JC Cole · Follow
12 min read · Sep 11, 2022
So, what exactly is a “Disciplinary Wife”? Read on.
I’ve been married to the same woman for almost 30 years.
For the first decade or so, the best description for our marriage might have been “conventional.” Another apropos word would be “vanilla.”
Professional careers. Young kids. Dogs. House in the suburbs. Like I said, conventional.
We’d met when she was still in college and I was a couple of years out.
Temperamentally, I was a “Type A.” Bold. Brash. Frankly, probably a little too brash for my own good. Or hers.
Opposites attract and, indeed, in important ways my wife is my opposite. Where I was intense and bombastic, she was more centered. Calm. Maybe a little too much so.
Despite her many accomplishments, she had a hard time taking charge or even just asserting herself. Her calm and unchallenging demeanor could come off as passivity.
When we first met, she found the brashness attractive. Women like “bad boys,” right? However, as many come to find, marrying one is a lot different than dating one.
Ten years into the marriage, my intensity, lack of discipline, and, frankly, some lingering immaturity, were almost certainly wearing a little thin.
Growing up without boundaries sounds fun, right? It’s not.
Like every couple, we had our share of fights, particularly in the early years. She fought in the way she’d seen modeled at home. Lots of flouncing and leaving the house, followed by days or even weeks of the silent treatment until someone gave in.
I recognized that my behavior was at the root of a lot of our marital imbalance, yet I seemed unable to do much about it on my own. And, it wasn’t like I enjoyed being the way I was.
In addition to having a naturally intense personality (a superior once described me as “earnest”), I was in a challenging segment of an intense profession, taking on more and more responsibilities, some of which I wasn’t really ready to handle.
I grew up largely without boundaries. My father was a natural-born rebel who never paid a lick of attention to any authority of any kind. My mother probably didn’t share his philosophy, but she had her own issues. By the time I was in junior high, she’d given up on imposing anything like real discipline, while my dad said straight out that he wasn’t going to set rules unless and until I did something that proved he needed to.
Growing up without boundaries or rules seems like a teenager’s wet dream, but it’s not that way when you’re actually living it. There are lots of opportunities to get into trouble and, when you inevitably do, it’s all on you to get yourself out of it.
I often felt overwhelmed and in way over my head. Yet, I usually did get myself out of it and, thus, it seemingly never occurred to my parents to rein me in. It definitely never occurred to me to ask them to.
Growing up without rules or boundaries left me feeling out of control as a kid, and as I approached my mid-30s, I found myself still feeling out of control. Outwardly, I was becoming a big success in my profession, but inside I felt overwhelmed a lot of the time. Imposter’s syndrome on steroids.
My wife, on the other hand, was not developing into all she could be. My intensity kind of sucked up all the oxygen in the relationship. I don’t think she was unhappy exactly. She liked being a mother. She liked her career. But, she never really had a sense of her own power and the “flounce out and go silent” approach she learned from her parents meant that when she was mad at me, it never occurred to her that she might be able to get for real aggressive instead of passive-aggressively so.
We discover a bit of spanking kink. But, there’s a problem . . .
Then, sort of out of the blue, things changed. It initially happened with such little fanfare I wasn’t even aware things were changing. Turns out, I went down a fork in the road but didn’t see it at the time.
Corporal punishment was very prevalent where I grew up, but I don’t recall having thought about spankings even once as an adult.
I know I hadn’t thought about adults actually being spanked, and certainly not being spanked “for real.” It never occurred to me there was such a thing.
At that time, there was a series on HBO called “Real Sex.” One night, I saw a segment devoted to adult erotic spanking, featuring a couple spanking each other with leather paddles and a riding crop.
Unexpectedly, it turned me on. Not in a major way, but it definitely stirred something in me. I showed it to my wife and, while she had zero interest in being spanked herself, I bought a small, flimsy, leather paddle at an adult store and she was happy to try it on me.
Although it was fun, it never went beyond foreplay, and the spankings weren’t “real” in any sense. It was play-acting scenes in which she would fake “punish” me for real misdeeds. After a few modest swats with the flimsy leather paddle, we would have sex.
The problem was that while the spankings were fake, the bad behavior was real.
Since it was all foreplay and ended in a nice org*sm, I was in essence being rewarded for bad behavior.
My wife quickly caught on that she might be reinforcing behavior that actually made her quite angry. Therefore, she put an end to the whole thing.
