Tom commented recently (on a post by Ranat) that I am popular with the…well, husbands. You know the ones I mean. The ones who keep, keep, keep trying to make their wives (or, occasionally, girlfriends, but let’s make stereotypes instead) be dominant. The husbands who all start to seem alike over time. “Oh, my Princess asked me to hold her purse the other day in the shoe store. Looking at her feet in those shoes and holding her purse, I really started to feel submissive. I think she’s starting to like this!” they write. A few days later, they come back a bit heartbroken.
I am entirely aware that someone could write an equally apt parody of a blog like mine. (Please do! I’m sure I’d get a kick out of it.)
I find those blogs irresistible at times. I think I like drama. I’d rather read stories where things get all fucked up than stories where they go well, and trying to convince your partner to follow a new (and possibly, for them, undesirable) sex paradigm is just asking for trouble. Trouble that you can then blog about on your secret blog that your wife doesn’t even know you keep.
If it’s true that I’m popular with these guys, it’s probably because I am actually a dom but at the same time seem insecure, muddled, confused, learning, etc., which makes me seem a lot more like their wives than someone confident would, or (certainly) than a professional dom would. (I mention pros because they have a lot of blogs.) I mean, I am not all that popular with them anyway, I don’t think, but…yeah.
The weirdest thing I see is all these men who seem to have entirely one-sided dominance relationships. He calls her Goddess but only on the blog / in his head, never to her face. He obeys her but in such a way that she just thinks he’s being agreeable. When she asks him to pick up some milk he thinks of it as service. An ordinary foot massage is transformed into an ultimate sexual experience.
I don’t know what the wives think of these men. I know that in reality they are all different people – the men, the women – as varied as all people. But they sure do sound alike. I could swear a lot of these men are married to the same woman. (Maybe this is because the men write about their wives as objects of their own desire and not as people with desires of their own. That’s natural on a blog I suppose.)
Guys, if your sexuality runs towards submission, if that’s a big thing for you, and you’re not married yet, for god’s sake, marry a kinky woman. She doesn’t have to be a dom, but a switch would be nice. Even another submissive will understand how it is to have crazy desires. Your sexuality is not pathetic and the right person will appreciate it, help you grow it, gleefully engage with it, challenge it, nurture it, and cherish it.
If you already married someone who isn’t very kinky, I don’t know what to tell you. Your partner has her own sexuality that might not be compatible with yours. By all means, find out. And then try to proceed in a way that respects your sexuality as well as hers. You both deserve that.
14 responses so far ↓
ranat // 6 June 2009 at 2:50 pm
Last two paragraphs: pure AWESOME.
Ranai // 7 June 2009 at 9:07 am
Seconding Ranat. I hope many people will take this to heart. The only part I don’t understand is the “even another submissive” idea, unless you mean with a view to going polyamorous?
What you’re calling the hapless husbands is yet another variant of people prescribing what someone else must be into, instead of having the ordinary human decency to ask what she wants and likes. Fallacy 1: No woman is into dominating her partner – that’s why domination only exists as a job. Fallacy 2: Every woman, deep down, is into dominating her partner – that’s why it’s fine to behave like a teacher giving marks for her level of compliance with a predefined model, and to use subterfuge, manipulation, lying and guilt-tripping to push her into a predefined direction.
Yes, it is scary and can be risky to ask someone you are dating if she herself (or he himself) perhaps has kinky or DS leanings. But for every participant’s happiness sake, ask.
Ranai // 7 June 2009 at 11:32 am
Oh, and of course Fallacy 3: On a woman’s part, freely chosen, voluntary, informed consent is optional.
devastatingyet // 7 June 2009 at 8:15 pm
That’s one way to do it. But I also think you could have a thing where you take turns playing the role for your partner. It’s more fair with another one like yourself than it is with someone totally different, and of course you’re more likely to “get” what they want and be able to give it to them. (And be more likely to enjoy it yourself as well.)
Tom Allen // 8 June 2009 at 11:52 am
I dunno – to me, the drama in this blog is much more interesting than the drama in what I call “the pink blogs.”
Soaking in rape culture « Bean // 9 June 2009 at 7:25 am
[...] that this may be part of the reason why so many “hapless husbands” (as Dev hilariously calls them) seem to have so much difficulty even convincing their wives not to finish them off. One [...]
