How to spank: the whole sequence

Somebody has asked you to do this, or you have asked them, and then it dawned on you that you have no idea what actually happens first. This is the order of it, start to finish. The individual skills matter less than getting the sequence right, and the sequence is where most disappointing first evenings come apart.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything here concerns two consenting adults over 18.

What follows is the whole thing in order, written for the person doing the spanking. Each stage has its own page with the detail on it, so this one sticks to the shape. If you read nothing else here, read the part about warm-up.

Before anything, the conversation

You do not start with your hand. You start over a cup of tea, and ten minutes covers it. What they want out of the evening. Where on the body. Whether marks are acceptable and whether anyone else might see them. Roughly how long. And what happens when it finishes, which people leave out and then regret.

Agree a safe word, and say out loud that you will stop the instant you hear it. Then do exactly that, including the time it arrives at a moment you think is trivial. The longer version of both conversations is at negotiation and safe words.

Where you put them

Position changes the meaning of the evening more than the implement does. Over your knee is close, slightly humbling, and lets you hold someone with your other arm. Bent over a table is formal and exposed, with distance between the two of you and a clear target. Kneeling on a chair sits somewhere between. The same twenty strokes in those three are three different evenings, and a session that fell flat is more often a position problem than a force problem.

Practically, you want them stable, with something to grip, and able to hold still for twenty minutes without their arms shaking. Warm room, door shut, phones silent and face down, everything you intend to use already within reach. See positions and what each one does and setting and space.

Where to aim, and where never to

The fleshy lower half of each buttock, above the crease of the leg and inside the outer edge. There is fat and muscle there and nothing underneath that objects to impact.

Almost everything that goes wrong goes wrong at the edges of that area: drift upward and you reach the tailbone, which is small, superficial and easy to fracture; drift outward and you reach the hip, where bone sits far closer to the surface than it looks. Higher still is the lower back and the kidneys, where blunt impact does real harm.

Read where it is safe to strike before you pick up anything with a tip on it. Tips travel furthest and land where you were not looking.

What your hand is doing

Slightly cupped, so a shallow pocket of air sits in the palm and the contact arrives through your fingers and the pad below them. Keep the heel of your hand out of it. That is the bony part, and it is where your own bruises come from. Loose wrist, swing from the elbow rather than the shoulder, and keep the contact brief. A hand that stays on the skin and pushes has turned into a shove.

Rings and watch off before you begin. Alternate hands when you can, which spreads the wear on your palms and stops one side of them collecting everything. Your weaker hand is less hopeless than you expect after ten minutes. More on all of it at the hand.

Warm-up, and why it decides everything

Ten to twenty minutes of hand before any implement comes out. Light and quick, not slow and heavy, covering the whole area instead of one favourite patch. It will feel to you like stalling.

Cold skin on a braced body turns a moderate stroke into something unbearable. The same arm, doing the same thing twenty minutes later, barely registers. That is the entire reason this stage exists, and it is the one beginners cut, because it is the least dramatic part of the evening and the thing they have been imagining for weeks is further along. Nobody has ever complained about too much hand. Warm-up has the minute-by-minute version.

Building

Once they are warm you have four dials: force, implement, rhythm and position. Move one, hold the rest, give it a dozen strokes to settle, then move another. Change three at once and you learn nothing about which one produced the reaction.

Watch the body rather than the face, and the skin most of all. Even pink deepening to red is what you want. Blotchy purple, white patches inside a red area, or any broken surface means stop and look properly.

Breathing that has slowed and deepened means they have settled into it. Breath held before each stroke, or a flinch that arrives before contact, means you are ahead of them, and the fix is a few more minutes of hand. Reading your partner goes through the signals, and pacing a scene covers the shape of the hour.

When to stop

Sooner than you want to, and sooner than they want you to. No session I have ended early has ever caused a problem. The two I let run on past that point did.

The signals are reliable enough to list. Reactions getting smaller when they should be getting bigger. Skin that has stopped changing. Check-in answers that have gone short and automatic. And the urge in your own head to hit harder to get a response back.

That last one is the alarm, and I read it backwards for my first couple of years, as evidence she could take more. It means she has gone flat, and the useful part of the evening finished several minutes ago. Two people had a bad Tuesday before I worked that out.

Make the end unambiguous when you get there. Say that it is finished, and put the implement down somewhere they can hear it land. There is no negotiating afterwards, in either direction. If something does go wrong, when it goes wrong covers what to do.

Afterwards

Come down the way you went up. Lighter strokes, then your hand resting flat on hot skin, then warmth, water, a blanket and something sweet. Look at the marks together so there is nothing to discover in the morning. This part belongs to the session as much as the middle does, and anyone who treats it as an epilogue is telling you how they treat the rest.

Then the bit people skip: a short message a day or two later. Drop tends to turn up on the Tuesday and not on the Sunday, and that message does more work than anything you did on the night. You may want one yourself, which surprises people who expected to feel pleased with themselves. Aftercare has the detail.

What beginners actually get wrong

1. Too hard, too early. The first stroke that genuinely lands should arrive fifteen minutes in, not at ninety seconds.
2. One spot, over and over. Bruising concentrates there while everywhere else stays cold, and it hurts in a duller, worse way. Move around and alternate sides.
3. Going quiet. A long silence reads as absence from the other end, and somebody bent over furniture cannot see your face. Say something every minute or so, even if it is only their name.
4. Treating an agreed number as a target. Twenty-four was the most you agreed to, and finishing at fourteen is a decision rather than a failure. Nobody has to reach the number.
5. Forgetting that your own arm tires. Accuracy goes long before strength does, so the strokes that land somewhere unintended are almost always late ones. Swap hands, take breaks, and when your palm goes numb, treat that as information about your hand rather than a reason to hit harder. See the top's own body.

None of that requires talent. It requires an hour of close attention, which is harder than it sounds.