The Disciplinary Wives Club
It didn’t really bother me that my wife was not interested in making spanking an ongoing part of our sex life. It had been a fun experiment but hadn’t been that big a thing for either of us. I was still interested in spanking enough that I’d sometimes read spanking stories on the internet, but it really wasn’t “a thing.”
Then, I stumbled on a website called the Disciplinary Wives Club.
It’s been so many years ago, I don’t recall exactly what led me to it. I probably had searched for something like “wives spanking husbands” looking for spanking stories and, voila, there it was.
What I do remember is the effect it had on me. It hit me like a freaking sledgehammer. It was like no erotic online experience I’d had before or since.
What was so different about the DWC? Well, even though it was all about spanking it wasn’t p*rn. There were some photos and drawings on the website, but most of it was text. It wasn’t even overtly sexual, at least not in a p*rnographic sense.
Oh, it had lots and lots about spankings. But, they were not facially erotic. Instead, these were real spankings, intended as real punishment, to really correct misbehavior.
There were lots of stories, both fictional and from “real couples” illustrating the disciplinary lifestyle, all of them involving wives spanking their husbands in order to discipline or punish them for bad behavior or rule-breaking.
Some of those stories got to me. I mean, got to me at a very deep, emotional level.
As did some of the material in the founder, Aunt Kay’s, “Tips & Methods” section. This excerpt, in particular, stirred something deep within me:
A spanking should be an event to remember. Don’t worry about how red his bottom gets. The more color you put into it, the better you are doing. Don’t pay any attention to his cries and pleas and promises. He will tell you anything to get you to stop. . . . If you give a spanking the way it should be given, the results should still show a week later. He should wince every time he tries to sit for days after. . . .
If you feel the least bit sorry for him during all this, remember, a submissive man does not want a weak or lenient woman. He wants someone very strict and dominant. If he wanted anything different, he wouldn’t be over your knees in the first place. This isn’t a small child you are holding over your lap by force — this is a grown man who needs and wants a hard spanking. Give it to him and pay no attention to his cries for mercy. The longer and harder you spank, the more he will love you for it.
“But, I’m not a submissive!”
That part about “submissive man” did give me pause. I don’t think of myself as submissive. In fact, nobody who knows me thinks of me as submissive. Quite the opposite.
Yet, here I was morbidly fascinated by a website that was all about wives taking control and enforcing that control in a very strict, very painful way.
Looking back, it was the prospect of losing control, not the spanking per se, that really got to me. If you’ve been the one in control most of your life, giving that up is terrifying, yet for some of us also magnetically attractive.
I spent a couple of hours consuming every story on the website. It was fascinating, albeit morbidly so.
I felt queasy, my stomach filled with butterflies. Especially after reading that description of what a “real” spanking should be like. It was really, truly terrifying.
Yet, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I tried, but I couldn’t. It kept me awake that night. It was on my mind all the next day.
It’s really hard to explain the emotions at play. On the one hand, there definitely was something very sexual about it. On the other hand, even if the spankings weren’t explicitly sexual, the erection I was sporting the whole time I was reading the website and for the better part of the following two days demonstrated that I sure found something about it sexual in the extreme.
Yet, the undeniable sexual turn-on merged with a very real and distinct sense of fear. It wasn’t so much about a hard spanking, though I knew one wouldn’t be pleasant. Rather, it was the utter lack of control. The stories depicted men spanked until they dropped all their defenses and finally just bawled. I can’t describe how threatening, yet attractive, I found that prospect.
That First Conversation
I could not imagine raising the prospect with my wife, but after days of thinking of nothing else, I could not imagine not raising it. The lure was just too strong, though it made my male ego tremble.
Finally, I initiated a discussion while we were in bed. The lights were off, which was good because I was so embarrassed I don’t think I could have faced her with lights on.
I began with something like, “I found this funny website . . ..” and explained the basic premise: women taking control of their men. Using hard spankings.
Before she could object that she wasn’t interested in any more play-acting that might reinforce my bad behavior, I stammered that this was different. These spankings were . . . real. I haltingly gave her the gist, so glad that she couldn’t see my face. I’m sure it was deep crimson red.
She let me get through it, not saying much of anything. When I was done, she paused for several moments, then asked whether I was suggesting this as something I actually wanted to try.
I almost lost my nerve, but finally told her the truth — the idea scared the hell out of me. It had left me with butterflies in my stomach and little sleep for three days. But, yes, I thought I did want to try it.
Then, it all came spilling out. How I felt our marriage was unbalanced. How unbalanced I felt inside. How I needed someone to rein me in when I acted up.
