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The Nature of Submission

A Paradox

There’s a paradox at the heart of D/s. The submissive wants to surrender all control, she wants to renounce her own desires and impulses and serve only her Dom. She wants to please him, above all other things. Never beat me for my sake, Master, she says. Beat me because you want to; beat me because you can, but never because you think I should like it.

I like to hear a girl say this. For my part, I want to control her totally, I want to use her for my pleasure, I want to test the limits of her obedience and push her beyond them. And so we fit perfectly together, like the two halves of a neatly carpentered joint. Opposite poles attract. I am the key; she is the lock to be opened.

And yet…if she wants what I want, then she does still have wants after all. And in pleasing myself I give her what she most desires. How then am I controlling her? Is she not controlling me, giving me the illusion that I am the one taking, when all along I am giving her exactly what she needs? Would she not be more truly submissive if I offered her only the kind of pain from which she could derive no pleasure, if I gave her nothing, but instead despised her, ignored her, abandoned her? If then she still wanted only to obey me, would that not be true submission?

Whereas, she knows full well she will receive from me only that which delights her: the stinging slap of my hand on her cheek, the bite of the cane as it cracks against her bare bottom. My fingers pinching her nipples or digging deep into her cunt, my voice in her ear, stripping away her pretences at modesty, calling her slut and whore, my hand twisting her hair cruelly, forcing her to her knees to take my cock deep in her throat till she almost chokes. All these things, all this cruelty, she craves.

And though I want to hurt her, though I want to push her further and further till she can bear no more, yet nothing delights me more than to feel how wet she is between her legs, to see the desire in her eyes, to feel her body shudder in the grip of orgasm. I want to shake her desire to its foundations, but I do not want to extinguish it. Maybe I’m not a true Dom at all. I suspect she hopes I’m not, if that’s what it takes to be one, taking away from her even the pleasure she gets in pleasing me.

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In Persian Fire, his brilliant history of the wars between the ancient Greeks and Persians, Tom Holland has much to say about Sparta, a Greek city-state that has become a byword for rigorous self-discipline and austerity, a kind of collective role model perhaps for D/s folk everywhere. Holland fastens on the contradictions of Spartan life: “Hence the unsettling paradoxes that governed Spartan society: humiliation was pride; restriction opportunity; discipline freedom; subordination the truest mastery.” A motto for us, perhaps.

Paradox, as I’ve said, lies at the heart of the D/s experience, and I think that is nowhere more evident than in the female submissive’s response to being looked at. Many submissives (I won’t say all; I haven’t met them all) are strongly exhibitionist. They have an urge to display themselves to the male gaze. They want to be looked at, they want someone to take an interest, and especially they want to be looked at with desire. They want the man to want to see them, particularly those parts of their bodies that are strongly marked as erogenous sites: the breasts, the ass, the cunt. They want him to want to look there, and they want to show him.

Here’s the first paradox: their knowledge that he wants to see gives them power. A woman becomes aware early in life that the revelation of her body can be controlled in such a way that the man may be manipulated. Obviously it’s not only submissive women who know this. But for the submissive there is this special aspect to it, that whereas notionally she is the one surrendering power, she does in fact exercise a modicum of control in the process. Not that, if she is properly submissive, she has the right to refuse, say, to remove a garment. But when she consents to remove it, she will feel that what is revealed does exercise a palpable power over him who sees it. He is not indifferent. She will derive pleasure from that, which is separate from and in addition to the pleasure she derives from being obedient. And just because she is a submissive, that doesn’t mean she has not got ways, subtle ways, of turning that power to her advantage.

The second paradox relates to her shame. In the submissive woman there is a force which at times may be almost, though never quite, as powerful as the urge to submit and to display herself. Every woman fears being labeled a tramp or slut, even if many of them know just how well the description is justified. But, as was pointed out to me by a very perceptive submissive, shame itself can be arousing to the woman. The more shame she feels, the more arousal she will get from breaking the taboo. In itself there’s no shame in being naked, but then no arousal either. If the woman stares at herself in the mirror, or disrobes in front of other women in the changing room, whatever sexual feelings she has are unlikely to be as strong as if she is being looked at naked by a man. (Obviously I’m only talking about heterosexual women here.) But when a man says, lift your skirt up to your waist, the blush that spreads across her face is an index not only of shame but of the forbidden pleasure which she is being “forced” to experience.

One more paradox: she wants to be objectified. She wants to be nothing but tits, or a cunt, for him. She wants to be treated not as a whole human being but as a sexual object. Submissive women are able to come to terms with such urges, which apparently fly in the face of all the gains of feminism in the past hundred years. They accept that this is what they need, to be used for pleasure, reduced to the status of a toy, a pet, a hole. And at the same time they want, just as strongly as their vanilla sisters, to be valued as a human being, to be cherished and loved, kissed and made love to. They want to know they are special. How can one woman have such contradictory impulses? I guess in the same way that a Dom has them. He also wants to use her as if her feelings are of no account, as if she exists only for his pleasure, a thing to be played with. And yet he also craves seeing that look of profound emotional fulfillment which crosses her face when he says “good girl”. One person can be many things at once. In order that the submissive is not distressed by her objectification she needs to know that she is not only an object, not always an object. Yet while she is being treated like an object she needs the ability to set aside her desire for affection and reassurance, confident that she can find them again when she needs to.

