Christian Domestic Discipline In The Daily Beast
I’m never happy to see popular press articles about consenting spankings between adults, because most of these reporters seem congenitally unable to understand that what consenting adults agree to do cannot be “domestic abuse”. The big Daily Beast story on Christian Domestic Discipline is no exception, but (aside from reporting an ignorant “it’s sick and abusive” opinion from someone who runs a shelter for abused women but isn’t reported to have ever encountered a spanked woman there) the story is fairly balanced. It even gets to the skepticism that I myself have always harbored about the Christian flavor of domestic discipline; I’ve always felt that DD couples who deny a sexual element to the practice are being less than completely truthful, perhaps even with themselves:
What seems to be the most obvious explanation for CDD, one acknowledged by some domestic discipline advocates not tied to the Christian church, is that the practice is a means to justify the fulfillment of a sexual fetish. On a CDD blog, “Sue” writes, “Boy do I wish more of the women in DD would admit to this. It’s a sexual fetish. There’s nothing wrong with it, but they try to make it so much more than it is.”
But the moral constraints of the church make it difficult for couples to be honest about the sexual nature of their desire, says Paul Byerly, who with his wife runs The Marriage Bed, a site dedicated to sexuality and religion. Byerly, who calls CDD a “distortion of what God intended,” believes that “women, particularly in the Christian church tend to be sexually repressed.” Domestic discipline, he explains, could be “a way around that” — a chance to explore sexual desires while still nominally acting in the name of Jesus.
Still, CDDers themselves reject this pain-for-pleasure explanation. “The pure CDD people don’t go there,” says Vera, who is both in a domestic discipline relationship as well as into sex play. “A lot of folks think of Fifty Shades of Grey — but this is not that,” she says.
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I didn’t think it was a very good article. For one, did you know that the “Clint” is a well-known scammer in Domestic Discipline circles? (And an aggressive reputation monitor…expect him to show up here with a long-winded retort.)
Other than that, it was the usual shoddy journalism I’ve come to expect from just about anywhere. I get the impression the author is not actually curious about any of the real lives involved.
(For the record, I don’t practice CDD. I just really like spanking and reading about things online.)
A similar article also quoting Daily beast was in the Huffington Report. It has some of the same shortcomings, but also states in the “BDSM community, in which spanking and other punishments are used erotically as a way to achieve sexual satisfaction. That is a pretty straightforward a description. However, like the Daily Beast, much of the remaining paragraphs are quite negative.
The CDD does somewhat rub me the wrong way. If they do it for their “kink”, or enhance their marriage, go for it. If they are using it as a way to control their partner (in a negative way), then some of the statements in the article are legitimate.
I participated in the CDD forum for a couple of months, but decided to leave the group because I was getting so fed up with the prevailing uptight sexually repressing atmosphere. Most of the group (particularly the men) seem to live in fear of becoming sexually aroused by spanking, and claim that spanking cannot be disciplinary if either the man or the woman becomes sexually aroused….so to answer Rob — it is claimed to enhance marriage, but the emphasis is on discipline…..always the husband disciplining the wife….means that they see spanking as a means for the man to control his woman.