Re:[UUPoly-L] Female Submissives

[bear@pagansexcult.org]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Stanley Forrester wrote:

> I can't speak to the male Dom motivation.  (Any male Doms out there
> care to add your two cents?)  There are fewer interviews with Doms than
> with submissives and proportionally fewer interviews with males than females.
> Two strikes which combined leave me with very little to go on.  What I
> have gotten out of this is the emphasis on communication and informed
> consent.

I was actually somewhat surprised when my lover (a longtime submissive and
self-described "pain slut") identified me as, not just a dom, but a *very*
*good* dom.  I basically thought of myself as highly self-trained vanilla
"sexual intellectual" who was (and is) just very, very into getting women off.

But as I thought about it, I realized that, even though I eschew the whips
and chains and gear and so on, she's right.  What I do in bed (and a few
other places) is all about building experiences that are for and focused
on my partner.  And I use techniques that I've learned *everywhere* - from
psychology texts and books on hypnosis to pagan sex magic to tantra and
karezza to stuff I just made up and tried and discovered works for her.

It's partly hypnosis and jedi mind tricks, and it's a lot about using
suggestion to sculpt perceptions and sensations, and it's *all* about using
every nuance of her response, from her scent to the tension of the muscles in
the small of her back, as a guide to what's working and what's not and
concentrating on what works.

But this sort of thing is also what more traditional doms do.  The boots and
gear and restraints and situations and so on are all just window-dressing to
exactly the same kind of psychological play; these things serve as suggestions
by association ("anchors" in clinical parlance) that the sub is about to have
a profound sexual experience.  But the sexual experience arises in the sub's
mind, not least from that very expectation. The dom gets to be the one who
opens the floodgates of experience and watches the fireworks, and who
*doesn't* find that thrilling?

One of the games we play is that I explain every "trick" I'm playing on her
head as I do it, and since she knows from experience that these tricks work,
the suggestion and explanation intensifies their effects.  So the explanation
of the trick becomes a trick on a different level, and we get to love the
irony of that situation, too.  But, as she tells me, she's been able to use
the experience and explanation also to learn to *do* some of these tricks with
other partners - for which I'm very happy; I think everybody ought to know how
to do this stuff if they want to.  (Umm, yeah... "sex ed" would be a lot
different if I taught it...)

The situation we wind up with is that she gives herself into my care, and I
reward her (sexually speaking) as richly as I possibly can.  The more she
trusts me, the more confident she is in my abilities to excite her, the better
those abilities work.  And with her cooperation, both conscious and
unconscious, our experiences are very rich.  The richness of our sex life is a
fine example of hypnosis working because the subject consents, or magic
working "only on those who believe in it" or however you want to cast that.
Because she knows I can give her an orgasm by just tickling her feet, her
brain goes right ahead and gives her that orgasm when I tickle her feet.  I
get to take the credit.  (and then I get to plot about teaching her that she
can be tickled from across the room... :-)  )

Anyway, when I see "what's the motivation for male doms," I'm a little
baffled.  I absolutely *love* these games.  I *adore* seeing my partner
respond to my little bits of magic and suggestion.  I even love the little
subterfuges of her giving me credit for doing things "to her" that she's
really just mentally doing to herself.  I love this process, this exploration.
And I love watching her sleep the contented sleep of someone who has just
experienced mind-altering sex.  I can't imagine *not* loving these things.
The idea that someone doesn't understand my motivations in this is, at best, a
surprising and peculiar idea.

Oh, and for whatever it's worth...  for me the idea that the personal is
political is pretty much limited to personal freedoms and attitude toward
others based on the exercise of those freedoms being political.

The details of the lovestyle one enjoys with a particular partner is *NOT*
political.  People's responses are way too individual to succeed in this when
merely thinking of them as an instance of some group.  Every bit of magic
builds on things you know about your partner, things you've experienced
together, things you know she's heard or thought, things you're learning from
her body about her personal responses, etc.  Being with someone else, I'd have
to start anew, and the magic would work better the more I learned about her.
So when I'm with a partner, it's not about "women" -- it's about *HER*.

Hope this helps...
				    Bear