Phantom of the Opera

xposted from my LJ


Ooooof.

Phantom of the Opera teaches girls bad, bad, orful thingz!

Of course, to call it a two-and-a-half-hour musical about rape vastly understates the bizarreo-world factor of this musical, although it's hardly an inaccurate statement.

At first, I was merely staggered by what this show must do to thirteen-year-old girls. I mean, it's just utterly designed to be seductive to anyone who doesn't want to own their sexuality and is drawn to any sort of narrative of submission, ordeal or apprenticeship. I should have, in fact, been all over this shit. At thirteen, I surely would have been. And the gaggle of girls that age we saw in the bathroom surely were.

....What a completely bizarre and vaguely intellectually offensive show. Man, when this first came out, gender and sexuality scholars must have been like "happy birthday to me" -- what a goldmine of crazy!

Where do I even begin?

Perhaps with "It didn't make me any less dominant..."

I wanted to be Christine for a few months, sure.

Then I asked myself "Why shouldn't he be singing my music?" and it was all over but the shouting. :)

And of course, rather than asking whether stories like that one attract people who have D/s leanings, we have to ask the same old tired "won't people get D/s leanings from this?" question.

And, honestly, what all the stories like this about D/s-y romance taught me was not "Be submissive!" but rather "If you be your dominant self, you will never be happy. Dominance is for the villains, and the villains are always either vanquished or voluntarily give up what's presented as their only chance for companionship because they realize they can never be themselves without doing harm."

These stories do not tell you that D/s is harmless, or is awesome, and I'm always stunned when feminists say they do. These stories are very, very, very clear about erotic power dynamics' destructive potential. They have to be. It's not socially acceptable for them not to be.

It may well be socially acceptable for them to be in romance novels and such geared toward adults, but all the stories I was allowed to see as a youth? None of those said that submission ultimately leads to fulfillment. They said, as I stated above, that dominance was what made the villains hot. The villains, by definition, lose.

Submission is something the heroine experiments with -- Hell, gets hypnotized into experimenting with -- and ultimately rejects. Do you really think Christine has the same dynamic she had with Erik with Raoul?! Yeah, right.

Why, when we examine this stuff, do we ask how it will affect a child we assume to be a vanilla tabula rasa? Why don't we ever, ever, ever ask what this says to people who are already dominant or submissive? Because they usually say "Your relationships are tragedies waiting to happen." If not "You're gonna grow up to be a homicidal maniac who can never be responsible about sex and love, kiddo. Sorry to tell ya, but we thought you should know."

If y'all need me, I'll be cranking Point up to max volume (and, yes, it is about rape, and yes, that is problematic. But FFS, the guy is a homicidal maniac! It's not like the show says "woo, rape!")...

...provided I can freaking find my copy of the OCR, anyway.

Category Airing (Reprise)

[ Reposted from here at Trin's request and in a fit of, 'Oh, right, that so goes at SM-F, doesn't it?' ]


I've got a fair amount of stuff rattling around in my head in response to Dev's post about female submission, and a lot of it is horrifyingly fraught and such, so I'm going to try to get what I said in the comments there coherent and see if I can deal with the rest of it later when I'm feeling less like bleeding on the carpet about it.

I am not a female submissive.

I am a woman. I am submissive.

Spotting the difference matters.

I'm on a couple of BDSM communities on livejournal, and every so often someone will pop up with "I read on male_dom" or "femdom" or "humbled_females" or something else linking sex or gender to power exchange. And while I'm pretty easy for communities, none of these have ever even remotely tempted me, not even as a place to lurk. They don't offer me anything I value, that I can value. I just ... not only is this not my kink, it's a kink that makes me uncomfortable.

And some of that discomfort is being genderqueer enough that any sort of sex-based essentialism tends to throw me out of the conversation entirely, because I'm either miscategorised or in that neither-fish-nor-fowl place where somehow, in the discussion being had, I don't exist. And not existing is a nasty, uncomfortable place to keep winding up being, so I prefer to stick to fields where my status as an extant being doesn't throw errors everywhere.

