Frankly, I can be simultaneously sympathetic and cruelly contemptuous of pseudo-submissives. Perhaps that explains why I have considered coining a fun new acronym for the folks who fall into this category. The acronym would stand for:
Deluded Undisciplined Masochists & Bottoms Earnestly Living the Lifestyle in Error as Submissives
It would be abbreviated as DUMBELLES. But, no. I am not going to do it, because that would be mean-spirited and wrong on so many levels. Then again, you’ve got to admit, it is kind of funny in a “just-kidding-but-you-know-I’m-really-not” sort of way.
I’ll probably just sneakily say it by saying that I am not going to say it. After all, being a Dominant is all about having your cake and eating it, too.
Here are some of the tell-tale signs that may indicate that someone may, indeed, be a pseudo-submissive:
· A pseudo-sub just loves following her Dominant’s instructions, just as long as those instructions happen to coincide with what she really wanted to do in the first place.
· A pseudo-sub thinks it’s critical to get her Dominant’s opinion on what color panties to wear, but neglects to mention that she bought a car today.
· A pseudo-sub is ever-ready to offer her Dominant advice on how to be a better partner. This usually consists of recognizing her bad moods and just not bugging her at those times.
· A pseudo-sub is never wrong. She’s just learning life lessons on her own, the hard way.
· A pseudo-sub asks her Dominant if he likes what she is wearing, not because she wants his opinion, but because she is fishing for a compliment. If she doesn’t get one, she sulks or gets angry.
· A pseudo-sub often cares less about her actual relationship with her Dominant than she does about what others think about her relationship.
· A pseudo-sub uses the word “why” as a way to top from the bottom. Why don’t you like my hairstyle? Why won’t you let me do this? Why can’t you be more flexible? Why don’t you want to have sex right now?
· A pseudo-sub trusts her Dominant, except when it comes to making actual, important decision.
· A pseudo-sub thinks the rules only apply to all those other submissives. She’s special.
· A pseudo-sub tells other submissives, “My Master is the best Master in the whole wide world!” At the same time, she asks him, “Why can’t you be like other Dominants?”
· A pseudo-sub thinks that having a Dom will magically fix whatever is wrong with her.
· A pseudo-sub knows the one true way. It was on Tumblr, so it must be true.
· A pseudo-sub has been tied up a hundred different ways and in sixteen different languages. This makes her a pro, since everyone knows being tied up takes real skill.
· A pseudo-sub has years of experience at being told what to do by her former Dominant. The fact that she didn’t actually do any of those things is completely irrelevant.
· A pseudo-sub describes her former Dom as abusive, her future Dom as perfect, and her current Dom as a work-in-progress.
Now, before you go and get your panties in a bunch, let me just say that this laundry list of pseudo-sub warning signs isn’t meant to be taken completely seriously. Then again, if you are going to get your panties in a bunch, please get photographs and send them my way. I think that’s kind of hot.
This list was actually intended as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the incredible complexity of D/s relationship and of how fragile that dynamic can sometimes be. If any of it seems to hit just a little too close to home, if you recognize yourself or someone you know on this list, I can only hope that you are able to laugh about it and perhaps find a way to use it to improve your relationship. On the other hand, if you have actually known and been involved with me personally in the past and think you recognize yourself on that list, I would just like to say:
Ha ha ha! Just kidding! (Does this building have a fire-escape?)
My Two Cents on Submission
Jade simply couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and had to ask me to clarify what I’d just said. “Master, did you just say Joanne is going to be moving here? To be with us?”
I nodded, and replied, “Well, of course! Remember? The three of us talked about it when she visited us last Christmas. At the time, we all thought it was a good idea. Afterward, you even told me privately that you were really looking forward to her moving here from Colorado.”
