Why Evolutionary Psychology isn't very practically useful when thinking about Femdom (or any BDSM) Relationships

I'd rather be a hardwired pervert
than a Freudian-made one.

I like Evolutionary Psychology. It's a great parlour game, real studies by real scientists are fascinating, and I've found it helpful to see that my submissive sexuality might actually fit into a more primal setting: I'd rather be a hardwired pervert than a Freudian-made one.

However, whatever you think of the value of it as a science, Evolutionary Psychology is not actually very practically useful in Femdom or BDSM.

Partly this is because it's hard to disentangle nature and nurture.

Mostly, though, it's because Evolutionary Psychology is redundant!

Why go from (A)  observations of the modern world to (B) hypothesising based on a hypothetical palaeolithic, and (C) then back to acting the modern world? You can just skip the middle step and ask, "What works?"

And most of what what works boils down to: 

• Don't be an ass or a loser. 
• Take social risks to form new relationships.
• Listen to people and take them seriously.
• Date for broader compatibility, not just kink (because a lot of people are secretly kinky or kink-amenable).
• Ask for things you want, but focusing on what's in it for your partner.
• Don't try to be dominant with a dominant potential partner.

That last should be pretty obvious! 

If you insist on taking the palaeolithic view: presumably a dominant palaeolithic woman would want a mate who would be good at wrestling cave bears, but also do as he's told. 

However, that's working backwards from the thing we observe anyway, to a hypothesis that doesn't help guide our behaviour.

Which is my point.

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Is Domination and Submission like sugar (but better for you)?

The urges to dominate and to submit -
those have to be natural. They're part
of our inner monkey. 

Humans are born addicted to sugar:

Many scientists suggest that we are primed to desire sugar at an instinctive level as it plays such a vital role in our survival.... The problem now is that refined sugar is too readily available (BBC)

So the urge to eat sugar is natural, but its ready availability is not. The end result, some people just can't stop eating sweet things because, thanks to modern civilisation, the sweet things don't just run out.

Now think about D/s.

The urges to dominate and to submit - those have to be natural. They're part of our inner monkey. 

Our brain pumps out happy chemicals to reward us for being dominant, but also for being submissive - we can't reproduce if we're killed in a pointless fight, or if our band of proto-humans is so busy with in-fighting that a sabre tooth tiger eats everybody! 

Somehow domination and submission are also sexy. Perhaps they once equipped our ancestors to breed with both high and low status partners? 

Whatever the cause, domination, submission, and eroticism are hopelessly tangled, so much so that vanilla power dynamics have featured in romantic fiction as far back as the old King Arthur stories, and still feature in human courtship and relationships.

In primal times, just like sugary foods, domination and submission must have been self limiting. 

Yes you could dominate another human, but they didn't stay dominated. You could wrestle them to prove your dominance, but sooner or later you have to let them stand up. You could cow them into taking a submissive posture while you mate with them, but sooner or later you'll all have to go and look for food. 

If you both like that kind of thing, you can
string out the experience for hours or even days.

And, sure, in your routine interactions, everybody will remember who's alpha monkey, but if you push things too far, the others will gang up on you or just wander off.

Modern human civilisation is still a bit like that. You can be alpha in bed or in the night club, but moments of intense dynamic fade into a blander routine. 

Even if the structure of their life reflects a practical power differential, nobody vanilla is dominant or submissive when they are asleep. 

Vanilla D/s doesn't really stick (unless bad things are happening).

Kink changes all that. It makes power exchange sticky.

If you are dominant, you can, for example, tie somebody up. You don't have to keep them in a wrestling hold - or continuously fuck them in a dominant way - to keep the dynamic going. Instead, you can apply bondage gear, or put them in a cage, and fix them in their moment of submission. Safety permitting, you can even wander off to find some food, come back and they'll still be there. If you both like that kind of thing, you can string out the experience for hours or even days.

...you can be dominant or
submissive even
while you sleep.