Tom // 29 June 2009 at 6:16 am
Just came across this. I was in this position, naturally sub by inclination but married to a woman who couldn’t domme (not her thing, beyond a desire to please me; and our relationship eventually lost the trust and respect that would have been essential to making it work). (And no, I haven’t been blogstalking you Dev!) I tried to see if I could inspire it in her for 4 years without success, the last year pretty much in despair.
One epiphany was meeting a couple of guys in their late 50s and early 60s through Janus in SF who had only just gotten around to figuring out their inclinations, getting divorced and starting to look for a compatible lady in this regard (good luck and Godspeed to both of them). I figured that I’d save myself 30 years, so my divorce is currently just waiting on some final paperwork.
I think that too many sub or potentially sub guys don’t or won’t take responsibility for their desires. It may be that they either figure that being submissive is an excuse not to take that responsibility, or they put their fantasies of dominant women on too high a pedestal, or both. In any case, whether you start out in the wrong relationship or not, even being submissive has to start with taking the responsibility to own up to that. How can it even be genuinely given if it isn’t genuinely possessed in the first place?
dylan // 30 June 2009 at 2:28 am
The best material I ever saw on how to introduce Femdom into your relationship was by Ms Rika. She had a website Uniquely Rika with most of her material but it is gone now. She has a very good book called Uniquely Rika available from Amazon. I recently found this link to some of her stuff from 2001 (she has evolved since then but you can get a good flavor). http : //www. tiedmoments. com/ submission/ rika. htm
Some quotes: Submission is about what he does for her rather than what she does to him. He needs to learn how to serve her the way the way she wants to be served. He does not get to choose how he will submit to her. He offers to submit to her and she accepts his offer on condition that he agrees to submit the way that she wants him to. She agrees to express her expectations, to express her pleasure when he pleases her, to express her displeasure when he disappoints her, and to help him learn to serve her in a way that she finds pleasing. It is not his place to evaluate her on how well she is dominating him; it is her place to evaluate him on how well he is pleasing her. She expects him to true his attitude and behavior to her expectations. Rika has a great fondness for tease and denial. He reveals his male centric fantasies to her. Because she loves him, when she is in the mood and feeling generous, she may indulge his fantasies but only to the extent that she feels comfortable with them. He may not get all of his fantasies satisfied; but he is guaranteed to feel dominated.
Ranai // 30 June 2009 at 5:15 am
Tom: I think you have a very good point with taking responsibility for one’s own desires.
Dylan: Ms Rika’s suggestions have possibly been derived from experiences in her own relationship, and may, or may not, in some cases turn out to apply to other individuals and relationships too. This can not be known beforehand. People can try it out – provided both parties consent voluntarily.
“She agrees to…”
Also a DS relationship presupposes that someone consents to entering a DS dynamic as the dominant partner in the first place. This consent can not be taken for granted. It can only be asked for. If the consent is not voluntary, it is no consent at all. Consent is only consent when there clearly is the option to choose “no”.
The unethical approach some men (hapless husbands) take, is that they convince themselves the woman’s consent to DS is not even an open question. She only has to get over her learned inhibitions and then she’ll “naturally” fall into the role he has prescribed for her. In other words, her place is to be in whatever role the man wants her to be. It is her place to enter a DS relationship as the dominant partner because that’s what he wants from her.
The ones who, as Dev writes, “keep, keep, keep trying to make their wives (or, occasionally, girlfriends, but let’s make stereotypes instead) be dominant” don’t give a fuck about consent. A “no” obviously isn’t valid. Taking it a step further, in a case of stealth submission without the woman’s knowledge, he doesn’t even bother to give her the option to say yea or nay.
If the woman’s consent is not even an open question – and hapless husbands like to conveniently omit this open question – then it is not consensual BDSM or consensual DS.
Men who don’t want to get lost in this ethical wasteland don’t need to make any superhuman effort, just apply a little human decency. They merely have to get used to thinking of women as subjects who have their own individual likes and dislikes – so it may make sense, while getting to know each other, to bother asking what she’s into or interested in.
Ranai // 30 June 2009 at 5:31 am
But I also think you could have a thing where you take turns playing the role for your partner. It’s more fair with another one like yourself than it is with someone totally different, and of course you’re more likely to “get” what they want and be able to give it to them. (And be more likely to enjoy it yourself as well.)
It sounds good the way you’ve put it. I wonder whether it can work in practice? I’ve thought about the idea and can’t at present think of any couples I know of, both being into kink and exclusively submissive by inclination, who say they take turns like this and give domination entirely as a favour. I wonder if anyone knows people who do it like this?
