Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (14 page)

I never worried why I had these interests. My first boyfriend and I had been going out for a while before something reminded me there was this other stuff, too. I wanted him to top me in a very mild way. I really wanted to struggle a little and have him hold me down. But I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. So while we were kissing and rolling around in the bed and kind of necking and doing foreplay things, I pushed him away just a little bit, not trying to really push him away. He was confused. He pulled back and gave me a funny look and tried to kiss me again. I tried it again, and after two or three times, he got up and walked to the other side of the room, all grumpy and
very
confused. He didn’t have a clue about what I was trying to do! So we sat there unhappy for a few minutes, and I said, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “What’s going
on
? I’m confused!” That was probably the hardest moment of my life! I had to get the words out to say, “I want you to hold me down; I want you to push a little bit.” Then he said, “If that’s what you want, sure, we can give that a try.” So we gave it a try, and we talked about it afterwards. He’d be happy to do it for me if I wanted
him to, but he didn’t really get it! We did it a few more times. I suspect we didn’t do it more because it didn’t do anything for him, and so a lot of the thrill wasn’t there for me, either.

I’ve always been a switch, but I’m in a transition. I always got a great deal of pleasure from bottoming—direct visceral pleasure. The pleasure I got from topping was not as direct; I am not a natural top. I enjoy [it], but topping wasn’t something that I automatically wanted to do: It was specific to a person who wanted me to do that. Just recently I have found women I was attracted to who were interested in S/M. My attraction was so intense that I just thought, I want to do S/M with this person; I don’t care how it has to happen. I have a girlfriend of several months now. We didn’t intend to get serious, but it’s gotten very serious. She is a bottom, and I’ve been doing all the topping. We’ve both been enjoying it a great deal.

As a bottom I like things that make me the center of attention. A few times I’ve been in scenes where I was ignored for long periods. I got very bored. I like a lot of physical attention, both painful and nonpainful. I like sexual play, and sometimes I like play where nothing sexual happens at all. I haven’t done formal meditation, but it seems to me that [pain] does something similar to what meditation [or] yoga can do, because you’re focusing your body, and your mind can be free to drift and not think analytically at all.

S/M is the only time that I’m only paying attention to one thing. Even in the middle of sex, I find myself being distracted [by] work or the dishes! S/M gets me completely focused. There have been a few times when everything has been just right, and it got to where I could take anything. I don’t know where the energy goes. It’s like a balloon breaking! I’m getting closer and closer to something, [it’s] swelling up in me, all the energy from the beating is going inside and staying there, and as I get to that stage, it’s broken. The energy is flowing real freely through my body and out of my body and, God, yes, anything can happen at that point.

Unfortunately, the first time I lived away from my parents’ house, I was young and uncertain. I lived with a dominant who was a couple of years older than me. He had a lot more experience. I deferred to his life experience and stopped trusting my own intuition. There was emotional domination that wasn’t Scene domination. I got into S/M for good reasons, but the relationship itself got twisted because we were both young. We did lots of play where I was submissive in ways that more than anything else looked like a traditional heterosexual relationship.

If you’ve ever talked to women who are in battered relationships, you’ll hear a lot of what I’m saying here. I’d gotten very confused; I lost my sense of who I was. I lost the ability to objectively and independently judge what
was going on around me. I was trying to figure out why this stuff that had been so exciting and wonderful at the beginning had gotten so scary. I puzzled it through and realized that there was an emotional dynamic that was happening which wasn’t S/M. Coming to the realization—that the S/M was great, but that the things that were going on that I didn’t like were not the same as the S/M—was very powerful for me. [This] allowed me to get out of the relationship and not blame the sex. To be able to separate those things is very valuable. I’ve read writings by women who were “saved” from a life of perversion; they didn’t separate those things. I read sadness in their words.

[In order for a] full-time D&S relationship to work, you have to be much more aware and negotiate more thoroughly and be able to talk about stuff and say, “When you did this, I felt that way.” S/M is not a matter of activity nor of degree: It’s a matter of intention.

SECTION TWO

I
MAGINATION AND
D
ESIRE

Four

P
ower—its uses and abuses—makes the world go ’round. To most people, power is a political, economic, or social phenomenon which often entails the assertion of superiority over others for personal or group gain. But to the D&Ser, the power exchange between lovers is a fundamental source of erotic excitement, shared by equals, and often an intellectually enlightening experience.

In this chapter, we explore the erotic potency of power. We profile six people for whom the power exchange is a critical aspect of their sexual play:

Submission, as it is popularly defined, is an act of resignation or defeat, a bowing against one’s will to a superior, frequently impersonal authority. While some D&S roleplaying may emulate such dismal realities, for most D&Sers submission is often, paradoxically, an act of liberation and also the realization of a private and profound need.

Desire precedes action: Submissives consciously seek out opportunities to enact pleasurable fantasies of being sexually controlled. Historically, psychologists have attributed the desire to submit sexually as a craving for
expiation of sexual guilt. This generalization appears to hold true for some submissives, for whom the psychodrama of coercion—in which the dominant, albeit consensually, “forces” them to accept erotic activity—relieves their individual responsibility for sexual desire. When lust is viewed as a shameful moral flaw, erotic coercion helps the submissive to surrender to sexual pleasure.

Other classic and condemnatory explanations for sexual submission include low self-esteem, weakness, passivity, and regressed sexuality. Theorists who have suggested these causes have relied primarily on anecdotal information from a limited base of troubled clients. The resulting theories seem to reflect the theorists’ individual biases against sexual variations.

Theories that submission is inherently a behavior of victims may account for the neo-Freudian (and pseudo-Darwinian) eagerness to classify submissiveness as a predominantly female phenomenon. Such theories fail to consider that consenting submissives are unlikely to exhibit these characteristics in other areas of their lives. Furthermore, submissive men comprise the single largest component of D&S culture. What clinicians have not explored is the main source of pleasure for the sexual submissive: a transcendent delight in surrender.