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Inspired by the wonderful podcast Sips and Smacks, Episode 108, this started back in April as a post on accountability, discipline, and punishment. However, as I tried to write it, I realized I need to write a context piece giving my take on consent and limits first. The specifics are, in places, blurry and that’s intentional. I’m not writing about any one event but rather some recent and not-so-recent experiences that inform my notions of consent, how it’s given, and what it means.
It probably goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: this post is written solely from my perspective and experiences. It’s my narrative, my truth. That’s significant because in any narrative about any relationship, each person involved experiences things from their own perspective and within their own specific context. This shapes their narrative, that is, their experience of reality. Without getting too “narrative theory-ish,” these differences shape each person’s “truth,” meaning that there’s rarely a single version of any experience involving more than one person.
This post, as has always been the case with any post I make about our relationship and/or play, was read by and discussed with Paul before I posted it. In this case, I explicitly asked him to check it over for anything that was untrue, though he has his own perspectives based on his own experiences and misunderstandings, so before I posted it we could agree we’re operating from the same set of facts.
All of the following are based on how things have been between us for the past 25+ years — how they will be is something we’re still figuring out, literally day-by-day, a process that’s painful and wonderful. I’m writing this, in part, to try and tease out all this so I can understand where we are and imagine where we might go. Since neither of us have figured out or agreed how things will be going forward, I’m keeping this in the present.
Paul and I have been partnered in some form or other 1 (1997) online only, long distance, (1998-2002) long distance, with in-person visits, (2002ish-2004) living together , (2004-present) married. basically since I delurked on the newsgroup.2I delurked in February 1997. Paul wrote the first “Pablo and Mija” story in March — he posted the first two in April 1997. Before that I’d never been spanked as an adult by *anyone.* Paul and I did a long-distance call in August 1997 that was a directed self-spanking as a serious punishment for a troubling real life issue between the two of us. That punishment, done via landline telephones using phone cards (yes, we are that old) in my dorm room was the first (adult) spanking either of us gave or received. Yet, even before this, we’d each playfully punished and disciplined the other with uniforms, essays, and lines. Those elements came naturally to the relationship –almost from our first exchanges.
Reading over Paul’s account of it, written for me and afterwards posted to the newsgroup, the early shades of the myriad ways accountability, and consensual non-consent to discipline and punishment are part of “our scene” are visible in that first punishment. Because of this, my limits and boundaries with Paul have framed my participation in the larger spanking scene. Negotiations and limits with other people exist, and have always existed, but those limits have always been created and lived within those I have with Paul, informing whatever I’ve considered doing with other people. There are, and always have been, a lot of things I do with Paul that I don’t do with anyone else and vice versa.
- 1(1997) online only, long distance, (1998-2002) long distance, with in-person visits, (2002ish-2004) living together , (2004-present) married.
- 2I delurked in February 1997. Paul wrote the first “Pablo and Mija” story in March — he posted the first two in April 1997.