No, really, the submissive does not hold all the power

How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real #2

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash.

“I’m changing over chastity devices,” I say.

“Oh?” says Xena. She’s getting dressed, tights half pulled-up to accidentally create what I call the stocking illusion. She doesn’t sound particularly interested.

Like I think most malesubs, I have a learned fear of rejection, so now I’m feeling insecure. Even so, I’m highly motivated to push on. “Usually that means I get an orgasm.”

My wife looks at me as if I had just asked for a blow job. “Why would that be?” She sounds genuinely puzzled.

I flush and feel weirdly embarrassed. “Because… uh… normally unlocking means cumming…”

That’s how it used to work, but now I’m unsure my tentative enquiry was appropriate.

Her disinterest in my chastity pit-stop wasn’t a rejection of my kink. Instead, it was because she takes it for granted. Her response was about the same as if I’d said, I’m going to change one of the car tyres today.

I’m suddenly very hard in my chastity device. “So do I get an orgasm?”

“Well of course you don’t.” She pulls the tights up with a snap.

She’s not playing.

Actually, she’s never really been playing.

When we started down the femdom path nearly thirty years ago, Xena was the world’s worst service top. My attempts to make BDSM “play” or “role play” always fell flat or fell away. Yes, she was an enthusiastic dominant, but doing things that suited her, not for their erotic effect on me. That was hot back then, and it’s still hot.

She also cheerfully uses our power exchange instrumentally. She once actually apologised for giving me a beating; “I’m sorry, it’s a lot of demerits, but you really need to keep your standards up.”

Then she gave me something like fifty very harsh lashes. The memory still turns me on as I type, but — nearer the time — the welts focused my mind on maintaining a high standard of housekeeping, which made her happy.

The thing is, as I strapped myself in for that beating, I wasn’t playing either. I was rightly scared of what she was about to do to me, but I didn’t think to withdraw consent.

“I need dinner at five-thirty today,” says my wife, “because I have yoga later. Oh, and lunch at one.”

“OK,” I say.

She strides off to her home office, leaving me turned on and slightly freaked out.

Functional is a good measure of real

What Xena and I have is… wonderful.

We don’t just behave as if we’re mistress and slave, or role play as mistress and slave.

Functionally, we are mistress and slave.

No, of course she can’t sell me, force me to perform sex acts outside my limits, or have me mutilated. This isn’t Ancient Rome.

However, day-to-day, my wife gives me whatever orders suit her, in the realistic expectation that I’ll obey. I do obey, in the realistic expectation of real punishment if I fall short of her standards. Xena also has flagrantly unreasonable control of our sex life, which includes keeping me continuously locked in chastity, with no orgasms…

And, both of us take this dynamic for granted. There are no layers between impulse and order, nor between receiving an order and obeying it.

This is why I call our mistress-slave relationship “functionally real”.

There are lots of clever thought experiments you could apply to this kind of dynamic. For example; Could an alien observer tell that she didn’t own me?

And, of course, it’s a turn on contemplating the answer to that question.

However, a more precise test is: Is she getting things she wants that I, in that particular moment, don’t?

The answer is, yes. Being a submissive masochist, I take great satisfaction in my lifestyle. However, in the moment, I don’t want to get up from my comfy seat to fetch her a coffee, not to take another twenty lashes, nor to not be able to have an orgasm.

The layers have a way of collapsing

Recently on the Femdom subreddit, there was a thread about whether it was OK for a malesub to volunteer to be — literally — a whipping boy for a stressed out domme.

The responses clustered around, on the one hand, “Hell no, that’s unhealthy” and, on the other, “You are underestimating the emotional labour required in crafting then enacting a scene.”

And all I could think about was how, one day when there were particularly upsetting #metoo related events in the news, Xena announced, “Demerit time,” then proceeded to whip me until she (accidentally) drew blood.

Afterwards, I cooked our dinner as usual, and we watched a Netflix romcom.

Xena didn’t do any emotional labour, and our relationship processed the brutal episode healthily… albeit for a fairly niche definition of “healthy”.

By now, you’ll realise that our dynamic is a long way from the detailed enthusiastic consent and crafted experiences advocated by BDSM culture, especially the online variety.

However, if you surf beyond Fetlife, you’ll find that our kind of Femdom relationship is quite common “in the wild”.

Unless you go to a lot of effort with repeated negotiation, scripting and after care, the layers of pretence and play have this way of collapsing. It seems there are several factors at work, and they interact… deliciously.

The first is that there really is a power imbalance between mistress and consensual slave.

(Article unlocks Sunday. The earlier articles of How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real are already unlocked)

No, really, the sub does not hold all the power

One of the most useless faux-truisms of BDSM culture is the trite statement that “the submissive holds all the power”.

Obviously, sometimes this is true. For example, I imagine the particularly hot young femsub with a taste for middle-aged “masters” has a particularly good negotiating position. The same goes for a well-heeled client having recourse to a prodomme, or a controlling husband pushing his wife into performing various scripts.

However, the statement implies several claims, all bollocks, and most vaguely offensive if you dwell on them. (And from hereon, I’ll assume F/m, though the observations probably apply to other combos.)

