Domination and submission and Operant Conditioning

How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real #3

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

“This is as permanent as it gets,” I say. “I can only get out of it by wrecking the device, and it’s worth something like £300.”

I’m showing off my new chastity device to Xena; a single use prototype permanent Saint that Lady Fox of Custom Chastity sent me to try.

“If I get off in it,” I continue, “my dick will swell up painfully. If I pull out and get off, I won’t be able to get back in.” (After more than a few months’ denial, I get an allergic reaction to my own semen.)

Xena scrutinises my new installation.

“Can you fly in it?”

“Yes,” I say. “There’s the possibility of an embarrassing conversation with security, but it’s not illegal and there are stories that chastity devices often get passed by scanners these days anyway - the AI knows what they are. So there’s no reason to ever remove this.”

“Oh,” says Xena.

My wife has me rub her feet for a while, then fetch her vibrator. My presence kneeling in the corner is distracting, so she sends me to my cell for half an hour so she can have peace and quiet to masturbate.

And that’s the important part of this story: this wasn’t for effect, or playing with my head, or teasing. As far as I can tell, my wife was too tired or not in the mood for messy sexual activity and just wanted a quick wank. I was in the way of that, so she ordered me out of the room.

Yes, healthy vanilla couples give each other space for such things. However, I suspect it's much rarer for them to start on — say — kissing and fondling, the wife to get turned on, and then banish the husband so she can get off on her own. I really doubt it's generally acceptable to terminate intimacy in order to pursue solo activity.

It’s the same - but less sexy - when she gives me lists of domestic tasks or has me fetch and carry; “Oh, fetch my phone from the lounge.”

Obviously, that’s something couples do for each other. However - usually - the request is reasonable, or couched in a way that appeals to reason. I might say to Xena, "Oh, I just got comfortable, and I left my phone in the other room. You're still on your feet - would you mind...?" Xena, however, will tell me to fetch something for her even if she's on her feet and I'm the one comfortably seated or in the middle of some other non-work activity.

In my previous article, I argued that when it comes to kinky power exchange, “functional is a good measure of real”. By that measure, our dynamic is very real indeed.

However, though there is a structural power imbalance — Xena could make the femdom go away! — that’s not what determines our behaviour moment to moment.

I don’t think, “Better fetch Xena’s phone or she’ll cancel our FLR!” Instead, I just do it.

Similarly, I doubt Xena’s always making calculations about what she can get away with. She just wants her phone.

So, what’s happened is that we’ve internalised our dynamic.

When you drill down into the details of how it works, there are two slightly scary things going on.

The first is conditioning; Operant Conditioning, to be exact.

We’re all familiar with the idea that conditioning is about adding behaviours. However, it’s also about stripping away layers and crushing filters. Read on!

(Article unlocks next weekend - read the rest of the series.)

Meet the Default Mode Network

The Default Mode Network (DNS) is an actual physical system in the brain that… well does lots of things, but it’s particularly important for when we are on autopilot. It’s what kicks in when we drive, dance, do a martial art, play an FPS, and it lets us do these things without conscious thought about the how.

Part of the DNS’s role is to identify the framework we’re in and what we’re doing, then serve up the next step.

Send a text, reach for a phone… Get stuck on a maths problem, goof off on the internet… Want an orgasm, order my sub to go down on me.

Wait? What was that last one?

Want an orgasm, order my sub to go down on me.

There is no conscious stage between wanting and ordering. There’s also no conscious step between receiving and order and obedience:

She orders me to go down on her, so I go down on her.

This is a long way from the idealised processes we sometimes get from the more detail-orientated corners of the online BDSM community:

How can I drive my sub wild? I could tell him to go down on me. Do I already have consent? I do. Is there time to do this and give him aftercare? Yes. OK, I’ll give the order and wait and see if he safewords.

And…

She wants me to go down on her. Did we negotiate consent to this upfront? Yes. Am I really still in the mood? Not sure. Should I use the traffic light colour “amber” to slow her down and get her to do more build up?

OK! Maybe I’m exaggerating a little, and none of the above is a bad idea, especially with a new play partner. However, there’s a big difference between the habits of command and obedience and the more considered mutually satisfying affirmative consent-moderated roleplay of the idealised BDSM scene.

That’s because those next steps served up by the Default Node are really habits. The Default Mode Network is where habits live.

Scarily, habits operate without conscious thought:

Stimulus → Response.

