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What Makes a Woman Submissive?

A couple of years ago I saw a Mexican film entitled Leap Year. It’s about a woman who gets involved in a sado-masochistic relationship. Unlike most such films, which claim to be frank and explicit but pussyfoot around, this one genuinely does show you some of the things kinky folk get up to. It starts with him spanking her a little while he fucks her, then he chokes her with his hand round her neck. She likes this a lot. Then he engineers a ‘punishment’ scenario, puts her naked up against the wall and spanks her ass really hard with his belt before taking her from behind (I think we are meant to assume, from the noises she makes, that he is buggering her). On another occasion he smacks her hard across the face, tells her to lie naked on the floor and masturbate, and then he pees on her. Yes, you do actually get to see this. The next thing is he’s got her tied down on a table and he burns her right breast with his cigarette. She asks him to burn the other one (I didn’t like this much). Finally, there’s a lot of knife play, him running the sharp point over her naked body while she tells him she wants him to kill her. She makes him promise to come back the next day and stab her to death. She waits for him, but he doesn’t show up. (Would you?!)

The action is presented in a straightforward, non-sensational manner and it feels real (I don’t mean the actors were actually doing these things. I’ve no idea if they were or not); unlike pseudo-D/s films like 9½ Weeks, the sex is convincing, and it’s not blurry soft-focus.

The big problem is this. The woman has marked February 29th on her wall calendar (hence the title). We never learn exactly what the significance of this date is, but some clues lead us to surmise that she may have been abused by her father. It’s not clear whether her desire for death is a form of erotomania, or a desire for suicide in consequence of the trauma of abuse, or perhaps both. What I really disliked is that once again, as so often, we get a clichéd explanation of why the woman is a masochist. It’s all because of something bad in her childhood. In other words, a desire to explore the pleasures of sexual pain is a symptom of a dysfunctional personality. The woman is psychologically damaged; hence she wants to be abused by her lover.

I’ve known a few submissive women intimately, and as far as I am aware not one had an abusive childhood or a history of sexual damage which would ‘explain’ their evident liking for being spanked. They weren’t submissive because they needed to punish themselves or because they had low self-esteem. They just liked to perform kinky, submissive acts. Why, oh why, can’t people who tell this kind of story accept that there are thousands of people out there who are perfectly normal, well-balanced and sane and are leading successful lives, and who also get very excited by engaging with sexual power and pain and pleasure? They aren’t sick. They just like it.

But if we reject these kinds of explanations as to why some girls are submissive, how do we explain it? In a sense it’s another version of the old nature/nurture debate. Is a submissive born or is she made? It might well be that it’s already determined at birth, or rather at conception, and for all I know, even as I write scientists are beavering away trying to isolate the submissive gene. Then in some future dystopia, all god-fearing vanilla parents will be able to choose to have the gene subtracted from their offspring’s genetic portfolio, thus helping to rid the world of kink. Or maybe (but don’t count on it) a benevolent state will insist on equal numbers of submissives and dominants being born (which seems far from the case at the moment).

I do happen to believe that, even if it’s not genetically determined, submissiveness, like its opposite, is something you are born with. I don’t think it can be induced later. And for that reason I think many of the plaintive cries we hear from subs, pleading with their (to me, amazingly reluctant) men to give them the spankings they are so desperately in need of, are doomed to be unanswered. You can’t make a man into a Dom if he hasn’t got it in him.

However, that doesn’t mean that nurturing has no part to play. I now believe that I am almost wholly D/s, to the point where I am starting to lose interest in vanilla sex altogether. But I didn’t always feel this way. In my youth, back in the olden days when porn was all underground and virtually unattainable in the UK, and when the internet was only a science-fiction fantasy, I had no inkling of what the possibilities were. In my twenties I read the great classic of D/s, Story of O, and was profoundly affected by it, but I had no idea what I could do about that. The likelihood of my ever meeting a woman who actually wanted me to beat her bottom as much as I wanted to do it seemed impossibly remote.

It was only when I gradually came to realize that otherwise quite normal people went in for this activity that I began to believe something might actually happen in real life. What I’m saying is that dominant, as well as submissive tendencies need the right environment in which to flourish. They need encouragement and nourishment before they can come to flower. But if the seed isn’t in the ground to start with, no amount of watering will make it grow.