If you are submissive, for example, you don't have to ever stop being submissive, even when you aren't thinking about it. You can wear a collar or a chastity device, or a piercing, day-to-day. You can agree protocol and power exchange in your relationship.

So I think these are still the same primal urges at work but, thanks to modern kink, there are no longer natural limits on how far or how long we can go.

Depending on who's wearing a collar and what it's attached to, you can be dominant or submissive even while you sleep.

Great, isn't it?

---

Learn how to how to walk the same Femdom path with your partner! 

GET THE "FOR HIM" MANUAL RIGHT NOW!
GET THE "FOR HER" MANUAL RIGHT NOW!

CLICK HERE to download my Femdom Erotica (all written while chaste!)

(For ebook format, 

Lulu or iTunes.)

Is Femdom a Neanderthal trait? Look at your toes.

If this is true, then I would expect, long term,
Femdom to turn out to be mostly a European thing,

People, especially poly folk, like to claim that Bonobos, being our cousins, are a better guide to ancestral human behavior than more violent patriarchal primates. Bonobos are basically furry-faced Femdom hippies:

Bonobo communities are peace-loving and egalitarian. Bonobos are considered to have a matriarchal society, meaning that females have a higher social status than males and social interactions are female-centered and female-dominated. Females have strong social bonds amongst themselves, but they do not exclude males.

One in the eye for evo-psych-touting red pill guys! It also provides a nice explanation for Femdom.

Only, alas, for most of history, most humans have not been like Bonobos. Men have mostly been nasty, war-mongering, status-obsessed, woman-beating, gay-bashing patriarchal pigs, and the woman have survived and accommodated that.

This leads to a knotty problem: Femdom seems bizarrely unlikely, because a million years of patriarchy. However, Femdom seems pretty well hardwired for some people, with practitioners often reporting an interest in D/s dynamics from an early age.

It's easy to imagine Femdom pairings happening on the quiet, despite the backdrop, but much much harder to imagine a Femdom track spontaneously evolving in humans.

And yet, it really does feel hardwired.

Where might a Femdom "gene" have come from? Not from the Bonobos! However, it turns out, humans interbred with two other species; Neanderthals and a Mystery Species tagged "Denisovans".

We already know that Neanderthal genes can affect not just our physical health, but also our propensity for nicotine addiction. Why not also our sexual orientation?

There's an old theory that Neanderthals were among other things matriarchal and that their culture has left an echo in our folklore.

So a really neat explanation - for which there is not as yet any actual evidence! - is that Femdom is a Neanderthal trait, or at least the product of a Neanderthal trait for Female dominance colliding with the Homo Sapiens trait for muddling sex and violence.

If this is true, then I would expect, long term, Femdom to turn out to be mostly a European thing, basically following a distribution like this:

A genetic explanation might explain how vanilla couples sometimes simply fall through a Femdom hole. Perhaps we Neanderthals are good at picking each other out based on scent or other clues.

Speaking of which, do you have Neanderthal genes? Allegedly, you can find out by looking at your feet. Is your second toe the same size or larger than your big toe?

Or, a better definition:

If the space between your first and second toe appears to be deeper, not wider, but deeper than the space between your second and third toes

Mine is...

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If Femdom is your destiny, use my manuals to help you walk that path! There's one for him, and one for her. 

Where does Femdom come from? My personal theory

Why Femdom?

Every so often, we ask ourselves, why Femdom?

Why us?

Anecdotal evidence on forums certainly supports D/S as an innate orientation. Most kinksters - like most gays and lesbians - seem to report an interest in their preferred dynamic from a pre- sexual age (see links here).

Where do female dommes come from?

...a scold looks pretty much like
an oppressed domme to me.

It does seem odd that after millennia of patriarchal gender roles - whether through nature or nurture - the human race produces a significant minority of female dommes.

When you look closely at history, this oddness is however an illusion.

Certainly in historically recorded Western culture, there has always been a sense of a battle of the sexes - e.g. you see it in legal cases in Ancient Athens, and in the punishment of "scolds" in early modern Europe, and in humorous illustrations and stories, e.g. Chaucer.

Put it this way.

