Hi, there!

Polly has said the bulk of what we want to talk about tonight, but I do have a bit to add. I want to talk some about the two SM life styles, including some good things about the SM subculture--which will probably surprise everyone--about how to tell the difference between the two, and about what is required to go beyond the fantasy SM life style.

First, the good about the public SM subculture. The phenomenal rise in visibility of the public SM world, mostly through the explosion of on-line communication on the commercial computer services and on the Internet, has had one profoundly good effect: it has allowed hundreds of thousands of submissive women who used to believe that their sexual fantasies and needs are unique to find out that they are not. I'm certain that a goodly percentage of the people here tonight can relate to the experience of having deeply felt dominant or submissive needs, believing them--perhaps guiltily--to be secrets that only you have and that must be kept to yourself, and then suddenly coming upon an on-line SM area or a local support group and finding that you're not alone at all, that many people share your desires and fantasies and even act on them. What an exciting and liberating--and shocking--moment that is! And had you not bumped into the highly public SM subculture, you might have gone the rest of your life keeping your guilty needs to yourself. Many, many people have done so over the years. It's a tragedy.

There's no doubt about the fact that the public SM subculture has provided and continues to provide a crucial moment of liberation for many isolated people. It's ironic and sad, however, that the realities of the public SM subculture often lead its newly aware members into an attitude toward their needs--what can be done and what can't, what should be done and what shouldn't--that is in many ways as repressive as the ignorance and confusion in which its members lived before finding it.

This is a shocking idea to many people--no doubt to many people here tonight. They look at the rich panoply of activity in the public SM subculture and feel like hungry children with an invitation to the world's biggest candy store. Why, out there are masters and mistresses, submissives and slaves, Very Important Subcultural Personalities who talk authoritatively and soothingly about what people should do and shouldn't do, support groups and play parties, chat rooms and support channels--what could be better? It's easy to believe--as many of its members do--that anything the scary dominant or little submissive could want or need is out there just waiting to be plucked. Even better, the subculture comes complete with a set of rules and jargon, clear guidelines about how to behave and what words to use--as Polly has pointed out--that can be learned just by watching and listening. And once you learn the basic niceties, there's a comfortable place for you, and you can begin your quest for sadomasochistic satisfaction!

Does anyone here have a degree in or any experience in anthropology? If you do, you'll recognize that there's a name for the sort of subculture that I've just described: mystery cult. Humans have been inventing them--mostly but not always around religious ideas--for at least as long as we have oral history to tell us about. It's a pretty loose mystery cult: very few Scene organizations have the formal initiations, the deadly oaths, etc., that are usually associated with such organizations. Still, it is a mystery cult, with the requisite rigid ideology (based on the rubric "safe, sane, and consensual" and on the belief that the submissive is always ultimately in control), a highly evolved jargon, a rough hierarchy, and all the rest.

For several reasons, it's not surprising that the sadomasochistic subculture has developed into a mystery cult. First is the reason that many mystery cults are born: the need to protect a persecuted minority from the outside world and to provide its members with support and a feeling of safety in numbers and in the possession of knowledge that not everyone has. Secondly, the public hetero SM subculture has been heavily influenced by the development of the gay leather subculture before it, starting just after World War II. These folks, a classic persecuted sexual minority, developed a structure of behavior and organizations that seems to have stood the test of time, complete with hanky codes, initiations, very rigid hierarchies, and a sophisticated symbology. Some of the leaders of the public SM subculture have simply been influenced by the gay leather culture; others seem to be intentionally trying to emulate it.

So what's wrong with all of that? Who cares if the public SM subculture is a mystery cult or a marching band? It seems to work, doesn't it? It does give people a comfortable place to belong, where they find people who seem to understand and support their ideas and needs, people who tell them that what they want is for the most part OK.

What's wrong with that is nothing--for a great many people. Many people don't want or need or simply can't have more than the public SM subculture offers: people whose dominant or submissive needs are relatively shallow, people with deeper needs who can't come to terms with those needs and who will always have to settle for a kind of play acting, people whose real-life situations--families and children and work and other considerations--make any more than the kind of involvement provided by the public subculture impossible.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of people reading their screens right now are confused, angry, or both about what I just said. It implies strongly a challenging and dangerous idea: that the public SM life style, with its IRC and news groups and play parties and support organizations, is actually a shallow and fantasy-based place whose members only imagine that they are engaging in SM in the deepest and most profound sense, which is what most of its members say that they want. Please understand, if you are among the angry or confused, that I am neither attacking nor trying to negate your experiences in and with other people in that version of the SM life style. I understand that many of the experiences and relationships generated by and within the context of the public SM subculture can feel real, profound, even life-changing. In fact, I want to talk for a moment about exactly that, since it is one of the most seductive and for that reason dangerous aspects of that subculture--that life style, if you will.

For the last decade or so I've watched the public SM subculture develop with fascination. I've talked to literally thousands of its members over the years, interviewed hundreds of them, and been in counseling relationships with dozens of them. And I've seen some astonishing ideas develop. Let me tell you a few of them--a few that will no doubt sound very familiar to many reading this, and in which some of you will find yourselves.

* I am the absolute slave of (master of) someone whom I have never met and who lives a thousand miles away from me (or whom I have met a few times, perhaps).

* I am the absolute master of (slave of) someone, but I still maintain my vanilla marriage and continue with my life in many ways just as I did before.

* When I submit to people at play parties or otherwise, I use a safe word and negotiate exactly what I will and will not do, but I still am submitting to the people I play with.

* When I dominate people at play parties or otherwise, I accept safe words and all sorts of limitations on what I can do, but I still am actually dominating the people I play with.

* I only submit to or dominate people over the computer, but I experience real and profound dominant or submissive satisfaction.

* [my personal favorite] the submissive is always ultimately in charge.

My friends, you cannot be the absolute slave of someone whom you seldom or never meet. You may want to be. You may try to be. You may feel as if you are--and more on this in just a moment. But someone who is not with you most of the time, observing your behavior and needs, cannot control you, which is what a master does, if the word "master" is to retain any real meaning at all. Likewise, you can not absolutely control someone whom you never or seldom see.

My friends, you cannot be the absolute slave of someone and continue your vanilla marriage and the rest of your life pretty much as usual.

My friends, when you "submit" to or "dominate" someone in a situation where safe words are used and when limitations are negotiated, you are not actually submitting or dominating at all--you are playing at it.

Is anyone really pissed off yet (g)? Even if you are, stick with me.

If all of what I've just said is true, howcum so many people disagree with me? Howcum so many people do those things and things like them and believe that they are actually owning or owned, actually dominating or submitting? Several reasons.

The first is an ancient human psychological ploy: wish-fulfilment and self-deception. People often feel their dominant or submissive needs deeply and are quite driven by them. Still, very few people view change, let alone drastic and painful change, with equanimity: they want to have their cake and eat it, too, have their dominant or submissive needs met without messing up the rest of their lives, without having to make extremely painful and portentous decisions. What's the solution for a lot of these folks? Pretending and believing. If I want it to be so, it is so. That's wish-fulfilment. If it isn't really working as well as I'd like, then just deny that and plunge on. After all, what I have now is more than I had before, and to have more would mean facing choices that I simply don't want to face.

Wish-fulfilment and self-deception need a lot of support from the real world to work, though, and that support does indeed come from the activities of the public SM life style. This is the seductive part, the dangerous part, the part that leads many people to disaster. People here who disagree with me will say: "But when I do these things, I really feel it! I go places where I've never been before, where I could not go if I were just playing at it. This is real!" In a sense, yes.

The emotions involved in dominance and submission, even in just fantasizing about them, are very, very strong and compelling--no doubt a few people around here have noticed that (g). Perhaps this is because the establishing of and awareness of pecking orders and dominance relationships is so important to most animals, perhaps for other reasons, too, but very strong they are. In fact, they're dynamite. The fact is that just playing around the edges of these emotions, even just playing at them as people do at play parties or with "absolute masters" whom they've never met, can be spectacularly affecting to the people involved. They go into "sub space." They can feel the exhilaration of controlling another person's actions and senses, even if that control is extremely limited. These experiences strike deep into our animal natures and make us feel intensely, perhaps more intensely than ever before; they seem to speak to us directly.

But it's crucially important to realize that that experience is like a kind of masturbation: the profound experience is coming more from inside you, from your imagination and expectations, from the contrast between the way you are behaving sexually and the way you are supposed to behave, from the experience of actually indulging some of your fantasies--no matter how pale-ly--than it is coming from that actual and only prerequisite of the other SM life style, that one thing that must lie at the root of all relationships in the second, often more private, version of the SM life style: the actual--and often the absolute--exchange of power.

I promised in the beginning that I'd describe the difference between the two SM life styles, and I just done did it. In the larger and more public life style of the SM subculture, despite all appearances, the actual exchange of power between two people is rare. In the smaller version of the SM life style of which I've been a part for most of my adult life, power is exchanged, either absolutely or, especially in the early stages of a relationship, experimentally.

It sounds like a simple difference. It sounds as if it ought to be easy to tell a relationship in which power is actually being exchanged from one in which it is not. It should be easy, too, but often it is not. The reasons for this are several. One of the main ones is that the distinction between a situation in which two people have actually exchanged power and one in which they are simply trying to do it but have not accomplished it yet can be subtle--crossing over that line involves changes in the heads of the two people rather than changes in their activities. Another one, sadly, is that many of the denizens of the public SM subculture, including most of its high-profile leaders and gurus, work hard to confuse the issue. Some of this misinformation is unintentional, sown by people who are simply confused. Some of it, alas, is intentional, generated by "dominants" who prey on new and needy submissives and by "experts" interested largely in promoting themselves--I'm sure that most of you can think of a few who might qualify for this last.

If you cannot, let me help you out. Have you read books that tell you that there are X number of Positions of Submission that all submissives must learn? That "masters" and "mistresses" should be addressed thus-and-suchly by submissive people, even if they don't know one another from Adam's aardvark? That negotiations, even between people who know one another well, are mandatory, since eschewing them violates the credo of "safe, sane, and consensual"? Have self-styled experts on line--usually but not always men who say that they are dominant--told you that a submissive is ultimately in control of a scene or a relationship? That love and SM should not be mixed? That he or she is the absolute owner of six slaves, some of whom he or she has never met and most of whom he or she hardly ever sees? That safe words must always be used? That he practices "Gorean slavery"? That relationships of ownership and slavery in the literal sense of these words are either impossible or to be avoided absolutely because they are inherently abusive?

People who tell you that sort of thing are describing correctly a certain reality: the stylized, fantasy-based reality of the SM life style which most sadomasochists in this country practice. It's all perfect nonsense, of course. There is no list of Positions of Submission. People ought to be addressed by their actual names, except in special and rare circumstances in the context of real relationships. Negotiations, safe words, and the idea that the submissive is ultimately in charge are ideas generated by people whose lives are dedicated to play parties and play relationships where responsibility, like power, remains fundamentally unexchanged. In the most successful and happy SM relationships, love and sadomasochism are inseparable--love must exist in any relationship that is longlasting and happy. It is a profound and constant challenge genuinely to own one person; someone who tells you that he or she owns two or five or nine is really telling that he or she owns nothing at all except a fervid imagination. Anyone who tells you that they practice "Gorean slavery" and have done so in real life for more than a few months is almost certainly lying to you. And ownership and slavery, in the literal senses of the words, are both possible and, for many people, mandatory for happiness.

But you know what? All that silliness, all those imagined rituals and silly orthodoxies can be fun for people--if those people are unable or unwilling to have the real thing--or are uninterested in having the real thing. As I said above, for many people the play world, whether at a play party or in a full-time relationship, is just dandy. More power, as it were, to them (g). So what's my beef, eh?

My beef is that the overwhelming power of the ideas promulgated by the public SM subculture hurt a great many people, people who need more than fantasy play in their lives. There are a lot of those people, too. And they get eaten up by the public subculture in many ways. Here's the worst of 'em.

