Hello party people. It’s been awhile since I actually ranted about something, so here’s a tirade for you to ponder on your Earth Day.
There is a phrase that has become so ubiquitous in the BDSM culture that it is literally written on t-shirts and mugs that you can buy from dropshippers worldwide – but it is just plain wrong and it sticks in my craw every time I read it or hear someone say it.
The phrase?
“My submission is a gift…”
This is usually followed by other such sundry tripe as, “… and any man who can’t understand that doesn’t deserve it,” or “… and if it is not respected, I will take it back.”
This is wrong.
It’s a terrible metaphor and we really need to stop using it. Submission is merely half of a power exchange negotiation. It represents something different for every power dynamic, and every couple or group. Submission, like almost everything else that we deal with in this thing that we do represents a spectrum of possibilities.
Submission is not a gift. A gift is something that you give to someone with no expectations. If you are submitting to someone with no expectations, you are doing it very, very wrong.
A gift is something that you give to someone knowing that you will never get it back. A gift is something that you give to someone because you are following a social convention, or because they are someone you care about and gifts are one of their love languages, or because you, yourself, enjoy giving things to people.
Only the worst gifts come with strings attached, and while every gift given creates some sort of socially bonded obligation on the part of the recipient – it is always acceptable at some level for the recipient of a gift to do absolutely nothing with it, or even to re-gift it to someone else. If someone were to offer me their submission and I did nothing with it – I would be doing us both a massive disservice, and if someone were to submit to me, only to have me pass that bond onto someone else, that would be a serious violation of trust (unless this is something that you negotiated prior.)
To make matters even worse, the vast majority of the people that I see using this phrase seem to think that they are somehow maintaining some level of control by trying to use this metaphor, which is completely untrue. Everything gets wrapped up in these bullshit harlequin romance novel terms and ceases to have any real meaning anymore. These sorts of modes of thinking force us to treat submission like it is a binary condition – either you are submissive or Dominant and that’s that.
It is certainly possible for a particular power dynamic to be so black and white, but that has to be negotiated to be that way. It is also just as possible for a power dynamic to be more fluid, for areas of submission to be valid under only certain conditions, or only up to certain levels of comfort, respectful of hard and soft limits.
In fact, in my not-so-very-humble opinion, binary D/s is boring and uninspired. Even if someone wants to consider themselves my property, I am not going to treat them like a slave under most conditions of normal everyday life. Not only is it exhausting, but it’s not fun.
So, if my submission is not a gift, then what is it?
It’s a negotiation. How many times do I have to say that here? In the BDSM world, everything is a negotiation.
Let me say that just one more time.
In the BDSM world, everything is a negotiation.
There is power to be shared on both sides of a power exchange negotiation, and if you have not negotiated away a particular power of yours, it remains yours.
I seriously urge anyone who is entering into a D/s relationship to think long and hard about what they want to give up and what they expect to receive as part of that power dynamic and to not only have an earnest discussion about what those things all mean for you personally, but to even write them down and codify them in a contract. This will help to prevent misunderstandings and many of the not-so-fun aspects of D/s relationship dynamics can be avoided.
Lately writing has been hard… in fact, accomplishing much of anything at all has been a great deal more difficult lately than it would normally be thanks to the status of the world around us, and I know that I am not alone in feeling this way.
But I also know that I want to share more than I have been able to, so I’m going to do something a little different for me. I’m going to record an old post in audio and let you hear what I sound like.
Here is me reading my own piece, Kneel for me. I’ve reproduced the text below as well, so that you can follow along as I read if you like.
I hope you enjoy.
— Rant
Kneel for me.
Meet my gaze and hold it. Do not look away.
I know it is not easy. Nothing worthwhile is.
Cry for me. Not because you are sad, not because you have lost, not because you are missing someone dear, but because I am asking you to.
Open your heart for me. Pour the blood of your emotion on the floor at my feet and let me sink into its depth.
Sing your song of sorrow until it fills my soul and covers the rough parts, smooths out the edges, fills the gaps of my emotional canvas.
Cry for me. Not because you need to, but because I need for you to.
Lift your heart and mind and soul to the sky and let my love surround you. This is a place of safety and security, you are in my Protection and nothing in the world can harm you right now.
Rage for me. Not because you need to purge the poisonous vapors of mistrust and envy from your mind, but because I feed on your ire.
Scream for me. Not because your voice needs to escape your throat. Not because you have broken through the wall of your pain and anger and the primal need for screaming catharsis is pulling apart the walls of your soul, but because I want you to.