The statement implies a moral claim that the submissive should control the action. This is bollocks because many subs explicitly do not want that control and many dommes only feel authentic if they are actually in control of kinky activities. There’s no obvious moral problem with them pairing off to do their thing, as long as there are boundaries and limits. It also seems morally wrong to expect somebody to do something against their nature: a domme has no duty to service top.

Boundaries and limits takes us to the implied logical claim, also bollocks, that because it’s mostly the sub who sets the ground rules, the sub — logically — has control. However, that’s like saying that the Rules Committee controls the action on the rugby field, or that a vanilla partner controls the vanilla sex because they can say “no”. The logic here embodies a category error.

Perhaps people lean into that category error because it’s comforting, and because it then lets them make the statistical claim that it’s normal for the sub to have the control. Honestly, outside some rules-driven corners of the BDSM community, I don’t think it is. Certainly, beyond Fetlife, it’s commin for the dominant to really be in control. Long term, that has to be the most sustainable dynamic — hence my advice on how to make your partner feel more dominant — so the longevity of actual power exchange couples probably makes a mockery of the statistical claim anyway.

Finally, we come to the implied structural claim: that, though the ground rules give the domme apparent freedom of action within set boundaries, the submissive’s ability to withdraw consent gives him the actual power. This model assumes that the domme’s negotiating position is structurally poor relative to that of the sub, such that the dominant is incentivised to keep things fun in order to avoid that veto.

This is bollocks for two reasons. First, because of the way the layers collapse creating a functional power imbalance — but that’s what this entire series is about, so you’ll have to read all the articles! Second, because, in practice, the submissive’s negotiating position can be really very poor indeed.

The dominant loses nothing by halting action she doesn’t like…

Sometimes the submissive does have the better negotiating position. If the relationship is vanilla, and the dominant was the one who introduced the kink, the dominant had better make it fun. If the submissive is much in demand, then the dominant is incentivised to craft an experience. Likewise, if the submissive is paying for it.

But we talked about that.

What “the submissive holds all the power” misses is that the submissive wants to submit, and the domme doesn’t have to dominate them; the dominant can also withdraw consent. Both have the veto.

That means they initially negotiate as structural equals. However, once a session is underway, the structure tilts in favour of the domme. That’s because she is generally experience-oriented, whereas the submissive is generally goal-oriented.

The domme typically just wants to do domination for as long as she can keep going, or until she’s satiated, whichever happens first. If the sub vetoes her thing — whatever it is — then there’s no reason to continue. She’s already had some fun, and she’s not going to gain anything by persisting… except perhaps a headache and maybe a feeling of being used.

The fact of the suffering is exciting and a turn on for the sub, but he’s on a journey to a particular mental space — whether subspace or just that weird afterglow we enjoy — and maybe also an intense erotic finale. If the suffering is too much or of the wrong sort, then, yes, he can in theory use his veto. However, that means writing off the suffering so far, and losing the prospect of reaching his goal.

It’s like being halfway up a hill and it starts raining and your boots are leaking. If you turn around, the achy legs were for nothing. If you push on, then you still get to reach the summit.

So, since the submissive has more to lose, his negotiating position is structurally worse than that of the domme. He has a strong incentive to take the rough with the smooth.

But wait, the sub’s negotiating gets worse!

All of the above applies doubly if the kink is part of a long-term relationship. However,the situation now raises the stakes for the sub, but not for the dominant. At any given moment, the sub may have invested hundreds of hours in his quest to reach his goal… whatever that is… whereas the dominant still has nothing to lose by halting the action.

Other factors also apply.

Once the sub feels trapped, if he is a masochistic sub — I was tempted to say actual sub — and feels physically safe, something I call masochist’s squirm sets in: the argh-whee runway feedback loop version of subspace in which the knowledge of being trapped is a turn on which makes him feel more submissive which makes him feel more trapped which turns him on even more, making him feel more submissive…

When that happens, the sub’s negotiating position literally drips away.

Though this reportedly applies to play dates, it has to be even more intense in an ongoing relationship. You can be doing something entirely unrelated and be poleaxed by a you-are-here moment: “I can’t believe she… OMG I’m turned on now.”

Male Chastity, if you practice it, obliterates the sub’s negotiating position. In its mildest form, it means he needs her in order to have an orgasm, but she doesn’t need him. If he makes femdom difficult or annoying, she can just use her vibrator in private. In its harshest “permanent” form, it makes his goal always just a little bit out of reach, tempting him to try just a little harder…

Finally, if the submissive introduced femdom to his long term partner, then there’s a long phase in which she can — apparently — take or leave the kink. In that situation, he’s utterly screwed. He can’t afford to push back against anything she wants, or the femdom might go away… forever!

That last situation is very common outside the BDSM community, and for various reasons, many of them cultural, probably applies to most of my readers.

As my friend

SkinS

once pointed out in horror, this means that, on the face of it, the experienced domme who partakes in the real life BDSM scene has a worse negotiating position than — say — the very vanilla and unadventurous conservative housewife nervously picking up the whip for the first time.

Fortunately, if you do power exchange for any length of time, other psychological forces kick in to make it real anyway. We’ll get to those in the next part of my series, How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real.

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