One of the mantras of the D/s lifestyle is Safe, Sane and Consensual. But there’s a paradox here. The Dom is both free to do with her as he pleases, and yet reliant on her consent. She voluntarily agrees to give up her freedom of choice. How can these seeming contradictions be true? My feeling is that we should see a D/s relationship as a condition of constant negotiation, a shifting balance of power in which each side is alert to the dynamics of the situation. There’s no doubt that when the submissive is aroused, both physically and mentally, the Dom does have genuine power over her. He can make her do things she would not ordinarily do, endure things she thought unbearable, want things she never imagined. This power is real, it’s not something she pretends to give him. In the throes of passion it may even seem as if his power is limitless. She may wish him to force her into what seems like a total capitulation, where she is past all resistance. But reality will ultimately intrude, the ebb and sway of power will eventually shift again, back to the point where she can freely negotiate the limits she will allow.

Some people might say, if this is the case, then surely D/s is just a game. My reply would be that it is indeed a game, with strict rules. If you don’t play by the rules there’s no point in playing. And it’s a very serious game, as all games worth playing are. Or perhaps we can say it’s like the state of mind you adopt when you read a novel. You know the story isn’t true, but while you read you allow yourself to believe that it is, otherwise the story can’t hold you under its spell. Critics call this ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’. I think D/s may be similar. She knows that she could stop him if she had to, but her submission is real enough in the heat of the moment. She wants to feel that he can make her want to do what she doesn’t want to do, make her take more pain or humiliation than she thinks she can bear. For her, there’s a wonderful freedom in renouncing control, in being taken out of herself. And for him, a heady sense of power in assuming total mastery.

Who Is Really In Control?

The following quotation is drawn from The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell: “…suddenly understanding with a terrifying clarity that men control nothing, dominate nothing, that they are just children and even toys, put there for the pleasure of women, an insatiable pleasure all the more sovereign that the men think they are in charge, think they dominate women, whereas in reality women absorb them, wreck their domination and dissolve their control, to take far more from them than they give. Men believe in all honesty that women are vulnerable, and that they must either take advantage of this vulnerability, or protect it, whereas women laugh, with tolerance and love or else with scorn, at the childish, infinite vulnerability of men, at their fragility, this brittleness so close to a permanent loss of control, this perpetually threatening collapse, this vacuity embodied in such strong flesh. That is why, without a doubt, women so rarely kill. They suffer much more, but they will always have the last word.”

It’s a brilliant novel but not for the faint-hearted, an account by a fictional SS officer of the horrors of the Russian front and the camps during World War II, and as such has little to do with D/s, one might think; but it’s a striking passage, all the same. It set me thinking about whether such thoughts might apply, mutatis mutandis, to D/s.

The conventional view is that in a D/s relationship the submissive renounces control. It is the Dom who prevails, whose word is law. In theory; however, it’s clear that it’s a great deal more complicated than that. The transfer of power from Dom to sub is freely given. It is a consensual relationship. We are not talking about force as it exists in the outside world, where the strong exploit the weak, whether it is the rich exploiting the poor, or a larger country oppressing a smaller, or indeed men abusing women or children. We speak in D/s of a voluntary exchange of power, freely granted and gratefully received. Thus D/s is the exact opposite of the so-called law of the jungle, the domination by the strong of the weak.

But if consent is freely given, how can it be that the Dom is in control? Is not the one who is actually dominant the one who grants or withholds consent? If I say to my submissive, “I am going to beat you” and she replies, “As you wish”, is that evidence that I hold the power? One could argue that because she has already given me the license to beat her, has voluntarily renounced her right to say no, then there has been a genuine transfer of power and that I am truly in charge. But I wonder if in practice it ever works like that. Even if she doesn’t have a safe word, she knows that she could always say no, if she said it with enough conviction. In a sane relationship, she can’t actually sign away her right to choose to submit. Each time she bows the knee, the contract between her and the Dom is renewed. Implicitly, it is perpetually in negotiation.

And yet…the appeal of this relationship for the submissive is that she has indeed ceded power. That’s where the excitement is, for her. He has the right to order her to do things, even things she doesn’t want to do. She has renounced her right to say no. If it is not so, then isn’t it just a rather pointless game that anyone can play? She has to feel that his power over her is real, not just a convention. The thrill that she gets from being ordered to kneel, from being whipped or used for pleasure, is dependent on the knowledge that any resistance she might have had has already been overcome. She cannot do other than what she is told.