Sunday, August 8, 2010

Hit me because you like me.

An interesting realization I had, pondering how kink in reality compares with fantasy kink: I'm really not into the dynamic of "the Dom doesn't like the sub." It came up in comments a couple posts back, with a person in a 24/7 D/s relationship remarking that they would never be called a "worthless worm." And it occurred to me that I've never been called anything of the sort either, and I wouldn't want to be. For all the hitting, the BDSM scenes I enjoy are based on the pretext "the Dom really likes using the sub." It's not quite the "precious gift of submission," but it's the idea that I'm an enjoyable toy, not an object of hate or disdain.

I haven't seen too much genuine-dislike-play in reality. I've seen a shit-ton on the Internet. The worst seems to be in financial domination sites (which are weird as hell anyway; I'm half split between "hey, I want in on that racket" and "god, this is the saddest thing I've ever seen")--check out this for an example of the dynamic that makes me a lot more sad than aroused.

Which is funny, because I am into some fairly icky humiliation play, but it's a different kind of humiliation. It's humiliation about "I can do whatever I want with you," which is very different from "I don't like you." It's the difference between "look at you, you'll fucking drink my piss, you'll do anything" and "look at you, you'll fucking drink my piss, you're revolting."

I guess it might sound sort of funny if you don't have real-life BDSM experience, but causing someone every kind of physical and psychological misery for your sexual pleasure doesn't mean you have to be unpleasant to them.

35 comments:

  1. That link is seriously revolting. I'm a guy who likes begging for footjobs and there is no least component of arousal in my reaction to that attitude.

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  2. Holly said:

    I guess it might sound sort of funny if you don't have real-life BDSM experience, but causing someone every kind of physical and psychological misery for your sexual pleasure doesn't mean you have to be unpleasant to them.

    Exactly. It's one of those things I have the most trouble explaining to people who haven't had positive bdsm experiences (read 'positive' as 'enjoyable and worthwhile for both [all] partners'): I may hurt you, torment you, fuck with you, push you into wracking,uncontrollable sobs -- but we're sharing this experience (albeit from opposite sides), we're in this together, and casual or serious partner, we share a bond at that moment, I want this to work for you, to fulfill you the way it fulfills me. That matters to me every bit as much as getting off on my end, and actually much more; it's part of my responsibility as the Dom or the top.

    I have a vanilla feminist friend whom I love dearly but who just doesn't 'get' bdsm -- it bothers her to no end, and I feel like I'm the wrong person to try to explain/justify it to her (after all, I'm the big bad patriarchal abuser). I'd love to get you two out to dinner some time; this blog entry makes me think you might be the right person for the job.

    And yeah, I hit you because I like you. :)

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  3. That link - O...MG... I am sitting here with many different reactions: the desire to laugh hysterically, because that shit is funny, right? And she can't be serious, although if she is, she's clearly a terrible person. And then I think, wow, she is a genius for finding this moneymaking niche. "Fools and their money" has been my reaction to this stupid scam of "financial domination" via the internet. I guess you have to have the ethics and hubris of the average spammer or investment banker to pull this off. Damn.

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  4. They're serious. I personally know at least one Domme in the Boston area who makes a living this way. There's a sizable market for it,and even one well-heeled customer can keep a pro Domme, esp. a financial domination one, in the clover for quite sometime.

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  5. I wonder how many people just masturbate to her photos.
    I wonder if she gets off on that.

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. Removed my own comment for a potentially offensive angry rhetorical flourish.

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  8. Boiling over here. I've been thinking about my own submissive kinks and poking around the Web the past few days to see what's out there. Some of it's fine, but too much of what I see amounts to women telling me "You are submissive so you must pay my rent now and consider yourself lucky to do it," and that fucking link takes it way, way past the edge. I have some submissive kinks, but if you so much as tell me I have to capitalize domme while leaving sub lowercase I will laugh in your face.

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  9. I'd heard about Financial Domination back in the 1980s (note: I was a kid back then). It was the second thing I heard about in regards to BDSM. Or rather, "S&M", because the term "BDSM" either didn't exist back then or wasn't known to most people. The first was Marquis de Sade. The third was dominatrixes. Nothing really in depth about any of those subjects; I happened to come upon them in news articles and psychology journals. Anyway, Financial Domination may be a rather small niche, but it is hardly a new thing.

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  10. ...Also, I can't really imagine ever saying that someone who is under my power is "worthless", and least not with any real sincerity or conviction. If I really considered someone to be worthless they wouldn't be under my power (or wouldn't be anymore if they were already) and I wouldn't want to associate with them if possible.