The Stimulus can be internal or external, and the Response can be anything from a physical action to a chain of thought:

Incoming karate chop → Arm block.

Bored → Pick a computer game.

Nervous → Look for candy

Sad → Phone a friend.

For example, it’s been years since I’ve played, but if a cricket ball comes my way, I “instinctively” try to catch it, where the instinct is really a learned habit. Similarly, if I find myself in the kind of pub I used to frequent as a student, I have the now unfashionable urge to buy a pint of real ale and sing sea shanties (long story).

Habits — as anybody with an inconvenient one knows — are neither trivial nor easy to shake. That’s because they are not conscious decisions, nor instructions stored in our short term memory, but rather actual neural pathways that light up in our brain when we dominate and submit.

Operant Conditioning

We acquire habits through operant conditioning, which according to Wikipedia looks pretty much like this:

Operant Conditioning

Obviously, Dominant and Submissive share the Positive Reinforcement of the weird shared intimacy of a D/s dynamic, but I think that becomes far less salient the deeper they get. Otherwise, the conditioning seems to work slightly differently for each partner.

How the submissive is conditioned

It’s easiest to see how all this applies to the sub — also, he has to be particularly vulnerable to conditioning because he’s spending a lot of time in a squishy near-hypnotic erotic haze.

His submission clearly undergoes continuous Reinforcement.

Every time he submits properly, something happens that pushes his buttons, either directly erotic or setting off what I call squirm — so all the Positive Reinforcement you could throw a stick at. There’s also Negative Reinforcement. By obeying, he’s escaping moments of immediate tension or boredom, e.g. kneeling in the corner waiting for orders. And submission in general avoids a whole slew of feelings that a sub may dislike: guilt, self-doubt, decision paralysis, self-consciousness, or just being trapped in his ruminations.

Punishment also decreases any tendency of the sub to balk at his submission.

Obviously, within the framework of the dynamic, there’s Positive Punishment — e.g. she beats him and it actually hurts — and Negative Punishment — e.g. no sleeping in the bed for a week. However, remember we talked about a D/s relationship having a structural power imbalance in favour of the domme? That applies here too: Balking may make the Femdom may go away.

How the dominant is conditioned

All this also applies to the dominant, as long as she’s getting things she wants. The stimulus has to be internal to her.

Her role is also continuously Reinforced.

She can have lashings and lashings of Positive Reinforcement, as much service — erotic or otherwise — as she wants, be as mean as she feels… what’s not to like?

Meanwhile, the Negative Reinforcement comes along as escape from whatever is bothering her at any given moment — whether sexual frustration or frustration at a messy home — and as active avoidance of the general irritations of, e.g. playing nice and being agreeable.

Less obviously, there are also Punishments for the dominant.

If she steps out of her dominance, she immediately has to deal with the Positive Punishment of blowback, which will include a disappointed partner who may expect help in getting his orgasm. At minium there will be emotional labour. There’s also the Negative Punishment of losing control of her surroundings — the laundry doesn’t get folded, the husband tries to initiate erotic activity, or wanders off into porno land, the play partner suddenly wants to make light conversation or renegotiate the dynamic…

Conditioning collapses the layers, crushing the filters

Careful what you wish for!

Early in our marriage, Xena remarked that it was hard to remember when it was not OK to hit me. We’d only been doing bedroom femdom, and I was — in hindsight, wrong-headedly — careful to set boundaries around it. Even so, the more femdom we did, the more demanding and short fused she became in vanilla time.

I suspect one reason we had a hiatus in our kink was because she was increasingly irritated by the dissonance between control in the bedroom and lack of control in the wider relationship: taking the dominant role became literally punishing for her.

D/s conditioning is relationship dynamite. That’s not because you can condition somebody to perform specific acts — to get wet or hard on demand, or adopt certain postures… the kind of thing some dominants boast about. Rather, it’s because the conditioning can act at a higher level, and ingrain the habit of command and obedience, of punishing and submitting.

Perhaps that’s the real reason why mainstream BDSM culture makes such a thing of pre-negotiations and post-scene aftercare. In addition to their obvious functions, these activities also set boundaries in time; what happens in kink land stays in kink land.

Even if you do manage to firewall the kink in the bedroom, there has to still be a tendency for the layers of kink culture framing to collapse, crushing the filters between stimulus and response.

For some of us, that’s a feature, not a bug. The same goes for the other scary thing that makes up the second part of conditioning. However, I’ll get to that in the next part of my series, How Kinky Power Exchange Becomes Real.

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