Jade closed her eyes momentarily, and took a series of deep breaths. It was obvious she was struggling to keep her raw emotions in check as she searched for the right words to express exactly how she felt about what I’d just told her. “Master,” she confessed haltingly, with downcast eyes, “I only said that because I didn’t think you two were serious! I honestly, never in a million years, thought she would actually quit her job, take her son out of school, pack up a rental truck, and move here to Texas!” She was on the verge of tears as she continued, “I love Joanne, but she is easy to love, as long as she is in Colorado and we’re in Texas! But now, with her coming here... I... I just don’t know! Master, what am I going to do? How am I going to be able to deal with this?”
I replied, “My love, you’ll welcome her and her son here the way she expects to be welcomed and, to the best of your ability, you’ll be a good sister-sub to her until things either work out or they don’t. And please let this be a lesson to remember always. I can’t make good decisions, if they’re based on bad information. Please don’t ever tell me something just because you think that’s what I want to hear. There’s no way that can ever end well.”
Jade hung her head and nodded, uttering an almost-whispered, “Yes, Master.”
The coming months were about to get very interesting, indeed.
# # #
This sad but true personal story from the dusty archives of my somewhat eccentric life illustrates just one of the many reasons why it is absolutely necessary for a Dominant to always know what is going on inside of his submissive’s head. A Dominant may be called upon to make life-changing decisions that affect not only his life, but the lives of his submissives and their families, both immediate and extended. It is hard enough to make good decisions based on timely, factual, and relevant information.
Imagine how difficult the decision-making process becomes when it is based upon information that turns out to be outdated, irrelevant or flat-out wrong. Not only does it become infinitely more difficult, but the quality of any decision arrived at will suffer.
The process becomes a classic case of junk in, junk out.
“Tell me what you’re thinking” is a question that every submissive should look forward to hearing from her Dominant. Unfortunately, many submissives dread it, perhaps for lack of confidence or fear of being inarticulate. That is always a shame, because it is the submissive’s golden opportunity to influence her Master’s decisions and opinions the right way.
Charlotte, the Spider: I'm versatile.
Wilbur, the Pig: Does versatile mean full of eggs?
Charlotte: No, it means I can change with ease
from one thing to the next.
- Charlotte's Web, E.B. White (1973)
Chapter 3: The Switch
What is a Switch?
There are two groups of people in the D/s and BDSM lifestyles who are quite often misunderstood and occasionally even the targets of lingering prejudice even from others in the fetish culture: Switches and Primals. We’ll discuss Primals at length in the next chapter. Switches fall into two general categories: BDSM Switches and D/s Switches.
BDSM Switches are individuals who enjoy performing in either the role of a Top or a Bottom, depending upon the circumstances, their moods, or their partners. D/s Switches are people who feel and relate to their partners as Dominants or submissives, for essentially the same reasons. Because the D/s and BDSM cultures are overwhelmingly focused on issues relating to domination and submission, Switches are sometimes regarded by others in the lifestyle with a certain degree of suspicion, condescension or bemusement.
The primary source of this prejudicial attitude tends to be the widespread misconception that Switches are simply confused or unaware of their true orientation. This erroneous belief is founded upon the naive assumption that everyone must either be a Dominant or a submissive. The truth of the matter is most people are neither. Most people have both dominant and submissive characteristics and are able to draw upon them as necessary and appropriate in both their day-to-day lives and their kink lives.
As I’ve mentioned earlier in this book, I firmly believe that most people can be found somewhere on a spectrum between the two extremes of Dominant and submissive. I would venture to guess that only about ten percent of the general population can truly count themselves as Dominants, and another ten percent as submissives. The other eighty percent of the human race falls somewhere in the middle; they exhibit characteristics of either, or both, depending on a variety of factors. These individuals should never feel pressured to decide whether they are Dominants or submissives because in truth, they may be neither, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Among the vanilla population, these folks are simply thought of as being normal. Unfortunately, in the BDSM culture, they are often considered confused, just experimenting, or still learning when, ironically, it is often the case that an individual has realized that he or she is a Switch only after a great deal of soul searching, experimentation and learning.