    Even if by some chance I became a truly evil bastard who delighted in causing misery and torment, simply telling someone they are worthless until they believe it would be uncreative and boring. I would prefer something more subtle and personal.

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  11. Pro-domme and "amateur" switch piping up here! I've had one or two clients in my time who were genuinely into the idea of financial domination as a humiliation kink, but they were the exception to the rule. Most clients who do or want to do financial domination (again, in my non-universal experience) can't or won't do BDSM play of any stripe outside the confines of the internet, so that money becomes the only way to "ground" the play in something real (not a method I recommend). For the record, most of the clients I see aren't into fin-dom--they pay me because I am giving them a set amount of time and use of my skill set, and that time is ultimately not about me or my desires (even if the role-play is that it's ALL about me and my desires)...NOT because I am an Untouchable Rubber Goddess and they are my cash-piggie-slaves and we're following some sort of natural pervy order. I always try to be really up front about what power dynamic exists inside ther session and what (somewhat different) one exists outside of it. If a client is unwilling to acknowledge the difference between fantasy and reality with me in the room, then that's not somebody I can be safe alone in a room with, no matter how badass a Domme I might be.

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  12. Thanks for posting that, Miss L. The impression I'd been getting from the self-presentation of a lot of these internet dominants was that they were taking a personality flaw that everybody recognizes as bad in ordinary life, namely being a spectacularly arrogant asshole who takes advantage of people with other personality flaws, adding a sexual component and then trying to hide it under the kink umbrella.

    But if I understand your implications correctly, I'm basically looking at some advertisements constructed within the intended fantasy that just don't include any real-life disclaimer information.

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  13. Awesome post.

    For a long time now, my philosophy has been that a sub of mine is like a pet. I love and cherish him and respect that he has feelings and an intellect, but if I don't feel like sharing the couch it's my prerogative to put him on the floor at my feet. Any slaps or spankings I give are totally unrelated to anger or hate - it's more the equivalent of putting tape on the cat's paws so you can laugh at his reaction (although I don't do this to my actual cat...).

    One time, early in our relationship, I was telling my adorable subby bf that he'd done something I didn't like. He told me if he ever did it again, I should slap him. And I was like, "Um...slapping you when I'm pissed off would actually be abuse, dude. Not going there."

    On a related note, I've always been skeeved out by subs who'd approach me online saying "I'm a disgusting worm and all women are goddesses." EW on some many levels.

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  14. "I have some submissive kinks, but if you so much as tell me I have to capitalize domme while leaving sub lowercase I will laugh in your face."

    All I can say is that I agree wholeheartedly with what everyone's said, but especially this.

    RAmen.

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  15. As the person who said the 'worthless worm' comment initially, I just want to say that I was just grabbing the most obvious porn-influenced BDSM thingie, and I don't think actual relationships are actually like that. Just so we're clear.

    In fact I honestly don't get why anyone would want to be told they're worthless. Possibly it's because I have a giant craving for praise and attention, but the idea of someone I love telling me I'm horrible and useless makes me want to curl in a tiny ball and cry. (I think this might be what one calls a hard limit.)

    And did anybody else notice that that lady is actually blackmailing people? As in actually committing an actual federal crime? That stuff's not on.

    I like perversecowgirl's strategy. That sounds sensible and much hotter than I Am The Domly Queen of Doms, All Bow Before Me, You Are Unworthy To Lick My Boots.

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  16. Third-person expressions which do not include me, e.g. PerverseCowgirl's "any sub of mine", don't bug me at all. That verbally leaves me free to say "I'm not into that on the relationship scale". It's expressions that are phrased to include me will-I-nill-I, e.g. "you" or "men", that offend me. The submission is taken for granted, but I never offered it.

    So I'm completely the wrong audience. The stuff that irritates me is stuff aimed at people who ARE submissive, or are at least thinking in terms of a submissive relationship. Whereas I'm a rugged individualist who has submissive kinks. When I hit the "I AM your Goddess and you ARE my slave" stuff, it doesn't engage my sexy "ooh, perhaps she'll grace me with a touch" thoughts, it engages my totally unsexy "Union volunteers shed rivers of blood to end slavery" thoughts. My reaction isn't "I want to kiss your feet", it's "I cast my defiance in your teeth".

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  17. Quick note on pervert capitalization - I've pretty much given in to capitalizing "Dom/Domme" in the generic, and I try to reflect someone's own usage in writing their name. I however will not capitalize personal pronouns for Doms, because that strikes me as sort of inappropriate when they're not my Dom.

