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Seven Types of Submissive

When I started out in D/s, I thought there was only one way of being a submissive, and correspondingly only one way to be a Dom. A lot of reading, mostly on the internet, and some intense discussions with some very perceptive girls made me realize there were lots of different ways to be a sub. And I came to see that they weren’t mutually exclusive. A submissive could have several facets to her submissiveness, overlapping with each other perhaps, depending on her partner, her mood, the stage of her development. I also realized that no form of submissiveness was “better”, more true to the essence of submission, than any other.

I can identify at least seven types. I list them in random order. There is no league table of merit.

1. The pain-slut. She needs to have her ass well beaten and often. She needs to feel the sting of the leather strap, the bite of the cane, or the intense, piercing pain of steel clamps on her nipples. She needs to be hurt, right up to her limits and maybe a little way beyond. Pain is her recreational drug of choice and her endorphins transmute pain into pleasure. Of course, there’s a psychological dimension (she needs to feel the power of her Dom, forcing her to suffer), but she also requires strong physical sensations.

2. The degradation-junkie. She wants, no, she needs to be humiliated. She wants to be called names (“cunt”, “slut”, “bitch”). She wants these names written on her body. She wants to be forced to eat off the floor, to crawl, to be used, abused, and shamed in public. She knows deep down she is a slut; she needs to be forced to admit it.

3. The saint. For her, submission has a spiritual dimension. She wants, through training and discipline, to achieve a higher form of consciousness, in which her self, her own needs and desires, are negated, subsumed into the wishes of her Master. There are sites for such women, where they may receive lists of exercises to perform, books to read, rituals to follow in their quest for perfection.

4. Daddy’s girl. Whether her Dom is actually older than her or not (and often he is), she wants to be his little girl, cared for, pampered and played with (sometimes as a child, but often in ways that only big girls ought to be played with). She wants to feel safe and a bit spoiled, like a pet maybe or like his little doll, and in return she’ll make him the happiest Daddy alive.

5. The slave. She has given herself lock, stock and barrel. She can be beaten, bitten or branded, anything goes. She no longer owns either her body or her mind. She may be forced to sleep on the floor or in a cage. She may be given to other men for their use. She may even be told what to believe about religion, or how to vote. Secretly, perhaps, she prides herself on being the only true kind of submissive.

6. The Domestic Discipline queen. Serene in her subordination, she acknowledges her husband as head of the house, and perhaps even believes women are inferior to men. It is his right to correct her, and in return she services his every need, getting as much pleasure from ironing his shirts as from the nightly performance of fellatio.

7. The bottom. She likes to be bratty and provoke a spanking, but only if she’s in the mood, and she may even fancy switching from time to time. Kink is just the icing on the cake, not a vocation.

Are there types I haven’t listed? Probably. I chose seven because of the number’s historical and aesthetic connotations: Empson’s seven types of ambiguity, the seven pillars of wisdom, the seven dwarfs, Seven Sisters tube station in London, Donne’s “seven sleepers’ den”, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, and all those movies: Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and its remake, The Magnificent Seven, Fincher’s Se7en, Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now, and just recently Seven Psychopaths. Seven has a sort of mystical dimension; but applied to submissives it’s an arbitrary number.

What Do Submissives Need?

Do submissive girls need more care and attention than vanilla ones? Of course it’s relative. I dare say most vanilla girls lap up all the care and attention they can get. But submissive girls are taking more of a chance. They put so much of themselves out there; everything, in fact. This makes them highly vulnerable. They never seem to be sure whether what they are offering is in fact too much or, whether it’s enough.

So what they need is plenty of reassurance. They need also to be told that the dark fantasies they have and which they are persuaded to admit to aren’t distasteful or stupid or childish. Submissive girls are a little nervous of letting too much of the inner slut come out to play. Perhaps they will meet with disapproval. But of course, any Dom worth his salt loves this inner slut. The sluttier she is the better. He just needs to make sure she knows that.

It’s also the case that submissive girls need to have their submission constantly tried and tested. You can’t just put her away in a cupboard and assume when you take her out again she’s ready to go. Submission thrives on submitting; the more a girl does it the better it feels. And the better at it she becomes. Like anything else, sexual submission improves with practice. You get to know yourself, and you get to know him and have a feel for what he wants, how best to please him. So if you want to get the best out of your girl, keep doing it.

Slut

I love a slut. I don’t know if every woman has an inner slut, but I love the ones who do. It’s an interesting word, with a lot of connotations. Probably everyone has a slightly different idea of what they mean by it. For me it’s not a derogatory word in the least. On the contrary, it’s a term of approval. A slut is a woman who has the courage of her desires, who is not ashamed to show what she likes, who is not shy of her lover seeing her enjoy her sexuality. But it’s more than that. A slut is a woman who is prepared to kick over the traces, who is not confined by conventional notions of how a woman should behave. Despite the so-called sexual revolution, there are still rigid social limits placed on what women ought and ought not to do sexually. A slut is a woman who doesn’t care about these limits, imposed by censorious busybodies, mostly men, of course.

Sluts have always been with us, thank goodness. My mother, an eminently respectable woman, indeed rather too much so, used to have a very fixed idea of how you could recognize a slut or, as she put it, a woman who “is no better than she ought to be” (a curious phrase that doesn’t make much sense when you analyze it, though I knew exactly what she meant). In those days a slut was a woman who wore red nail varnish. Yet, curiously, it was fine to wear red lipstick, which my mother wore every day of her life. Sluts also wore high-heels with trousers (or “slacks” as my mother called them). They smoked in public and they drank gin. No doubt she also had notions of what things they might do in the bedroom, but she was much too reserved to tell me what they were. I’m so glad I eventually found out what a slut will do in the bedroom. (If she’s a real slut, there’s not much she won’t do.)