I told her I thought it might empower her. I told her I didn’t like her feeling like she was playing second fiddle in our relationship. How I wanted so much more for her than that. How I wanted her to display the strong and decisive woman that I knew was in there even if she didn’t always feel comfortable letting her out.
She listened intently but noncommittally, saying only that if I sent her a link to the DWC website, she’d try to take a look at it. Frankly, I thought the most likely outcome was she wouldn’t look at it at all. Or, she would look but think it was weird.
And, if she thought it was weird, wouldn’t she inevitably think I was weird?
“Get me a brush.”
That’s the mindset I was in when her name popped up on my telephone’s caller-ID at work. After a few pleasantries, there was a pause, and she stated:
“Well . . . I visited that website.”
“And, . . .?” I asked, tentatively.
“And . . . very interesting.”
“So . . . what does that mean . . . interesting?” I asked, my voice a choked almost-whisper.
“Well, I guess it means you need to get me a brush. You are to leave work early, go find me a nice, heavy wooden hairbrush. Bring it home with you tonight, and we’ll talk over dinner about how this relationship is going to work.”
While my nerves were a wreck, she seemed utterly calm. Decisive even.
The rest, as they say, is history. I won’t go into the rest of the details in this article, other than to note that finding a sturdy, wooden hairbrush was harder than I anticipated. I finally found something semi-serviceable, after walking around a mall for an hour.
It was a very embarrassing hour, because I was still sporting that massive hard-on, and I was sure that every salesperson in every store I looked in could read my mind and knew exactly why I wanted to know where they kept their hair brushes.
The Rules and That First Disciplinary Spanking
That night, over dinner, we sat down and discussed a set of rules. First and foremost, she would control when and how hard I was spanked, period. Second, every spanking would be serious. She still was concerned that “play” spankings could reinforce bad behavior, so our spankings had to be “real” each and every time.
We also came up with a list of “spankable” offenses, though the underlying rule was and remains that she can spank anytime she thinks I deserve it.
It’s odd that while I recall virtually everything leading up to that first spanking, I don’t recall a lot about the main event. I know that she asked whether we should wait for some bit of new bad behavior, but I told her I wanted to get it over with, and surely there was plenty of bad history justifying a current spanking.
It definitely didn’t leave me sore for days as the DWC’s Aunt Kay had advised, largely because the hair brush wasn’t really built for it. And, we were both getting a feel for what a “real” spanking would entail. We graduated pretty quickly from my not-so-serious shopping mall hair brush to wooden paddles and a leather strap.
From Novice to Disciplinary Wife
Although there was a learning curve, my wife graduated surprisingly quickly from novice to very serious spanker. I think what surprised me the most was just how quickly she took to Aunt Kay’s advice about erring on the side of severity. Maybe it was all those years of frustration with my behavior?
Over the years and after getting acquainted (mainly online) with others in this lifestyle, I’ve heard variations on this story many times. We husbands are so concerned about how to broach the topic of Domestic Discipline but once we do, the wives take up the paddle or strap with surprisingly little diffidence and are soon spanking like pros.
Over the years we have been doing Domestic Discipline, my wife has grown into a much stronger, confident woman with a voice all her own, and the relationship has gone beyond merely discipline.
Instead of just enforcing rules we mutually agreed to, she now tells me how she wants it to be.
She sets boundaries for me and expects me to respect them.
We’re living the DWC admonition: “The longer and harder you spank, the more he will love you for it.”
I hope to hear from some of you with positive reactions to this story and those to come. I’m not under any illusion that there is some large “market” for this lifestyle. I have no way of knowing how many actually practice it, but I suspect it is a very small niche.
Yet, I kind of like it that way. As Aunt Kay once said to me an email about the days when her Disciplinary Wives Club was an actual live thing, “It was like a naughty little secret we all shared.”
Let’s hear it for naughty little secrets.
Note: “Aunt Kay” died in 2018. I’ve stayed in touch with her co-founder and husband. He has been interested in preserving her legacy in this kinky little community she largely founded. I asked for, and received, his permission to try extending it into a new medium, namely this Medium.
If you would like to discuss these issues directly but don’t feel comfortable leaving a public comment, feel free to reach out to me directly at dwc_husband@proton.me. You can also use Medium to leave me a private note. Just highlight part of the article, which brings up the box with bold, italics, etc. Click on the box that shows a comment/quote bubble with a little lock inside. It allows you to send a private note that will be visible to me but not to the public.