You don't for instance, need a scold's bridle unless you first have a scold, and a scold looks pretty much like an oppressed domme to me.

Courtly Love

Men controlled the law and the government, had a virtual monopoly on domestic violence, and still there was a battle of the sexes.

I think this means that not only have women have been resisting oppression for a long long time, but also that sexual dominance is innate and particularly strong in some individuals regardless of the cultural context.

When the culture allows it, the Femdom comes out of the woodwork.

Examples include Roman women keeping male slaves for pleasure and more, and the Medieval ideal of Courtly Love and its Arabic equivalent - though to what extent ladies made real knights jump through hoops, serve and suffer is not clear.

Modern Femdom simply allows dommes (and subs) to be themselves, much as liberal legislation does for gays and lesbians who however have always been there.

Modern Femdom allows dommes

 to come out of the woodwork 

and be themselves

Now, if Nurture - culture and upbringing etc - doesn't explain female dommes, then we are left with Nature.

Going down the selfish-gene root, being a dominant female has obvious reproductive advantages in terms of access to protection and resources with the possibility of maintaining sexual autonomy.

We can imagine the extreme example of a pre-human female in primal times who keeps a male around to protect and help feed her and her offspring, but who tends to breed exclusively with the alpha males.

It also makes sense to regard female sexual dominance as something that can often be switched on by particular permissive circumstances, which perhaps suggests the runaway success some subs experience with formerly vanilla partners.

The real mystery, then, is where do the male subs come from?

Where do male subs come from?

...editing himself out of
the gene pool. What is
going on?

Male submissives often experience their orientation as innate. However, clearly, male submission in its most extreme form confers no direct reproductive advantage; the chaste cuckold who waves his wife off to be impregnated by her "bull" might feel totally fulfilled, but is pretty much editing himself out of the gene pool.

What is going on?

One way of looking at this is to borrow from genetic explanations for male homosexuality; the reproductive benefit applies to the gene, not the individual.  

So, scientists have observed that gay men often have very fertile sisters. The implication is that the hypothetical gay gene passes so effectively from mother to many daughters that it doesn't matter that the sons don't breed.

Similarly, there is a theory that being a little bit gay makes you very attractive to women and thus more likely to breed; in a nutshell, gay men have brothers with large families.

Perhaps being a little bit submissive 

makes you better at courtship

So, imagine there is a "male sub gene".

Perhaps male subs have hot sisters. Perhaps being a little bit submissive makes you better at courtship. It doesn't matter if one son ends up as a happy cuckold, because the daughters or other sons, depending on the theory, reproduce successfully to offset this

The link could also be totally obscure, and apply only to a lost corner of our primal history. Perhaps male subs are better at smelling the approach of sabertooth tigers?

Another - and not mutually exclusive - approach is to consider specific fetishes - cuckolding, boots, chastity, cross-dressing etc - as merely culturally-determined expressions of the desired underlying dynamic.

Perhaps, before the advent of modern contraception and chastity devices, male submission was actually an effective breeding strategy? (NB not a conscious strategy, rather something that results from instincts and urges. Anytime we talk about evolutionary psychology, we have to be careful to distinguish between personal subjective motivation and why nature "favors" a behavior.)

...when a modern young man puts
himself in the "friend zone" 

Male submission could be a good way of adding a extra reproductive years to a primal male's short life. Girls mature a few years ahead of boys. Teenage boys are fertile, but usually too weedy to stand up to the adult males or - in primal times - to win an adult female's attention through dominance display.

Perhaps submission once translated as being very agreeable and compliant in the "hope" of mating a couple of times. The years would be a reproductive write-off anyway, so there would be no real cost to hanging around laying siege to a potential mate.

young male subs are often
drawn to angry young
women.

That would explain why some men adopt vanilla submissive stances as teenagers, the classic being when a modern young man puts himself in the "friend zone" (a status almost always self inflicted by the man, by the way).

It would also explain how men acquire submissive fetishes - it's easy to imagine eroticising the experience of girls being justifiably mean to you (I certainly did), and that then becoming a fetish.

