Taken In Hand vs Captain and First Officer

Reader question…

This is a more complicated question than you know. For those with the book, I’m going to connect the dots between The Primer Chapters 9 (Captain and First Officer), 11 (Behavior Modification) and 24 (Rough Stuff).

Taken In Hand was one of the places that I read heavily and first learned that many women enjoy submission and that male dominance isn’t evil in and of itself. I think it’s an important resource for that perspective. (It does however seem to be dying a slow death with minimal posting in the last 12 months.)

In terms of us personally, the answer is yes and no. I think the Captain and First Officer model incorporates a fair amount of the Taken In Hand perspective, but without the Domestic Discipline aspect. We do erotic spanking once in a while, but that’s quite different.

The Taken In Hand approach with Domestic Discipline essentially is a form of husbandly behavioral management using aversive techniques seeking to stop wifely bad behavior. My approach to behavioral management is to reward good behavior and to purposely not reward bad behavior. A lot of that not rewarding is by reducing attention and allowing the natural consequences for bad behavior take their course.

The trap with Domestic Discipline is if a high stimulation need wife gets her drama fix by a spanking for doing something bad, you are actually reinforcing the bad behavior because she got what she wanted by doing it. If she wants the spanking fix, she has to create a Fitness Test situation to do it. Thus a vicious cycle begins. The spankings can tend to escalate in intensity trying to “break the defiant wife” and after a certain point it all just becomes a senseless beating. I can’t imagine doing that to Jennifer and I can’t imagine she would stay if I did.

If a couple discovers that the wife (or husband) enjoys the sensation and intensity of being spanked, then you could perceive it as a reward and tie it into their good behavior. I know of a couple where the wife cleans the house from top to bottom in semi-random “cleaning crazies” and gets an erotic spanking as a reward for it. Her husband comes home from work and notices the spic and span… and her sort of bouncing up and down waiting for his attention. He just says “I see” and gives her what she wants that night. It’s sort of an inverted Fitness Test this way as he “bumps back” on a clean house. But if she likes it, what’s the harm?

The basic question is… do you enjoy being erotically spanked by your husband? Explore that first and become comfortable with it as an activity, before deciding whether or not you want to tie it into your good or bad behavior. Though if you do, I advise to do it for good behavior. And as I say again and again, only about 30% of what you try works for any one couple, so this may not be for you.

So the final answer for us is that we do the Captain and First Officer thing, and quite infrequent, consensual, erotic spankings on Date Nights when the girls are out of the house. Jennifer doesn’t like pain, so on a one to ten scale of intensity, our Date Night “ass-whoopings”… score about a two, maybe a three.