For the love

For the love

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Submissive fantasies are...problematic

For years, I had no reality upon which I could base my fantasies, or against which I could judge them. I think my fantasies were largely based on what I viewed through FemDom porn and/or erotic literature. In these, Domination is almost always coupled with sadism and, to a lesser extent, humiliation. So it went with my fantasies.

My reality with Mistress Delila is much different. There is some pain involved, but it is not necessary to push the boundaries of pain simply for me to feel "truly submissive." I can honestly say, as well, that I have never felt humiliated by Her...although We have discussed and agreed that certain things contain some amount of degradation, the two are not synonyms.* In other words, my time with Mistress Delila has changed the way I view submission and Dominance, and so it has changed the way I view myself, the way I view Her, and the way I view representations of Feminine-led D/s.

My initial reaction was to blame the mismatch on the source of my information. In other words, I figured that FemDom porn was sort of poisoning my mind. But as I considered it, I realized that it was not exactly that clear cut of a relationship.

The fact is that I enjoyed FemDom porn because it matched some of the preconceptions I brought to it. The women were beautiful and dressed to accentuate their beauty. The ropes, the physical pain, the pegging, even (to a lesser extent) some of the verbal abuse resonated with my inner desires. What FemDom porn did was simply to put together images and archetypes that had been bouncing around in my head already. The problem was that it became a self-reinforcing cycle - any fantasies that could not be visualized began to fall by the wayside. Or, eventually, I began to move away from FemDom porn to female masturbation videos.

This is an important step. For me, submission is practically meaningless if the woman to whom I submit does not enjoy it. It can't just be acceptance. She has to want it, to demand it, to be enthralled by Her power over me. Anything less is just being an actor on a stage.

So I was better able to engage in my mental world better if I simply saw a woman enjoying her body than I was with the more explicit FemDom images. I could enjoy her pleasure, which is a much bigger trigger for me than is the pain or degradation. But when I would think of submission, and when I would write about it, I would almost default back to the intense and explicit language of FemDom rather than the erotic servitude of Feminine-led submission. Why?

I think I made a connection while involved in discussing the concept of "rape fantasy"as it was being discussed on a chat board.. I have to put that in quotes because I don't think it is possible to want to be raped...because rape is being forced against one's will to have sex (rough definition, I know). Beyond that, a person controls their fantasy completely. So it is, at best, a mental exercise to fantasize about having no control over something one always has complete control over. In fact, it is probably impossible.

What happens, I think, is something like a defense mechanism kicking in - call it a "fantasy mechanism." Because it is impossible to actually lose control in one's fantasy, the fantasy gets stretched to include things that one would not generally want. What I wanted was to turn over total control of my life to a partner who would enjoy that power (and not actually be abusive about it). But it is very difficult (impossible) to fantasize about what someone else would enjoy, particularly when it is not actually known who that "someone else" is.

As I have turned my life over to Mistress Delila, I have found myself engaging less and less in fantasy. When I try to do so, I am often confounded by trying to approximate the surrender I experience with Her. Knowing what it really means to submit to Her - giving up control of what will happen next and how it will happen - means that it is just not possible to maintain the illusion of powerlessness in a fantasy that I am turning the pages on. So it is just unsatisfactory.

So, too, have I found that FemDom images and videos simply do not hold the interest for me that they once did. It is just an unsatisfactory parody of what We enjoy. And despite the obligatory female orgasm in such media, it doesn't really appear to me that the women enjoy themselves all that much...and they don't seem to like the men involved, either.

This is a long way around of asking this question: Is part of the reason for the state of FemDom portrayals this inability to conceptualize a malesub fantasy? If so, does this just not speak of intellectual laziness? Even more to the point, does it not speak to devaluation of Dominant Women? After all, if we wanted to know what kind of porn might turn on a Dominant Woman, all we have to do is ask, right?

I think that is a discussion worth having. Not because of the wank fodder that will result (and let's be honest, the point of sexualized fantasies is to ENJOY them). But because letting submissive men peek inside the Dominant Woman's mind will give him an alternative to what he's being fed by his own inability to conceive of what She wants and by the porn industry that sees that as the One True Path. Because when Dominant Women are comfortable (and brave) enough to open up about what excites them, then we will begin humanizing them and seeing them as the loving and worthy people they really are.

*"Degrading," as I am using it, simply means to [somewhat] forcibly lower another person's standing relative to one's own; "humiliation" is to forcibly lower another person's value relative to one's own - related concepts, but vastly different. So degradation says, "I have status above you and you are beneath me (therefore I can direct you how I want)," while humiliation says, "You are worthless to me (and your needs are immaterial)."

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