I think that certain experiences in early life may serve to reinforce inherent tendencies towards submissiveness. I talk elsewhere about age-play, and women’s relationships to their fathers are a fascinating topic. I think it possible that an inclination towards enjoyment of age-play may be strengthened by the early dynamics of father-daughter relations. But I hesitate to say how exactly.

I also think that despite the advances made in the last few years, society is still structured so as to make it more difficult for girls than boys to achieve self-esteem. I think some submissives suffer from low self-esteem and their submission helps them deal with this. They feel valued through being humiliated; they make a virtue out of necessity. If that works for them, that’s fine, though my personal preference is for a submissive who has a good opinion of herself, one which I try to reinforce.

It’s not an either/or question. Even if one is born submissive, your early upbringing is going to have an effect on how you develop those inbuilt tendencies. And how, and even where, you live and who you meet will have a major bearing too.

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After I wrote the above passage, a discerning reader questioned my reluctance to trace back the origins of submissiveness to early family history. Her view was that I was looking at the wrong parent. It’s not abuse by the father that turns women towards a D/s relationship; it’s difficulties with the mother. She cited half a dozen or so instances of submissive women she was acquainted with whose mothers continued to cause them problems, even into adulthood. In these cases, it mostly happened that the role of the father was peripheral. A somewhat fraught relationship with their mother is common enough among vanilla girls too, surely. Nevertheless, it would be surprising, given what we know about human psychology, if there were no connection at all between early development and the particular nature of a person’s sexuality. Submissiveness (and dominance too, for that matter) is something that goes to the heart of many of us, and is unlikely to be insulated from the powerful social determinations upon our characters that result from family life.

In such a situation, with an overbearing mother, the child may feel that the father fails adequately to fulfill his role. He doesn’t stand up for the child when the mother is unkind, he doesn’t protect her. And so it may be that in adult life the woman searches for a man who will fulfill that role. A good Dom is not only a figure of authority who provides necessary guidance and discipline, and even punishment if it is deserved; a good Dom also nurtures his submissive, comforts and protects her, encourages her, praises her, all things which a good father would also do. She trusts him; he is the one person who will not let her down. She craves his approval, dreads his displeasure, and strives constantly not to disappoint him. Of course, a Dom is not actually the father, because he also does what no good father would do; he fucks her. He understands the precise nature of the sexual pleasure she craves and he satisfies her need. She needs someone who supplies some of the qualities of a father, but she needs sexual fulfillment too. This, presumably, is her ideal combination; the Dom is both nurturing, and fulfilling.

A question that then arises is this: is the submissive woman always in some sense a little girl? Does she always look up to the Dom, in the way the child looks up to the father? Can such a relationship ever be among equals? It’s common enough that a Dom refers to her as a “girl”, even as a “little girl”. It’s a minority of submissive women who seek to make this explicit, who actively seek to play out the role of little girl, acting it up to the hilt and calling their Dom “Daddy”. But is there not an element of this in all D/s relationships? My experience of being a “Daddy” is limited and recent. But looking back I can perceive traces of this dynamic in previous relationships. This may well have been strengthened by the fact that invariably I have been older than the submissive women I was involved with, and sometimes much older. And the degree to which there was an element of the little girl in their behavior varied quite a lot; no two relationships are ever the same. But looking back I can feel that they were often in some sense, to some extent, my little one. “Good girl” was often the highest praise I could give.

But if we pursue this line of enquiry, how can it apply to those women who can switch, who can move from being submissive to a Dom, to taking the upper hand? Here I can do no more than speculate. No parent is ever quite what the child wants him or her to be. That’s part of growing up, the recognition that people are imperfect, that our parents are flawed human beings, just like ourselves. But perhaps in the case of the woman who has suffered some aggression from her mother, and felt that the father did not take her side, there may be some long-harbored, even subconscious, feelings of resentment towards him, which then are expressed in a desire to hurt the man, the Dom, to whom she has submitted. He will suffer, if only in symbolic form, her revenge.