Decades ago, being a Switch generally meant something else, entirely. The classical definition of Switch used to refer to a person (usually a female) who was always submissive to one person, and Dominant towards another. Historically, this manifested itself typically in poly relationships consisting of a male Dominant head of household living under the same roof with two submissive females, one of which was the more dominant. In such a scenario, the more dominant of the two females is always submissive to the male Dominant, and yet simultaneously always Dominant towards the other submissive female. The meaning of the word has evolved over the past thirty years or so to better serve the purposes of a post-modern BDSM culture that embraces experimentation, self-determination and kink-tolerance. Even so, even today, there are still many people who consider themselves Switches who categorize themselves as such on the basis of the classical definition of the word.
In some ways, perceptions of Switches in the BDSM community may be similar to how bisexuals are sometimes viewed by straights and gays. Many heterosexuals have an unfortunate tendency to view bisexuals as gay. Conversely, there are members of the gay community who demonstrate a bias against bisexuals by characterizing them as straight people playing at being gay. Perhaps this is all due to the fact that we all have a very human need to interpret our environments in simple terms. We want to see things as being black or white. We really don’t like all those pesky shades of grey in-between. It messes with our sense of balance; we want things uncomplicated. You try one kind of sushi, discover that you don’t care for it, and you say, “I don’t like sushi.” Never mind that there are literally thousands of different kinds of sushi out there that you haven’t tried. That would be far too difficult to contemplate.
This tendency to oversimplify things can lead people to believe that certain things are opposites and mutually exclusive when, in fact, they are nothing of the sort. Domination and submission are not opposites, nor are they mutually exclusive in any way. A person can be both simultaneously, as in the poly household with the “Dominant submissive” who is always sub to the male head of the household, and always dominant with the other female sub. Many people also erroneously consider sadism and masochism to be opposites and mutually exclusive. They are not. A person can easily be simultaneously a sadist and a masochist and, in fact, it’s extremely common in the fetish lifestyle. If you’re still having a difficult time wrapping your head around this concept, consider this analogy: when a thirty-year-old woman takes her ten-year-old daughter to visit grandma, she is simultaneously a mother and a daughter. For the most part, no one thinks there’s anything weird about that.
Introspection
How do you know if you’re a Switch? It may be overly simplistic to assume that just because you are neither a Dominant nor a submissive, that this automatically makes you a Switch. After all, millions upon millions of vanilla folk are neither Doms nor subs as well, yet that doesn’t make them Switches, either. I believe that there are a few definitive traits and characteristics that are common to most Switches. Let’s examine them.
The first characteristic would necessarily have to be an involvement in the D/s or BDSM lifestyle. Without some degree of involvement in the lifestyle, virtually anyone (kinky or vanilla) who doesn’t consider himself a Dominant or submissive would have to be categorized as a Switch. There are at least three good reasons why this would be neither smart nor effective.
First, the mere fact that someone doesn’t consider himself a Dominant or a submissive doesn’t necessarily mean that he isn’t one. There are a lot of people out there who simply haven’t yet learned that there are other people like them, and that there is a name for what they are. Lumping those individuals into the category of Switch by default would not be helpful to them in any conceivable way, and could actually hinder their journey of self-discovery. Second, any categorization that gives a member of the vanilla community a BDSM label, regardless of the character traits that he or she exhibits, does a disservice to both communities. Finally, the mere application of such a label to a group so large that it applies to eighty percent of the world’s population would have the undesired effect of watering down its meaning to the point of not really meaning anything at all.
The second characteristic which is common to most Switches is the enjoyment of performing in both Dominant and submissive roles, depending upon the circumstances, mood or partner. Please note my very deliberate use of the word enjoyment. It isn’t enough to simply be capable of performing in either role. After all, practically everyone is capable of exhibiting both dominant and submissive behaviors. I personally know several die-hard submissives who happen to be quite capable of functioning very competently in a dominant role, despite the fact that they dread it and it literally makes them nauseous to do so. What we should be asking is: Do they seek out such opportunities and do they enjoy it? Do they find fulfillment in it? Is this where they go to find their happy place? If so, they just may be Switches.
