Sabbatical in Slave Land - Trust

"What are you doing this evening?" asks my wife just before she goes out with the girls.

"Well," I say, "Since I'm being 'compliant husband', I thought I would work through those chores."

"Oh!" She laughs. "I hadn't realized."

I wave my hand at here. I'm wearing a discrete wrist band. "Remember? We talked about this."

Compliant Husband

"Ah. I was thinking that the wristband was supposed to mean something."

Now it's my turn to laugh. "I've been 'compliant husband' all day yesterday and today! Are you saying you couldn't tell the difference?"

"Well I was feeling well looked after..."

* * *

We're at the start of what in my How to be a Roman Dominatrix book I call a "sabbatical".

I'm on the beach  at home for a couple of weeks and she's working weekdays only and not on call. A while back she agreed I could be her "compliant husband" during this golden window.

Compliant Husband is our low key mode. I'm not much different from a submissive old fashioned housewife except for the chastity device, the demerit counter, and the possibility of darker slave/mistress sessions. I'm myself, but I don't argue with her and I do chores to her satisfaction. Pretty much time-limited FLR.

We also agreed in general I would flag my chaste compliant status with a wristband; this gives her a "take it or leave it" choice without having to actually say "no".

But she's forgotten everything!

* * *

I mentally squirm because this is not a moment for talking about erotic things. I'm scared of rejection, scared of losing the Femdom. But we're not talking about sex or fetish here, just service so I stick to my guns.

"So, what do you want me to do?" I ask - a nice neutral question that could let her terminate the experience if she wants.

"Oh well. Give the bedroom a proper clean - dust and vacuum. And there's a wash that needs to go on..."

She comes back later, tired and full of food;  she has work tomorrow and no kind of sex is on the menu tonight. I give her a foot rub which turns me on horribly, but just makes her ready to sleep.

I don't pester. The point of being a compliant husband is that I comply! So soon we're sitting up in bed reading.

"What are you going to do tomorrow?" she asks.

"I'm trying to decide..." I say, an open answer to an open question.

"Do the kitchen," she says, "I proper deep clean."

"OK," I say.

"And leave that thing of yours on."

"OK. That way you'll get better service in the morning."

"That's what I was thinking." She gives me a cat like expression. "And in the evening." She kisses me. "Good night."

My penis rears up inside its cage and I'm still hard when I come back from tossing the key in bushes outside our front door. She, however, is asleep.

* * *

People talk about "trust" in D&S. In our kind of relationship, the most important trust is the one she has in me: she trusts me not to presume or pester, to really be a compliant husband or slave. (The fabulous Ferns says something similar.)

There may, or may not, be wilder BDSM later this week. If it happens, it'll be all the more intense for several days of chastity on my part.

And the house will be clean and tidy.

For spicing up your sex life with some time limited FLR, see my Femdom self-help guides....

Conservatives can teach us a secret about Femdom!

In the UK we have lots of queens but also an actual Queen - old lady, wears a crown on occassions, odd taste in dresses.

Silly...

And that's the thing, take away the deference, the "OMG it's Her Majesty" and you're left with something pretty silly - the Empress has no clothes on!" (Ewww!)

Less silly?

For example, (left) here's a top-flight lawyer receiving his knighthood. A moment of great solemnity and a life achievement but...

Most social institutions are potentially silly

The ultimate recognition for a hard-working lawyer who presumably earned every single ounce of his achievement is to kneel down before  an elderly woman who - though charming and hard working - is a monarch via random inheritance? What she gives him is a title that qualifies him to clatter around the medieval countryside rescuing damsels?

Isn't that a little bit silly?

The same goes for all the objects of relationships that underpin traditional society.

You can choose to see: a President as just a politician with an interesting record; a flag as just a scrap of cloth; a teacher as just a science graduate who couldn't get a research post; a priest as somebody with a friend you can't see; a boss as just somebody who holds the purse strings; a (traditional) husband as just the partner with the penis who leaves the house to work, rather than stays home and works equally hard....

Looked at from the wrong angle, it's all silly.

The right angle

Oops

One morning in AD1789, the French commoners woke up and - as one - exclaimed, "Zis monarchy she is merde!"

Monarchy stopped being real and we ended up with the Great Terror - not ultimately a happy thing. (Happier examples include the collapse of East Germany, and of the toxic regime in the Philippines.)

This is what conservatives of all flavours fear. They know that the entire social and political structure can potentially be laughed out of existence if enough people insist on looking at it from the wrong angle. Hence the loud "defence" of the head of state, the Flag, deference and protocol in all walks of life, and of the institution of marriage itself.

So, rightly or wrongly, conservatives are always rushing to defend this institution or that.

A Femdom blog is not the place to discus their choice of what to defend, and to defend rather than to adapt. However, they are absolutely correct in the way they choose to defend their preferred institutions; by insisting we only address them from the right angle; which is the one in which you treat the underlying relationship as real.

Treating relationships as real makes them real

Humans only think we are fully self-aware and consciously in control.

The sad truth is that situation and context mostly determine our behaviour. There are plenty of experiments to back this up, most notoriously the Stanford Prison experiment: pretend jailers and pretend prisoners quickly began to act their roles, and - however tongue in cheek or ironic their initial behaviour - ultimately believe in them.

Treating relationships as real makes them real.

The the real world, people - abused spouses, bullied workers, alienated teenagers - stay in bad situations they could just walk away from; the relationships have become more real than the practical means of escape!

This loss of perspective can be also happy thing.  In what Stephen Pinker calls the Civilising Process, the state, social pressure and choices made by potential mates forces the cowboys to become gentlemen, and then they start believing in it. I think the same goes for many very happy marriages.

