Spanking Resolutions

It’s a New Year!

A time of reflection and resolutions. Most folks enjoy the clean slate feeling of the new year and get the itch to create better habits and dump the ones that no longer serve them. Since this is a paddle blog, I’ll ask, what spanking resolutions can we make in the year ahead?

Take Better Care of Your Paddles

Between scenes, store your paddles in a dry, dark location, preferably wrapped in a soft cotton cloth or drawstring bag. Applying wood conditioner to your paddles, particularly in the summer and winter when indoor air is especially dry (or whenever the wood starts to look dull or thirsty) will extend the life of your paddle and keep it looking beautiful.

Protocols surrounding the care and maintenance of your gear help make it last longer and can heighten the anticipation in a scene. There’s something delightfully dreadful about polishing a paddle that’s about to be polishing you! Likewise, a bottom taking special care to apply wood conditioner to a paddle after a spanking can add another layer of care and respect to the scene.

Have Regular Maintenance Spankings.

Not for everyone, daily spankings may work for those who want frequent (less intense) reinforcement of the power exchange dynamic. Daily sessions are typically less severe or intense than other spankings in order to allow sufficient time for the bottom to heal and lessen the risk of piling drop on top of drop. Setting these at the same time each day can serve as an anchoring event to underscore the rest of the day.

Weekly spankings can create a similar type of anchoring event but allow more space for processing and healing between more intense sessions. Ultimately, you should listen to your body to make sure you’re getting enough time between scenes. That said, weekly spankings can be therapeutic and can offer a great deal of catharsis at the end of a long work week or enhance the clean slate effect at the onset of a new week.

Monthly spankings work well for folks who don’t see each other or simply can’t get away that often. Committing to a monthly maintenance spanking gives you enough time to negotiate, plan, and prepare for a meaningful spanking that can become the highlight of every month. Plus it gives you ample time to process and heal between spankings.

Keep a Pre & Post Spanking Journal

Track your body’s response to spanking. How does your body feel when you’re anticipating getting or giving a spanking? What goes through your mind when you’re in the throws of a spanking? Is there a breaking point for you? What happens to your body when you’re approaching that limit? What about afterward? Are you tired, lethargic, or famished?

Considering questions like these will help you understand yourself better. Tracking these types of responses will help you notice patterns in your behavior and make it possible to change these patterns if they aren’t serving you.

For instance, you may notice that you get nervous before a spanking, forget to eat, and crash harder than normal in aftercare. Now you keep an extra snack in your bag in case you need a pre-scene snack.

Track your mental health response surrounding your spankings. This doesn’t even have to be complicated to be helpful. A simple 1-10 scale of 1 being terrible and 10 being fantastic, how’s your mental health right now? Keeping track of how you feel leading up to a spanking and in the moments after is great but consider also keeping track of how you feel in the days and weeks afterward since that’s when most of us experience drop. Just the act of checking in with yourself regularly can help you notice when something feels off and enables you to course correct quickly and more easily.

If your spankings are done to maintain your power dynamic, journal about that!

How is the connection to your partner affected by the spanking?

Did the spanking deepen your submission?

Did you feel loved and cared for in your aftercare?

Was it difficult to get to the point of surrender or were you there before you even began?

Find a Spanking Partner

Join a spanking server on Discord - not sure where? Check out your favorite content creator because they likely have one! Discord servers serve as a space where you can create a private virtual community, and are a great way to meet like-minded people who could be potential play partners.

Of course, you can also meet people the old fashion way at a class or munch. If you’re not in an area that has those types of events, you can join one virtually. There are free virtual classes and munches posted on FetLife’s events page every week.

Get Better at Kink

You may be the domliest Dom to have ever dom’d but there’s always room for improvement. Learn a new technique or pick up a new skill entirely. Masochists and bottoms may want to learn a new pain-processing technique while competent spankers may want to hone their flogging skills or become more proficient with caning. Or maybe you’re an impact player who feels comfortable with their impact skills but wants to create more intentional scenes. Honing your kinky craft will build your confidence and make you a more desirable play partner overall.

Avoid Comparing Yourself to Other Kinksters

We all bruise differently and process pain in our own ways so give yourself a bit of room to be human. Just like Instagram and other social sites, our kink’d out pics on FetLife and in spanking videos online are highlights and filtered images. Delicious derrières are saturated with red in pics and that beautiful bum bruised up so prettily because of the blood thinners the impact player was taking. Don’t compare a snapshot of someone else to your entire life. It’s not going to be accurate or fair to anyone. That said, it is fun to see what other people are doing and challenge yourself to do the same. Treat it as an experiment! Take what works for you and chuck the rest.

That goes for this list of resolutions too.