The third characteristic is tangentially related to the first, and tends to be more a matter of degree than it is a yes or no proposition. True Switches tend to be individuals who have accumulated a great deal of experience both in and outside of the lifestyle, had more than just a few relationship partners, and should be on the downhill side of the self-awareness learning curve. This statement may offend some readers and confound others. In fact, I’d bet the rent money that there’s probably someone reading this paragraph right now who is thinking, “How dare he suggest that just because I’m relatively new to the lifestyle, that I might not be a true Switch?” Hear me out. I dare say it because telling the truth may be a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it, and it might as well be me.
Why might we expect a true Switch to be on the experienced end of the BDSM lifestyle spectrum? The obvious reason would be that most Switches tailor their dominance-orientation to different situations, circumstances and partners. It stands to reason, then, that if someone has had an extremely limited number of experiences and partners, it is likely that he has not had many opportunities to fully explore and plumb the depths of his switchiness. It’s entirely possible that he has yet to meet that one individual who can help bring forth his inner Dominant or his inner submissive. Perhaps that crucial pivotal experience or event that decides the question for this individual is still in his future. At best, anyone who has had very little lifestyle experience to speak of and just a few serious D/s relationships might be more accurately described as a provisional Switch. In other words, he or she may be a Switch, subject to change.
Types of Switches
As complicated as
it can be deciding whether or not you are a Switch, the issue can become even more convoluted when we progress to the next logical question, which is: What kind of Switch are you? For our purposes, we will be categorizing them primarily by whether they are predominantly D/s or BDSM, and by their dominance-orientation. One should also keep in mind that there is often a significant amount of overlap between a person’s D/s mindset and his or her BDSM activities. I assign Switches to eight categories. They are the Provisional Switch, the Dominant-leaning D/s Switch, the Submissive-leaning D/s Switch, the Balanced D/s Switch, the Top-leaning BDSM Switch, the Bottom-leaning BDSM Switch, the Balanced BDSM Switch, and the D/s-BDSM Switch.
As we cover each of the following categories of Switches, keep in mind that D/s is all about the relationship dynamic, while BDSM is about the kink activities. For many people, there is a great deal of overlap that occurs between the two but, for others, there may not be any at all. It’s very much analogous to love and sex. For some people, it’s all about love. For others, it’s all about sex. Ideally, for most people, it’s nice to have both, and preferably with the same person. At the risk of beating a dead horse, we can take this analogy even further: Being a Switch could, as we mentioned earlier in this chapter, easily be compared to being a bisexual. A man could be madly in love with his wife, yet sexually attracted to both men and women. In such a scenario, his relationship dynamic may be purely heterosexual, but his sexual turn-on is bisexual. The same sort of thing often happens when it comes to D/s relationships and BDSM turn-ons.
Provisional Switch
The Provisional Switch, as we explained earlier in this chapter, is a Switch who is relatively new to the BDSM lifestyle and has had comparatively few real-life D/s relationships. His orientation may change as he gains experience and becomes involved in more relationships over time. This should carry no stigma or negative connotations, as everyone has to start somewhere, and acknowledging the inevitability of change simply makes good sense. Example: Miranda has been in the lifestyle for about a year. She was introduced to it by a friend, and has become active in attending the local group’s get-togethers and events, where she has been eagerly learning all that she can. Thus far, she has enjoyed practically everything she has tried, from both the Top and Bottom perspectives, and hasn’t really developed a preference yet. The one thing she hasn’t done yet is become involved in a serious relationship with someone in the lifestyle. She isn’t sure how that will change how she feels about the kink stuff that she’s learned, and isn’t even sure if she should be seeking a dominant or submissive partner, or even whether it should be a guy, a girl or a couple. In other words, stay tuned for further developments.
Domination & Submission: The BDSM Relationship Handbook Page 7
