private fantasy situation here. I didn’t need to actually put the magazine down, I knew her well enough to know that she would have been completely satisfied if I’d simply looked up from it and maintained eye contact with her. (But I also know she did enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that I was so afraid of punishment that I was actually doing more than she would have required.) And in fact, if I’d chosen to ignore the punishment and not changed my behavior at all, I’m sure that she would have just essentially shrugged her shoulders. For her, I believe, the real satisfaction was in being able to punish me that one time, when she was in the mood. The fact that she actually changed my behavior was for her, I believe, a bonus.
But she got more than she would have really insisted on, because what we were doing was satisfying to both of us. I was able to make myself believe in what I actually knew was only a fantasy, namely that anytime I didn’t immediately lay the magazine down on the floor I would be whipped. And that gave both of us what we wanted.
Rest of discussion with comments by many.
Originally posted 2012-10-12 07:12:14.
Submissive Men Who Crave Punishment
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