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Can You Be Too Submissive?

There are (at least) two kinds of problems that bother the submissive girl. On the one hand there is the worry that she is not submissive enough. However much she gives, she fears he still wants more, and she begins to wonder if she can ever give all that he demands. Some days she wakes up and she doesn’t feel very submissive, doesn’t know if this is really what she wants after all. Then (hopefully) the submissive feelings come rushing back and she remembers where her true satisfaction lies. Even so, there are things she’s never done before, never even thought about, but things which he’s talked about and seems intent on trying, and she doesn’t know if she can. She dreads being a failure.

And then there is a quite opposite set of worries. What if she is too submissive? A Dom might think, how is this possible? Surely he wants her to be just as submissive as she can be. The more she can take, the better he likes it. But what she worries about is, if she simply lets him do exactly as he pleases, never offers the slightest resistance but soaks up everything that is thrown at her, won’t he get bored with her? She thinks maybe the Dom enjoys a challenge, a girl who needs to be enticed, coaxed, maneuvered or even “forced” into doing what he wants. She thinks if she makes it too easy and never fights against his dominance he may lose interest. He doesn’t want a doormat, she surmises; perhaps he’s even said as much. She embraces her submission with open arms; but would he not prefer it if she were a bit skittish, not quite tamed, not too predictable?

I can’t tell you, from a Dom’s point of view, what is too submissive, or what is not submissive enough. You have to work these things out for yourself, through trial and error, with plenty of feedback. Every relationship is different. However, while it’s true that you cannot make a girl into a submissive if she’s not, it’s either in her or it isn’t, her submission may need a lot of drawing out. Of course, that’s where the fun is, teasing out just what you can get her to submit to, especially all those things she swore she’d never do but it turns out only needed to be put to her in the right way; perhaps in such a way that refusal no longer appears as an option. It’s amazing what you can get girls to do if you put them in the right frame of mind. So you can often find that a girl who worries that she may not be submissive enough is simply one you haven’t found the right approach for. I’m not saying even the most submissive girls don’t have their hard limits. Of course they do. But if you find you have come up against a limit, my advice is to circle round a bit and work away at something else, maybe something she hasn’t ever been asked to do, or something she turns up her nose at, but which, you sense, is not such a limit as she thinks it is. And then you might find, having got under her defenses with that particular taboo, she later proves vulnerable to the thing you originally thought you could never get her to do.

I don’t think there is really such a thing as a girl who is too submissive; there’s only a girl who hasn’t yet been asked to do the really difficult things. If either of you thinks she’s too submissive, then up the ante. Push harder against the places where she offers the most obdurate resistance, or against those places she never suspected would be the focus of an assault. If you are able to make a breach in her defenses, follow up by attacking an even more strongly fortified position, or one she thinks will never be discovered. Even the most seemingly submissive girl has a redoubt which she thinks safe from being overrun. When a girl says she’ll do anything, she may not be aware of the implications of what she’s said, perhaps because she hasn’t previously met a Dom who is prepared to make her do the unthinkable.

The Perfect Submissive?

More than once I’ve been asked, what does the Dom really expect of his submissive? One answer might be this: that he wants her to surrender utterly, totally, without reserve. His objective in training her is to lead her to that state of perfection in which all traces of resistance have been expunged, in which every last drop of stubbornness or hesitation has been purged. She wants only what he wants. Her own desires have become fused with his. She wishes only to serve, having renounced all claims to the ownership of her own desires. Without question, without allowing for the possibility that there even might be a question, she kneels, she bows the head, she submits, no matter how fast the tears are falling.

But a quite different answer might be this: that whatever the ultimate goal, in practice he relishes her resistance. Indeed he seeks it out, testing her constantly, searching for her limits and pushing against them. Perhaps in one field he may achieve a complete surrender. Say that once she had inhibitions about her ass, was shy of any approach to it, tried to shield it from his attentions. She felt shame if he should demand to inspect it, she would blush if he should insist on pushing his finger into her anus, still worse should he insist she wear a butt plug, making her conscious of being opened up to him, being forced to wear it as a badge of her submission, despite herself. But knowing how she shrinks from anal intimacy, he insists, and gradually trains her to an acceptance that her ass will be used by him as he pleases, no matter how she might protest. He knows that her reluctance is nothing but the modesty instilled in her from birth, and submissives have no right to such feelings. And then gradually, as he carefully and sensitively trains her to renounce her inhibitions, she grows to like his attentions to her ass, grows to look forward to his use of it, even if there are vestigial emotions of shame. And at last she may even develop into his little ass-slut, who craves the feelings of being owned that her butt plug gives her, who longs for his tongue there, his finger, and at last his cock, so that she who once could hardly bear for him to look at her little rosette now freely offers herself to be buggered.

