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Anyone can take their hand (or an implement) and smack it against someone else’s bottom. It’s not difficult. But there’s so much more that goes into a great spanking, and one of those things, on the top side, is intuition.

Have you ever heard the term “chasing the dragon“? I’m pretty sure I’ve used it on this blog in relation to pegging. Some bottoms, however, chase the dragon when it comes to spanking. I was dating one such bottom a few years ago; she wanted to be spanked hard, wanted it to hurt, but realistically speaking she wasn’t able to take a hard spanking. It was just too much for her. She was pretty obvious about it; even though she chose not to use a safeword, it was clear that she couldn’t take it, so I eased up.

However, intuition is about more than just not going too hard. It’s about when to increase intensity, when to decrease it, when to pause and for how long, when to keep going and for how long, when to use a certain implement or switch to another one, and so much more. Intuition like that can only come with time. Oh, I’m sure there are some natural spankers who can do this without practice, but odds are those folks are generally intuitive and empathic outside the realm of spanking as well.

I can almost always intuit how a scene is going by the smallest cues a bottom gives me. Whether she’s a squirmer or not, whether she’s noisy or quiet, it doesn’t matter; I am rarely wrong when I change how I’m spanking. That’s not being boastful; that’s years and years of experience being put to good use. The only way you can get good at intuition, when it comes to spanking, is to give a lot of spankings over a long period of time. It also helps when you spank the same person more than once, because you get used to how they react and what they want; for example, I have a friend who likes hard spankings with very little warm-up, so with her I start a little beyond firm and work my way up to 80-90 percent of my full intensity. Toward the end of the spanking, I might get up to 100 percent, but that’s rare with an implement — with my hand, it’s more common. When I first spanked this person, I started out lighter than my usual firmness, because while we had been friends for some time it was our first play session and I didn’t want to overstep. Plus, I didn’t know what, to her, was too soft or too hard.

Intuition isn’t just about how you spank, either. It’s about watching how others spank a person that you are also going to spank. When I’m at a spanking party, I’m always observing how bottoms are asking for, receiving, reacting to, and enjoying their spankings. Most of the time it’s just filing information away in case I need it, but sometimes it’s because I know I’m going to ask that person if I can spank them later (or we’ve already set up a scene) and I want to know the right way to read their bodies and give them what they want and need.

Intuition and empathy can go a long way outside of the world of spanking, and when you have them both, they can make spankings that much better.