Remember that submissive woman I talked about above who has had submissive fantasies all her life but who, like lots of people, represses them because she thinks that they are sick and in any case that nothing can be done about them? Then one day she is surfing the Net and happens upon an SM-oriented page, which leads her to an SM channel on IRC or to alt.sex.bondage or another kinky news group. Remember what a wondrous revelation comes over her! Here are the people who understand her needs and who don't think they're sick! And she begins to explore the possibilities.

Now, let us say that this woman is a woman of unusually deep submissive needs. A woman whose fantasies and dreams are not just about being spanked or whipped or tied up or having enemas forced on her or any of the rest. Her fantasies go beyond that, to an absolute exchange of power, where she is genuinely owned by a man or a woman who has both the need and the ability to own her and who also loves her dearly. This woman is newly hopeful that her needs can be met by someone out there in the public SM subculture, and she goes searching in many ways. She talks to other people about her fantasies. She goes to play parties and support groups, where she is welcomed with open arms. She reads books and pamphlets. And, far more often than not, here's what she finds.

She finds people and publications that tell her that what she wants is either impossible or sick or both. She finds people who claim that their relationships are wonderful, exactly what she has in mind, but when she actually gets to know these people, she finds that their relationships are not as described--that the people are either living a palpable and obvious fantasy or that their glowing descriptions of how they live are dishonest, that their relationships are dysfunctional and unhappy. Or she may meet "dominants" who make many promises on which they don't deliver.

What a position to be in! Her brave new world of hope is suddenly and cruelly dashed on the rocks of the reality of the public SM subculture, and so, in the end, she gives up any hope for what she really wants and needs and either withdraws back into denial or settles for a fantasy relationship that may or may not be better than nothing. There are lots of people like this woman, folks, who have been mortally wounded, in an emotional sense, by the ideology and practice of the SM subculture. I've dealt with them in counseling--and, believe me, they are often irrevocably lost.

This woman I'm describing has a sister who is also a victim of the public SM subculture. In fact, Sister is considerably more common than the woman I described above. She comes into the subculture with no sense at all of the depth of her submissive needs. She joins in the fun, and she enjoys it. But genuine internal exploration, while the SM subculture pays lip service to it, is not something that is really encouraged. This woman is absorbed by the subculture and its ideology and values, and what she might have been if she is in fact profoundly submissive, the joy and satisfaction that she could have found if encouraged honestly to explore herself and if supported in the process, is never hers.

I'm willing to wager that there are people here tonight who fit both descriptions. It's a damnable shame.

Let me put this bluntly. A woman with deep submissive needs, the kind of woman who needs to be owned to be happy and fulfilled, is far more likely, at the mercy of the public SM subculture, to be the victim of an abusive and manipulative man or woman posing as a dominant than she is to find a man or woman who will actually be her loving life partner and who can and will give her the control that she so desperately desires. That's not something that we ought to be proud of.

I want to talk for a moment about the other SM life style. As I said above, there's only one crucial difference between the public SM life style and its alternative: the actual exchange of power. Simple idea, right? Sure. But what the hell does it mean?

People involved in the public SM life style use all sorts of words that describe what they do that imply that power has been exchanged: mastery and slavery, dominance and submission, ownership, control, helplessness, many more. But, although it's popular in the subculture to twist the meanings of those words so that they seem to fit activities supported by the subculture, so that they support the fantasy of the exchange of power, in fact very little of it goes on. This is another unpopular idea; nevertheless, it's a fact.

If you go to a play party and negotiate with a dominant what he may or may not do to you and then you "submit" to activities entirely obedient to the terms of the negotiation, you are giving up no power at all; you are controlling the activity from beginning to end, even though you do not always control each specific event that occurs within it. If you like that, great--I have no bone to pick with you whatever. Just don't pretend that it is what it is not. If you sign a "slave contract" with a dominant that says what he controls and what he does not, what he is allowed and what he is not, then you remain in control of the relationship to a degree that precludes any genuine exchange of power. If you have a scene or a relationship that includes a "safe word" whose effect is to stop whatever is occurring when you speak it, then who is really in ultimate control? 'Tis you.

People living that other, usually more private, SM life style eschew any situation where any control at all remains in the hands of the submissive--although, particularly in the early stages of the relationship, they may accept certain limits, especially limits of time, until they are are sure that they want to make final commitments of ownership to one another. There is supposed to be enough trust and intimacy between them that the absolute commitment of control or helplessness is possible. And, while just making the commitment to helplessness and absolute ownership does not create helplessness and absolute ownership in an instant--does not make out of whole cloth that genuine exchange of power--it is the beginning of the process of creating it. People who make that final and irrevocable commitment to one another and who then make the relationship work are without a doubt the happiest and most satisfied people in the SM world--in fact, they are as a group the happiest and most satisfied and contented people whom I have ever met.

What is living this life style like? Well, aside from the fact that it always involves an actual exchange of power, people living this life style often share very little with others living it. The hallmark of the people living this life style is that they create their own shared and very individual realities. They do the things that work for them, not the things that self-appointed SM gurus tell them are the things that "all BDSM people do." Although there are a few emotions, attitudes, experiences, and difficulties that most such couples have in common, beyond these very basic matters there is very little that all of us share. How people actually live in such a relationship is ultimately decided by the ideas, intelligence, experience, and character of the dominant, leavened by the same qualities of the submissive, as well as by the particular package of emotional difficulties that the submissive brings to the relationship. The submissive's life may be anything from that of a cloistered house slave to that of an active and aggressive woman of and in the world who is yet absolutely submissive to her owner. There are endless permutations--whatever makes the two of them happy is what they do. It can be permanently glorious.

So how do you, as a submissive woman, know if that sort of life is right for you? And if you decide that it is--if the version of the SM life style that is for you is one where you are absolutely owned by your loving dominant--how do you go about creating that kind of life for yourself? Just as important, how do you avoid the pitfalls of trying to create that sort of life for yourself (serious dangers lurk in these waters)?

In the answer to that question lies an irony and a paradox. One of the characteristics generally shared by profoundly submissive women is the desire to be little: to be without ultimate responsibility, to be loved and controlled almost in a parental sense. And yet, before such a woman can be little, she has to be very big indeed. She has to take a difficult and often searing inner journey to decide if the life of a slave is something that she absolutely needs (if she doesn't really need it, she ought not to mess with it). If she decides that such a life is for her, she faces the daunting prospect of finding, in the SM wilderness, the master or mistress who is right for her. All of this requires taking the kind of responsibility for self, the ability to make difficult decisions that, good or ill, will change her life forever, that are precisely the kind that she often wants to do away with entirely. And she'd better make her decisions well, too.

So how does our profoundly submissive woman go about all of this? Glad you asked (g).

That inner journey, through which she must know herself well enough and be absolutely honest with herself, must usually be made more or less alone, alas. There may be friends who can help her, if she is lucky there may be a couple who is in a genuine power exchange or at least whose members are not hostile to the idea and who understand it, who can help. But the most obvious way--becoming involved with the myriad "dominants" and "mentors" who populate the public SM world--is something that she should avoid. Many of these folks have agendas of their own, and they are less interested in helping the submissive to know and discover herself than in getting her clothes off her and bending her over the nearest hassock. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but how can she know that the person whom she's relying on for honest counsel and insight is either honest or insightful? She cannot.

The details of that inner journey are a subject far too complex to address here in any more detail than Polly and I have. We'll certainly be dealing with it in Submissive Women Speak. But its outlines should be pretty clear.

So let us say that our submissive woman's inner questioning is done and that she has decided that her happiness lies in exchanging power, in giving up control of her life to another person. What now? Unfortunately, things get even harder.

The challenge of finding a man or a woman whom she can love and who can love her, who needs to own another person as badly as she needs to be owned, and who has the emotional maturity to pull it off is daunting. What such a woman must do is to make her interest known anyplace where she imagines such a person might be watching. Yes, it's true that most of those places are the strongholds of the public SM subculture: support groups, educational organizations, interest areas on line, and even (shudder) SM clubs and munches. That those are basically the only places to look for such people, outside of a chance encounter in the Piggly Wiggly, is part of why the task is so daunting.

Having made her interest known, our hopeful submissive will be deluged with offers from putative dominants, all glad to give her "exactly what you're looking for." Anyone here ever experienced anything like that (g)? Some of these people are lying to her, trying to get her bent over that ubiquitous hassock. Others who respond to her believe that they can offer what she needs; it's most likely that all of them, inculcated with the ideas promulgated by the public subculture, are wrong. They'll be happy enough to play with her, and they probably like the idea of owning someone, in theory. But are they capable of it? Do they have their emotional shit together enough to do it? Do they really want the responsibility, day after day and year after year and decade after decade, of absolute power over another person? Not bloody likely. The person who might be for our girl is the one who meets all of those prerequisites and who really needs to own a woman; anyone with less than that real need will poop out pretty quick.

Hard as it is, our submissive woman must keep looking, fending off the bozos and the poseurs and the honest people who really don't understand what she means by a permanent exchange of power. She may be able to get some help from a couple who is living the life that she wants to find for herself and living it successfully. Such a couple may be able to help her enormously in her search--if she can find one. If she has someone in mind to help her, though, it's crucial that she see their relationship as it is--not as they say it is--and be certain that what they have together is fundamentally similar to what she wants for herself.

What to look for in an owner and how to tell if someone is the right person is too complex a process to talk about here in any detail, and, in any case, I've talked long enough for one evening. Perhaps we can go into it at another time; we certainly will do so in our book.

To conclude, then: there are really two SM life styles, one the life style of the public SM subculture and the other, often very private, of the actual exchange of power between two loving people. One is relatively easy to become involved in and to enjoy, the other much more difficult (although both have their dangers). Each of them is fine for the right person. Either can be emotionally deadly and physically dangerous for the wrong person.

If you like the public SM subculture and if it's all you want or all you can have, enjoy yourself to the fullest. Remember, however, that there are others out there who are not cut out for it and who you may be able to help by telling them that they have alternatives. If you think that you may be someone who would thrive within the strictures of a permanent power exchange, know that it is possible to make such a life for yourself if you do the hard work that is necessary first. And all of you: remember that being absolutely honest with yourself, not letting yourself wiggle away from the tough questions about yourself, is the surest way to happiness.

I'd like to thank Artful and Natasha for having us tonight. Polly and I would be happy to answer any questions about what we've said tonight.

• I want to play frequently, much more frequently than he chooses to.
• I want him to do new things to me or more elaborate things to me than he already does.
• I want him to do all those active things he is incapable of doing because of his physical disability.
• I want him to do the same things to me--and with the same intensity--as he did during our first week together, when I was in "submissive boot camp" and was being given a strong orientation. Sometimes I think that I just want to feel as intensely as I once did when I was new and exploring things.
• I want him to act like one of those dominants in the fiction books: tie me up and chain me in a dark, cramped cell overnight; have me kneel at his feet every second of the day unless he has something else for me to do; whip me constantly, so I'm always bruised or welted; make me walk around naked or half-naked at all times; you know, all the usual fantasy crap. And I want him to do this every single day, not just on special occasions!
• I want him to be meaner to me, more strict, more stern, more rigid, more demanding and not be so nice whenever I ask him for something. I want him to refuse me, arbitrarily, or just for fun.
• I want him to give me away to be played with by other dominants whom I find sexually attractive and safe.
• I want never to freak out or yell at him, never get upset, never get resistant, never feel like a bad submissive.
• I want not to have to play that stupid card game that he likes so much virtually every stupid night of the year before we go to bed!
• I want him always to know, instantly, the right thing to say to calm me down and bring me back to my submissive self when I am upset.

• I need to feel completely safe with him and to be able to trust him with anything I might bring up or that might happen. I need to be able to trust his stability and know that he won't freak out, no matter what I throw at him.
• I need to feel actually controlled and owned and overpowered by someone who enjoys controlling another person and is not doing it simply to please me.
• I need to know that when we have kinky sex he is truly sadistic and gets sexual enjoyment from doing what he does to me. It would crush me if I thought he were doing it just to "get me off."
• I need to know I cannot get away or escape from him, even if I wanted to. (Believe it or not, for someone who is strongly submissive, this is part of her "safety" need).
• I need to feel obedient to him, and I need to know that he's in charge and making all the major decisions (not because I can't--making large decisions is easy and even fun for me--but because if I were to make them, I would feel like the one in control of the relationship, a feeling that I hate).
• I need to know that I cannot bully him or push him or manipulate him or talk him into into doing whatever I want, into being some sort of perfect RoboDom.
• I need to know he can solve any serious problems that come up between us.