And so he has successfully pushed against these limits and overcome them. But does he then rest on his laurels? Or does he press on, discovering another area where her submission is less than perfect? It’s unlikely, isn’t it, that her desires will perfectly overlap with his? He likes to spank, she likes to be spanked. But is she equally enthusiastic about every spanking implement? Or does she perhaps relish the tawse rather more than the dreaded cane? If so, he will work on this, so that even if she never comes to love the cane exactly, she will not shrink from it but accept it. And then, having achieved that, he will find something else to work on. There is always a new frontier to be crossed.

Perfect submission is a bit like heaven, at least in the traditional fantasy of choirs of angels plucking their harps and fluttering their wings. Sounds a bit boring to me. One might have her perfect subjugation as a goal. But do you ever want to get there? Because what then?

Frustrations of Submissive Women

I’ve had several D/s relationships. I’m grateful to each and every one of the women I was involved with. They taught me much, they gave me much. They are a varied group, differing widely in personality, in appearance, in experience. Beyond the obvious fact that they are all submissive, they don’t have much in common. But there’s one thing they all shared. Each and every one was married to a man who either couldn’t or wouldn’t understand their sexuality. I guess that’s why they found their way to me. If they had been sexually satisfied in their marriages they wouldn’t have needed what I offered them. (If your first and only response to the idea that women would stray outside their marriages for sexual satisfaction is moral outrage, then this is not the book for you.)

It wasn’t that they hated their husbands. Obviously if they had then they would have left the marriage. Things were tolerable enough to remain. Some of them would say they loved their husbands, others that they at least liked them, more or less. In one case I think she stayed mainly because of her children. But the sex wasn’t working, not for any of them. All these women had made some sort of effort to talk to their husbands about their needs. They had made sometimes very explicit, sometimes rather coded attempts to describe what it was that they needed to obtain sexual satisfaction. A couple of them had persuaded their husbands to try a little recreational spanking. But it hadn’t worked. It never does if the woman thinks it’s being done just to please her. If the domination isn’t real, just play-acting at causing her pain or humiliation and not really imposing control on her, then it’s hopeless. It’s worse than trying to spank yourself. It’s my experience that if the man is not wired up to want to spank, you will never make him into a Dom. With some men, though the latent dominance is well hidden, with patience and understanding the woman may be able to bring it out. But if it’s not there in the first place you can’t put it there.

One or two of the husbands reacted with ridicule. I can’t imagine anything more deflating than summoning up the courage to talk about something so intimate, a subject set within a minefield of embarrassments and misunderstandings, and then finding that your attempt to reach out and establish genuine communication is met only with an incredulous snort of laughter: “You want me to do what?!” All too often the man thinks that a woman’s desire to be dominated sexually is weird, totally incomprehensible, or else that it is sick and perverted. Or perhaps the man is simply indifferent to his partner’s sexual needs. He really doesn’t much care if she is getting what she wants.

You might wonder why these women had gotten into these marriages in the first place. They were all intelligent, none of them down-trodden. How did they end up married to men who weren’t on their wavelength sexually? I think, risking a generalization, that when they got married sex wasn’t the main thing for them. I don’t mean they didn’t like it, but maybe they thought other things were more important: emotional security, financial security, a social position, companionship, having babies. You know how it goes. Sex with their husbands was something they did in order to get the other things. It wasn’t really something they did for themselves. Perhaps it became, as it so often does, a currency, or even a weapon; something you use to get something else. Can you honestly say, ladies, that you have never withheld sex as a form of punishment, or as a strategy of passive resistance against a man who wasn’t behaving as you wanted? Or have never used it as a reward, for letting you buy that dress, for taking out the garbage or being nice to your mother?

But then, with these women, time passed and in their mid-thirties or later they started to feel differently about sex. They got more interested in it. They started wanting it more and wanting it differently. They began to realize that what they wanted was a really hard spanking (or to be tied up, or made to eat their dinner off the floor like a puppy dog, or whatever). Offering themselves up totally to a man, submitting to him, was having sex for its own sake, for their own sake, not a way of gaining power in the marriage, or compensating for the lack of it. By conceding power over their sexuality, they attained it. Their need for this was so strong that all of them were prepared to risk their marriages.

I’ve had women in such situations say to me, I feel selfish wanting these things, why can’t I be satisfied with what I’ve got? He’s a good husband in other ways, it’s just that he can’t or won’t deliver what I need sexually. I’m wary of giving advice. I don’t necessarily know these women intimately; all I know is the little they tell me. So it’s not my part to recommend a particular line of action. Maybe it’s right for them to take the unselfish route and deny themselves sexual satisfaction. But I don’t think they’d be writing to me in the first place if they were at peace and had learned to live with an unsatisfied libido.