Lines, corner time and impositions
The vocabulary makes people wince slightly, which is part of why it works. But the practical case for impositions is a plain one: they last longer than a spanking, they cannot be enjoyed, and they require the person to keep choosing to comply.
Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.
In short
- Impositions require ongoing compliance over an evening. A spanking requires a few minutes of endurance. That difference is why they often work better.
- A hundred handwritten lines takes twenty to thirty minutes, and two hundred about an hour. Five hundred is a whole evening. Above that, most people simply do not finish.
- Handwriting matters. Typed lines can be pasted and carry none of the tedium the punishment is made of.
- Photographing the completed page and sending it is the accountability mechanism. An unchecked imposition teaches that the rules are decorative.
Everything on this page is about consenting adults over eighteen who have chosen an arrangement with each other. Not every consequence has to be corporal, and I would argue most of them should not be.
Why a dull imposition beats a spanking
There are three practical reasons, and they all follow from the same thing: time.
A spanking is short. Even a severe one is a few minutes of holding still, after which it is finished and the person can go and make a cup of tea. An imposition takes the evening. It sits in the diary. It has to be started, and the starting is the worst part, and it has to be carried on with when the novelty has gone and there are still four hundred lines left.
Second, and people are shy about admitting this: a spanking can be enjoyed. For a fair proportion of the people reading this, being put over someone's knee is the thing they wanted in the first place, which makes it an odd choice of penalty. Nobody has ever enjoyed line four hundred. The absence of any pleasure in it is the whole mechanism.
Third, an imposition needs continued willing compliance. A spanking only requires you to stay in position while something is done to you. Lines require you to keep choosing, every few minutes, for an hour, to carry on doing something you do not want to do. That is a much more demanding thing to ask, and it is closer to what the arrangement is actually for.
Lines, in practical detail
The numbers matter more than people expect, because setting an unrealistic number is how impositions quietly stop being enforced.
| Number | Roughly | In practice |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | 10 to 15 minutes | A marker. Registers, does not sting. |
| 100 | 20 to 30 minutes | The standard unit. Enough to be felt on a weeknight. |
| 200 | About an hour | Serious. The hand starts to complain. |
| 500 | A whole evening | More than most people can write well. |
| 1000 | Several sittings | Usually abandoned, fudged, or resented into uselessness. |
Handwritten, not typed. This is not fussiness. Typed lines can be pasted, and even when they are not, typing is fast and mechanical and skips the exact tedium the punishment is constructed from. Pen on paper, legible, and if the handwriting degrades into a scrawl by line eighty then that is visible on the page and can be dealt with.
Keep the sentence short and specific to the breach. "I will text when I get home" is a better line than a general statement of contrition, because it is about the actual rule and because repeating it several hundred times does genuinely lodge it somewhere. Long sentences also triple the time, so a fifteen-word line at a hundred repetitions is not a hundred lines, it is three hundred.
The accountability is a photograph. The completed page, photographed and sent, by an agreed deadline. That is the part that makes the whole thing real, and without it you are relying on self-report about a punishment, which is a strange thing to rely on. A deadline matters as much as the number, because "sometime this week" means Sunday night and a rushed page.
Corner time
It sounds absurd until you have done it, and then it does not. Standing facing a wall with nothing to look at, no phone, and no conversation is a much longer fifteen minutes than fifteen minutes elsewhere.
What it produces is the reflective state that people wrongly expect from a spanking. During impact you are mostly dealing with impact. In the corner there is nothing to deal with, so your mind goes to the thing you did, and keeps going back to it, because there is nowhere else to go. Ten to twenty minutes. Longer is not more effective, it just becomes an exercise in standing up.
Essays and other written impositions
Five hundred words on why the rule exists, due by Wednesday evening. This is the one I use most for anything that involved a judgement rather than a slip, because it requires thought rather than time, and because it produces something you both have to read afterwards.
It also has a failure mode worth knowing. Essays can turn into performances of self-abasement, which is not the point and is not good for anyone. If what comes back is four hundred words of how worthless the writer is, the exercise has gone wrong, and the right response is to say so rather than to accept it as compliance.
Withdrawn privileges
These work, and they need more care than lines do, because they operate on the ordinary shape of somebody's life rather than on an hour they have set aside.
Withdrawing something that belongs to the dynamic is clean. No spanking this weekend, no scene until the essay is in. Withdrawing something that belongs to the person is not, and this is where a lot of arrangements start to go wrong. Their phone, their evening out, their money, their contact with a friend. Those are not privileges you are in a position to grant, so they are not privileges you are in a position to remove.
Impositions take up someone's time, and control of a person's time is one of the things that quietly turns a chosen arrangement into a controlling one. A hundred lines on a Tuesday is a consequence. An imposition every evening for a fortnight is a schedule that somebody else now owns.
The Home Office statutory guidance on section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 lists regulating a person's everyday behaviour as an example of controlling or coercive behaviour, an offence in England and Wales, and no violence is required for it to apply. Read consent and coercive control before your impositions start stacking.
Whatever you set, check it
An imposition that is set and never followed up is worse than setting nothing at all, because it teaches both of you that the rules here are ornamental. If you are not going to look at the photograph, do not ask for the lines.
Sources
- Serious Crime Act 2015, section 76. legislation.gov.uk
- Home Office, Controlling or Coercive Behaviour: Statutory Guidance Framework (2023).
Where this page mentions the law, it is general information written from an England and Wales position unless it says otherwise, and it is not legal advice. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own law. If your own legal position matters, speak to a solicitor.
Common questions
How many lines is a realistic punishment for an adult?
A hundred handwritten lines takes most adults twenty to thirty minutes and is enough to be felt. Two hundred is about an hour, and the hand starts to complain. Five hundred is a whole evening, more than most people can write well. Anything above that stops being an imposition and becomes an endurance test that usually goes uncompleted, which is worse than setting nothing.
Why give lines instead of a spanking?
Because a spanking is over in minutes and can be enjoyed, and an imposition is neither. Lines occupy an evening you wanted for something else, require continued willing effort from start to finish, and offer nothing pleasurable at any point. For a great many people that makes them the more effective consequence by some distance.
Does corner time actually achieve anything?
It is far more uncomfortable than it sounds, which is the point. Fifteen minutes facing a wall with no phone and nothing to look at is long, dull and oddly exposing, and it produces the reflective state people imagine a spanking produces but usually does not. Ten to twenty minutes is plenty.