After being approached by a well known Third Wave feminist author who saw some of her work in the USENET news group alt.sex.bondage, Polly Peachum wrote Violence in the Garden for inclusion in a collection of Third Wave feminist essays. The book's stated purpose was to demonstrate that women can be feminists while also living lives that appear incompatible with traditional feminist principles. While the editor of the book loved the article and called it one of the strongest pieces in the collection, she decided, under the influence of other doctrinaire feminists, not to include it because the life and ideas it describes are too controversial (or "sick," as one of her advisors put it) and would turn unwanted media attention on that single essay instead of on her book as a whole. Apparently, women whose life styles resemble Polly's are not worthy of notice, let alone defense, by mainstream feminists.

The locus of fantasy of a lucky man holds no robots; of a lucky woman, no predators; they reach adulthood with no violence in the garden.
--Naomi Wolf (1)

     

We have an indoor cat, and so each morning, as a special treat, I carry our little gray tiger in my arms as I walk through the wildly disorganized jungle that my neighbors mistakenly call their garden. As I take my tom along paths lined with flowers almost a foot taller than I am, beside a dark stand of pines, and back around the magnolia tree and through the weedy grass to the struggling tomato patch, I often find myself daydreaming about who or what might be hidden in the vegetation, watching me with hungry eyes. In my "unlucky" imagination, the dark, fertile garden is populated with predators. Behind every bush, lurking just out of sight within the shadows, is someone stronger and more brutal than I, someone who will overpower me and bend me to his will, someone who will cruelly torture or humiliate me just to see me blush, whimper, or scream with pain.

It is a wonderful, thrilling daydream, and I live a less feral version of it in my daily life. I spend my life as a full-time slave within a heterosexual sadomasochistic relationship. To many, I know that this must make me seem to be a self-destructive, abuse-loving victim. That view is neither right nor fair. My jungle daydreams (and my hard-core reality) represent the living out of sexual desires that are for me far more positive than--albeit radically different from--what most people consider to be healthy or even sane.

I am not alone in having these kinds of dreams. According to a study mentioned by Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth (2), Dr. E. Hariton finds that 49 percent of American women studied have submissive fantasies. Like me, they have dreams of being captured, spanked and whipped, controlled, used like a toy. But because sexual dominance, submission, and sadomasochism in general are looked upon with horror and distaste in mainstream society, most people with submissive sexual fantasies, women or men, stop at the level of fantasy. I have chosen, however, to turn my fantasies into reality, and in doing so, I have made my most cherished dreams come true. I believe myself to be the happiest and most fulfilled person I know. I am certain that I owe my happiness to one simple fact: I have pursued and embraced my deepest desires instead of ignoring them. I have become the person whom I feel I was always meant to be, the person I needed to be. I am reasonably unconflicted, reasonably at peace with myself, and vibrantly alive. I have accepted my passion for submission absolutely as the healthy, life-affirming, and wondrous choice that it is for me. In the six years during which I have been living the dream, I have never once regretted my choice or cursed my perverse desires. In fact, I consider myself to be one of the luckiest people alive.

I suspect that many women must see me as a downtrodden tool, duped by a man into doing what women have done for men in most cultures from time immemorial: serving, obeying, and sexually servicing them. I see myself, in contrast, as a conscious, intelligent, and intrepid individual who has dared to do what few women attempt: I have taken an enormous risk, rejected almost everything that the organs of society have told me should make me happy, and deliberately pursued that which I knew inside would actually make me most happy. And I have succeeded.

My success was hard won and all the more dear to me for that. No one in this culture grows up being told that being a slave is a good thing. No one is encouraged to become a servant or praised for her subservience. If you are a child with such desires, you learn to keep them from your parents. As you grow older, you hide them from your playmates. And if you, like me, reached puberty in a time of growing feminist consciousness, you may even have learned to keep them from yourself. But in the end, hiding your true sexual desires from yourself never works. Like the proverbial bad penny, one's sexuality always comes back from whatever faraway land it's been banished to and must, sooner or later, be consciously dealt with, even if the conscious decision that results is to be aware of but to ignore one's urges.

Many of the women who, like myself, have gone beyond the fantasies and are active submissives struggle with the apparent contradiction of these desires with what society at large--and some doctrinaire feminists--tells us is good for our mental and emotional health. Resolving this contradiction is central to our sense of self-worth and humanity. Is what sadomasochists do, think, or desire wrong, as so many would certainly demand? If so, why do we want it so badly?

The emotional and intellectual conflicts that a submissive must resolve while learning to accept herself involve a wide range of issues beyond the core question of Am I sick? These are questions such as Must I repress parts of my personality in order to be a submissive? Can I ever get angry? How I can I take pride in myself as a strong woman and as a feminist if I am always at my master's beck and call? In my selfish desire for sexual satisfaction, am I perpetuating violence against women? What happens if I am ordered to do something I really fear or hate and I am incapable of doing it? I may believe that my desires are OK, but how can I live with other women's hatred of what I represent and--even worse--their pity for me?

The reality of my life is deeply shocking to most people. Among active submissives, I belong to the rare subset that lives the dream 24 hours a day, absolutely and completely, without breaks, time-outs, or respites. In the sadomasochistic subculture, this is referred to as life-style submission. Since the moment I gave myself away to another, I have taken my slavery very seriously. It is as real to me as if it were legally sanctioned, perhaps realer, as many legal slaves refused to consider themselves as owned chattel. Although no court would uphold my master's ownership of me, I consider our master-slave relationship to be far more binding than any legal document, because we decided together that we would both make it so. When I gave myself away to my master, it was with the explicit understanding that I would not be able to leave the relationship no matter how much I might later want to. In our arrangement, only he has the power to dissolve the bond of ownership, and this will remain true no matter how unhappy I might become. I have not once in six years become so miserable that I have wanted to leave. If I should feel that way at some point in the future, however, my master has promised me that he will carefully observe me and our relationship and try to resolve its difficulties for a long period in order to determine if leaving is really the best thing for me. If, after many months of careful observation, he believes that my unhappiness with him or with the relationship is a permanent condition that could not be fixed by either of us, he will release me. But he will not release me from slavery to him immediately if I should express such a desire. I cannot just walk out of the relationship. If I did, he and I both know he would have every right to get me back by whatever means he could, as I really belong to him absolutely, and not just when it is convenient for me to belong to him.

Although relationships like mine are not unique, in many other power relationships that I have observed, the couple does not take this aspect of ownership to the extreme that we have. The concept in these relationships is that the slave is continually giving her slavery to her master. That "gift" is constantly renewed with every moment and can be taken back by her whenever she wishes. Doing this would probably end the relationship, but ultimately both partners want the slave to have the final say, the final veto, and ultimately, absolute power. To me, such a relationship would be a sham, much as a child's "let's play house" game is an inconsequential and unreal imitation of an actual family, with all of its moral responsibilities and legal obligations. I would never have consented to such a sham slavery. Yes, certainly, I could gather up our little cat and then drive off in the car, never to return voluntarily, but the truth is that I will not, ever, do this. I have committed myself to being this man's slave for as long as he should want me to be, and that commitment, that decision to give myself away, is sacred to me. In a culture where marriages, the priesthood, and other commitments that are supposed to be permanent and sacred are broken as easily as we change our minds about what to wear to work, many people find this concept of absolute dedication difficult to understand or to credit; they don't believe that it really works. But I know myself to be a person capable of keeping such a commitment, and so does my master, and that's all that matters. The opinions of others on the actuality of my slavery have about as much affect on it as a swarm of suicidal moths has on the ability of a campfire to stay lit. The moths' effect, if any, is--in a very small way--to feed the flames of my dedication.

My life with my master is very tightly controlled. I must try to obey every order given to me, and on the few occasions when I disobey, I am severely punished. My actions are not my own, except during those limited times when my owner allows me to act freely (for example, he has given me permission to write for this publication; had he refused me permission, you would not now be reading this). My dreams are not my own, nor are my thoughts: I must reveal them to my master upon demand.

All the money I make is immediately turned over to my master, and he decides how or when it is spent. Likewise, all my former personal property, everything I used to call my own, now belongs to him. I must get permission for all major actions and for many trivial ones. For example, if I want to buy a new suit or take a new work contract (as a high-tech consultant, I do projects for a variety of clients), I have to get his permission. At home and often when I am away, if I want to use the bathroom, I must again get permission. I am not allowed to leave the bed at night without permission; in fact, I am tied each evening to the bed by a rope attached to a collar. If I am invited out for drinks or dinner by someone I work with, I must get permission, and often orders are given about the quantity and kinds of food and drink that I may consume. My owner requires me to do most of the housework, to exercise regularly, and to come immediately when he commands, no matter what else I might be involved with. Spankings, whippings, and other physical "abuse" are a recurring part of my life.

Although I am bound by the many rules that control my behavior, my everyday life, on the surface, resembles most people's. I keep my sexuality absolutely hidden at work, and while the occasional perceptive coworker will guess that my partner is "controlling," that's as far as it ever goes. We are "out" as master and slave only to other sadomasochists and to those very few of our straight friends and acquaintances whom we trust. Although this is not so for my master, I have discovered that the only people I really want to become good friends with these days are people who share my sexual practices. Submission is such a big part of my life that friendships in which that aspect of myself must be hidden feel incomplete, almost dishonest. My master is out to the immediate members of his family; I am not out to mine, primarily because I am estranged from them and cannot trust them. I left my family and my friends behind when I moved across the country to live with my master, and since the move, sadly, I have acquired many acquaintances but no close friends (it is difficult enough to find good friends when you have all of humanity to choose from; when you limit your selection pool to a small fraction of that, the search for simpatico people takes much longer). Although I am actively searching for new friends, I have resigned myself to the idea that this search may very well take years, if not decades.

Despite the fact that I am searching for my friends among other sadomasochists, I have a suspicion that the friendships I do form someday will probably be with sexually conventional people who have the understanding and compassion necessary to accept me as I am. The other kinky people that I meet are often disappointing because it so often turns out that the only thing we have in common is what we do for erotic excitement, and that is never enough to base a friendship on.

My relationship with my master is able in many ways to compensate for my lack of close friends. Unlike the cold and forbidding routines which are so often the lot of fantasy slaves in erotic literature, our everyday life is full of intimate, loving rituals, combined with a dash of sadism to keep things interesting. On an average morning, I am awakened by my master at the time he decides I should get up, usually between 5:30 and 6:30 am, even on weekends. I tell him my dreams from the night before, and, as I am usually still half-asleep after this recital, he lets me "float" for a few minutes before untying me from the bed and sending me off to use the bathroom. Our morning wake-up routine includes a number of other activities which we do purely for fun: an in-bed wrestling match, a morning song, a wake-up spanking, and a head over heels "airplane ride." I then go to make breakfast, collect the newspapers, and take my little cat for his garden walk. After a leisurely breakfast, I clean up the dishes and do some other morning chores. With those out of the way, my master has a brief planning conference with me to discuss what I must accomplish that day. During these conferences with my master, as with all our conversations, I am allowed--in fact, encouraged--to make any comments or suggestions that I wish, but the final decision on what I actually do that day rests with him. If I am working on contract, I either dress and go to the client's or go into our home office to begin my work. If I am not working that day, what I do depends upon what my master wants to get done and also on what I would like to do. I may run errands, I may clean house, I may write email to my electronic pen pals, or I may simply settle down in an easy chair with a good novel. Like conventional couples, we take vacations to the mountains or the shore. The crucial difference between what I do on an average day and what a person living a conventional life does is not in the kinds of things that I do but in the fact that whatever the activity, I must first get my master's OK. Another difference is that, when I am at home, whether working or playing, my master will interrupt my activities many times during the day with orders for me: to get him lunch, to fetch him something from another room, to listen to him read me a news story, to have another planning conference, to bend over and be caned, and so on. It could be anything. At night, after dinner is cleaned up and all my evening chores are finished, we will often do something together before bedtime, such as watch a TV show or play a game of cribbage or backgammon--or something more intensely sadomasochistic. When it is time for bed, I participate in another set of playful rituals. Just before lights out, I am tied to the bed and blindfolded. I am usually sound asleep within 10 minutes.