So, the evidence is that most relationships gain strength from the outside to the inside.

Call it pragmatic or cynical, but conservatives have long known this, hence their love of deference, formality and protocol... sounds a bit BDSM, doesn't it?

Conservatives teach us to treat the Femdom relationship as real

In a  wonderful recent blog entry, Robert Anthony wrote:

The weird thing is, it seems totally normal now... which is how it should be I guess. Although I am somewhat surprised that we've never looked back, never had a break from it, never had second thoughts - either of us.....[my edit]  I no longer crave denial. Oh I still want Mistress R to control my orgasms and I still want her to tease and deny me for however long pleases her, but I no longer 'crave' denial, because denial is my everyday reality.

We've had a  similar experience:

Loss of perspective...

I want to tell her I love her. Tell her how much I desire her. Instead, I can only rub, pummel, and thumb her naked flesh until she's limp and relaxed. I know what's going to happen and I segue from frustration, through irritation, to a kind of erotic horror; I know we have a relationship beyond this slavery, but I can't reach out and touch it. I'm powerless to do anything other than massage her until...She announces that she's ready to sleep and does just that.

So, no, I'm not going to argue that conservatives are all perverts, or that any flavour of conservatism is inherently inspired by the Marquis de Sade. That's not the point!

The point is that our Femdom relationships are as inherently fragile, as potentially silly as any of the institutions beloved by our conservative friends. No slave contract is legally enforceable anywhere you would want to live. No punishment is really inescapable. No discomfort is truly forced.

And yet, our Femdom relationships - be they 24/7 or part-time, or some nuance in between - can easily become real to us. We can - gloriously - lose perspective.

However, this loss of perspective only happens if we take a leaf out of the conservative playbook and unremittingly treat the power relationsip as real.

Don't step outside the Femdom

He dropped her best coffee mug!

We submissives need to never step outside the Femdom. If we question an order or express pain or discomfort, if possible we must do it as a slave ("[this] will result in [that], mistress."). Mostly we shouldn't question an order, nor do anything to elicit a dommish response. Mostly we should accept the rough with the smooth, the boredom with the ecstasy, the frustration with the fear. Safewords, yes we need them, but only as a last resort.

Dominants also need - or I would humbly advise them - to never step outside the Femdom, not for practicalities, not for safety, not even for irritation. If the slave does something annoying the slave gets punished; don't flip into your vanilla role to yell at your husband or partner. If the slave is suffering but the husband seems to be enjoying himself, ignore it. If the slave is really suffering and you feel sorry for your boyfriend, shrug it off. You can cuddle him later.

Anything that looks beyond the power relationship to the consensual one wrapped around it risks committing the worst sin of all...

Why "not treating it as real" is the worst Femdom sin

Really, beyond safety, sanity and consent, "not treating it as real" is the worst Femdom sin because as soon as you go "You know what, I/you don't have to do this!" then the lights go up and neither of you look very dignified. One or other of you may look just plain silly.

The dominatrix is caught being evil, which can be very uncomfortable if she is ostensibly vanilla. She may also feel a fool for playing such a childish game of tying up and make believe, and suddenly embarrassed by her sticky-crotched husband cringing at her feet.

"...suddenly embarrassed by her sticky-crotched
husband cringing at her feet."

The sudden splashdown to reality is just as bad for the submissive. It's the nightmare of being found out made real, coupled with the embarrassment at his partner's embarrassment, and a fear that the Femdom will go away.

And if it does keep happening, then the Femdom will probably go away. That glorious loss of perspective? You can only achieve it if the vanilla relationship isn't lurking at the boudoir window.

She needs to know her orders will always be obeyed, otherwise she will start second guessing your wants, and you'll start editing your reactions to prevent this from happening. Soon you'll both be on edge, irritated and going through the motions. It won't be real anymore. It'll probably just be embarrassing.

So, like the conservatives do for relationships they care about, we must treat our Femdom  as 100% real.

For how to make this work in practise, see my Femdom self-help guides for couples where the female partner is mostly vanilla....

Ferns: Trust works both ways

The wise, dominant and articulate Ferns says (among other things):

Without that trust, I can’t exercise my dominance. I can’t. Because I will be second guessing myself over and over. Without trust in him, I will feel like I am not at all able to understand where he is in it, it will be as if I am blind in trying to read him, like I am groping around in the dark while worrying that I am going to knock him over some cliff and I won’t even see it coming. And that doesn’t work for me.

She's talking about the need for the dominant to trust the sub.

Treat the power relationship as real,
and it will become real!

Yes, BDSM culture talks about trust, but usually dwells on how the dominant must earn the trust of the sub. However, for a relationship to be sustainable, then the trust has to go both ways; the submissive must also earn the trust of the dominant.

In other words, the dominant has to trust the submissive to actually - guess what? - submit, and also trust them to provide safety feedback (emotional and physical) when required.

It is incredibly jarring to be in dominant mode and to be suddenly jolted back to vanilla world and perhaps - worse - be made to feel foolish. It's also impossible to relax and enjoy dominating if you can't rely on the submissive to tell you when something is really wrong.

Ferns identifies as a dominatrix from one relationship to the next. When she can't trust a sub, she reconsiders the relationship.

However,  if your dominatrix is also your wife or girlfriend, and she can't trust you as her sub, then she'll reconsider being a dominatrix! Ever.

Treat the power relationship as real, and it will become real. Treat it as packaging for some kinks, and both the power relationship and the kinks will go away.

For how to make Femdom work in your relationship, see my kinky self help guides.