Preventative, Maintenance and Other “Unearned” Spankings (2024)

Are they “fair” in a Female-Led Relationship using spanking for discipline and accountability?

A couple of days ago, my wife asserted that I was owed a spanking for some bad behavior from a week or so ago. I retorted that she had “waived” the issue by not dealing with it closer to the time of the offense. (We have no such “waiver” rule, but it was worth a try.)

My wife, being quick on her feet, retorted: “Well, we have a couple of social events coming up. So, we can just treat it as a preventative spanking.”

“Preventative” spankings are among a variety of rationales or systems that don’t include a 1:1 relationship between a particular offense and a particular punishment. For that reason, I used to think they weren’t really “disciplinary” and might not have a legitimate place in a Female Led Relationship (FLR) that uses spanking for discipline and accountability.

Preventative Spankings

I’ve seen preventative spankings also referred to as “precautionary,” “preemptive,” or “prophylactic.” Regardless of the terminology, the basic idea is they are spankings that are delivered before bad behavior has taken place, in an attempt to head it off in advance.

An example would be, perhaps there have been repeated instances of getting into arguments with Drunk Uncle at family gatherings. In order to prevent it from happening this year, the wife decides to give her husband several swats with the paddle before they leave for the event, leaving him sitting on a warm and tender bottom and causing him to think about whether, in the name of holiday harmony, Drunk Uncle’s political assertions really require a response.

As stated, I used to be a skeptic about whether preventative spankings had a legitimate role in F/m domestic discipline relationships, because they didn’t seem to be about being disciplined or held accountable for something you actually did. That seemed more than a little unfair, since involved punishing for something that hadn’t actually happened and might not.

Gradually, I’ve come around to the concept.

There are at least two answers to the “fairness” question.

First, the wives who use preventative spankings do seem to be dealing with situations in which there has been a well-established track record of misbehavior in the past. It might be drinking too much at a party. It might be something like the Drunk Uncle at the holiday dinner example. It might be making overbearing comments on certain topics in certain social situations, leaving others feeling uncomfortable or intimidated.

Whatever the particulars, in such cases wives may be well-justified in predicting that, since bad behavior happened in that situation in the past, it likely will do so again.

When I’ve discussed this with disciplined husbands who received preventative spankings, they concede that their wives’ predictive power is pretty good. Therefore, while the spanking may be coming a bit early, based on his track record it was likely to be fully earned anyway.

Second, and closely related, the alleged unfairness of preventative spankings seems to be at least somewhat mitigated if they are seen as a precursor to the much worse spanking that will be avoided if the preventative spanking actually works.

So, it’s not strictly true that a preventative is “unearned.” Rather, it has been earned over, and over, and over again. She’s just trying to keep him from earning another, much worse one.

Do preventative spankings work? Although my own wife hasn’t used them often, when she has, they have made a difference.

For example, we were invited to a graduation party with a group of friends who have a track record of boozing to excess, and my own track record was joining in with gusto. I vividly recall sitting there, on a freshly warmed and still stinging butt, very aware of each drink I took and of what came out of my mouth, to an extent that probably would not have been the case without that little pre-party “reminder.” As a result, I kept myself under control despite the excesses going on around me.

As for why they work, it isn’t complicated. As one commenter on a blog I’m associated with explained:

“It’s been remarked how well-behaved most guys are after a spanking. There is a reason for that beyond the mental and psychological effects of being punished, namely the condition of your bottom. How long that lasts probably depends on how severely you were spanked. For me, it seems to be around three days to one week.

“The same thing applies to preventative spankings. It’s much easier for me not to lose my temper, not have that extra glass of wine, or refrain from telling Uncle Carl that he should read a newspaper once in a while, if I have been recently spanked. What stops me is not the abstract thought that she might spank me, but the all too vivid physical memory that she already has.”

Maintenance Spankings

I don’t know whether there is an accepted definition, but I think of maintenance spankings as “reminders” or “just because . . .” spankings that happen on some regular or frequent schedule.

While they don’t necessarily have to happen at pre-set intervals, my impression is that most couples who use them do so on a pre-scheduled basis, like once a week, once a month, on a particular day of the week, etc.

As with preventative spankings, for a long time after discovering FLR-oriented domestic discipline spankings, I was skeptical about maintenance spankings. My primary issue was the same as my concern about preventive spankings, i.e. was it really discipline if it didn’t involve punishing a particular action or failure? Moreover, since they happened at regular intervals, I always wondered whether they were just an excuse for someone with a spanking fetish to get spanked more often.