While we are on the subject, there’s another side of this. What makes a man a Dom? The Killer Inside Me is a movie about a psychopathic cop who gets his kicks from the sadistic abuse of women. The film is directed by Michael Winterbottom, a British director I have admired for some time, and based on a novel by Jim Thompson, who wrote several successful noir thrillers in the 1950s. Casey Affleck plays the cop, who half-kills one girl with his bare hands and succeeds in beating another to death. As with Leap Year, there is a suggestion that an explanation for the central character’s sexuality is to be found in a childhood experience. The cop’s father used to beat his mother for pleasure, and one time his mother invited the cop, when a child, to spank her bottom (an experience liable to turn anyone a bit peculiar in later life, one might think). The two principal beatings of the film are carried out because the cop wishes to frame someone else for the crimes. They are savage, almost unwatchable. Much of the commentary on the film concerned the issue of whether the depiction of such violence against women could ever be justified. However, I think there’s another issue. Does the film try to make a psychological connection between murderous violence against women, and a taste for spanking? The cop is not only a killer; he enjoys beating his girlfriends’ bottoms, and they enjoy having him do it. It’s made very clear that this is consensual. The issue is whether his enjoyment of it is seen as pathological, and whether there is some natural progression from spanking for pleasure to beating a girl to death. It’s a movie, not a clinical case history; it doesn’t try to argue anything, it just shows things happening and you have to work out for yourself what the connection between them is, if anything. But even though it’s a very well-made piece of work, it did get my back up a bit. Once again, it feels like D/s folk are being demonized.

Perhaps I’m paranoid, although misunderstood minorities (and I think as D/s practitioners we can include ourselves in such a category) are very apt to sense they’re being got at, because so often they are. I don’t think the film provides any clear answers about what makes men interested in sexual domination. It certainly isn’t saying all men who like to spank girls are potential killers; at least, I think not. But all the same, as a man who does like to spank girls, it left me feeling a bit defensive.

It also left me wondering, not for the first time, why men do like to spank. When discussing Leap Year, my readers had some insightful things to say about the relation some submissive women have to their mothers. Now, I’m trying to think about these matters from my own position. Unfortunately, looking into my own experience doesn’t help me much. I can’t find anything in my childhood that explains how I am sexually. Perhaps a Freudian would say I’m repressing things; but if I am you’ll never know, and nor will I, because they are repressed, and I’m not about to let someone go digging around inside my head on the off-chance there’s a killer in there. You’ll have to take my word for it that my upbringing was normal. (Though if you are a strict Freudian you believe that what passes for normality is pretty weird in itself. I mean, the Oedipus complex isn’t something that makes you feel exactly comfortable about your mummy and daddy, is it?)

I once had a long lunch with a charming woman who has her own, highly successful, sex-blog. Our conversation was pretty wide-ranging, but at one point we did get on to what makes us kinky. She told me about a man she knew who was abused by his father, sexually and physically. His mother, who might have protected him, didn’t raise a finger in his defense, being herself in thrall to his father. The result was that when he grew to manhood he started to take his revenge on women, not through murdering them, but through seeking out women who would allow him to subject them to extreme pain. In this way he could ‘punish’ his mother for her failure to safeguard him.

I think that’s quite a compelling case-history; you can see the logic. But it doesn’t remotely come close to my own situation, nor do I suspect to that of many Doms. I guess if I had to think really hard and come up with some sort of account of my own psycho-sexual make-up, it would be something like this. The English middle classes are notorious for their suppression of emotion and of sex. At least they were when I was growing up, in a world rather different from today. In our house sex was never ever mentioned. And nobody raised their voice. Emotion was undoubtedly present, but it was battened down. Don’t express yourself. Stay buttoned up. Letting your feelings show was something for vulgar people, or other nationalities. I absorbed this way of behavior and it came to control my sex life, such as it was in those early days. Be polite to girls, even diffident. Good manners are the ultimate virtue. And nice girls don’t really like sex, so don’t expect much.

It took me years to realize that women were as much volcanoes of seething sexual passion as I was, and even longer to see that, just as I desired to bring women under my control sexually, there were women who wanted exactly that, to be controlled. I think that my eventual self-liberation, when I felt free to express what I wanted, and indeed take it when offered, was in some sense a process of freeing myself from those early days of repression, and of good manners. Perhaps you can’t imagine what a liberation it is to be able to say to a girl, come here, bend over, and lift up your skirt. Without having to add please, without wondering if I am being too forward, without manners coming into it at all (though in my defense I’d like to think my manners are impeccable when required). I occasionally wonder whether all men would be Doms if they dared. But I’m probably wrong about that.