However, it does not explain how submission could be a life-long orientation identifiable in pre-sexual stages. Not all kids play at tying up!

Nor does it explain why young male subs are often drawn to angry young women.

Ultimately, what's left is that male submission is really good for pairing off with a female dominant!

Femdom roles seem innate in
some people.

If that's true, then primal proto-Femdom couples must have been at least as good as breeding as their vanilla peers.

Final thoughts

In the end, all this speculation is no more useful than any other parlor game.

It doesn't tell us how to do Femdom better, and all that's required for us to feel better about our orientations is the thought at the start of this blog entry: Femdom roles are probably innate in some people. 

Just because something is natural, doesn't mean it's good or compulsory. However, it does mean that it is a fact of life.

Since Femdom does no harm, it follows that we might as well relax and focus on how to enjoy it, rather than where it comes from.

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Don't resign yourself to just getting off on other people's adventures! 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. 

Why I think erotic submission works

Our brains reward us for
leading and following,
for dominating and
submitting

Over on reddit, somebody asked about the underlying psychology of erotic submission. This is my answer:

Though I'm sure our personal stories are what lead us to D&S, I strongly suspect that the satisfaction from either role comes from a combination of evolutionary psychology plus the odd way the brain works.

The evolutionary psychology part is a simple.

We're wired to feel good about being in charge - being alpha. However, not everybody can be in charge at any given moment, so we're also wired to feel comfortable not being in charge.

In other words our brains reward us for leading and following, for dominating and submitting.

(If you prefer, perhaps this is socially learned behavior; things go well when we lead or when we follow, but not when we compete pointlessly.)

no matter how much you wrap up 
your D&S in communication, consent, 
safe words, scripts even, a primal 
part of your brain registers it as real

The brain itself is odd.

For a start, parts of it are stupid and can't tell the difference between the thing and the thing that looks like the thing.

So no matter how much you wrap up your D&S in communication, consent, safe words, scripts even, a primal part of your brain registers it as real -- hence triggering the evolutionary psychology working.

Then there's this thing where a lot of our emotions run in parallel.

Our brain chemistry makes it possible to like things we don't want, want things we don't like, get a buzz out of things that scare or hurt us. This is especially true if the sensible part of our brain is assured that we are really physically safe.

 ...much of the joy of submission
comes from ambivalence.

If that sounds complicated or implausible, consider all the other weird things humans do: bungee jump, extreme sports, horror films, roller coaster rides...

You can't meaningfully untangle all this or reduce it to a single factor because much of the joy of submission comes ftom ambivalence.

So in short:

Our psychology may lead us to submission. However what makes us stick is that it feels good on a primal level and at the same time provides the same kind of safe thrills as a roller coaster ride. The ambivalence is the buzz. Don't over think.

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Don't just have deep thoughts about Femdom ! Use my manuals to walk the Femdom path! There's one for him, and one for her. 

Sex, Housework, Domesticity: Is Domination and Submission "natural"?

One of the surprising things about our Femdom Sabbaticals is that we experienced the non-eroticized aspects of the temporary Female Led Relationship as utterly natural.

I mean that it felt perfectly right to let Xena control the intimacy and the housework.

...it felt perfectly right to let Xena control the
intimacy and the housework. 

This phased me somewhat.

In the past, whenever I read that kind of statement online, I immediately assumed that the author's feverish imagination was at work either justifying a kink, or creating a thrilling trap for themselves.

But, no, it really just feels natural. I didn't have a constant hard-on while deep-cleaning the kitchen, I was just relaxed, focused and industrious. Similarly, in the bedroom, though I did get delicious feelings of panic at not being able to get off, mostly my experience of one-sided sensuality was comfortable and warm.

I can think of several explanations for this, all of which might apply.

Do Submissives train ourselves to submit more generally?

I've had BDSM fantasies for years, but it's only in the last couple of years that I discovered the tranquility available through non-eroticized submission.

