12 Rules for Malesub Life - Introduction: "What is a Malesub?"

Some gatekeeping on the quest to create an antidote to being a pest or a loser

As any dominant woman will tell you, not everybody who claims to be a malesub is a submissive, and not every man who does submit is a malesub.

We tend to get sandbagged if we talk about “true subs”, but we can’t have clarity without definitions.

So, I’m going to say that — in this series — a “malesub” is a man whose kinky submission reflects something in his personality. That bears some unpacking.

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There is, we are often told loudly, no link between D/s preference and personality.

On the face of it, that’s an odd claim: sexuality is core to who we are, but we are suppose to believe that how we approach our sexuality is entirely arbitrary, neither impacting on the rest of our personality, nor feeding off it? I just happen to be a malesub the way my friend happens to be gay? It doesn’t feel like we’re comparing the same thing.

True, it’s reasonable that the noise of fetish, culture, and repression should make it hard to predict a person’s kink orientation, or even if they have one.

A “people pleaser” might make a happy service top, just as a man from a macho culture might frame his desire to pleasure his partner as dominance. A very dominant “Alpha” might enjoy starfishing while in bondage, or getting the physical buzz from a flogging. And people develop fetishes for things that violate their basic selves, or get confused as to which role they identify with: we grow up around images of women in bondage — it’s even there in the Greek Tales — so assume that’s the way it is in kink land.

However, if you start from the fact of your own submission, the picture is simpler. Yes, some men submit for kicks or because of a fetish, but many of us — if we introspect honestly— can see a direct line from our personality to our kink.

There again, it gets complicated.

First, we can have a submissive personality as a streak, or as a true self, and just about anything in between. (Meaning there’s room to be genuinely a switch.)

Jungian psychologist have the concept of the “Shadow”, which is basically a containment unit for rejected, as in “repressed”, possible selves. Roughly, these Shadow Selves often come bundled with useful functions, such as assertiveness or empathy, hence the practical need to “integrate” them to create a whole person.

Some of us have a submissive Shadow Self shoved well into the Shadow. Others are already submissive in normal life — I’ll get to what I think that means! — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg… there’s even more submissiveness lurking in the Shadow. Either way, since Shadow Selves have a way of escaping into the wild, if that describes you, and you are a man, then you count as a malesub for the purposes of my 12 Rules!

I think being submissive in normal life — See? I keep my promises! — isn’t what people would normally expect. Submissives are pleasers, yes, but we also get our certainty from outside ourselves. We are great joiners, love to champion an organisation or cause, or person, and feel the gravity of other people’s visions. We have a strong sense of duty.

In other words, we make great generals — Maximus! — PAs and executive officers — remember MCU Pepper Potts? — NCOs, bankers, carers, and professionals devoted to caring for others, such as therapists and medical doctors.

The snag is, we are bad at defending boundaries. So, we can be doormats, abused partners, workhorses, and general fools. Though the “friend zone” doesn’t exist, we often build one all on our own and end up there. We can be passive aggressive, because standing up for our own needs is hard. And — I strongly suspect — we have a tendency to dependence on anything from people, through video games, to drugs and alcohol.

We also harm others. We’re vulnerable to joining mobs and we can be zealots for unworthy causes. We can be appalling enablers… especially if somebody pushes our kinky buttons and we don’t admit it. And we overcommit, then flee into the night, leaving people confused and hurt.

This leads to the other factor that muddies the waters.

Given the above, it’s small wonder, that we often react to our submissiveness by being hyper-defensive of boundaries, fanatically individualist, resolute in not joining anything, ever, and really ambivalent about dominant members of our potential dating pool. We may even marry somebody who presents as as submissive as we are. None of that looks submissive! However, the tell to the discerning is that this all requires effort, and we often pump ourselves up on outrage or other emotions before we assert ourselves or move forward.

None of this makes us feel good.

And, if we’re uncomfortable with our real life submissiveness, then we’re likely to find or sexual submissiveness terrifying. We similarly react against it, or try to channel it into approved and nerfed boxes. Hence many of the crapsubs dominant women complain about.

However, deep down, we know who we are. Perhaps the test is twofold:

First, in our fantasies, we are drawn to the life beyond the hot kinky action. We fantasise about — say — being a Roman slave beaten by a cruel but hot owner, but also about serving them day to day, and that last part feels strangely comforting. We want to have a hot kinky encounter with — say — Eva Green’s Vanessa, but we’d also like to serve her tea in bed.

Second, in real life, we are drawn to people who carry their own certainty with them, that is, to dominant people, or people with a dominant streak that occasionally comes out. If we can’t find that, when we’re young, we often find a toxic proxy, such as somebody with uncontrolled mental health issues, or an abiding and abusive anger.

In other words, if we were straight, we grew up not just wanting to sexually service Cat Woman, or the White Witch (CS Lewis was really kinky, by the way), we also want to be their servants… and we’ve probably spent some time in the orbit of real life equivalents of varying wholesomeness.

And it’s all horribly complicated, and my 12 Rules for Malesub Life is my take on how to navigate all this.