And then do all of these things again for the reasons I told you not to before.
I will hold your heart close and keep it safe while you channel the dark things away and I will eat them for you.
And then, when you are ready, I will return your heart to you, clean, shiny, and new.
And any time you need to, I will be here, and you can…
I started this blog with very little intention of continuing it for very long back in April of 2014.
At the end of every April, I get a yearly summary of my blog activity for the previous year.
It is always a little interesting to see how things change over time.
In my first few months, I got a couple of dozen hits a day if I was lucky, but I was cranking out original content. (All of the content on this blog is my original work, by the way…) I was posting at least once a week, and most of my content was either rants about my personal experiences and how I felt like things were better in the “good ol’ days,” (even though most of those days were strikingly less good for me in reality) or educational pieces attempting to fill the knowledge gap that interest without reasonably accessible educational materials was causing. However, the small bit of recognition that I received was enough to spur me on and do more with the blog and my community.
In the second year, things really started to sizzle. I was getting hundreds of hits per day most days and thousands of hits per day on the busiest days. I slowed down on content generation, but I was still getting a great deal of attention and I was getting emails from readers almost every day and responding to those took up a good deal of my free time and introduced me to some really interesting people from all over the world – several of whom remain my friends today.
In the third year, I slowed down on content creation even more, and the readership started to dwindle away. My most frequently read post was An Imaginary Conversation With a New submissive and I was still getting emails from readers almost every day with comments or questions, but readership was starting to diminish as I started producing less new content and started revealing more about me personally as opposed to fielding questions about BDSM or writing informative pieces based on common questions that I often hear.
Now, coming out of my fourth year, and with even more sporadic writing, my readership has dropped back down to first-year levels. I’m getting dozens of hits per day, up to a few hundred on the busiest of days, but nowhere near where I was at the height of things. Yet… I kind of like it that way.
I still get emails and comments asking me questions, and I still try to answer all of these within a day or two at most, but it’s a much more sustainable pace for a part-time single parent and full-time tech startup employee and I don’t have to feel like I’m letting people down by not answering them in an expedient manner. This has helped to reduce my stress level somewhat, especially since sometimes the questions that I get asked are intensely personal, time sensitive, and important.
‘An Imaginary Conversation…’ is no longer my most-read piece, being replaced by Finding subspace – which is, interestingly enough, one of the very first posts I wrote (as opposed to ‘An Imaginary Conversation…’ which was written almost at the height of my popularity.)
Most of my hits in the first year came from links from other people’s blogs – or from ‘likes’ on facebook (which continues to amuse me, since I’m not on facebook), or through some unclassified means of finding me, but now the majority of my hits come from google and bing.
And perhaps most amusingly – I think that most of the hits that I’m getting from google and bing for that particular page are not people who are coming here looking for information on BDSM themes, but math students looking for easy answers to their homework questions about linear algebra.
I have a degree in mathematics – and I can almost certainly answer your linear subspace questions as well – but I’ve only ever once actually been asked such a thing.
I suspect the person who did ask me this question was seriously confused, but I’m really much more amused by the imagined reactions that I suspect of people when they come to a site like this looking for answers to their math homework.
Today is May Day, and the start of Year Five.
I’m really curious what this year will bring… hopefully it will involve drastically fewer broken bones, but I suspect that it will still involve a broken heart – perhaps more often than once, as that seems to be the one thing that I am wholesale incapable of escaping.
Anyone who knows me personally and has interacted with me in the past several months knows that I have a (relatively) new submissive whom I adore. She is Devoted to me, and I am pledged to her, and I have no intention of changing any of that.
She and I have an open relationship and we are honest with each other about everything that goes on – and more importantly – about how those things make us feel. We work together to ensure that we have a proper understanding of both the factual and emotional issues that surround anything that may come up – because emotions and facts don’t always correlate well until you take some time to understand how they interact with each other around the particular issue at hand.
And that was a lot of words to say: she trusts me and I trust her – and the reasons for that are brutal and open honesty coupled with a lot of patience.
I hide nothing from her. I don’t always tell her everything, because sometimes I don’t think to do so, and sometimes too much information can be hurtful, but I always answer all of her questions and I patiently allow her to feel what she feels and then reinforce the fact that I love her, I cherish her trust, and I am still committed to her. It isn’t easy, but it is extremely valuable.
I have not always had relationships that ended well. Heck, I’ve not always had relationships that proceeded well. However, I am nearly always patient and polite. No one manages to always be these things, but I do my best, and I usually succeed.