My tightly structured life with its heavy workload and the never-ending requirement to obey may seem intolerable to most people, but I reap many rewards from it. I am madly in love with my master and he with me: he understands my special needs and complements them perfectly. Within this relationship exists a level of intimacy that I haven't experienced anywhere else. It is so comforting to be able to tell--in fact, to be required to tell--one's darkest secrets to someone else: someone else knows all of this; I am not alone. My master is a gentle and compassionate dominant, and there is a strong healing aspect to our relationship. He supports me, builds me up, makes me feel good about myself, but never lies to me. I have absolute trust in him. I find that the longer I live with him and the better I know him, the more time I want to spend with him.

No matter how benign the rule, no matter how eroticized the physical pain, the question remains, however, of why anyone would subject herself to outrageous violations of her personal freedom. Part of the explanation is purely sexual: giving away control, having no say in the major or trivial decisions that affect me, provides me with a continuous low level of erotic excitement. I am always slightly turned on. Beyond that, most life-style submissives, including myself, include something that I think of as a "service ethic" in their personalities. I long to serve. I love to bring my master pleasure by doing his bidding. At no time in my life have I been unaware of that service ethic.

As important for most of us female submissives as the joy of service is intimacy: experiencing extremes of pain and humiliation at the hands of one's dominant creates an intensely intimate bond. This person can do anything to me. I have absolutely no defenses against him. My soul is stripped bare and on display before him. This intimacy is frightening in its intensity. The trust required to experience it is prodigious. But submissives who have felt it within the context of total powerlessness describe it in ecstatic, almost mystical, terms. For us, the admission price of fear and vulnerability is well worth paying for a ticket to heaven on Earth.

These are some of the general features of submission valued by myself and other submissives. But just what a submissive feels, what turns her on, surprises many people. The tediously conventional answer, often said with a snicker in the voice, is "whips and chains," but for me, the richly idiosyncratic sensations, fantasies, and impressions that excite my erotic imagination and bring my submissiveness to the fore are practically endless in their variety. They include the intoxicating smell of new leather; the sight of someone dressed entirely in black; the thrilling touch of cold steel restraints against my skin; watching a pair of gloves being slowly drawn on; the pungent and humiliating taste of my own juices on a pair of fingers being forced into my mouth; hard, sharp sounds, such as a club coming in contact with a golf ball, which remind me of wood or leather being brought sharply to bear against flesh; the terrifying sensation of blood trickling down the back of my leg; the vision of someone slapping a riding crop rhythmically against his hand; the acidic taste of fear accompanied by a crazy leaping sensation in the stomach; the intent eagle-like expression found in the eyes of certain dominants; a slap on the face; a hand at my throat, gently squeezing, threatening; the sight of a needle as it passes through skin; the unique sensation of lying on the floor with a boot pressing down on my head; an intense, embarrassing, goose-bumpy awareness of one's nakedness in front of a group of fully clothed people; being forced to kneel, crawl, or grovel; being forced to assume the classic slave position of head to the floor, bottom raised to expose the buttocks and genitals for my dominant's amusement; an inability to catch my breath and an aching pain in my mouth that come from giving forced oral pleasure; the sound of my beloved's laughter in response to my screams of agony; the close embrace of a locking steel collar around my neck; the taste of a leather whip that is shoved against my lips to be kissed or licked. The life of a life-style submissive at its best is a low-level--and often not so low-level--phantasmagoria of erotic stimulation, profound intimacy, and intense awareness of specialness.

Such a life, obviously, is not lived unexamined. The questions that submissive women ask themselves, the internal colloquies which they engage in, arise from the cultural sea which surrounds them: the submissive's questions are the inverted accusations of society. But are these accusations fair, or do they embody myths that most people believe simply because it seems the right or obvious thing to do? The myths themselves must be examined. Do the assumptions made by conventional society about submissives match the submissives' personal experiences? The motives of those who publicize myths and negative attitudes about submissive sexuality must also be examined by the female submissive in search of her own acceptance of her needs.

The mythic female submissive is weak, unable or unwilling to make decisions, because she does not want to bear the normal burdens and responsibilities that other adults bear, or because of a pathological need to be dependent upon the dominant. She and her dominant are said to form a particularly violent and sickly codependent relationship.

As is often the case with popular beliefs about people or things we are uncomfortable with, the belief in the weak female submissive is often the exact opposite of the reality. In fact, most people would be incapable of full-time, life-style submission no matter how much they might desire it, because they simply don't have the strength of personality required. Most people, when they think of a submissive, picture a rubber-willed, weak little doormat whom everyone, not just a particular dominant, can walk all over. The truth is that while there are certainly some weak submissives, who fit the rubber-mat profile, there are also many weak people involved in conventional, non-kinky relationships. Self-destructive people exist--period. Some are drawn to sadomasochism, most not, but they will go wherever they must to find affirmation of their worthlessness.

Weak individuals are a minority among conscious female submissives and are especially rare in life-style, permanent relationships, for a number of interrelated reasons. Most important among them is that people involved in life-style submission tend to take their sexuality and their potential partners very seriously. A lot of careful evaluation goes on, both by the submissive and by the dominant, before a union, especially a permanent union, is formed. It would be awfully hard for a weak or self-destructive individual to hide such tendencies from an experienced dominant, as signs of pathologically low self-esteem are one of the primary traits that an experienced dominant looks for--in order to avoid--when getting to know a submissive woman (healthy male dominants avoid self-destructive submissives because dominants are interested only in an actual exchange of power, and power is not something that a self-destructive submissive has much of to exchange). Successful life-style relationships require a measure of strength and unselfish giving that a person obsessed with getting her negative sense of herself confirmed has no energy for nor interest in. Absolutely sincere obedience, the kind that resonates in the soul as the required action is performed, is rare and, even if you have a knack for it, is extremely difficult to cultivate. Only an individual with a good grasp of her own strengths and a positive opinion of her abilities is capable of learning obedience in the form required in an absolute master-slave sadomasochistic relationship. Only a very strong and stubborn personality will have the ability to stick with it when the going gets rough: when she doesn't want to obey or when orders are given in a humiliating fashion, perhaps in front of others whom she wishes to impress with her independence.

Another feature of the weak-submissive stereotype is that submissives "escape" into a life-style relationship in order to avoid adult responsibilities and decision-making. I can't speak for all life-style submissives, but I certainly didn't volunteer for a lifetime of slavery out of a need to have my decision-making taken away from me. I was 30 years old, had been living on my own and making decisions for over 12 years, and was having not the slightest trouble fending for myself before I became involved with my master. In fact, giving up decision-making was particularly difficult for me. I was used to making decisions in my personal relationships. I was used to being among people who liked me to make the decisions, and I had grown to trust my own judgment. Trusting someone else to make decisions about the relationship, let alone about me, that are as good as or better than my own was very difficult to do, and only lengthy experience with someone who actually is as competent as myself has eased my mind in this area.

(Closely connected with the stereotype of a submissive as a weak doormat is the image of the dominant as a manipulative, selfish, and immoral predator on weak people: a person who cannot form a relationship with someone his equal. While some people are attracted to the dominant role out of personal insecurity, out of the belief that the only way they can attract and hold a woman is by dominating her, successful life-style dominants do what they do out of a deep wellspring of confidence which tells them that what they do is profoundly right: that this is what they were meant to do. It is a mirror image of the submissive's feeling of being "home." Experienced members of the S&M communities know how to differentiate between a wannabe dominant doing it for all the wrong reasons and the real McCoy. Insecure people who are not really dominant show numerous clues, and these traits can be spotted by experienced submissives, just as experienced dominants can spot individuals with severe self-esteem problems posing as submissives.)

A crucial question about ourselves that most female submissives must contend with, and a particularly important one for feminists, is whether we, in our selfish desire for bizarre sexual satisfaction, are perpetuating violence against women. Sadomasochistic sex is commonly seen as ritualized violence: impersonal, brutal, dehumanizing, and objectifying. It is said to perpetuate hostility toward women and to turn the paradigm of loving, intimate relationships on its head. It is seen by many as amplifying power inequalities between men and women and promoting a form of sex that is cold and emotionally distant. These ideas are multifarious and must be looked at piece by piece.

Does conscious submissiveness have anything to do with cultural inequality between the sexes? It doesn't seem so to me. On the Internet, the international computer network, is a section where people can post personal ads for those interested in sadomasochistic sex. Typically, the posters of such ads reveal their dominant or submissive orientations. Most messages posted here are from submissive men looking for dominant women. (This is not definitive information, of course. Many factors affect the willingness to search publicly for sexual partners. But the reality as represented on the Internet does not support the idea that the roles played in sadomasochistic sex reinforce sexual stereotypes--nor does any other available information.)

According to Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (3), "Sexuality theorists traditionally have held that men are more likely than women to have sadistic sexual fantasies...that women are more likely than men to have masochistic fantasies. No evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, supports these conjectures. Indeed, submissive men are the single largest component of the [sadomasochistic] communities, and widespread male interest in submission is an observable phenomenon." Some of the belief that female submissiveness perpetuates stereotyped sex roles and violence against women is no doubt rooted in confusion about violence. Those who believe in the perpetuation myth assert that when one person hits another person hard enough to cause pain, this physical act, irrespective of whether the person being hit has asked the hitter to do so and is taking great pleasure and satisfaction from it, is violence in the same sense as a rape or mugging or spousal abuse. Neither the intent of the person being "abused" nor that of the "abuser" matters at all. But what about the submissive woman who eroticizes pain and force? If these are things that she wants, that affirm her from day to day and raise her to ecstasy at times, can they in any way be compared to the brutal violence forced on a desperate and unintentionally helpless victim?

The belief that female submissives take part in relationships that are impersonal and dehumanizing is particularly appalling. Those who so believe tend to be individuals who have no experience with female submissives or with sadomasochistic relationships. Some experience with such people and relationships would teach them that the people in long-term sadomasochistic relationships tend to be those with considerable conventional sexual experience who find it lacking in intimacy and intense personal communication (for example, I had a small number of short relationships, one 12-year relationship with a man, and one relationship of two years with a woman before I became an active sadomasochist). Submissive women generally find that sadomasochistic sex allows a deeply felt intimacy and closeness that conventional sex doesn't approach. The "consensual nonconsensuality" that is central to conscious sadomasochistic relationships requires a profound and even radical level of honesty and communication between dominant and submissive if it is to function successfully. Successful sadomasochists have learned to practice this hothouse honesty as a matter of course. Submissives who are unwilling to share what they really feel or who are actively dishonest as the whip falls or as the humiliation commences are avoided by experienced dominants and, in any event, generally fail as submissives (similarly, dominants who are dishonest and uncommunicative are dangerous and tend to fail as active dominants). Trust and honesty, the cornerstones of intimacy, may exist in a conventional sexual relationship, but nothing within the dynamics of such a relationship requires them in any high degree of either individual. Because these qualities are mandatory among successful practitioners in conscious sadomasochistic relationships, impersonality in such relations is simply impossible. Similarly, dehumanization, although it is often used by dominants as a technique to produce erotic fervor in a submissive during sex, dooms a life-style sadomasochistic relationship to an early end if it is a reflection of the actual attitude of either partner.

Yet despite the reality of being a female submissive, so much warmer and fuzzier than suspected by the unknowing, requiring such self-confidence and emotional strength, so exquisitely fulfilling, virtually every female submissive struggles, sometimes recurringly, with the question of whether her sexual and social tastes reflect serious pathology, perhaps involved with early physical or sexual abuse. I have certainly struggled with that idea.

Someone who knows my tastes and attitudes very well once gave me a little button that reads, "I've been reduced to THIS!" I like it very much, but I'd like to modify the button a little to make it read: "I've always wanted to be reduced to THIS!" as this wording aptly describes the story of my life.

