I'm not Submissive?

Date: Sun Feb 27, 2000 4:11 pm Subject: I'm not really submissive!I've got to confess. I'm not submissive. I'm feisty, opinionated,temperamental, moody, and generally a real handful. I'm also a died-in-the-wool feminist; carried petitions for the ERA back in the days when. Still keep the wallet card with the complete text, and nurture the hope that someday my daughter and grand-daughters will have the same rights that their male counterparts are assured by virtue of being born with a mismatched set of chromosomes!!! Submission is something I do. It's a choice. It's also an act of will and a decision for me every single time. Maybe someday it will get to be a habit and a way of life. Until then, I'll just keep practicing...

That was me. Almost five and one half years ago. Struggling. I didn't come to terms with any of this easily. I fought, and flailed, and ran around in circles, looking desperately for some other "label" for what it was that I was. BECAUSE -- I knew that the WHAT of what I was contradicted and undermined and undercut everything I believed in, and had fought for all my adult life -- everything I had taught my children to be, everything I was.

There is more than stridency in that short bit, written on a listserv that focused on Domestic Discipline (the sanitized and "vanilla-cized" brand of BDSM that I first talked the husband into trying with me early on), there is real fear and panic and a deep knowledge that the path I'd set my feet on would lead to an ultimate clash between the two halves of my "self" that seemed so diametrically opposed. In those early days, I hoped that the mere declaration of the negative could keep the secret locked safely away. I had no real understanding of the dragons I'd unleashed.

Of course, that piece of brave rhetoric was utter bullshit. I was surely submissive. I knew it somewhere in the depths of my heart and soul, else why protest so sincerely? Note that, even then, I never used the more casual, more easily managed, more pedestrian shortening: "sub." For me, it has always been the idea of "submission," and later, "slavery," that drew me and fired my imagination -- and I've always adhered to the formal language even when it scared the willies out of me.

Denying that I was submissive, I nevertheless, studied what "submission" meant. It is simply the way I am about things in general. I tend to want to know what things mean and how things are done, and so I read widely and asked questions and tried to learn how "submission" is done. I came to understand that, while it is true that there were sexual implications and SM implications to the term, there was much more -- that submission implied, at its deepest levels, a desire, and indeed a dedication to serving all the wants of the Dominant One, whatever those might be -- a submissive learned, over time to understand and anticipate and serve with joy and grace and skill in all areas of life, and to elevate that service to the level of "art." I was intrigued and further ensnared and enchanted. Each new bit of information drew me deeper, and there was so much information to be had.

Reading widely, interacting in many different places, I encountered a variety of viewpoints and a wealth of information -- some of it incredibly wise, some of it utterly foolish, much of it somewhere in between. Then, as now, if one typed "spank" or "bondage" or "sadism" or "masochism" or "BDSM" into a search engine on the Internet, the range of information that was likely to come up was highly variable. Not every hit was "reliable" and much sifting and sorting had to be done. Even on the more stable and sane listservs, things could get pretty wild sometimes and there were times when it was downright ugly, especially if one didn't fit the mold -- and quite often, I didn't.

I had one interesting misadventure (or not, depending on your point of view) on a private list owned by Jon Jacobs. Jon is dead now, but he is best known for co-authoring Different Loving. If you talk with anyone "in the life" who knows of Jon, you are likely to elicit an interesting response. Folks seldom reacted "neutrally" to him. He was a BIG personality. Anyway, when I encountered him, he was running a list and chatroom for submissive women called "Submissive Women Speak." I don't think it is in operation anymore -- it fell into some disrepute, largely because many felt they were "betrayed" by the practices used there. I got myself into some trouble there because I was unwilling to follow the "Jon Jacobs says:" party line and was a bit too aggressive in my somewhat vocal dissent... It didn't take me long to get myself thrown out of the place, so I can't speak to the charges that some have leveled against the place. Anyway, I wasn't there too long before information that I'd shared about the nature of my relationship with my husband and the things I wished for and needed led JJ to declare that I was a deeply submissive woman and that my husband was clearly not a Dominant. He told me in no uncertain terms that someday a Dominant man would find me and would take me and that I would leave my husband to go with the Dominant to whom I belonged. That whole exchange scared me half to death and made me furious. I went after the guy with extreme venom and made his life a living hell for the short time I was allowed to remain on the list. It didn't take long for them to eject me from the place...

Our association ended badly, but the prophetic nature of our exchange has stayed in my mind ever since. Now, it is possible that Jacobs used essentially that line with most of the women who came to his site. I don't really know. The fact is that for me, it turned out to be true. I have ever after felt that one of the things that we (experienced lifestylers) do badly for new people coming into "the life" with questions and a desire to explore, is warn them of the potential for major upheaval and change because of the doors that they will open... I have long thought that somehow we need to find a way to post metaphorical signs for visitors to these realms: "THIS WAY THERE BE DRAGONS."

Not that dragons aren't wondrous and magical and mystical beasties... They are all of that and more, and I've enjoyed getting to know mine (most of the time), but a relationship with a dragon can be a costly one. It can mean that you might have to leave the village where you've lived your whole life and give up a whole bunch of comfy stuff that you thought you would always have in your life. Dragons have demanding tastes and interesting lifestyles that don't always accommodate the mundane.

We ought to be more clear about that I think...

swan