On the other hand, I can think of various people who are kinky and exclusively submissively inclined, who say they just feel too deeply uncomfortable with dominating someone to ever consent to it. They say it goes against their grain too much and would make them feel unhappy.
So I wonder if people would need to be at least somewhat switchily inclined by nature to make it work and be happy?
devastatingyet // 30 June 2009 at 8:44 am
Ranai, you’re right, I don’t really know. I think more people are switches than immediately realize it, but that is kind of like saying everyone is secretly bisexual (obnoxious).
I never really liked Ms. Rika’s approach. I think it could probably work for some couples, but it just didn’t ping my sexuality particularly. But I still get a lot of searches for her (people who come to my blog because I’ve written about her in the past) – I wonder where she went?
sera // 30 June 2009 at 9:40 am
I knew a couple in which both partners were submissive, but the woman topped because she conceived of it as a service to her partner–a way of pleasing him as he instructed her to do. Just depends on who you are and what works for you.
I agree with Dev that more people are switches than they know, but I also agree that sounds hideously presumptuous!
Tom // 1 July 2009 at 2:35 am
Ranai, agree with the problems with the Ms. Rika approach. Sounds great, after one is already in a D/s relationship (and one that seems to tend more towards M/s, by the description provided in the quote Dylan references). If that floats everyone’s boats, and the participants are already sexually compatible, then peachy. Problem is that approach doesn’t turn a woman into a Domme so much as it may work to turn a man into a crypto-sub. Again, if that works for both of them, great!
But people vary in terms of how they can and will practice D/s, dom, sub or switch. There isn’t one way that describes everyone who does any of these things, and there’s a lot more richness and diversity within each than can be encapsulated by one simple statement. About D/s and BDSM in particular, people really shouldn’t be fundamentalists.
And that gets to the heart of this issue. Even if a wife or woman in an LTR could be inspired to become a dominant, who is to say that what will turn her on in that way will work for the man who wants to be a sub? Just as one specific example, tease and denial doesn’t work for everyone. In my case, just based on biology and hormones, I start to shut down and lose sexual interest after about a week without release, whether I want to or not. If I had been “stuck” in a relationship with a woman who really wanted to get into T&D, then it would have led to mutual frustration.
Ranai // 9 July 2009 at 4:19 am
Sera: It’s interesting that in their case, the result apparently was not taking turns, but one-sided. Did someone else top her to please her then?
On the subject of switching (you don’t mind thread drift, Dev, I hope?):
In a post on Race Bannon’s blog he references a casual survey he made among a sample population of leathermen in the US, in preparation for his keynote speech for the Leather Leadership Conference 2008.
‘For those here who are not members of worldleathermen, members can self identify as 100% active, 90% active, and so forth to 100% passive. This means that more nuanced top/bottom/versatile identifications were possible and therefore easier to quantify and plot on a chart. (…) So, of the 1,200+ men in the sample, 372 say they lean top, 456 say they lean bottom, but a truly unexpected 426 identify as being 50/50, equally top and bottom. This changes the relatively smooth bell curve of the past data to one with an even greater spike at the 50/50 mark, showing, at least using this same sample population, an even greater move towards versatility since I crunched the numbers back in 2006. So maybe there is something to an increasing identification of gay men as versatile.’
The data is at the end of the pdf document. The whole speech makes interesting reading, also on the subject of richness and diversity.
Datenschlag, a kink information site, writes in an introductory text: ‘Many sadomasochists like to take on both roles, they ‘switch’ according to desires and moods. More than half of sadomasochists switch more or less frequently.’ (In German, take “Sadomasochisten” as the word we use for kinky people in general.) Though I can’t make out what empirical sample or which book among the literature mentioned they’re basing this on.
My anecdotal impression is that more people call what they do ‘switching’ – or ‘submitting to X and dominating Y’ or ‘being both dominant and submissive’ or ‘I’m submissive/I’m dominant, and we also like to switch on occasion’ etc. …, than say ‘I’m a switch’.
One result of this is that if kinky people get asked ‘Are you a) dom b) sub c) switch?’ instead of using percentages as Race Bannon encountered on the worldleathermen site, numbers get unrealistically skewed towards the extremes. Perhaps this will change somewhat as kinky people get less hung up about ‘identities’ and focus more on individual interests.
I’ve also come across the variant of switches universalising their personal interests just as creepily as male supremacists and female supremacists do: ‘I’m into switching – ergo every human on earth must be too.’ I agree this kind of projection is both obnoxious and ignorant.