Yesterday my submissive received some very strange text messages from a woman (or someone claiming to be a woman) who she has never met, but that was put into contact with her some time ago. This woman resurfaced and started making claims about me – that she ‘catfished me on her behalf’ and claims that I derided her on fetlife and threatened her when she refused to have a skype sex session with me and tried to warn my submissive that I bad-talked my submissive behind her back and that I was a dangerous man.
Now – I am a dangerous man, but not for the reasons that she accuses me.
Anyone who knows me and has tried to get me to agree to a video chat session knows how laughable this is. I am extremely reluctant to have a video call, and I almost never engage in any sort of sex over the wire. I don’t enjoy it, and it triggers a few unpleasant memories for me. If I’m doing it, it’s because I love you very much and I want you to be happy – it’s never something that I would pressure someone into, and I use words like ‘always’ and ‘never’ extremely sparingly. I don’t even like talking on the phone. So – on its face this was an amusingly ridiculous accusation, but even the most ridiculous accusations can destroy relationships when there is not trust there to begin with.
I’ve been in relationships where that trust was not solid. I’ve been in relationships where accusations of infidelity – and actual infidelity – destroyed the relationship, and the reason that happened was because trust was either never fully established, or worn away. I am certainly not trying to portray myself as always being in the right in these situations – I don’t know that there is always a right to be had – but I do know that I have never acted in the manner for which I was accused.
I honestly have no idea who this person is or what his motives might be. It’s extremely unlikely that it is one of my exes trying to get at me through her. It’s equally unlikely that it’s her ex trying to get at her, but the motive of anyone else in this matter just doesn’t seem to add up…
The fact that we can’t find a sensible motive is an any area of consternation to be sure, but sometimes people just like to cause drama, and maybe that’s all this is.
I’ve been in relationships that would be threatened by such a thing, but I am ecstatically happy to not be in one of those now.
My relationship is as solid as ever, and may even be stronger now for having faced this sort of challenge and walked away unscathed, and we have accomplished this thanks to the intrinsic power and value of honesty, compassion, empathy, and trust.
The nature of Dominance is not always an obvious thing – even to me.
Preface: This is a post that I started and didn’t finish from about two months ago. The information is still valid, but the email that I reference is pretty old at this point. Caveat lector.
I recently received an email from a very intelligent reader who did not specify his gender, so I apologize if my use of male pronouns is inappropriate, but I’m going to continue to refer to this reader as ‘him’ for expediency’s sake.
He asks me, “Is this FinDomme for real? I’m really thinking about this and I don’t know how to stop myself. Is this for real? What should I do?”
I’m not really sure how to respond to such a request. I can’t claim that I didn’t know that financial Domination was a kink for some people, but I’m not sure that I can bring myself to endorse it.
I know that “your kink is not my kink but your kink is okay” is a huge part of the open philosophy that I love about the kink community so much, but this may be one case where I have to reserve my views.
I’m not sure that I think that financial Dominance – especially in the form being peddled by the young lady in the link that I won’t echo here – is okay. I don’t judge her. She is extremely honest about what she intends to do. She explicitly states that she wants someone – very clearly intended to be a wealthy older male figure – to give her total financial control of his life, and that once she has this, she intends to completely ruin him. There is a great deal of camouflaged language that follows which seems to indicate that this financial control would also entitle one to sexual favors, but even that is very clearly secondary to the stated and intended purpose of financial ruin and humiliation.
I have been involved at some level in the kink world for almost two decades and learned that there is quite literally a kink for everything and that there is always, always, someone who will subscribe enthusiastically to that kink, and yet, even after all of the things I have experienced or seen, I have a really hard time believing that there is someone out there who wants to be financially ruined like this person is advertising, and like one of my readers is considering.
My problem – and it may just be a personal problem for me – is that I can’t see how this is a good thing for the person being Dominated.
D/s relationships are, by their very nature, stilted. They’re not equitable. They’re not equal partnerships, and they’re not intended to be, but there is still some level of balance.
One can, and probably should, argue that every true TPE relationship is a financial Domination, and that might be true. but there is a huge difference between controlling something and destroying something.
My own personal philosophy, and I know I’m not alone in this, is that I always try to leave every interaction I have with people such that they are in some way better than they were when I first found them. I’m human, and I don’t always succeed in this. I’m sure some of my former friends and exes would probably start fuming if they were to read this, but I actually do try to do the best I can in this regard. I value friendship highly, and I try to always help and support my friends, but D/s takes this even further.
I regret to say that I cannot, with absolute certainty, claim that every submissive that has been under my thumb left our interactions in a better state than she began them, but I do know that I’ve done more good than harm, and I’ve tried to ameliorate any issues of which I am aware and able.
