Maintenance spanking

What is maintenance spanking?

Maintenance spanking is a spanking at an agreed time, without anything having gone wrong. It sets itself apart from every other form of punishment because no transgression comes before it: the calendar decides when it happens, not behavior. The point is to keep a power dynamic something you can feel.

How a maintenance spanking goes

Short, predictable, and without discussion. That is exactly the point.

The usual picture: it is Sunday evening, the children are asleep, and it has been on the same slot for weeks. No one asks what went right or wrong. There is a count to twenty, by hand or with a paddle, and afterward there is tea. Anyone there for the thrill is in the wrong place; the number is almost always modest and the build-up is missing.

What sets it apart from an ordinary scene is the absence of negotiation in the moment. With spanking you steer during play toward what feels good. With a maintenance spanking everything is set beforehand, because the moment itself is meant to bring nothing new.

Where maintenance spanking comes from

From the domestic discipline world, and not from the BDSM scene. That is why the word has barely taken root in Dutch.

According to DeGroot, Carmack and Quinlan in Sexuality & Culture, domestic discipline is a relational approach that advocates female submission and male dominance, with disciplinary means such as spanking. They analyzed 592 blog posts by women who live it themselves, because these people record their experiences almost entirely online. Within that world, a spanking at fixed times is a common part of the arrangement, alongside the spanking that does follow a transgression.

The researchers are not gentle about what they found. Their analysis shows women wrestling with letting go of their independence, casting men as dominant, and celebrating female submission and inequality between the sexes. Anyone who takes over the term without knowing that origin imports a dynamic they may want no part of.

Why couples arrange a maintenance spanking

To keep the dynamic something you can feel in the weeks when nothing else happens. That is the reason people give themselves, and it is a different reason from the one behind punishment.

• For the person on the receiving end, the payoff is a set moment when the role fits again, without anything having to have gone wrong for it.
• For the person giving it, the gain lies in keeping up something that a busy household would otherwise show no sign of for weeks.
• For two people together, it works like any other set ritual: it is on the calendar, so it happens, even in the week no one felt like it.

There is measurable ground for the idea that such a moment does something to the bond. Sagarin and colleagues followed 58 people before and after sadomasochistic activity and reported in Archives of Sexual Behavior that participants who said afterward it had gone well had less stress hormone in their saliva and felt closer to their partner.

Among participants who said it had gone badly, that closeness dropped for some of them. So a standing arrangement guarantees nothing; it only makes sure the thing happens, not that it happens well.

The forms maintenance spanking takes

The difference is in the frequency and in who runs the calendar.

The most common form is weekly, on a set evening, with a set number. There is also the monthly version, which works more as a marker than a routine. And there is the on-request form, in which the person on the receiving end asks for it as soon as they feel the dynamic fading; that is the only version where the initiative comes from below.

Careful or sloppy is not about the hardness here but about the review. Anyone who never asks afterward whether it still means anything ends up, within a few months, with a habit the meaning has drained out of.

Maintenance spanking versus punishment

“It’s just a little punishment.” No, and the difference is the whole concept. With corporal punishment there is something it answers for; a maintenance spanking by definition has no trigger. Anyone who uses it because something happened is doing something else and had better call it that.

“So it changes behavior.” It can’t. Within discipline a consequence hangs on a rule, and that link is exactly what is missing here. A spanking that comes even when everything went well cannot possibly be tied to behavior.

“This belongs to BDSM.” Not natively. The term comes from the domestic discipline world, which pointedly sets itself apart from the kink scene, even though both use the same act.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Maintenance spanking is one of the few things people ask me about because they read it somewhere and not because they felt it.

People don’t want the smacks, they want the standing arrangement. A moment in the week that doesn’t get cancelled, in which someone else has the lead for a bit. They rarely put it that way, but the moment I say it, they nod.

And the mistake I see most here is the same one as with house rules: it gets set up too ambitiously. Weekly, a set number, years ahead. After six weeks one gets skipped, and after that it stands there only for form’s sake. A monthly arrangement that actually keeps going does more than a weekly one that fizzles out.

What you can do yourself

• Agree on the moment, not the trigger, because the moment a reason gets added it is no longer a maintenance spanking but a punishment.
• Pick a frequency you can keep up for half a year, and start monthly rather than weekly.
• Set the number and the tool beforehand, so there is nothing to discuss in the moment itself.
• Agree that the safeword holds here too and say it out loud; a standing arrangement is no reason to drop that way out.
• Review every few months whether it still means anything, and stop if the answer is no. A ritual that has gone empty can’t be patched up by doing it harder.
• Never use it to settle a real grievance. It isn’t built for that, and it backfires.

More on maintenance spanking

On this site corporal punishment sets out how a punishment with a trigger works, discipline lays out the framework of rules and consequences this term deliberately steps outside, and spanking describes the act itself, including where you do and don’t strike.

Beyond that, the paper by DeGroot, Carmack and Quinlan is the only study that describes the domestic discipline world from the inside, and Sagarin and colleagues show what measurably happens to closeness around such a scene.

Where this fits on this site

Trying out a standing dynamic without an arrangement tied to it at home can happen in a single evening. The page on the BDSM date sets out how we agree beforehand what happens and where it stops.

Sources

• “Topping from the Bottom”: Relational Convergence of Meaning in Domestic Discipline Relationships. Jocelyn M. DeGroot, Heather J. Carmack & Margaret M. Quinlan, Sexuality & Culture 19(1), 85–102, 2015 (DOI 10.1007/s12119-014-9247-0). Only the abstract is free to read; no claims from the full text are used. Gives the description of domestic discipline as a relational approach that advocates female submission and male dominance with disciplinary means such as spanking, the design with 592 qualitatively analyzed blog posts, the finding that women turn to blogs about this because the practice is seen as deviant, and the result that their texts show the struggle with letting go of independence, position men as dominant, and celebrate female submission and inequality between the sexes.
• Hormonal changes and couple bonding in consensual sadomasochistic activity. Brad J. Sagarin, Bert Cutler, Nadine Cutler, Kimberly A. Lawler-Sagarin & Leslie Matuszewich, Archives of Sexual Behavior 38(2), 186–200, 2009 (DOI 10.1007/s10508-008-9374-5). Two studies among 58 sadomasochism practitioners, with saliva measurements and questionnaires about closeness before and after. Gives that participants who said it had gone well showed both less cortisol and more felt closeness afterward, and that among participants who said it had gone badly, closeness dropped for some.
• Discipline (BDSM). Wikipedia. Gives that within BDSM the dominant party sets rules the submissive follows, and that breaking such a rule carries a consequence; that link is what this page sets the maintenance spanking against.

Related terms

A maintenance spanking is discipline without the rule that belongs under it, and that missing link is the only thing that sets it apart from its neighbors.

• Corporal punishment. The same act with a stated trigger, and the sharpest contrast with this page.
• Spanking. The act itself, with the build-up and the spots you leave alone.
• Discipline. The framework of rules, training, reward and punishment this term is an exception to.
• House rules. How arrangements get written down, though for a room instead of two people.
• Funishment. The other form without a transgression, but with fun as the goal instead of maintenance.
• Punishment. The form with a transgression, which this page sets itself against.