The D/s Blog

Chapter One-3

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 s****l 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, s*x-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-s****l make-up, it would be something like this. The English middle classes are notorious for their suppression of emotion and of s*x. At least they were when I was growing up, in a world rather different from today. In our house s*x 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 s*x 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 s*x, so don’t expect much.

It took me years to realize that women were as much volcanoes of seething s****l 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.

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 n*****s. 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”, “b***h”). 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, s****l 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 s****l 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.