I don't know if I was always submissive, but some of my first memories, beginning at age five, involve submissive acts and thoughts. I was the little girl who always wanted to serve the other kids I played with. I remember games in which I pushed my sisters around in a little toy wagon to the point of my own exhaustion, while thinking all the time of how comfortable they were and how much fun they were having thanks to my toils. I loved being able to be of service to them. With my parents I felt similarly but much more strongly. I glowed when they gave me things to do to help them around the house, and I accepted most punishments, when they came, with unquestioning obedience. Punishment held, even at that age, a distinctly erotic thrill. I was being physically corrected by someone stronger and wiser than myself, and that was not only just and right but also terribly exciting.

As I grew, I started to have explicitly erotic submissive fantasies: I'd make up stories about being a captive or a servant, forced to do extremely embarrassing things and endure painful punishment from those older and stronger than myself. These fantasies always excited me: they never made me feel evil or guilty. I think I assumed that all little kids dreamed of being chased naked in a circus arena by a swarm of bees trying to fly up their bottoms as the crowd laughed uproariously at such a shameful and painful predicament.

Around the age of nine, I tried consciously to engage the children I played with in master-slave games in which I, naturally, was always the slave. But while most kids loved the novelty of being the master, of being in charge of someone for a change, I seldom found any playmates who liked the game after the first few times we played it. I, of course, could play it all day if they cooperated, and I felt titillated while obeying my Lord's or Lady's increasingly outrageous demands. Paradoxically, when I actually learned some facts about sex in my early teens, the constant and powerful sadomasochistic themes that had pervaded my childhood faded into the background. Perhaps this was because I was too busy trying to learn what to do on a date; perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I, a voracious reader, had discovered feminist literature at the tender age of 13, literature which strongly suggested that fantasies along these lines were not appropriate. Whatever the reason, my submissive urges became, at puberty, much less conscious than before, only emerging at night, as an accompaniment to masturbation. But even at those times, I did not associate these fantasies with myself or my needs; they were just something I did while jerking off.

For years my sexual fantasies and inclinations went consciously unexamined, at least by myself. At age 17, an older acquaintance gave me a copy of Story of O (4), the classic sadomasochistic novel of the 20th century, to read, saying simply, "I think you'll find this interesting." I devoured the book, and it formed the basis for my fantasies for years to come, but I smothered any speculation about why she might have given me that book. I simply did not want to think about it. In retrospect, my denial seems amusing and also understandable. Try to imagine a precocious teenager taking community college classes and living with two male graduate students 10 years her senior. A true child of the Seventies, her curriculum includes a women's-studies class taught by a lesbian and a touchy-feelie human-sexuality class, in which sadomasochism is mentioned briefly in a five-minute talk about variations and fetishes and then never brought up again. Yet she comes home each night and spends 40 to 60 minutes kneeling on a hardwood floor at the foot of a bed, massaging her politically correct, ecologically conscious, and sex-role-sensitive roommate's feet, until he falls asleep! And the time she spends doing this is the most thrilling, exciting, and intimate part of her day. Once again, in a limited and socially acceptable way, I got to relive those thrilling times in childhood when serving gave me such pleasure. But sexual submission was just not something related to me. I did not reject it; I simply did not think about it--except as a nighttime fantasy.

I did nothing more about my fantasies till six years later, when, at the age of 23, I tried to spice up a five-year relationship by telling my boyfriend incidents from Story of O while straddling him during our lovemaking. He became so turned on by my stories that, to my great delight, he surprised me one day by tying my arms to a hook in our dorm-room ceiling. He then beat the living daylights out of me with a switch he had cut outdoors, degraded me, and attempted anal sex with me. This first genuine experience with forced submission thrilled me to my core, but the next morning, when my boyfriend saw the bruises on my hips and buttocks, he was absolutely appalled. His guilt at having caused these marks to appear on his lover's flesh prevented him from ever doing anything that "sick" with me again, despite my assertions that I had loved it.

Once again, my awareness of my submissive desires seemed to go underground, but they never were quite as buried as before. During the six years that I spent with my boyfriend after that one submissive experience, I'd listen to music by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Eurhythmics and actively fantasize about being captured, beaten and abused, and made into someone's masochistic plaything. But I took no action.

An awareness of my relationship to submissiveness may have been slowly moving toward consciousness during those years, but it took a catalytic experience, an epiphany of sorts, to bring home to me the fact that I am a submissive. I was almost 30 years old and had been seeing LuAnn, a woman I had worked with for nine months. She was an avid reader of popular fiction and had made me aware of Anne Rice's Vampire books (5). While reading them I was strongly affected by and attracted to the power relationships between a vampire and his chosen victims--really, between a centuries-old, experienced vampire and a young, recently human protege. In my usual steamroller reading style, I went on to read everything Rice had ever written, and I eventually stumbled upon her erotic novels, written under the pen name of A.N. Roquelaure (6). It was then, as I began to read about the erotic fairy-tale adventures of Beauty, wakened from a deep slumber by a rape and a spanking, that I was suddenly roused from my personal slumber to make the essential connection: this is me. I am like this fairy-tale character. I am a submissive, and I want nothing more than to be someone's slave! Bingo. The penny dropped. The trumpets blared. I went directly to Go and collected $200. There I was. But where was I? Was I nuts and just didn't know it? It didn't feel nuts. It felt right.

At that time I had no idea of how few people viewed sadomasochistic relationships as acceptable for others, let alone for themselves. It really hurt to learn, as I quickly did, that LuAnn was utterly unprepared to accept my self-discovery. I was suddenly isolated, had no idea of where to turn to meet people who shared my new interests, even to talk to someone who would not be repelled by my feelings. Like many people in my lonely circumstance--till later I had no idea how many--I turned to the computer nets for relief. Alone in my apartment, I learned how to attach a modem to a computer and discovered the world of on-line communications. I also quickly found, thanks to some surprising assistance from my ex-boyfriend, the kinky areas on the BBS'es and the commercial on-line services that I subscribed to. Here I began to meet other submissives and dominants. I left long, probing messages about my sexuality and within hours received numerous replies and private electronic letters. I got to know a number of people, even "played" with a few over the computer. I learned that the kind of total-immersion, or life-style, submission that I craved was not what everyone involved in sadomasochistic sex wanted. In fact, most people I met on line seemed satisfied with doing a little S&M with their partners in the bedroom or over a weekend and then returning to a conventional relationship of equals after these relatively brief "scenes." I, on the other hand, was certain that I wanted nothing less than absolute, never-ending slavery.

I searched among the people I was meeting on line for my dominant counterpart: someone who wanted to dominate and control as much as I wanted to submit and be controlled. Eventually I found him--actually, he found me. After a long correspondence, numerous phone calls, and several meetings lasting many days, I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to give myself to him in slavery. Although he could have ordered me to become his slave, and I would have obeyed instantly, he wanted this to be my choice--and my final free decision. I thought very carefully about it for several weeks, and up to the second when he told me it was time to decide, I consciously considered the idea that I had a choice, that I could back out. Even though I didn't want to back out and all of me was screaming for the experience of slavery, I was still very aware that up until the second I gave myself to him, I had the power to remain free. I wasn't brainwashed; he hadn't talked me into anything. On the contrary, I had been actively and aggressively searching for him, or someone like him. It was my decision, and it's been the best (and last) serious decision I've made.

When I first met my master on line, I expected to be manipulated. I expected bravado and show, masking a bottomlessly insecure ego, just as I had found in so many men whom I had met or had had relationships with. He had told me in one of his first electronic letters to me that he was a healer, someone who helped unhappy people to get better emotionally. In fact, when we first began to talk, he made it clear that although he was attracted to me, he saw me as someone he could help rather than as a potential lifemate. At the time, he had a slave whom he was happy with, and although that relationship later ended (he had chosen to end several earlier life-style dominant-submissive relationships which he had found to be unsatisfactory for various reasons), he was not "trolling for slaves," or trying to add me to some sort of sadomasochistic harem. He healed on an informal basis, he said, not charging the people he helped for his services, because he had a passion for it, a vocation. This all sounded so vague and New-Agish to me. I felt the same suspicion I would feel for someone who announced that he was a witch or that he could communicate with the dead. I assumed that this so-called healing was probably his ego outlet. And so I tested him.

Not really believing he could help me emotionally (no one in my life had been able to help me--any accomplishments or growth I had achieved had been in spite of the people around me, not because of them), I issued to him, without fully realizing that this was what I was doing, a challenge. In response to his healer message, I said in effect, and rather cynically, "Sure, Mr. Healer, you're welcome to do your thing all you want, but don't expect any fancy results from me." Much later, my master told me how he had chuckled over this "uppity" statement of mine and how he knew, even before we began, how quickly I'd change my mind. How did he know this about me? Having read my public messages carefully, and having a wide range of experience with people, he already knew that I was bright, motivated, and very sincere about my desires for submission. He also knew by then a lot about my personal problems and hang-ups: the things I wasn't facing, the assumptions about life that weren't working for me, my fears and sensitivities.

Realizing, as I soon did, that he knew so much about me was only the first of many extraordinary realizations I was to make about him over the years. As the master-lover-slave dynamic was slowly added to the healer-patient dynamic, I began to realize that everything he had said about himself, even those things that sounded as if they had to be idle boasting because they were too good to be true, was accurate and genuine. He really did have an immense confidence in himself and a positive attitude toward undertakings, which he was able to convey or project to people he was trying to help. He really did take responsibility for everything he did, and he always kept his word. If he said he was going to call me at 7 pm on Tuesday, he did. He had an absolutely steady personality which was unafflicted with mood swings and invulnerable to conversion syndrome (after reading this last sentence, my master said with his usual sardonic humor--he fancies himself a latter-day Oscar Levant--"Another way to say that is that I'm a fanatic"). He had enormous emotional strength and maturity and a baffling lack of emotional hot buttons. He was not overcome when terrible things happened in his life, nor was he strongly angered or upset by anything I did. Most refreshingly, he did not take either himself or anything in his life too seriously, and he constantly poked fun at both--something that an egotist posing as Lord Sir Omnipotent Dominant Of the Universe is incapable of. These strong personal traits have allowed my master to be reasonably successful, and sometimes very successful, in almost everything he has undertaken. In five decades of living he has been a writer and an editor of newspapers and magazines; a writer of books; a photographer, actor, and musician; a small business owner; and a labor organizer and civil-rights worker. In addition to all of these paid occupations, he has always found time to counsel people who come to him for help and, more often than not, to help them to effect in themselves profound personal change. Finally, he has been a staunch feminist for decades and was fighting for the rights of women long before they became fashionable things for men to pay lip-service to.

Six long and wonderful years have gone by, and I am extraordinarily happy with the choice I have made and the course my life has taken as a result. Were I given the opportunity to decide about becoming a slave again knowing everything I know now, I would choose identically. Looking carefully at myself as I am now and at the person I was before I became a life-style submissive, I can say that my experiences as a submissive have enormously enhanced my life and in some ways completely turned it around. Without my master's experienced guidance, I don't believe that any of this would have been possible. Six years ago I was incapable of pulling myself out of my self-made quagmire. I was very overweight and steadily gaining. Although I had a moderately interesting job, my own apartment, and a lover, I was at loose ends. I was deeply dissatisfied with myself and felt impotent, powerless to change a life that was perfectly functional but stuck in emotional neutral. I had my little satisfactions, things that made me happy, but most of these had become vices. I drank almost a six-pack of beer every evening while eating my enormous dinners. After months of this bodily self-abuse, I could barely drag myself out of bed each morning and into work. I often called in sick and felt tremendously guilty for doing so. I liked to correspond with people over the computer, but this, too, quickly became an addiction. I bought every beauty and fashion magazine as soon as it came out and spent hours enviously gazing at the beautiful models and dreaming of looking like one of them. Like eating and drinking, trying to match society's ideal of beauty was one of the ways I avoided confronting the real problem: the barren, unfulfilling aspects of my life. Oddly, I considered myself to be happy.

