Growing up kinky - an old memory helps me own my submission

She wasn't there.

The slave girl wasn't there.

Not so long ago, we were in a grand old house in the North of England, winding up the staircase, and I had a sudden sense of expectation. There would be this statue of a chained slave girl.

All I found was an empty niche and a note saying she was off on loan to an art gallery.

But the memories were there and they blew away the last vestige of my "submission is just a sweet spot" narrative:

Domination and submission is one of several sweet spots in a relationship. At this moment, I feel more comfortable as a submissive.

This is really just a variation on the story I used to tell myself and lovers:

As a kid, a gymnastics class taught me the sensual joy of stretching and straining my muscles. For this reason I was drawn to non-sexual bondage fantasies and tying up games. As sexuality dawned, I wove sex into the fantasies. Submission just provided a pretext, a scenario.

In a nutshell, I had convinced myself I was just a "bottom" with vivid fantasies. I suspect an awful lot of men do this. Bottoms are heroic, licentious, rakish in their search for transgressive pleasure. Subs are... well, we don't look exactly macho, do we?

But the missing slave girl told me neither of these are true.

Staring at the empty niche, I remembered back more than a couple of decades to visiting the place on the edge of my adolescence, and being mesmerized by the slave girl.

I was surrounded by naked bronze, at least half of it
slinkily female.

She was, of course, supposed to be about the horrors of slavery. However my father detected hypocrisy at work and remarked, cynically, that some people got excited by such a thing -- and that was the first time I was made aware that other people might be kinky. (He sounded slightly contemptuous of kinky people, which was probably not helpful in the long run.)

At the time, I was guiltily aware only of erotic curiosity, of wanting to slip a hand up those tempting thighs and see whether she was anatomically correct behind the wispy kilt.

However, walking up the imposing stair some three and a half decades later, I discovered I was surrounded by naked bronze, at least half of it slinkily female.

Whatever the pubescent me thought was my motivation, my real interest in the chained Slave Girl can only have been that she was a slave girl and I have a sense that I vaguely wanted to be her.

I was always -- in my imagination
 -- the victim

Yes, she was chained, but those are not chains you could strain against. Nor do they easily fit some bondage fantasy. They are there because she is a slave. (And yes, she's a Victorian fantasy slave, carved from racism and colonialism, with a side order of misogyny; I am chronicling my youthful reactions here, only. Real slavery isn't sexy.)

So even at that age, I was more interested in the dynamic than in the bondage.

So much for being a bottom.

This was also well before the confusions and knock backs of early dating could have given me the idea that submitting might be a sweet spot if only I could find it. So I can't pretend that my interest in the dynamic was a response to experience.

So much for the sweetspot excuse.

As Xena drove us south, that evening, I revisited the memories on which I built just a bottom and sweetspot.

I was one of those kids who was always interested in bondage and restraint, in dungeons and tying up games and damsels in distress and the martyr stories they fed us at school. I was always -- in my imagination -- the victim.

I was also intrigued by
tales of slavery

However, I was also intrigued by tales of slavery. For example, weird thoughts about being Roman mine slave agitated my imaginings when I was supposed to be sleeping.

I even once got a friend to tape me into a robot costume -- a confection of cardboard boxes --  and then guiltily, angrily, getting rid of the thing. It made me feel vaguely dirty.

That leads to the memory of always guiltily being aware that this was a dark fascination. In hindsight it was definitely tied to my awakening sexuality. For example, felt very agitated about a SciFi inspired game I planned in which the neighborhood girls would chase boys and then tag them with stapled-shut cardboard fetters, and then recoiled from that agitation and let the idea drop.

Then, in very early teenage, there was a visit to a castle dungeon, and a there was a girl my age who loudly gloated over all the torture apparatus.

I remember a panicky sense of loss that I had no way of talking to her, let alone striking up any sort of relationship. Here was the only girl in the universe who seemed to think my way and I was too young to do anything about it. Talk about bad timing!

Here was the only girl in the universe who
seemed to think my way

I'm not sure what I thought I'd do with that relationship even if I could have it. However, had she lived on my street, perhaps I would be with her still.

So looking back, I can see now that my fantasies, pre-sexual but sensual, then sexual, were always submissive ones rather than merely bondage-orientated, and always tending to boy-girl scenarios.

I'm just glad I ended up with Xena

I can also see that none of my submissive urges came out in the rest of my life. I was often the kid who organised the others into games, was no more obedient to adults than my peers, and didn't in any way feel drawn to caring or serving professions.

It seems to me now that I have always been a sexual submissive, the way gay people will often tell you that they were always gay.

I still think Femdom and particularly male chastity is a sweetspot. However, this really is my sexuality, and it's so ingrained, I wonder whether it might be better described as an orientation.

So there I was growing up kinky without even a word to describe it, carrying with me a terrible secret while trying to be normal. I'm just glad I ended up with Xena.

I don't think that growing up sub and dom will ever become socially acceptable or even politically correct the way LGBTQ has. I really doubt even the most liberal high schools will include BDSM in their sex education, or that fellow pupils will ever rally around a teen who "comes out" as a submissive!

However, young kinksters do at least have the internet:

Hi, I’m 18, just turned in April, but I’m interested in being a submissive. I’ve been curious about it since I was fifteen, but really started wanting to experiment this year.

Go read the full question and lunaKM's response. 

Meanwhile, I'm left with a question.

If this is so primal, so ingrained in my personality from such an early age, where does it come from? It's one thing to suspect humans have a D&S mode. Another thing to be born with it pre-triggered.

EDIT: Interesting Reddit thread that throws context on this. I'm certainly not the only one...
And another thread here: Earliest memories that hint at your tendency towards BDSM sexuality?

And another one: What's the etiology of your interest in Femdom?

And another: When did you realize you were into BDSM?

And another with a nice opening post from a Gay submissive: Where does kink come from?

And another from a dom: Found the porn I jerked off to during my adolescence at my parents' house this weekend...

And another.. How did you discover your first kink?

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Don't be alone with your Femdom urges! When we started out, my wife was vanilla. Use my manuals to help you walk the same Femdom path! There's one for him, and one for her.