How to firewall your dynamic so it doesn't leak
How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real #7
Moment to moment, power relations are mostly in the head.
An established kinky D/s dynamic turns out to be a self-reinforcing framework presided over by our monkey brain. Actual power imbalance, conditioning, and relational model work together to generate the kind of automatic behaviour and emotions that would be appropriate if the power exchange were “real”.
For example, when he commits a faux pass, the submissive isn’t role playing shame, and the dominant isn’t role playing irritation.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s how Method Acting works, how military discipline is maintained, and how sports stars lose perspective on the field or pitch.
We’ve seen that there are some fairly obvious positive ways to strengthen a kinky D/s dynamic. Most of them come down to “if you treat the dynamic as real, it becomes real”.
But what if you don’t want the dynamic to leak out into vanilla life? How do you use this knowledge to firewall your kink?
Addressing the Power Imbalance
Earlier, I pointed out the elephant in the room: no, the submissive does not hold all the power.
Generally, in the wild, the Femdom was his idea, not hers. Moreover, even if both partners are equally openly enthusiastic, generally the submissive is chasing a goal whereas the dominant is revelling in an experience. He simply has the most motivation to take the rough with the smooth. This nudges the monkey brain to tag the relationship as Authority Ranking out of the box, even before the kink starts!
BDSM culture already has two potential fixes for this. Negotiations and light scripting frame the kinky interaction as mutually beneficial, with nobody having the upper hand. Then, later, aftercare puts the dominant in the service role.
I am… sceptical that negotiations can dodge the power imbalance. Yes, some dommes — especially ones active in the Scene — do have particular somewhat extreme things they are happy to negotiate for. However, I suspect these are in the minority.
Aftercare looks to be more effective because you can see it as the dominant’s way to “pay” for the action after the fact. However, I’m not sure how comfortable dominants might be with that concept. (Eww.)
It’s probably more fruitful to focus on tweaking the conditioning to prevent the dynamic from leaking.
(Article unlocks next Sunday. The earlier articles of How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real are already unlocked… unlike me.)
Tweaking the Conditioning
Operant Conditioning writes habits direct to the brain. It follows that if you don’t want a lifestyle relationship, you should be very careful about what habits you establish.
This shouldn’t be too hard because a habit is basically…
Stimulus > Response
All you have to do is control the stimulus: “No D/s without a costume”.
By costume, I mean anything you’re both aware of. Potentially this could be anything from stockings through to a latex wombat suit. However, the most practical option has to be a collar and/or chastity device on the submissive.
If a collar — or whatever — is always part of the stimulus when the dynamic is in force, then when it’s not there, there’s no dynamic. Voila! You have a firewall.
This has the added benefit that it lets both of you ask for kink indirectly, e.g. by leaving the collar out on the bed, or asking, “How about I/you wear the collar tonight?”
Aftercare to reset the Relational Model
Domination and Submission uses the “Authority Ranking” Relational Model, one of the four hardwired boilerplates that the monkey brain references when navigating relationships.
There’s no technical reason why you can’t have Authority Ranking running during kinky sex time, and Communal Sharing and Equality Matching in the rest of your relationship. Any given relationship can use several versions of all four Relational Models, depending on the context. For example, my wife is in charge in general, but I’m in charge for home improvement tasks — “Pass me the drill, Xena.”
The challenge is that kinky Authority Ranking can be so intense that it overshadows the other Relational Models. The way round this has to be to use aftercare as a reset.
The standard model of aftercare seems to be that the dominant turns nurturer. This makes sense if the submissive has been entirely in a service role. However, if the dynamic involves giving and receiving pain, then I suspect that the monkey brain reads the giving and receiving of nurture as just more Authority Ranking!
This maybe explains why a sadistic Fetlife friend reports ending up in charge after a session. He’s not interested in dominance for its own sake, but he ends up being the one to make decisions like choosing a restaurant.
A more effective strategy, once everybody has recovered somewhat, might be a shared activity that very firmly does not involve any sort of Authority Ranking, perhaps a video game, or boardgame, or a round of ping pong.
Oddly, I’ve never heard of anybody doing this.
Do people actually do any of this?
So there are three challenges to the firewall: power, conditioning, and relationship model. That gives us three responses: equal negotiation; costume; and ping pong.
I think the first is usually structurally impossible. The second… well, kinky couples do use costume, but that it’s more about getting into the mood than subsequently getting out of it.
The third, a shared non-hierarchical activity such as a game of ping pong? I’ve never heard of anybody doing that. Aftercare usually just reasserts the hierarchy through nurture.
To me, that suggests that kinky folk aren’t actually as interested in firewalling their power-exchange dynamics as they maybe claim to be.
The revealed preference is that the dominant remains dominant, but in vanilla ways.
Things might be easier if more people would admit to that…
There is, however, another firewall that some dominant women seem particularly keen to maintain. Contemplating it takes us to a uncomfortable territory. Tune in next week!
So this:
>>"suspect that the monkey brain reads the giving and receiving of nurture as just more Authority Ranking!"
I'd say a big big BIG "yes but" to it. My personal objection to this is that while it maintains AR (in my -- admittedly small -- experience with "more serious" aftercare), extensive, especially "cuddly" but even the "lie there with ice on your butt and don't move" style qualitatively trabsforms the top/dom role, from whatever it was and is normally to a "caretaker dom", or in kink parlance "daddy dom" (regardless of sex and gender of involved parties). So yes, a big ewww warning for this if you don't want this kind of dynamic. You might turn yourself into a daddy dom(me) purely by accident.
Of course many tops enjoy this kind of power too, within reason. But if you want to keep THAT ring fenced too (and it could get hard with an insecure or a bit needy sub) you STILL need a reset / toggle button.
As to "why people don't do things like board games", don't they? I think they must do. I certainly did with one regular playmate/fwb. We'd have a cuppa and a conversation about unrelated subject (local government politics, computer games, respective children growing up) and it provided an VERY effective reset. The whole relationship had virtually no leakage despite being pretty much "blanket consent within broad boundaries" in-play, and my partner never once safe wording or revoking that consent over more than a year of regular play. And any debrief/discussion of kinky stuff was done later, from "non AR place".