My all-new collection, Holiday Heat, comes out Monday January 15. Click here to pre-order!

As Skyfire said recently on Fetlife, it takes zero skill to hit hard. I get what he’s saying — anyone can hit anyone else hard — but there’s also the fact that if you’re going to hit hard you have to do it the right way (as he also says).

I used to think that hitting hard was the only way to go. When I first started out spanking people in earnest, back in 2013, I thought that all of them wanted hard spankings all the time. I had precious little experience, and everything I knew was from fantasies or erotica. So when I first met up with someone who wanted to play, I spanked her hard. This is what her bottom looked like after just a visit from my hand:

That’s perfect, right? She was happy with it, I was happy with it, and the marks were beautiful. I felt validated — yes, Virginia (that was not her name), I really can spank someone the way I see on Fetlife and Tumblr. As it turned out, this person liked getting very hard spankings. So did the other people I played with that year. I was lucky.

Then I met my first poly partner. We met up in person for the first time at an Airbnb in a western US state, and I started out spanking her just as hard as I normally do. She managed about ten swats and then she got up, in tears, and threw herself on the bed. It was a combination of things — she was afraid she’d disappointed me, and that I’d gone harder and faster than she wanted. It turned out she’d experienced spankings that were just as hard, but she wasn’t expecting it. From her I learned moderation — I learned that you have to build someone up before you can really whale away on them (punishment spankings excluded). We talked, and I learned what she needed, and for the rest of our time together her spankings were exactly the way she wanted them to be.

Which isn’t to say that, over the course of our relationship, I didn’t still spank her very hard on occasion without a warm-up; it happened a few times. But each time she knew it was coming, and could prepare herself. For the most part, though, I warmed her up.

I’m generally known as a fairly hard spanker, especially with my hand. I’m very good at moderating how hard I hit, both with said hand, and with wooden implements. Of my three partners, only one really enjoys being hit hard right from the get-go, and even she would prefer I didn’t do that very often (so I don’t). One of my partners is a more “medium” bottom (who can still play hard when she wants to), and one prefers lighter spankings — for her, the hardest I can go is “light-to-medium”. Now that takes talent and skill — hitting someone as hard as she likes when she doesn’t like it hard, controlling my innate tendency to increase the intensity as the spanking goes on, realizing that a light-pink bottom (for her) is the ultimate goal to make her happy. When she’s happy, I’m happy, so of course I do it the way she likes it.

Do I always have to hit hard? No, I don’t. Do I want to? Usually. Will I, if we haven’t negotiated that? Definitely not.

Oh, one other thing: lest you think that the above photo was a fluke, here’s another post-hand-spanking photo of someone I spanked very hard to start with, using only my hand, although in this case she specifically asked for it. (That spanking inspired the initial spanking in the short-story “Baker’s Dozen”, in the collection of the same name, and if you liked that story, you’ll definitely want to pick up the February edition of Holiday Heat next month because those characters return in that collection.)