    And the S/slashy T/thing just makes me giggle every time.

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  18. I really have the same "Uh, what? Look, language doesn't *work* like that" reaction to playing capitalization games that I do to the vast body of gender-neutral neologisms.

    I tend to capitalize names (including scene names) but leave everything else lower-case, or (rarely) just capitalize both Dom and Sub. I flatly refuse to ever use "Dom/me" in anything but parody, though. "Dominant" is gender-neutral enough.

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  19. Aaron - I tend to evade gender-neutral neologisms by being grammatically incorrect and using "they" to mean "he/she/zhe/hir", because it avoids making gender assumptions while still sounding more natural to my ear.

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  20. Seems to me that English is rapidly evolving to make "they" for "he/she/zhe/hir" grammatically correct, and given that language does change with settled popular usage a much better argument can be made that "they" is now correct usage compared to the alternatives.

    It gets really ugly when other pluralizations get involved. "Zhe is running". "They is running" or "they are running"?

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  21. Holly/Mousie - I'm fine with people using "they" as a gender-neutral singular. I don't do it myself (I use "he", and I've yet to be burned at the stake by feminists for it), but I certainly have no issue with it.

    There are *sixteen* invented gender-neutral pronouns and none of them is widely used. Maybe that should tell us something about how useful it is to invent more, and we can just stick to letting language evolve as society pushes and pulls.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Summary

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  22. Actually, people have been using "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun on and off for hundreds of years. It's just been re-entering popular use in recent decades. Some people have suggested using "ey" and "em" to distinguish it from the plural, as there are some people who do this in certain regional dialects. But it's not universal in those dialects hasn't caught on for English in general.

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  23. My basic opinion on Stupid Kinky Capitalisation is that I am pretty sure that the English language has not given informed consent.

    My basic opinion on the singular "they" is that it is about as worth getting up in arms about as that grotesque abomination before grammar, the singular "you".


    I'm also a bad person to talk to about humiliation in kink, because half the stuff that people talk about for it is stuff that I'd dropkick someone to the curb for, half of it is stuff that I don't understand why it's being called humiliating, and half of it is incomprehensible to me. ;)

    I'm submissive, not whatever that's all about.

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  24. If Mistress Whoever is such a 'goddess,' she should be far above such simple grammatical errors as this:

    "I don't need you. you need me."

    Mega Fail. But highly amusing, nonetheless.

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  25. The Mistress didn't capitalize the word "you" even though it was the beginning of her next sentence because it was in reference to all those "worthless worms".

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  26. In that case, she should have used a semicolon.

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  27. No, she deliberately didn't capitalize it because she felt the BDSM rule of subs not deserving capitalization took priority over the grammatical rule of the first word in a sentence being capitalized. It may be silly and annoying, but she was being consistent.

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  28. Isn't this the PUA-style selection for poor self-image and manipulation based on that, turned up to 11, with financial parasitism added?

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  29. Perversecowgirl - love that description of your relationship with your (adorable-sounding) sub.

    My girlfriend and I have an approximately similar pet/owner relationship, and it's satisfying and actually really supportive :)

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  30. Anon -

    But by using a semicolon, she could have both remained grammatically correct and not capitalized the reference to the submissive party; that would be, in my opinion, a strictly superior stylistic choice.

    Okay, I'm done being pedantic now. *wry shake of head*

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  31. @ Dw3t-hthr:
    My basic opinion on the singular "they" is that it is about as worth getting up in arms about as that grotesque abomination before grammar, the singular "you".

    I thought the issue was the plural "you". There are/were some dialects which use(d) "yous" or "youse" for the plural, not to mention the southern American "y'all", but again it's not entirely universal within those dialects and no plural form of "you" has ever caught on for the language as a whole.

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  32. Not Me, formerly the singular for "you" was "thee" or "thou", and which one was used was based the speaker's familiarity with the person being addressed; when to switch from one to the other was a social minefield. "You" was only plural.

    Dw3t-Hthr is pointing out that in a very similar case, the language evolved to drop something socially complex and replace it with the simpler form with the wrong pluralization.

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  33. Oops, looking this up I see I didn't explain "thou and thee" quite accurately, but it's way too complicated to clog this thread with.

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  34. Mousie is correct; 'you' is a plural word in crazed pedantland.

    You are, of course, aware that it takes plural verb forms, right?

    (Bolding added to make sure the joke is blatant.)

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  35. I is apparently more ignorant that I thought, as I never noticed it was that simple.

    (bolding added to make sure the stupid counter-joke is blatant.)

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