Now all of that has changed. I lost the weight I needed to lose on a slow and healthy eating and exercise plan (I wouldn't even call it a diet--it was so moderate and inclusive). For the most part, I no longer have a compulsion to overeat. I no longer drink heavily, nor crave drinking as an escape. I rarely read a fashion magazine these days, as the women in them no longer strike me as that attractive or desirable to emulate--in fact, I sometimes find myself thinking, when staring at one of those grotesque, heavily made-up bags of bones that these magazines so love to promote as the pinnacle of attractiveness, that it's a pity that poor scaggy model can't look more like me! I am no longer dissatisfied with my career: I make things happen. Unexpected results of my own unconscious making rarely sneak up on me, as they once regularly did. I'm not avoiding the knowledge of the effect that my actions have on my social and work environments any more. My subterranean efforts to sabotage my life have ceased. I don't believe that I am trying to escape or avoid any aspect of my life. Most importantly, who and what I am is no longer a dark mystery to me. I've discovered who I am, what I want from life, and am learning more each day about how to get it. I no longer let people walk all over me, and I can do things--like express anger to strangers--that were inconceivable to me six years ago. My low-level, ongoing emotion has changed from one of mild depression to one of happiness and peace with myself. I am no longer searching for a place in life; I have come home.

As much as my master has helped me to heal and grow, I have done most of the hard work myself. But what has allowed me to develop the power to change my life in such important and positive ways, when people can spend decades in formal therapy without getting these sorts of spectacular results, is that I am finally doing what I was meant to do, doing what I need to do in my life. I am living and experiencing, in a positive, sane, and unharmful way, the fantasies I've had for years of ravishment, violation, loss of control, erotic suffering, and degradation. After years of trying to understand just why I have been able to achieve all I have, I have concluded that when a person finds where she belongs or finds something she really loves to do, a lot of negative behaviors, including entrenched habits, may fall by the wayside, the superficial symptoms of a deep dissatisfaction with life.

I believe that I became a submissive in spite of my environment and experiences, not because of them. I have the kind of background that turns people into emotional basket cases, not sexual submissives. My father was an alcoholic who died before I reached puberty. While he was alive, he alternately abused me physically and emotionally and spoiled me with love and attention. After he died, I spent months crying myself to sleep with loneliness. Bad as he was, he was the one in the family who had given me a sense of myself as someone special and loved. (I am aware that my life as an adult in some ways is an acting out of my relationship with my father. I am also aware that for me it is a healthy one and that much more is involved in my sexuality than childlike re-enactment.)

Shortly after Dad's death, my mother dragged me out of the public-school system and sent me to Catholic school. The effect of our family constantly moving around and my going to a new school each year, in addition to the recent shock of losing my father had had its effect on me by then, and I was a pathetically shy, insecure child. I stood against the wall of the playground, watching the other children play, and made up hurtful fantasies about why I was never asked to join in the fun. I was too stupid; I was awkward. My family was too poor. I was a stranger. I was not as good as they were.

And then there were the nuns. Take an already insecure child with a very poor sense of herself and set a vicious and embittered pack of half-crazed emotional abusers loose on her, and watch the blood fly!

During those tortured years, my mother worked at a low-paying teacher's job to try to support a family of six. Her exhaustion and disappointment in her life left her emotionally distant and entirely oblivious to my misery. Although I was an intellectually and creatively gifted child, I developed a sense of myself which contained almost overwhelming elements of inferiority and defeat. I felt helpless, that almost everyone else around me was more powerful or more intelligent than I, that I could not do anything, and that I was incompetent to handle life in many ways simply because I was a woman like my mother. While I knew deep inside that my male classmates were not, in almost every case, more intelligent than I, I discounted my ideas and opinions as worthless next to theirs, abetted by my teachers. My large creative resources were put to heavy use inventing reasons for why the boys' thoughts were always better than mine.

My emergence from Catholic school, terribly wounded, left me facing puberty and my first genuine sexual experience, a rape at age 14, unarmed. And with this marvelous introduction to the wonderful world of sex under my belt, I passed through my teens and most of my 20s as frigid as the North Pole. The feminist literature which I began reading at that time gave me idealistic hopes about how things should be--how I, as a strong young woman, should act and feel--but I was in no position to put such ideals into practice. I had no experiences of success on which to build. But I was still alive deep down there, with an unshakable core of optimism, a stupid, unflinching hope that things would work out for the best. It's as if I had and have a metaphorical core of steel in me, raw and unforged, but nevertheless unwilling to give way. I know that I managed to keep a place in me safe from the awful things that life threw in my way, safe from the cruelties of the world. In that place I was happy, in that place I had hope for a better life, and in that place I lived my fondest and most intimate sexual fantasies.

My history is difficult but far less difficult than some and in no way different from the backgrounds of millions of women whose submissive feelings, if they have them, are unimportant in their lives. Yet many of these women, in a nearly infinite variety of circumstances, are unhappy, confused, at a loss--and I am not. Paradoxically, I have discovered how to act on my feminist convictions, how finally to make them a real and practical element in my life, during the last few years, which I have spent in slavery to a man. The basic theoretical premises of feminism, as I have seen them, are that women are as capable as men; that women ought to have as many rights, options, and responsibilities as do men; and that it is deeply wrong that anything should or should not happen to a woman simply because she is female. Feminism, as I have been living it during the last six years, has been bound up with the parts of my personality that were affected by sexist cultural attitudes. My becoming a practicing feminist (as opposed simply to believing in feminist ideals) has involved learning to believe that the lessons I learned as a child--that I was inferior, incapable of accomplishing anything important, that my opinions weren't valuable or important, especially when compared to a man's--are not true and acting as if they aren't true.

I work as a contractor in the field of high technology: an extremely risky and competitive career. I have no job security, I don't know where the next assignment or project will come from, and yet I am very successful at what I do. Part of the reason I get the jobs is that I have confidence that I will get them. Although I work in a technical field in which men predominate, I don't believe that the men who compete with me for contracts are any better than I am. I don't believe they'll get the jobs instead of me. And they usually don't. My confidence in my own abilities allows me to persevere in an environment where many people give up in despair due to the large number of rejections inherent in this kind of work. This confidence comes not entirely from my feminist reading, which, although it laid the groundwork, could not, given my background and expectation of failure, be put into practice, but also from the support and nurture that my master has given me. He believed from the beginning that I could do exceptional things. He knew that what was holding me back was not any lack of ability but my own lousy expectations. He helped me to see myself as a strong and competent woman. He also taught me how to succeed and how not to ignore and brush aside as meaningless past successes. I now feel ever stronger, more competent, and just better about myself than I ever have, and I expect these feelings to grow for a long time to come.

My experience of living within a power-exchange relationship and my acquaintance with other sadomasochists have also provided me with an important skill which gives me an increased sense of mastery over my life and environment. I have acquired a deep insight into the fact that power is a part of all relationships, whether professional, political, or personal, and I use that insight on a daily basis to satisfy more fully my personal and professional feminist ideals.

Most people are unconscious of the primary role that power transactions play in their lives. They don't realize when they are giving power away or when it is cleverly wrested from their grasp. They don't always know when they are taking it from someone else. Being oblivious to the power exchanges that occur in everyday life, people often base their actions and decisions upon false assumptions which ignore an important part of reality. Because dominants and submissives are constantly dealing with power directly and consciously in their primary relationships, it can sometimes be shocking to them that other people don't see this dynamic as clearly as they do. This awareness of interpersonal power dynamics has changed my life profoundly: I know how to handle most people. I can sense how situations are going to develop and therefore can predict when it is realistic to give up and when it is realistic to push on through.

These developing skills have come to my aid often. Once, for example, a manager I did a project for clearly appreciated my skills and experience but occasionally would insist that I had made some obvious mistake when I had not. I realized from the way this drama played itself out (he insisted he was right and at first refused to look at clear evidence showing that his assumptions were incorrect) that I was doing too good a job for his comfort and that he needed to perform this correcting every once in a while to reassure himself that he was still in charge of the project. Understanding this underlying power dynamic allowed me to do two things. I offered minimum resistance and backed down in those cases where his thinking that he was right would not adversely affect our work; this allowed him to feel in charge of the project again. But when the error he was making would have had a strong impact on the success of the project, I calmly stood my ground in spite of his escalating anger and accusations that I had "lost it," and I continued to point out the facts to him until he eventually saw what I was getting at. At heart, this man was rational, and, knowing this, I had the perseverance to wait out the emotional storm until his rationality returned.

Had I been unconscious of the ways in which people use power without knowing what they are doing or why they do it, the kind of behavior exhibited by this manager might have pushed my personal-integrity button (How dare he mistrust me; how dare he doubt my word about this issue!), and I might have walked off the contract and, master permitting, never returned. Knowing what was going on inside his head, however, made my personal indulgence in indignation unnecessary. Thus, oddly, my submissive sexuality has helped me to overcome emotional limitations that were once imposed by my history.

The relationship of my history to my sexuality is mostly obscure. It must be understood that, although theories--many of them preposterous--abound about the reasons for an individual's unique sexual needs, none of these theories has proven to be generally valid. And so, inevitably, it is futile to try to measure a woman's sexual needs against an arbitrary and unproved standard of psychological "normalcy." Even worse, less humane, is to imagine that an individual's sexual needs have some generalizable political meaning. Dr. Ronald Moglia, the director of the graduate human sexuality program at New York University, says in an interview in Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (7), "There's so much we don't know about how our sexual desires are formed. People often perceive sexual behaviors in a political manner. A lot of our behaviors are as a result of our social-cultural leaning and influences, and certainly, in women, that's a great force. But to then take that and apply it to people who act in a masochistic way--or in any other particular kind of way--makes me question how scientific the observations are, how politically biased the observations are, and what [such people] would say about the sadistic female that's appropriate and the masochistic female that's inappropriate." Nevertheless, the hostility of mainstream society, and of many feminists, to sadomasochists, and particularly to submissive women, is overwhelming.

That's one of the painful ironies of being a female submissive. Even after struggling with all the emotional confusion and political ambiguity engendered in one with strong submissive desires and finally reaching some level of internal resolution, she faces hatred and dismissal coming from most of the people among whom she must live and function. Hostility seems inevitable from an unthinking mainstream that regularly lumps sadomasochism with pederasty and bestiality as utterly beyond the pale--after all, this is the same mainstream that bathes in racism and sexism while denying both and which is rapidly and mindlessly destroying our planet. The hostility of a majority of high-profile feminists, however, is much more difficult to stomach.

Why are so many doctrinaire feminists, including some with high public profiles, so hostile to submissive women? (8) Their explanations, as noted above, center around the idea that the relationships that submissive women enter promote male cultural dominance and that images of submissive women, in sadomasochistic erotica and elsewhere, promote violence toward women. In Powers of Desire: the Politics of Sexuality (9), essayist Jessica Benjamin says, "The danger has always been that women and other victims of violence will be blamed or will blame themselves for 'provoking' it. This has led to an attitude of counter-blame: the discussion of erotic domination or rational violence in which participation is voluntary or fantasized seems to some an apology for male violence in general." But the first objection--that dominant-submissive relationships promote male dominance--even if it were true (and I do not believe that it is) denies the importance of the positive experiences of submissive women like myself as we live with and live out our sexual identities. And the second objection--like similar ones raised by censors and reactionaries of many stripes and over many centuries--is unsupported by honest data and is discredited.

I suspect that a low, vile hunger for power masquerades behind all of this righteous concern over the political meaning of my or my submissive sisters' activities and for our personal welfare. There is something incredibly arrogant and frighteningly Third-Reichish about a reasoning that goes "Because my own personal opinion of this form of sexuality is that it is terribly wrong and causes harm, it is therefore terribly wrong for everyone else and should be attacked and repressed."

Permanent Link | Comments ]]> http://www.the-iron-gate.com/essays/359 http://www.the-iron-gate.com/essays/359 Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:44:18 CDT From SubmissiveWomenSpeak.net, a now defunct website.

In an earlier paper, I highlighted the developmental line that produces a healthy adult heterosexual submissive female (here). I highlighted the role of temperament and environment and how they interact to influence the personality development of girls destined to have a submissive orientation in adulthood. In doing so, I alluded to problems in development that can occur, and in this paper, will expand on those.

