I recently filled out the University of Nova Scotia’s sex research survey, apparently trying to cross correlate personality with self identified sexual orientation in BDSM.
So my identification is something that’s sometimes a bit awkward for me. I’m not “Undecided”. I know I’m a dominant. But even beyond the sensual/sensitive/strict variations, I also have other stuff in there.
I am, among many things, a masochist, and not just a pure sensation based masochist. I have of course encountered this often enough that I can’t claim to be a special snowflake. However I can observe how it effects and effected me and what this sort of experience demonstrates about how we construct the concept of sexual dominance but also submission.
Dominants, by common stereotype, are not supposed to be in a weak, subjugated position. We’re not supposed to be confused, incompetent or insecure. And not emotional either, though we can be rhapsodic about our “pet” a bit, or possessive. It’s hyper performance masculinity for the masses.
Occasionally dominants chirp up that they feel a little bit like they’re not allowed to be incompetent- Bitchy Jones and Dumb Domme both touch on it pretty well. A lot of pixel text passes through BDSM forums fighting the idea that dominants can’t fall in love (wah?!) and so forth. Everyone’s fighting the looming spector of the true dom.
Me, my masochism was a red herring that diverted me for quite some time. Of course we make room for so called ‘sensation bottoms’ but trying to explain that I enjoy more than physical sensations but I don’t actually submit really makes me feel like I’ve traipsed into that special zone of hell where you need to split hairs and refine terms so exactly you’re defining things on the molecular level.
Then again, you have to do that anyway when you define what kind of dominant you are. I’m nobody’s Mommy, Sissy Trainer or Goddess. I have to do that already. And yet…
I like, as an overarching thing, to have authority. It feels very good in the “me” place. The principle that someone or something is Mine really appeals to me. i’m a nasty little sadist who would love to hear you in that abject, broken down place. I just go a tingle from writing that last sentence, it’s such a big thing for me. And yet I like to caretake in a way that borders on acts of fussy service (of course I made your gruel into a happy face, prisoner!) and there is an aspect of me that really enjoys sexual victimization.
Yeah, yeah, all strong women secretly want to be raped and taken by an aggressive man, etc… etc… No. I don’t want to be owned. It’s not about submission. In practice, being on the receiving end does not take me to that good, cozy place that domination does. As a victim, sure I’m physically aroused, the orgasms are good, I’m crying and pleading and so forth. But part of that is the ability to pull away from the victimizer. I’m actually pretty loathe to experiment because I don’t want actual vulnerability. Ew, gross. I pretty much have a rule that if you don’t sub to me, it isn’t going to happen. And don’t get me started on me and aftercare.
I’m a person who needs to be hugged and held after something intense, or I feel like a truck backed over me the next day. Constitutionally speaking, though my pain thresh hold is high, I think I take strong emotions really hard. I’m even a little loopy after intense topping! But there is very few instances where I will trust someone to give me that real need.
So there’s that piece of awkward. Especially since there is a background tendency, that bastard “True” to think about subjugation on a rank scale. Like people still tell others how positive it is to “start as a submissive” as if being a dominant was something you worked up to. Or that you would be a more skilled dominant, which from a sensation experience might be correct, but honestly, from a *doing* perspective, if you’re actually into technical skill the sooner you can get started the better.
I’m a lot less open about the broad spectrum of my sexual desire because I feel like it creates more headaches than it sooths. Kink profiles mainly only make oblique references to it because I am made extremely uncomfortable by aggressive come-ons, much less the sort that people perceived as sub women get. I mean outright rape threats meant as come-ons will make me stabby.
So far my policy is simply that if you don’t sub to me, you don’t get to even consider negotiating with me. And I really don’t appreciate how often some random would be mentor has offered to help me “explore” this side. Granted the last guy went off on a rant about how I was rejecting him because he was black, so there’s other reasons why that sort of explicit come on creeps me out.
So I’m a dominant sadomasochist. If I own you, I own you. If I like and trust you, I can be a victim too, but don’t get too attached because the dom thing is going to bob back to the surface.
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How to Top Your Master
It sounds like what you want goes beyond this. But your point of view makes much more sense to me. It is vulnerability up to a point, but with deep-down control? I know it’s inconvenient for our binary habits of thought, but I only *wish* my desires ran that way.
For me, I wandered into things via experimenting a lot with the s-type stuff and came to the realization that I was more of a piece missing that wanted to go through that door and into being utterly owned. The vulnerability is a lot more like wanting the real risk of losing that comes with a worthy opponent, but not actually wanting to lose.
Like, faced with “You will do X and Y and Z, because it is my will.” The response is to endure and consume them through my endurance. I learned pretty early on that my vision of things like service submission burned brighter than any dominant I tried to play with, that my enjoyment of pain games still left a piece of me perfectly comfortable with the edge that were my limits and aware that beyond that point wasn’t even fear as much as “No, that’s stupid, I don’t want to be permanently damaged. I like this state, thank you very much.”