Problem for Men Getting Started in DD

Joannie wrote:
“So many of our S/O's come to this DD lifestyle at the request of their s/o, and for some men it is a difficult lifestyle to embrace since it goes against what a good many of them have been raised to believe is acceptable. What is the single-most important factor you would share with these men to make it easier for them to adapt?”

I received this as a comment to my last post, and I’ve been thinking about it for a good while. The more I consider it, the more I realize that the response should be a long one, a lot longer than can be addressed here, so I’ll give a short answer and work on a longer one to put in the advice area of Bethany’s.


You know, after you are involved in a real DD relationship for a while, you really don’t think about it much, or think about the struggles that almost all couples have who are new to this way of life—the very same struggles you had in the beginning.

The first part of the equation is deciding what DD is. For Bethany and me, it is a conscious choice—made by the both of us—that I am the Head of Household, and that my making final decisions has very great advantages for the both of us. It is a mindset—it is not female bondage, enforced by a paddle. In an odd way, rather than being a type of bondage, it is really a type of liberation.

I think that for men—especially those who came of age in the feminist era, the toughest part of DD is accepting the notion that having a clear leader in the household is a good idea, and that while DD can be practiced without spanking, if necessary, spanking is still a perfectly acceptable method of reinforcing that paradigm.

As time has passed, it’s become more and more clear to Bethany and me that the domestic model of the past six thousand years, where there is a clear Head of Household, has stood the test of time for a reason, and that the model touted by many for the past thirty years has some very serious drawbacks. My previous marriage was the ideal example; I simply had no tools to deal with my ex-wife’s “f__k-you” attitude. No way to force her to get up off her lazy butt and be a wife and mother—none, that is, until I divorced her, and then the courts assumed the rights that I, as her husband, should have had—the rights to require her to do those duties, and serious consequences if she did not. It required the breakup of a family to accomplish that which a different mindset and a few swats of a paddle could have done.

So to answer your question, I think the hardest—and most important—part of DD is overcoming societal programming and learning to think for yourself. It is coming to the realization that a DD lifestyle has some serious advantages, and that a clear understanding or each partner’s role (and, if necessary, an occasional swat on the bottom) are a small price to pay for a strong, successful marriage.