How do I make my partner more dominant?

How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real #1

Photo by Marie-Michèle Bouchard on Unsplash

Question: How do I help my wife/girfriend/husband/boyfriend to be more dominant?

It comes up on Reddit so often, I should probably sell cards with the answer printed on in big red letters:

Identify vanilla things that your partner already likes
that can be unreasonably improved
through power exchange,
and then suggest and deliver them.

It really is as simple as that!

If you make kink about your partner getting things they like, then they will always know what to do, and will like doing it. They’ll also have a story to tell themselves while they — hopefully — start enjoying the kink for its own sake, power corrupting and all…

Then, bingo, you have sustainable kink.

There are, of course, a few caveats, and you have to approach it right.

For a start, this approach only really makes sense if we’re talking about the kind of consensual power exchange sometimes called “authority transfer”, where one partner is in charge and empowered without having to fight for it.

(Paywall unlocks at the weekend)

Caveat: When this doesn’t apply

The Unreasonable Improvement approach does not apply if you don’t really mean dominant in the sense of “empowered”.

These days, “more dominant” is often actually code for the less comfortable “more aggressive and rougher” during what’s basically consensual rough sex with safe words, with bondage and devices being increasingly optional. It can also be malesub code for “more enthusiastic about pegging me” (or even the slightly sad, “goes on top during vanilla sex and maybe sits on my face”… but I don’t know what to say about that).

If either of these are true, and you genuinely think your partner is secretly enthusiastic but holding back, maybe try a kind of walkthrough. The aim is for them to experience how far they can go and that you can survive it. This involves you doing your own safety research: “Put your hand there… slap me… harder… a little harder… too hard…”

If — more likely — you don’t think they’re really into whatever it is, but they’re happy to do it for you (at least until they get bored), then a good approach might be to make it a means to an end: “Subdue me properly and I’ll [do a very sexy thing for you that you wouldn’t normally get]!” Fetish has a way of spreading backwards, so eventually the kink may become a turn on by association. I strongly suspect that this works best on masculine partners.

Finally, if — and I’m afraid this is the most likely scenario — they just aren’t into it, but gave it a go for novelty a couple of times, then your best bet is to shelve the activity and explore the kind of domination and submission that’s closer to owner/slave role play… which is what I’m talking about here.

Delivering Unreasonable Improvements

So you’ve worked out a kinky unreasonable improvement — I’ll assume F/m from now on, but the ideas should work for other combos — and pitched it to her and she’s agreed to try it.

Now you have to actually deliver, otherwise you’re just going to annoy her and torpedo the kink, and maybe the relationship as well.

For example, if she likes oral with no obligation to reciprocate, followed by her falling asleep, you actually have to provide that with no whinging or hints that — say — a reciprocal blow job or verbal humiliation might be nice after all. It’ll maybe be weeks or months before she takes this for granted, and you’ll have to bite your tongue all that time.

Also, you only get your specific kinks if they make sense to her.

So, oral service while wearing a slave collar and chastity device is likely to work, however — checks your browser history (because I can do that, you know) — that latex wombat suit you bought can probably stay wherever you keep it hidden.

Probably.

Nor can you expect lots of attention while you provide a service, unless of course the service is being the object of her sadism.

If she is sadistic — a surprising number of women seem to have a sadistic streak — then expect her to do it her way. The action will be about her, say, whipping you, not about you getting tied up in interesting ways and her putting on stockings to do it. She may enjoy you pleading and squealing, or — like my wife — she may prefer you to be mostly muted. (It might be worth doing a calibration exercise along the lines of what I suggested for rough sex.)

Finally, don’t necessarily expect any “after care”. That can feel far too much like a tax or a penance. That’s especially true if you’re the one who introduced kink to the relationship. It may be a long time before she stops feeling guilty and at the same time that on some level she’s doing you a favour.

Another Caveat: Careful What You Wish For

The problem with using power exchange to improve an element of your relationship is that she may come to firmly prefer the upgraded version.

This can be a nice problem to have, but you may end up becoming a person you did not set out to be.

For example, my wife Xena turns out to prefer erotic activity with me locked in chastity and in service mode, so that’s been pretty much my sex life for the last ten or so years.

You may be thinking, “Oh, I won’t let that happen to me.”

The snag is that, even if it’s limited to the bedroom, kinky power exchange has a way of becoming real, and also then leaking.

Some this is down to things like negotiating power, however, thanks to the way our brains work, there are much deeper, darker forces at work… which is what I’m going to talk about over the next few weeks in my series How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real.

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