My wife doesn’t feel the need to do them, though I no longer have my reservations about them. I’m also not as sure as I once was that “preventative” and “maintenance” are distinct categories.

A disciplinary wife commenting on the blog I’m associated with had a husband who had a big problem with behaving arrogantly at home and at work. She described her approach like this:

“We do weekly spankings, whether or not there have been any transgressions, but we don’t call them “maintenance.” We consider them “motivational.” He gets paddled every Monday morning to remind him to keep his arrogance to a minimum. I do believe in domestic discipline that is proactive instead of just reactive. I also like restricting it to one day a week so it is not a dominating thing in our lives.”

She also had an issue with the frequency needed to address deeply rooted, ongoing habits. Her husband’s issue with arrogance was a daily problem — addressing it every time it happened would entail spanking him nearly every day, and she didn’t want it to dominate their lives like that. Thus, her habit of spanking him every Monday. Spanking him once a week was both a kind of “catch up” covering all the instances of arrogance during the week (including arrogance at work, which she wouldn’t necessarily learn about) and also a reminder for him to behave over the following week.

In that sense, maintenance seems to perhaps be kind of a sub-category, or variation, of preventative. It may address accumulated bad behavior that has gone unpunished, while also serving as a reminder to behave in the future.

Here is how her husband summarized his experience with it:

“My wife paddles me every Monday morning, as a reminder to curb my arrogance. She spanks hard enough that sitting is uncomfortable for 2–3 days and I can even feel it as I walk. That discomfort serves as a constant reminder to be humble and keep my mouth shut when I otherwise want to make sarcastic comments. As the discomfort fades, so does my humility. All of my recent incidents of arrogance have come toward the end of the week.”

This couple’s comments blend the concepts of prevention, maintenance, and punishment. The wife’s references to “proactive” and “reactive” were echoed by another disciplinary wife, who liked the term “management” as opposed to “maintenance”:

“If spanking is viewed purely as punishment, preventative spanking doesn’t make sense. But I view it as “behavior management,” rather than just punishment. I have used it in a specific context with my husband in the past. The men in my husband’s extended family have epic political arguments during family dinners. I have always found that annoying, especially when my husband gets involved, which he often does…or rather used to. Therefore, I have, on a couple of occasions, spanked him before going to a family dinner to heighten his consciousness of the behavior I expect of him. I also couple the preventative spanking with the implied threat that, if I have to intervene in an argument during dinner, I just might “forget myself” and remind him at the dinner table of the consequences of misbehavior. I have found that it works. That’s the important thing to me.”

“Role affirmation” and the transition from mere discipline to a Female Led Relationship

While preventative and maintenance spankings obviously overlap a lot when it comes to managing behavior, there is another sense in which maintenance has a role that is totally distinct from preventative spankings, namely “role affirmation.”

Power exchange relationships like domestic discipline and FLRs usually don’t become robust overnight. Making them real may require undoing a lot of deeply-entrenched hierarchies.

If a woman was raised in a patriarchal environment, or if her marriage was once itself an example of such an environment, she may need to periodically remind herself that she now has a new level of authority.

In that sense, preventative and maintenance spankings may be tools for transitioning the relationship from a fairly limited kind of dominance, focused primarily on discrete instances of disciplinary accountability, to a deeper, more pervasive power transition. It’s the transition from simple domestic discipline to a real Female Led Relationship, in which she takes on a more proactive role in managing conduct instead of just punishing it and, indeed, managing more of the marriage as a whole.

One of the disciplinary wives quoted above summed up all these various roles for maintenance and preventative spankings nicely in this single quote:

“I’m not sure if there has been a Monday morning when there was NOTHING to punish him for. So, we start with that. Then we move on to the upcoming week, though there really is no noticeable transition. On many Mondays nowadays there are more swats about the upcoming week than there were for the past week. To me, that is a sign that the discipline is working because he had a good week last week. But he admits that he needs a paddling to remind him to keep it up. If he completely stopped being arrogant, maybe the reminders would stop. But that’s all speculative, since his arrogance is unlikely to go away completely. I think the routine we have established of paddling him every Monday has been good for him. He knows what to expect. And it is good for me too, to remind myself of the authority I now hold in our marriage. I don’t have to and won’t accept his arrogance anymore. Maybe we both need weekly reminders of that!”