There is a concept in the literature of temperament called "goodness of fit." This refers to the interactions between a child and her family of origin. When a child's temperament is found to be "good" by her family, and her developmental challenges are handled sensitively and well, development proceeds more smoothly than not. A novelty-seeking, sensation-seeking, socially expressive, high energy child will be seen as "good" in a family of high-energy, adventurous people. The same child in a low energy, novelty-avoiding, socially limited family will stick out like a sore thumb and irritate her parents and overwhelm them with her energy.


Similarly, a child who has an aversion to novelty, is slow to warm up, and takes little intensity of stimulation to react to will be "out of sync" in a family of high energy, novelty seeking extroverts. No matter how well meaning they may be, they won't "feel with" their very different child. They won't emotionally understand what the world is like for her, and why she has so much trouble with things the rest of the family finds easy and satisfying. There is a poor temperamental "fit".

It isn't so much what the temperamental characteristics are, it's the goodness of fit between parent and child. A similarly constituted child may fare VERY differently in two different environments, one more and one less well suited for her particular way of being.


This isn't to say that poorness of fit dooms the child to spend her adult life on some psychoanalyst's couch, but it does mean that the parent has to work that much harder to stay in empathic touch with his or her poorly fit child. And that during times of stress, their capacity to do so will be sorely strained.

In a situation of poorness of fit, with enough environmental stresses such as divorce, financial stress, or illness, it is inevitable that the child will suffer.

Let's imagine then a child with the essential temperamental trait of social responsiveness, that common trait in all submissives. That child that picks up subtle tensions, is vulnerable to criticism and praise, and develops a "people-pleasing" nature.

If such a child has OTHER temperamental traits that create a poor fit between her and her parents, she is going to be mightily affected by a sense of "wrongness", guilt, shame, and anger, because no matter how hard she tries, she can't be what is "easy" for her parents, and she is exquisitely aware of being difficult for them. Or if a marginal or even good fit between parent and child is strained by unpredictable and overwhelming trauma which renders the parent less than fully available to the child, the child will still be mightily affected. She will still come to experience those painful emotional states of being wrong, bad, unacceptable, because she is so attuned to parental distress, and so likely to squash her anxieties and angers in order to "not make trouble". What happens then, because such a child is still a child, her attempts to take care of, to cure, her parents will inevitably shortchange her development. Something very common in the backgrounds of submissive women is a history of having, or feeling, overwhelmingly responsible for herself, and her significant others. You can see where that arises: in the child so attuned to the emotional states of others, a child who temperamentally is a people-pleaser, a child who too easily is used inappropriately because she does try so hard to be good, such a child feels the burden of responsibility for making others better.


You have a situation in which a child has no "psychological skin" so to speak; who reacts intensely to the emotions of others, and internalizes the difficulties she experiences with others. Because she is so sensitive to interpersonal nuance, and is so often not validated by her environment, nor taught how to manage her emotions, she develops real problems adapting.

Whereas an adequate, relatively stable early environment in a family with "goodness of fit" will likely give rise to the healthy adult submissive, an inadequate, unstable early environment with "poor fit" will give rise to a more or less troubled adult.

It is my opinion that this last group tends to be troubled by the spectrum of personality disorders in the cluster defined as borderline, narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder. Now, not every woman who has borderline, narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder is also a submissive; this is a critical point. I believe that some submissives do exhibit the life problems that lead to being diagnosed with those disorders. But I believe there are two separate populations, and two developmental lines to account for it.

IF a child with the temperamental axis involving intense, selective attention to social interaction is faced with an upbringing in an EXTREMELY poorly fit environment, with parents so far different in temperament, that they almost cannot empathize at all with their child's inner experience, THAT child is vulnerable to developing submissively, that is, with a core trait of being exquisitely sensitive to the moods of others, AND a personality disorder. The latter developing because of the repeated failure to actually be able to please her parents with her "essential self". She grows to feel herself nasty, bad, destructive, unloved, and each misunderstanding damages her more and more. She feels intense rage at her psychological mistreatment, and intense shame at feeling the rage, and black despair of ever being good enough.

If a child without the temperament with the core submissive traits is born into such an extreme mismatch of temperament with her parents, she will still have to deal psychologically and developmentally with the experience of not being empathically understood, of not fitting in with her family, and so on. But because her nature, unlike the submissive, is NOT so vulnerable to the interpersonal nuance, she is less likely to wind up quite as damaged. She may well have a personality disorder, but it often takes more than just poorness of fit to damage her that much. It may take outright abuse, and a host of other environmental factors other than poor temperamental fit. I am saying here, that the submissive child is more vulnerable to damage by poorness of fit by virtue of her interpersonal sensitivity and need to please, as well as more vulnerable to trauma.

Please remember, this is a model, a construct to account for observations. It will be more or less useful, and more or less "valid" the more accurately it can be used predictively. Only time and actual studies can do this "scientifically"; for now, I am interested in less rigidly constructed tests of validity.

So we can see that there are three major variables interacting to account for adult outcome. The center of the interactions are with the child's temperament and the goodness of fit with her parents. That interaction constitutes the most central and most highly determining of outcome. The third variable is the impact of trauma on the child: sexual, physical, emotional abuse, loss of significant others through death or divorce, severe socio-economic strains on the family, illness in self or others, and such other often unpredictable severe stressors.

I am postulating the following three developmental lines:

I. The Healthy Submissive: is born with the central developmental trait of social responsiveness leading to sensitivity to others' expectation, needs, and emotions, and ultimately to becoming an adult people pleaser with an external locus of control. Her sexuality follows along these lines, and she has her most intense pleasure when in sexual service, even if, and often especially when, she suffers in service. She is relatively unconflicted about both her dependency needs and her sexuality, and is happiest in a consciously D/s based relationship.

2. The Submissive with a Severe Personality disturbance: This child is born also with the central developmental trait of social responsiveness leading to sensitivity to others' expectations, needs and emotions. However, due to either extreme poorness of temperamental fit, or extreme environmental trauma, her development goes seriously awry. She suffers such intense neglect, misunderstanding, devaluation by her parents, and often horrendous abuse that she develops severe disturbances in self-regulation. She exhibits the typical problems associated with such disturbance: a lack of trust in her own perceptions; misperceptions of others (detecting slights and attributing malfeasance to normal, everyday empathic failures); inability to modulate affect (emotion), ranging from intense overwhelming emotional states such as panic, rage, sadness to depression; inhibited grief, with many periods of emotional shutdown; cycles of alternately overvaluing significant others and then devaluing them (often manifested by the numerous hirings and firings of many many therapists during those cycles); and finally, a tendency to act out the rage and despair in self-harm: alcohol and drug misuse, promiscuity, eating disorders, self-cutting, burning, head-banging and other such acts.


What distinguishes the submissive borderline from the nonsubmissive borderline is that IF HER PATHOLOGY IS NOT SO DAMAGING AS TO PRECLUDE LONGTERM RELATIONSHIPS AT ALL, SHE CAN BE HELD BY A DOMINANT MAN LONG ENOUGH TO DEAL WITH THE PROBLEMATIC ASPECTS OF HER DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTIONING. A non-submissive borderline is no more likely to be held by a Dominant than any other woman with a personality disturbance. The submissive borderline, in the hold of an extremely strong and healing Dominant, along with the judicious use of therapy, and perhaps medication, can do a great deal of healing work. The path is never easy, and carries risks: the risk of self-harm getting mortal; the risk of suicide when the woman feels her life will never get better, or is overwhelmed with grief and rage; the risk that in anger or rage she will turn her destructive impulses on her helpers and destroy the helping frame. While the submissive borderline has the characteristic underlying sexuality of the submissive, it is distorted by her interpersonal difficulties. She may be conflicted, shamed, guilt-ridden, and find herself acting out her conflicting needs in sexual promiscuity, sexual avoidance, or repetitive abusive relationships that repeat her earlier traumatic histories. But underneath all that, and coloring all those difficulties, is a submissive sexuality. Often, this is the woman for whom self-harm (cutting, scratching, burning self) has an element of eroticism; is a distortion of the healthy submissive's pleasurable response to sexual sacrifice, sexual suffering. This kind of self harm, rather than being the joyous, intimate act of a healthy submissive in a good relationship, is a distortion of that healthy impulse.


3. The NonSubmissive Borderline: This is a child whose temperamental mix does not have the prominent interpersonal sensitivity that the submissive child does. This child instead has experienced the traumas that typically result in the features of severe personality disorder and phenomenologically may look indistinguishable from the submissive borderline EXCEPT THAT SHE DOES NOT RESPOND TO DOMINANCE IN THE WAY A SUBMISSIVE BORDERLINE DOES. I think that while a submissive borderline may suffer more intensely from interpersonal contacts, her very relatedness, distorted though it may be, is a good prognostic indicator, because she will be so influenceable. The nonsubmissive borderline does not have that same influenceability: therapy with her will be and feel different because she is less permeable to healing influences. This woman's sexuality is NOT characterized by the central images of pleasure through being used, disciplined, forced, swept away in the way a submissive's is. Her sexuality is not "fixed" in that way, is far more fluid and influenced by the rest of her personality, which as we have said, is not submissive. [Eds. Note: I talked over the ideas above with Yaldah Tovah after having realized that it confused some people. The kind of submissive experience that Yahdah Tovah refers to here is primarily that of submissive girls who undergo massive aversive treatment as children and youths and then spend the better part of a lifetime developing highly neurotic and self-destructive responses to those events. She does not mean here to refer to submissives for whom the most important aversive events come much later in life.]

The reason I think these distinctions are useful is because when a troubled submissive woman reports to her therapists the nature of her submissiveness, she is likely to encounter an uninformed therapeutic stance: that her submissiveness is just another manifestation of pathology: of disturbed interpersonal relations. The therapist does not know how to use the woman's submissiveness in a therapeutic way, because s/he doesn't understand what an ally in the healing process the submissive response is. Nor is it understood that a GOOD outcome is enough healing to allow the submissive to express her nature and sexuality in a healthy manner, like that of her more fortunate sisters who didn't face such difficulties in development. In other words, she doesn't need to be cured of her submissiveness, just her "borderline" pathology. She needs to be helped to become a healthier submissive.

From the author: 

I wrote this article in 1988 for one issue of a short-lived print bdsm zine called "The Original Agenda." This zine was produced and distributed by Jon Jacobs and Gloria Brame to a small subscription base comprised mostly of couples and individuals they had become acquainted with on Compuserve, from the Variations II forum, or Section 12b, which they co-founded.

The Original Agenda discussed issues of interest to people intrigued by extreme forms of power exchange. My CompuServe handle at that time was ~ ~ ~ denis ~ ~ ~, and that's how I signed this piece in the newsletter. At the time this was written I was just getting to know Jon, my future master. He went by the handle Master Red Dawn on Compuserve, or MRD, which was much easier to type.

Although I am not a believer in much of anything except maybe in the persistence of love, this piece has a somewhat spiritual flavor, because I was comparing some of the emotions and aspirations that I was experiencing as a newly conscious submissive to what I knew about similar expressions in the literature of Islamic mysticism. It's sixteen long years later, although they really seemed to go by in the blink of an eye, and I still like everything I wrote in this. So I figure it's time to get this one up on the web.

 

Some of us intensely enjoy submitting our wills to that of another. As this is a rather peculiar enthusiasm, most of us (not to mention our Significant Orderers) have discovered or adopted an explanation for our deviant desires. When we try to be honest with ourselves, the reasons that we use to explain why we love to submit include, but probably are not limited to:

    "I want most of all to be taken care of and told what to do in detail, like a little child"

    "I crave the embarrassment and humiliation that comes with assuming a weaker role"

    "I manipulate rather than confront to get what I want. This passive-aggressive style is the psychological earmark of a submissive."

    "I feel a marvelous relief when I can give up all responsibility for myself."

    "I love to feel pain, because perversely, I want to re-live (and punish myself for) an abusive childhood."

Each of these reasons may partially explain the psyche of someone who is submissive, but I suspect that the popularity of such explanations in an age admirably searching for the deep neurotic truths lies in their ability to fit the fashionable social formula: the more unflattering or self-serving the motivation, the truer it must be. I want to tell an alternate tale of the reasons for submission, one that I fear--as a more positive admission--may not gel so easily in the psychologically correct mind.

