Monday 17 October 2016

So submissive you give up your submission? Why meta submission is horseshit

Does the fantasy
of submitting to a
life of only
vanilla sex get you
hard and/or drippy?
Call it "meta submission".

It's a glib little meme, but all the more toxic for it. Subrugbylad articulates it beautifully:
...they said, “it could be the ultimate submission, giving up your kinky side to please your partner”.
The kink world variant is:
If they are truly submissive, then they will obey when you order them to dominate you.
There's a hole in this logic - a category mistake, I think.

However the real problem is that it comes from too much clever reasoning and not enough reality, so let's start with the reality instead:

Would you actually masturbate 
over submissive fantasies of submissively 
giving up your submission? 

Do you jerk (or jill) off over 
binning your chastity device, burning your 
whips, recycling your chains? 

Does the fantasy of submitting 
to a life of only vanilla sex get 
you hard and/or drippy?

No?

Then, no matter how clever the spin, meta submission isn't going to make you feel very fulfilled as a person, so probably don't want to do it.

If that's not convinced you that meta submission his horseshit, then read on...


Romance is only one aspect of vanilla love. The other
is 
desire - the earthy need to fuck to mutual satisfaction.
Still here?

OK.

Think about vanilla love.

Straight people want to get intimate with their opposite numbers, bi with either gender, gay men with other men and lesbian women with other women.

Yes, people make mistakes and see what there's not: the object of their affections may not be able to reciprocate - the spark just isn't there, or perhaps their genders and orientations don't match up.

However, even though our culture says romantic love is selfless, statements like, "If you truly love me, then you will be happy with a sexless partnership" sound manipulative and accepting them makes you a bit tragic.

That's because, whatever fluff we wrap it up in,  romance is only one aspect of vanilla love. The other is desire - the earthy need to fuck to mutual satisfaction.

You can't have love without desire because they are two sides of the same coin. You feel romantic to a person you desire. You desire a person because you feel romantic toward them.

It makes no sense to demand that your orientation make you feel good about giving up your orientation!

We submissives want to surrender to the person
 we want to submit to, and want to submit to
the person to we want to surrender to.
Now, if you are a submissive then sexual submission is your sexual orientation (or so close to being an orientation that I will use the word here).

It's not just to do with what gets you off, submission is about who you are and what fulfils you. It's the intimacy and romantic channel - or an important one - that works for you.

Just like vanilla love, submissive love has two aspects: I'll call them service and submitting.

Service is what we do when we set out to fit around or partner, to please them out of bed and in non-sexual ways... even in ways we can't eroticise. (It's something we have to be careful to manage if we also want vanilla aspects to our relationship.)

Submitting is the earthy desire to serve and suffer in the kinky bedroom (or dungeon).

It's amazingly easy to get vanilla
partners to at least try kink
Similar to vanillas, we submissives want to serve the person we want to submit to, and want to submit to the person to we want to serve. And just like them, it makes no sense to insist that our urge to serve should make us give up on submitting: that our orientation make us feel good about giving up our orientation.

Again, like vanilla folk, we can get it wrong especially, since BDSM is stuck in the equivalent of the gay 1930s, we may be looking for somebody with a dominant streak who has yet to discover it.

Though I think most people have potential to be sexually dominant or submissive - it's amazingly easy to get vanilla partners to at least try kink -  there are some people who just can't do dominance because, behind a smokescreen of domineering behaviour, they are as submissive as we are, or else just won't explore BDSM because of inhibitions.
Even in the vanilla world, there are plenty of
people willing to explore their sexual dominance
The situation then is just like vanilla love. You've fallen for the wrong person. Either your orientations are incompatible after all, or else your partner is the equivalent of sexually dysfunctional in the area that matters to you. What do you do about it? 

Well, if you've discovered your own submissive orientation well into a relationship, you may choose to accept the kink equivalent of a dead bedroom. Pair bonding and shared commitment are also fulfilling and honourable, and there's still vanilla sex.

However, if you discover the incompatibly early, you would be insane and perhaps immoral to persist with the relationship while spinning it that you are being super submissive by not pursuing your submission. It's better all round if you move on. 

Even in the vanilla world, there are plenty of people willing to explore their sexual dominance if you approach them right and don't overwhelm them...

Meta submission is not just horseshit, it's toxic horseshit.

When we started, Xena was vanilla! Learn how to how to walk the same Femdom path with your partner... 

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5 comments:

  1. This is an interesting and I think very valid distinction between service and submission. I tend to think of what you call 'service' as a form of 'submission' and what you call 'submission' as 'specific kinks'. But that might be irrelevant semantics more than anything else. Or maybe not. I am not sure.

    This is all extremely individual as in what acts or mental states are best at scratching the sub/dom itch. For example I like having things done for me, in the very general vanilla service sense but also sexually, and some of those acts I can SEE could well be felt to be submissive by a sub. But it does little to press my kink buttons. This includes anything from being helped with work to foot rubs to massage to cunnilingus. All great but don't strike the dom chords in my head (without adjustments). On the other hand, overriding someone's sexual preference (consensually, now and then) does.

    So, I am not sure if it's "meta-dominance" - to me it's simply dominance - but to answer your (possibly rhetorical)question: I have indeed masturbated to a fantasy of making a sub tie me up/hurt me specifically to instruction and it had nothing to do with being tied up/hurt (which was awful even in fantasy - it wasn't service topping, I don't enjoy pain or bondage) and everything with overriding (temporarily ;) the specific-kink preferences of the sub -- and mine too, as an exercise in ultimate assertion of power. And power is, occasionally, the biggest kink of all.

    But isn't it really a question of matching specific kinks? I like erections/cock to play with and I also like male orgasms and there is no way I could click sexually with a guy whose biggest, deal-breaker kink is to be denied and especially locked up for weeks (or even, the horror, months) on end. The mismatch would be so significant that I'd be better with an accommodating vanilla man.

    It's a fascinating subject, and something that really fucked my head up a lot when I started to explore bdsm with some self-awareness. I've gone on long enough here, I should probably write my own post about it all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Please do! And thanks for the comment.

      I was using service and submission as handy terms. I am not sure I dare offer a sweeping definition! I really mean the distinction between a vanilla D/s dynamic in action and an explicitly kinky one.

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    2. Oh and what sparked this off was somebody considering it in the context of a vanilla relationship..

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    3. I really love that you mention vanilla D/s, we hear a lot about 'vanilla kinksters/fetishists' but rarely the other way - I think it is VERY MUCH a thing (I wrote about, or around it here: http://skinshallows.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/semantics-of-control-or-how-dominance.html)

      On the anecdotal side, my rl sex is probably significantly more D/s than average but it's very vanilla (no kink). And the latter sucks.

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    4. My philosophy - the one I push in my 2 self help books - is that though not so many women are kinky dominants, most like being pampered, and many like to flirt. So the proposition is, "What if you were *really* her slave?" At first it doesn't necessarily get her behaving like a fetish domme, but it does generate a load of kink as a by product.

      It follows from this that the best approach is to take a vanilla thing that already works and see if it can be improved for her via kink. (Oh, and stop giving away unacknowledged submission.)

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