We all think we share a language when we talk about BDSM, but when you pry apart the abbreviation you’ll often hear people mumble their way through a definition of “discipline”.

Bondage, D/s and SM seem straightforward, but what do we mean when we use the D-word?

BEFORE WE USED “BDSM”

Let’s blame it (at least partially) on the Old Guard. Why not? They get blamed for all kinds of things.

It’s said that the abbreviation BDSM was coined around 1969. Before that, you had two very overlapping groups. There was B&D and there was S&M. There wasn’t a clear-cut line down the middle, and there was also Dominance & Submission, which tended to be common in both groups but could be claimed as a separate identity in itself.

So, if a bar or club held a “Masters and slaves” event, you could expect a cross-section of people and some might say they were into S&M while others might say they were more into B&D.

What separated these two groups was how they liked to play. The S&M people focused more on pain or sensation play, while the B&D people identified more with the hierarchy in their relationships. Again, the distinctions are not that clear-cut, but if you asked someone what they were most into then you would get an idea.

WHAT IS DISCIPLINE?

In a way, the fact that Discipline has a separate place in the BDSM abbreviation is a leftover from those earlier times. You can’t have Discipline without Dominance/submission (because it inherently includes a power dichotomy) so it’s already included. But, it’s a specific practice within D/s, it’s not what D/s is.

Let’s give it a definition.

Discipline is any activity in which one person trains another person to act or behave in a specified way, often by enforcing rigid codes of conduct or by using rewards and punishment to encourage them to behave in a prescribed way.

So, one person takes control of aspects of another person’s behaviour.

This would generally start with negotiated rules, protocol and/or ritual. It makes no sense to enforce behaviour when the other person doesn’t understand the expectations.

What’s meant by “negotiated” in that sense differs from relationship to relationship. Some people agree to quite authoritarian (or disciplinarian) D/s dynamics while others like to reach mutual consensus on everything. Both styles are equally valid.

But, however the communication flows, it makes sense that the boundaries first need to be set and understood before any “discipline” can take place.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DISCIPLINE AND PUNISHMENT

We’ve written a lot about behaviour modification, and classical and operant conditioning, in the past and all of those tools might be used in discipline. Most commonly though, it’s associated with punishment. It’s the same use of the word that we would have in regular English, where you might discipline your child or a judge might discipline an offender.

Punishment can be something of a trigger-word in D/s communities. A lot of people will immediately jump in with “punishment is a kink” or “my submissive is an adult, so why would I need to punish them when I can talk to them”.

I’m not saying that there is no truth in that. Discipline is not D/s, and a D/s relationship where punishment has no place is a valid (and common) dynamic. But, the “why would you do that?” response reveals a lack of respect for the range of different ways someone might enjoy their D/s dynamic, and it’s often a veiled way of saying “you’re doing it wrong”.

It also ignores the fact that people have been into Discipline since before “BDSM” was coined as a term.

Some kind of punitive measures are often what both the Dominant and submissive want. Perhaps that could be a “serious talk”, or perhaps it is some form of punishment, but it validates the structure that the partners have agreed on. What’s the point of having rules if there are no consequences for breaking them?

Of course, no-one is looking for punishment, and that’s where discipline and punishment differ. Discipline is the actual defining and enforcing of codes of behaviour. Think of it more like “learning discipline” in the armed forces. Punishment might be part of it, but it’s not what it is and it’s not the point. The point is control.

DISCIPLINARY POWER

It’s worth a little philosophical diversion at this point to talk about power.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Max Weber (1864-1920) both talked about power in terms of a sovereignty, or centralised control. It was a kind of monopoly, though it could have a kind of trickle-down effect, but it was thought of as “legitimate” or “appointed”. The sovereign or monarch had it and they gave it to their government and law enforcers, who then might give some of it to other citizens… the landowners, shopkeepers or the Masters who owned slaves.

Michel Foucault published Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in 1975 and The History of Sexuality: Volume One in 1976, and these talked about other forms of power. He didn’t deny sovereign power, but he brought attention to other types… corporate power from the concentration of capital, gendered power in the form of patriarchy, white supremacy, real-estate, our relationship with banks.

It seems obvious to us now, but the assumptions of Hobbes and Weber that power was kind of “singular” stuck with us for a long time.

Discipline, according to Foucault, is a form of power that tells people how to act by coaxing them to adjust themselves to what is “normal”. Its goal is not to punish, but to produce “obedient people”.

He uses the prison system to tease out these concepts. The first thing you might think of about the prison system is the “sovereign power”. It’s the big stick that punishes criminals, no different to the archaic forms of sovereign power that exert violent force over the criminal, the exile, the slave and the captive.

But, prisons didn’t really exist before the 18th century. Unless someone was very important to the State, you would just torture and execute them. It worked by being a public spectacle.

In the 18th century, we seem to have suddenly become more benevolent and humanitarian, but Foucault doesn’t think that is the case. He argued that if you looked at the way prisons operate it becomes evident that they are designed not so much to lock away criminals as to submit them to discipline — meaning to submit them to training to render them docile.

Foucault writes that prisons are first and foremost not houses of confinement but departments of correction, and if you observe the mechanics you can see how that works. It’s inherent in the routines that govern the daily lives of prisoners — the inspections, the mealtimes, the work shifts, the supervised “free time”.

And, all the while there is surveillance, and it’s important to understand that this surveillance is not hidden. The very point is that it is visible and the prisoners know that from morning to night they’re being watched. That’s not to prevent them from escaping, it’s to force them to evaluate their behaviour. They are constantly forced to inspect, manage and correct themselves, and if the system is well designed then eventually they don’t even need supervisors. They become docile.

To widen that concept out a bit, Foucault writes:

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

How much of the way we accept the design of the world — our schools, our public spaces or the cubicles of our open-plan offices — is power manifesting itself?

Discipline is not sovereign violence, but it is power, sometimes in a subtle and relentless form. It trains us, drills us and “normalises” us.

TAKE-AWAYS FROM FOUCAULT

As Foucault makes clear, discipline is not punishment, it’s something else entirely. To back up a little bit… it’s control.

I don’t think there is one monolithic reason that people enter into Dominant/submissive relationships or find their sexual identity in those roles, but I do think that control plays a central role for many people. We might call that “power exchange” or “authority transfer”, but underneath it is ultimately the feelings associated with giving up, or taking on, aspects of control.

What we do with that understanding is up to us. There are multitudes of different ways that we can work with power, and I suspect that the ways we (personally) choose reflect something larger about ourselves — our ethics, our cultural backgrounds, our innate needs or desires. We choose what feels right for us. Equally important, we need to understand our partner/s and their understanding of power.

“Power” isn’t just the ability to micromanage everything and make someone ask “mother may I” for every little thing all day long. It’s also knowing that you’ve laid out rules and standards for behavior… and those things are being adhered to even when you’re not standing there to see the rules being followed.

Not everybody wants or needs punishment in their relationships, but the fundamental need for control exists independently of that. Many people who practice D/s need to feel that control because it’s what they are looking for in the dynamic they have chosen.

I would argue that how we make it tangible, how we give it form and make it something we can feel, is discipline.

Feature image: Léon Bonnat (1833-1922), The Suez Barbier (detail)