In England we have a lot of words for women who don’t come up to the high moral standards expected of them. Slut is one, and it’s the only one, I think, which has been redeemed and put to more positive use. If you call a girl a scrubber or a slag or a slapper, there’s no way it can be a term of approval, still less one of affection. Whereas if I call my submissive girl my little slut, she basks in the certain knowledge of my admiration. And the word lends itself to being embroidered with all kinds of prefixes: pain-slut, come-slut, ass-slut, each one a label to be worn as a badge of honor.

I don’t think there can be a male equivalent for a slut, because society doesn’t impose similar restraints on men. They can do as they please, and if they like something a little kinky in bed, then they are just being a bit of a lad. There’s no implication that in any sense they compromise themselves, whatever they do.

A girl once told me she’d gotten a new vibrator, a small one, easily secreted in her purse. Off the cuff, I said maybe that’s one definition of a slut, a woman with more than one vibrator. And then we got talking some more about what a slut was.

I guess there are other things that might qualify a girl for the title. If she’s ever sent naked pictures of herself to a guy, maybe? If she’s ever put lipstick on her nipples. If she ever goes out in public without knickers. If she keeps wearing those high heels, even though she’s got a blister. If she’s been fucked by more than one guy in a single day. If in her fantasies she sometimes thinks not about just one cock but about many. (But then that probably makes ninety per cent of women sluts, doesn’t it?) I could go on, but you get the general idea. Oh, and one more: if she reads my writing and wants to masturbate. I’m in favor of all these things, but especially the last one.

After I wrote about sluts, I got some interesting questions from readers. For example, must a slut have achieved a certain level of variety and numbers in her partners to be worthy of the term? I don’t know what’s meant by variety here. Does it mean, fucking both tall men and short, both old and young, both plumbers and bankers, men with big cocks as well as those with small? As for numbers, it’s relative, surely. There are societies in which a woman who has had more than one sexual partner in her life is regarded as a slut, and not in the honorable sense we are talking about here. But I think that among young women in contemporary London, if you have had only one partner by the time you are thirty, you are regarded not as a good girl but as a freak, virtually a nun. I suppose I’d say that a true slut, the best kind, doesn’t think in terms of numbers. She’s not keeping score, because she thinks it doesn’t matter how many. And she believes there’s no such thing as too many, as long as you yourself feel good about the number.

Another reader asked at what age it’s emotionally safe for a woman to regard herself as a slut. This raises an important issue. I don’t think it would be right for teenage girls to consider themselves sluts, even in a positive way. A woman needs some self-knowledge as well as sexual experience before she ought to think of herself that way, and that can’t be acquired overnight. If a woman is a slut under twenty-five, maybe that’s not so good for her. If she’s not on the way to being a slut in her thirties, I think that’s a shame. What’s holding her back?

A submissive girl sometimes fears that if her Dom knows all the dirty things that are in her mind, he won’t respect her any more. He’ll just think she is a nasty little slut. Personally, there’s nothing I love more than a nasty little slut, but it has never stopped me giving a girl all the respect she wants. But what if the reverse is true? What if the Dom is so awed by her, thinks she is so wonderful that he can’t bring himself to make her do bad things any more? What if he wants to put her on a pedestal instead of putting her on her knees? That’s just as bad for her, isn’t it?

I guess some of the things that submissive girls want can seem pretty extreme, even shocking, if you are just starting out as a Dom. But we like to be frank here, and I’m going to list a few. I think any novice Doms out there should know the worst. I don’t know if there are any girls who want all of these things, but with each one I think I’ve known at least one girl who wanted it. So, look away now if you have illusions about the purity and high-mindedness of women.

She wants to be put in a corner with her bottom bared and made to wait till he scolds her for her stubbornness, her cheekiness, her brattishness. Until he lectures her on the need for obedience. Until he punishes her for speaking out of turn or for her dirty habits (fiddling with her cunt when she’s no right to). Until he decides to whip her recalcitrance out of her.

She wants to be called names: dirty little slut, filthy whore, tramp, fucktoy, cunt...

She wants to be prostrate on the floor, writhing with unsatisfied lust, her cunt throbbing and drooling, whimpering and begging for release, pleading that he let her come. And then she wants to be denied. Or at least, half of her does.

She wants to be his darling little girl, his sweet little baby girl, his naughty little girl.

She wants to be debauched, degraded, defiled, and debased.

She wants to be exhibited to anyone he wants to show her to. She wants to be examined and inspected, prodded and probed. She wants to have her modesty outraged and her shame stripped away.

She wants to be buggered. She wants her ass to be penetrated, invaded, stretched, and violated. She wants her ass to be pounded by a big hard cock. She wants to be his little ass-slut.

She wants to be tied up so tight she can’t move, then interfered with and subjected to all manner of indecencies.

She wants to be slapped and pinched and choked and hurt till she aches all over.

She wants him to fuck with her head.

But here’s the point. There’s one other thing I know for sure they all want, not instead of the above, but as well as. They want to be cuddled and kissed and loved and respected and valued. I don’t see a paradox here. On the contrary.

It’s what the Dom wants too, I hope. He wants a girl who wants those dirty things I’ve listed above, but who’s got self-respect, who’s independent and stands up for herself and doesn’t take shit from guys and who knows how much she’s worth. He doesn’t want a doormat, because where’s the fun in degrading a girl who really thinks she’s worthless? But he doesn’t want a goddess either, stuck on a pedestal. One of the reasons he respects her is because she’s not afraid to admit to him what she is and what she wants. In fact, he wants her to be proud of it – proud to be a self-respecting slut.