I do have remain friends with some of my exes and some of my former subs, so I know that I’ve managed to keep things positive at least most of the time.
So – with that in mind – I cannot see how this could possibly be a good thing for at least one of the participants in this arrangement.
If you go over things with a fine enough resolution, you can probably find something that is being satisfied by such a relationship, and if you have an itch that needs scratching, you could say that finding someone to scratch it for you is a good thing, but again, I have to think about the relative magnitudes of these things. While my reader may be getting some deep seated psychological need fulfilled – temporarily – by this sort of arrangement, the implied consequences are far from temporary.
Bankruptcy is a horrible thing.
Fortunately for me, I haven’t had to go through it, but I have been destitute at one time, and while I do not necessarily believe that it is required for us to have material possessions to be happy, I do believe that having our primary survival needs met is absolutely critical to our wellbeing, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. In the society that I live in, not having access to any money at all would be a severe impediment to at least two of these needs – food and shelter.
I can see how a relationship where the Dominant partner controls all aspects of the submissive partner’s finances would be appealing. In fact, I’ve been in such relationships myself, on both sides of that particular coin, and I don’t believe that the experience was damaging to any party involved, but this particular situation differs a bit. The FinDomme in question is not offering to take ownership of this person and care for him – as I have done and had done for me in the past – but instead is explicitly stating that she will financially ruin and embarrass this person, leaving them completely on their own with no resources and no recourse.
I cannot recommend such a thing.
D/s is a journey. I believe that more strongly now than ever. It is, however, a journey that one must undertake with much forethought and preparedness. It is not a thing to engage in lightly and there are no shortcuts.
Sure, you can do a short scene or incorporate elements of D/s into your kinky fuckery and leave off with a lot of the more profound considerations, but in so doing you are only scratching the surface of the possible. To get the profound D/s experience that it seems most of my readers are seeking, you have to commit yourself, body and mind, time and energy, and give it real attention.
I suspect that the reader who wrote me is trying to shortcut some of these things – by signing over his assets, he is creating an instant and binding relationship that goes far beyond the ordinary. Most vanilla marriages include at least some aspect of separate finances, or at least some kind of equitable scheme through which both partners are able to make purchases of necessary and everyday items. Under the sort of scheme this young lady is trying to proffer, her finsub would not even have the ability to purchase food or pay rent.
And then again, maybe there is just a kink element to it that I can’t understand…
When I was inducted into the BDSM world, one of the very first lessons I learned was on the use of a safeword. For this reason, it surprised me to learn how infrequently these are actually used. In some ways, this isn’t so bad. Some groups/pairs have other negotiated ways to stop activities or scenes if they need to, and that is all well and good, but there is one important difference between some of those things and what I was taught a safeword was supposed to represent…
I don’t know if it was the 50 Shades books that made this popular, or if it was popular before they were released, but I hear a lot about the use of the words ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ as ‘safewords’. While on its own, this is not a bad innovation, it seems to have come at the cost of damaging the protocol for how to treat safewords – at least, insofar as my understanding of them has gone.
The protocol I was taught is very simple:
* There is ONE and only one safeword. It should be a word that you would not normally use in play and it should be deliberate – something that you wouldn’t utter on accident or that might be misinterpreted as another word, and not a single syllable – something you have to mean it when saying. Anything else is intended as part of the scene.
Sometimes this can be difficult for me to accept, I’ll admit, especially in things like rape fantasy scenes… I sometimes react to ‘No’ even when I should not. It is a limitation that I’ve been unable to completely overcome even after 15 years, but this protocol helps and without it, I would likely be unable to take part in such scenes at all.
* If your play restricts the ability to speak, another gesture/movement will be used to convey the same meaning – this gesture/movement should fall into the same category as the word above – something deliberate, something that can’t be mistaken for something else.
* Either person (or any person in scene) can use the safeword to stop the scene/play/activity at any time for any or no reason.
* Use of the safeword stops everything for everyone. Action will be taken to immediately stop all activities, pull participants out of bondage, cutting bonds if necessary, and begin aftercare to establish a sphere of safety and comfort for all participants.
And that’s really all there is to it.