What I am going to talk about is something that cannot be easily admitted in an age intent upon beating itself over the head for its severe emotional defects. DO sick, neurotic motivations manage to account for the deeper, absolutely real thrill of submission? I don't think so. Boasting or not, it's time we submissives volunteered a deep dark secret: we're in it for the dust. That is, the intoxicating scent of humility sniffed from the dust of the ground at our masters' feet.

Humility is not a popular term in a culture addicted to the rather morbid brand of narcissism mentioned earlier. Neither is self-effacement nor renunciation--both have, to modern ears, that sanctimonious overtone of negating everything worthwhile in life. And don't mention sacrifice--if you dare to perform a self-sacrificial act in modern America, you are too obviously seeking admiration: a gilded plaque in the Hall of Saints and Martyrs! But despite their obvious unpopularity, these words--humility, self-effacement, renunciation, sacrifice-help to describe a state or experience that I--and, I believe, some others like me--have been looking for all of our lives. Ideas of sacrifice and denial send a chill up my spine:

    Being your slave, what should I do but tend
    Upon the hours and times of your desire?
    I have no precious time at all to spend,
    Nor services to do till you require.
    Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,
    Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
    Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,
    When you have bid your servant once adieu;
    Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
    Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
    But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,
    Save, where you are how happy you make those:
    So true a fool is love, that in your will
    (Though you do anything) he thinks no ill.
    --Shakespeare

Think of how it would be frowned upon if the modern person, even the modern slave, sat around like said sonnet-writer, doing nothing until her beloved walked into the door. As well-rounded healthy submissives, we know how to be constructive while the master is away. Shakespeare's words, however, express a truth that few of us in our self-reliant worlds like to admit: that the greatest happiness we get in life comes from the company of one special other. A submissive approaches that happiness in a perfectly natural way: through attentive service and sacrifice. When allowed, she can lose herself in her master's needs and will. And through "unselfing" herself, she enters paradise.

    No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
    and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven.
    --Sanai

A common fear of novice submissives is that if they were to give themselves over completely to someone in absolute slavery, then their personalities would become submerged in the personality of their top and they--or an essential part of themselves--would shrivel up and die. I am convinced that this fear keeps many subs dog-paddling on the surface of submission, preferring the safety of superficiality to a dive into the depths of one's soul. Superficial submission takes many forms and is expressed in varying levels: from an unwillingness to admit that one is submissive; to an insistence that D/s be kept in the bedroom, away from everyday life and decisions; to "allowing" one's top beat you (physical masochism) but not humiliate you (emotional masochism) or vice-versa; to reserving the slightest area of one's mind, the smallest thoughts to oneself as sacrosanct, an inner sanctum one's owner is not allowed to enter.

Do you know the feeling--that ecstatic feeling of "consuming yourself like burning chaff" in the service of another? Need I describe the joy I feel at being called in to bring my master his dinner or to rub his feet? You'd be doing me (and perhaps other submissives) a disservice if you were to ascribe this joy to the self-satisfaction associated with being an "obedient little slave," or if you were simply to assume that I feel adoration in his presence. While both of those feelings are there, something else is at work as well. This something else has to do with performing acts of servitude, that, when combined with feelings of deference, humility, and self-renouncement, cause a delirious loss of one's sense of oneself. A submissive can sometimes briefly forget herself in the service of her owner. There is something on the edge of sacred about that forgetfulness.

    Lower yourself in submission,
    and become the beloved
    of every dwelling.
    --Sanai

Is the desire to sacrifice for another sick? The sublimation of a death wish? If so, then I have had the urge to suicide since about the age of five. I remember the happiness I felt, even at that age, at doing things for my parents or my sisters, especially when I thought I was _required_ to do these things. How disappointed I would be when the little task was over, the requirement completed. I wanted the serving to last forever; it touched a deep part of myself; being a slave was the best game I had ever played.

I like to fantasize about what would happen if, at that young age, we could be sold or otherwise enslaved to someone kind and loving without being abruptly torn from our family or surroundings, or traumatized in any way. Despite disturbing questions that this raises about the ability to give consent, I think some of us would have taken to a youthful slavery like fish to water--and never looked back. I certainly knew--without the words--what I wanted back then. Then, for the next 25 years, I learned how to ignore and deny the one thing that would have made me truly happy. What a waste!

How many other submissives feel the desire to be a fulltime slave, to immerse themselves _totally_ in selfless devoted service--NOT for the self-congratulatory "I'm so good" pat on the bottom, but for the utterly delightful twist-in-the-belly feeling of "I'm less, and isn't that wonderful," a deep feeling of the extremes in power, an intoxication with dust. Perhaps your acquaintance with self-serving grovelers at S&M gatherings has turned you from the thought that submission can be anything more than a mass of confusing, selfish desires and narcissistic compulsions, but I doubt that anyone with genuine submissive feelings has not felt some of what I am trying to describe. Dominants seem to find it easy to explain the good feelings they experience when, in all of their glorious power, they give a submissive something she wants. Why then will they sometimes deny that similar selfless urges to give (albeit expressed in a different language) can exist in their greedy little slaves? Shakespeare captures nicely this essence of submission: what hell in heaven it is to await the opportunity to serve one's beloved:

    That God forbid, that made me first your slave,
    I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
    Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,
    Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!
    O, let me suffer (being at your beck)
    The imprison'd absence of your liberty,
    And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each cheek
    Without accusing you of injury.
    But where you list, your charter is so strong,
    That you yourself may privilege your time:
    Do what you will, to you it doth belong
    Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
    I am to wait, though waiting so be hell;
    Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well.

The interior story of humility has been translated to words many times, but never so beautifully, I believe, as in the following Tale of the Sands. While written in a different context and for a different audience, The Tale of the Sands suggests that if you go farther into submission, deeper into helplessness before your master or mistress, that you will become more unique, more yourself, not less.

    “A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.

    “It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered: ‘The wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream.’

    “The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly and this was why it could cross a desert.

    " ‘By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across. You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over to your destination.”

    “But how could this happen?

    “ ‘By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind.’

    “This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality. And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could be regained?

    “ ‘The wind,’ said the sand, ‘performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river.’

    “ ‘How can I know that is true?’

    “ ‘It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years; and it certainly is not the same as a stream.’

    " ‘But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?’

    " ‘You cannot in either case remain so," the whisper said. "Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one.’

    “When he heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts of the stream. Dimly, he remembered a state in which he--or some part of him, was it?--had been held in the arms of a wind. He also remembered--or did he?--that this was the real thing, not necessarily the obvious thing to do.

    “And the stream raised his vapor into the welcoming arms of the wind, which gently and easily bore it upwards and along, letting it fall softly as soon as they reached the roof of a mountain, many, many miles away. And because he had had his doubts, the stream was able to remember and record more strongly in his mind the details of the experience. He reflected, ‘Yes, now I have learned my true identity.’

    “The stream was learning. But the sands whispered: ‘We know because we see it happen day after day: and because we, the sands, extend from the riverside all the way to the mountain.’

    “And that is why it is said that the way in which Stream of Life is to continue on its journey is written in the Sands.”
    --The Sufis, Idries Shah

The essence of submission is remarkably like that stream: it is fluid, yielding, flowing, flexible, capable of allowing itself to be dissolved and carried in another's will without being damaged. But unless a submissive can learn trust enough to let go completely and be consumed, the fear of losing one's self will keep her stuck in one spot, and, no matter how skillfully or gently limits are pushed, she will not budge from the desolate territory in which she is living her emotional stagnation. By "raising its vapors into the welcome arms of the wind" the stream both stares down its darkest fear and acquires a means to carry out its destiny. Likewise, humility can be the way that a submissive gets beyond the stagnant selfishness that fears annihilation, and in doing so, become fully absorbed in what one feels one was born to do: trusting, fearing, obeying, and attending to the needs of someone with absolute power over you.

Consumed. When you feel submissive, don't you want to be used, that is, to be observed, enjoyed, captured, plucked, engulfed, overwhelmed, ravished, devoured? Is not what you love most that feeling of helplessness and loss of control, the knowledge that you can do nothing, while your dominant can do anything to you? Both immensely satisfying and rather terrifying, humility, the act of smelling the fragrant dust, is an attitude of submission in which the exhilarating fact that someone has truly taken control of you and is steering your life is staring you directly in the face. And what can you do about it?

    From out of the streets of So-and-So,
    Oh wind, bring perfumes sweet to me
    For I am sick and pale with woe;
    Oh bring me rest from misery!
    The dust that lies before her door,
    Love's long-desired elixir, pour
    Upon this wasted heart of mine--
    Bring me a promise and a sign!
    --Hafiz

You see, I was one of those girls that didn't believe in being slapped in the face. It was wrong … it was nothing more than blatant humiliation and degradation, and I deserved better than that. I wasn't a child and was not about to be treated like one. I wouldn't put up with something that was designed to make me feel bad about myself while at the same time put someone else into an empowering stance over me. Having someone slap you in the face is far more of a blow psychologically than it is likely to ever be physically. I saw it as a belittling gesture that had no place in a relationship that was built on trust and respect.

Looking back at my mindset, I still believe a lot of it. If some random person slapped me, I think I would likely slap him back, once I recovered from the sheer shock of being slapped. That isn't something I would allow from just anyone … that isn't something I would allow from anyone but Him.

From a girl's perspective, a slap in the face is an eye-opening communication technique. It doesn't need to be explained, it doesn't need to be clarified … it simply just is. Yes, there is an element of control with it. But the slap doesn't empower Him … the control in the situation is already His … the slap simply demonstrates that. It is a very effective way of reminding both parties of their place in the relationship … it reminds Him that part of His responsibility to her is discipline and that ultimately, she is His. It reminds her that her goal is to please Him and she is His, to do with as He wishes. Chances are, if He's just smacked her, she's failed in that goal at that point in time.

A caveat to this is my belief that in order for any communication to be effective, the means of communication must be discussed and understood by both parties. The girl needs to understand what He means when He slaps her. For me, we've discussed that a slap means that I've fucked up somehow. It triggers the knowledge that I've done something wrong. I understand when He slaps me, that's the primary reason behind His action. There are times when I'm upset or distraught and a slap is a focusing technique. It brings me back to “this moment”, to Him and to myself. It doesn't leave room for tears or thoughts or fears. Using a slap as a way to help me center myself and my thoughts is one more way for Him to help me help myself. As with other “methods” this is something that should be used in moderation. If it is used every day, all the time, the girl will have a lot of unsightly bruises to explain to family and co-workers, and it will lose its meaning and become commonplace, and therefore not as effective.

The psychological effects of having disappointment or anger pointed out in such a very clear manner is … incredibly difficult for a girl to accept. It isn't given with the intent of belittling her or making her feel bad about who and how she is, but rather, it's a teaching technique to guide in what she's done wrong. A slap on the wrist would let her know that she's displeased Him, but it is not the same, but any stretch of the imagination. That mental wall that's hit when His palm (or the back of His hand) hits her cheek will leave a lasting impression that will help enable her to not make the same mistake again.

A slap can say a lot of things, given the circumstances and the parties involved. To some, a slap in the face can say “I love you.” It can say, “you've fucked up.” It can say any number of things in between. But something it will always convey is “you're Mine.” The control and the ownership that is inherent in that one motion can be overwhelming. He loves me enough to discipline me when I need it. I'm His, to be punished when He chooses to punish me, to hurt me as He feels necessary, to love always, in general, to do with as He wishes. No matter the reasoning behind it, to a girl who is owned, a slap will always remind her that she is owned, and if she's owned, why should He not do with her as He pleases? To anyone who has ever been on her knees willingly, a reminder of being owned is a reminder of being loved.

That was the difference that I never took into consideration before that first time. I saw the “negatives,” the brutality, the harshness. I never realized the “positives” that are behind it. I still maintain that I would never accept it from anyone but Him … when my collar was secured around my heart (for me, it was around my heart far earlier than it was around my neck), the ownership He's taken gives Him that right. And I don't, for a moment, regret the journey it has brought us. However, I will always cry when He slaps me, and my cunt will always clench at the reminder that I'm His.

© 2004 - His fucktoy