Sure, we start off with fantasies of erotic submission, but perhaps we're training our brains to submit in general, either by a kind of fallout, or because the comfort associated with the act of fantasizing transfers to some of the subject matter... when I see sexy boots, I am in my happy place.

Is MLR and FLR an emergent property of relationships (and cultures)?

...the FLR couples over on the At Her Feet
forum claim unparalleled levels of
domestic harmony

Last week we simply did not argue at all. Similarly, the FLR couples over on the At Her Feet forum claim unparalleled levels of domestic harmony. I am sure the same goes for MLR couples.

As relationship self help books tell you, the lower desire partner controls the sex. The opposite seems to hold for housework; the person with the higher standards generally sets the standards. In both cases, the other partner chafes against the control, wheedles, negotiates and generally puts stress on the relationship and on themselves.

It's also possible that one partner is always going to be more "dominant" than the other, leading them to second guess while the less dominant partner feels the urge to push back. Another cause of stress.

One response to this stress is resignation, either to giving up goals or embracing those of your partner.

As soon as that resignation includes a narrative - a positive spin - to make you feel good about it, then you have submission in one aspect of the relationship.

If all those submissions line up in the same direction, then you have a vanilla D/S relationship: the "surrendered wife" or the "henpecked husband" stereotypes.

If the couple are self aware about the dynamic, then you have MLR or FLR. However, it's the same dynamic as in the vanilla world.

(A shared pool of similar narratives becomes part of a culture, and in doing so each particular narrative becomes more comforting.)

Is Domination and Submission hardwired?

Humans aren't all about "who's alpha?" We're also good at cooperating, and there have been and continue to be societies which emphasize equality between the genders.

Even so, Patriarchy is very pervasive and ancient. It would be odd indeed if it were not in some way hardwired. The snag is that though Patriarchy "explains" MLR, it does raise the problem of FLR!

It would be fine if male subs were like those fetishists who cross dress for the transgression and humiliation. However, many of us just feel comfortable in FLR circumstances.

There would seem to be two obvious possibilities:

First, perhaps the D/S roles are not gendered. Perhaps we are adapted to feel happier taking leadership from somebody more dominant; it's more efficient if somebody is in charge, and submitting is better than being killed or cast out. Perhaps we are also adapted to feel happy in the matching dominant roles. If so, then MLR and FLR are just gender specific ways to get at these feelings.

Second, perhaps the D/S roles are gendered. MLR mirrors Patriarchy. What does FLR mirror?

Looking at human culture, I wonder if FLR is a courtship behavior that switches on in certain circumstances. We see it at work in traditional Western courtship styles, in exaggerated stories of chivalry and knightly love (this one was an eye opener!), and the men who meekly stay in the "friend zone" for months or even years and those women who let them.

Perhaps FLR switches on when a desirable
low status male comes into contact
with a desirable high status female.

I find it interesting that boys mature sexually two years before they do so physically.

In other words, our male ancestors had two horny years in which they could not take the sexual initiative without a higher status male ripping off their heads.

Perhaps FLR switches on when a low status male comes into contact with a desirable high status female.

I wonder if there are cultures where adolescent males habitually form relationships with older women.

(NB A couple of things now we've strayed into the dreaded Evolutionary Psychology.
First, saying something is "natural" is not the same as saying it's how things should be. Nor does it imply that there aren't equally natural contrary forces at work.
Second, Evolutionary Psychology tends to see behaviors evolving out of genetic self interest, as strategies for (i) reproduction or (ii) resource gathering. This stark vision sees only exploitation and exchange. However, that's not how these behaviors feel. The emotions associated with vanilla FLR include: chivalry, gallantry, playfulness, being flattered, romance... not cynicism and cost-benefit-analyses.)

Conclusion: Are MLR and FLR "natural"?

They feel natural, but there's simply not enough evidence to prove that they are. Given that our most compelling drives are our natural ones, I would be very surprised if D/S was not a natural human response to particular scenarios.  However, I am uncertain as to whether MLR and FLR are distinct behaviors.

While pondering this, why not introduce some part-time FLR to your relationship?