I cannot stress the importance of the concept of immediate stop here enough. What we do can be dangerous. Permanent nerve damage is possible, as is asphyxiation, severe physical trauma, even death. However, much more difficult to quantify, but possibly much more lasting in terms of long term damage and the need for repair are the possible psychological trauma that can occur from what we do. The physical nature of things requires obvious action when the safeword is called, unless you don’t know what you’re doing – in which case you should not be doing it! – you will be able to easily spot where the tension is wrong or where there is too much torque, or where the beating is in danger of causing nerve damage or things like that, but it is nearly impossible to spot the signs of psychological trauma, and the only reasonable thing to do is to always assume that is present.
I keep a set of EMT shears with me at every scene. I would recommend that every Dom do the same, whether you are intending to enact a bondage scene or not – just have them with you. They’re second only to condoms in importance of having nearby, in my opinion, and with a fluid bonded partner, much more important. This is a good example of what you should have : link – I’m not recommending these specifically, and there is no affiliate link in there, so I don’t get any kickback if you order them from that link – do your research, find a pair that you like, get those.
I actually have a full trauma kit in my home, as much for use in possible civil emergencies as for things that might go wrong in a scene (which, thank the gods, I have never needed for either case) but I don’t usually take the whole thing with me when I’m going somewhere else. The EMT shears are non-negotiable though, even if it means I have to check a bag on a flight for which I could have otherwise avoided doing so.
I have never needed the trauma kit, but I HAVE needed the shears. I did a bondage scene with rope once where my submissive called out the safeword that I had set for her, and I cut her out of some complicated knots as fast as I possibly could have and it still felt like too long. I’ve used leather restraints with carabiners and hooks before, and while those do obviate some of the need to cut someone out (since releasing a carabiner is much faster than untying a knot) I would not have hesitated to cut right through the leather if I had to, and I’ve tested the shears to be certain that they can do just that.
Pulling my submissive out of that bondage scene and then holding her and telling her that she was safe and that I was there to take care of her now and that the scene was ended was an intensely emotional thing for me as well as her. She claims that she has no lasting psychological trauma from the scene, but it could easily have gone that way.
And this brings me to the reasons why I am not fond of ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ as safeword/codes…
One – having two words adds confusion to something that can not really stand to be confusing.
That is more colloquial English than I am used to using, but I want to make this point very clear: confusion is your enemy in a BDSM scene. This is why I push on open communication and negotiation hard. Confusion will get people hurt. If not physically, people will get hurt emotionally or psychologically.
Two – having an ‘almost safe’ word detracts from the power of the ‘safe’ word.
I am not a fan of this ‘new’ development at all. I call it ‘new’ because there was no such concept when I first started in BDSM.
It is my duty as Dom to understand what is happening in the scene and to control it, and that includes making sure that my submissive is okay no matter whether she uses the safeword(s) or not. I should understand that if my submissive is not comfortable that I am encroaching upon her limits and be careful. I am more than happy to make her uncomfortable, but I never wish to injure her. Walking that line is usually pretty clear to me, because I make an effort to understand my submissive and what her body language is like before I begin any physical or even psychological contact, but everyone makes mistakes.. and that is what the safeword is there to resolve.
Hearing ‘yellow’ and then transitioning to ‘red’ leaves the feeling that there may be yet another level above that, or invite the question, “did you really mean ‘red’ or are we still at ‘yellow’?” In my opinion both of those scenarios are dangerous and uncalled for.
The responses that I’ve seen advocated for with ‘red’ even are to back off and reassess, which in my not-so-very-humble-opinion is not nearly enough. When I’ve been called upon to play by those rules, I’ve tried to do so to the best of my ability, but I would really rather have heard ‘hurricane’ and dropped out of scene entirely and gone straight to aftercare.
This is where this instructional message turns into a rant.
If I am your Dominant, I do not want to injure you.
I will hurt you.
I will bring you right up to the breaking point and show you how deep your own well goes.
I will push myself every bit as hard as I push you to achieve these goals.
I crave nothing more than the trust and worship and catharsis that comes from knowing that I can push you as hard as I think you can take, as hard as I myself can take, because that safety net is there – the safeword.
I have known couples that claim a safeword is not useful, or, even worse, say that use of a safeword is somehow not “real BDSM”. That a slave who uses a safeword is not really a slave and that they have no place in these things.
That is an ignorant and dangerous position to take, and frankly those people scare the shit out of me, and I’m honestly not scared by much.
I need to be able to trust you to know your own limits, and I need to be able to know that I can push those in a safe, sane, and consensual manner.
If you take away my safeword, I cannot do that.
And yes, I have used a safeword as a Dominant. I find that it provides a more complete catharsis and begins aftercare in a more distinct manner than simply pulling away and saying something like, “you’ve had enough.” That is a condescending and unnecessarily brutal way to end a scene.