The thing is, these things aren't descriptive to me, stuff like "M/f" or "F/m"; they don't seem to describe systems where those just happen to be the relationships those people have, but rather something where it is important that The Person Of One Sex Is Dominant, and The Person Of The Other Sex Is Submissive. It's a particular gendering fetish, and it's not one that I share; it's not one I want to be involved with, either. ("Your kink may be okay, but I'll go over there now.")

If one isn't treating the sexes of the people involved as something that matters, then there isn't a need to specify. Those facts will come up as relevant, and if they're not relevant, they won't, and there's no sense bringing them up. There's no need to make a marked case of it. Someone reading for detail can probably pick out the facts of various interactions, to some level, and make guesses about others, especially as I do not go to any particular effort to conceal stray data (partially as a political act), but unless it matters, that's just data kicking around.

And every so often I get in my tracking someone doing a websearch for 'femsub' (and that's, I believe, the first time that appears in this blog; I just googled and got this for the search result, which doesn't contain it), and I sort of wince and want to shake the boxes a little, make space in which I can be a submissive without being a "femsub". Because I'm not one, and no amount of treating someone who fits two categories, who is 'female' and 'submissive', as thereby going into a category that links the two will make me stop existing for the convenience of the categorisers.

And all this leaves me awkwardly on the edge of discussions of differences in perspective on seeing a male submissive or a female submissive. For reasons that I think have a lot in common with people who have conceptual issues with the two -- that I'm deeply uncomfortable with stuff that looks like it's framing 'power' and 'sex|gender' as being intrinsically linked in a particular way -- but from my usual Klein perspective. Because I don't approach or perceive power as gendered, I can't meaningfully take part in a conversation in which the gendering of power is present as an axiom. It erases me from the discourse.

It most particularly erases my power. When my submission is gendered, it feels to me like it turns it into something that's about-womanness, rather than about-power. And I can't understand that as anything other than a caricature, because it's so alien to me, so it feels like treating me as a cardboard cutout, making my status as a woman the first and most important thing about me in a context where I feel the most important thing is my status as a submissive.

And yes, there's a fuckton of problematic stuff out there about power, especially in this context sexualised power, and sex|gender. I don't deny that, because I'm not a damned fool. But my submission is not about womanhood, it's not about femininity, it's not about genitalia; it's about loyalty, dedication, oathmaking and oathkeeping, being a pillar of support, service, strength, and trust.

These are not incompatible with being a woman, but they are not female. Focusing on my femaleness uncenters the perception from my power.

And it's all about the power.

Not your usual BDSM and abuse story

[ Posted here and at World on a Slant ]

I have this friend.

When I met her, she was in a marriage with a lot of partially hidden problems; those problems started coming out more blatantly as things started to fall out, through the separation, through the divorce: the extensive emotional abuse, the 'I got over my situational depression just fine, you should just cheer up out of your clinical depression and stop being such a whiner', the waving his penis in her face to demand oral sex. When they separated, he resented any suggestion that he take responsibility for her, because hey, they were broken up, that gets him out of any obligation to his wife, even though divorce paperwork wasn't even being negotiated yet, even though he wound up shacking up with "a hot redhead" and blowing vast amounts of recreational money while his wife was struggling to make rent in part because he insisted on moving to an area of the country with rampant unemployment where, furthermore, she's miserable.

I helped talk this friend through the breakup and the divorce, pointed out things that she was missing like, "Your asshat ex is really treating you very badly" and "You are being taken advantage of here". Supported her through a bad time and helped her out of the abusive situation.

And one might think that would be the end of it.

Of course, like many people who have been in abusive situations, she has done a lot of thinking about how she got into that place, what patterns there were in her life, and how she needs to change to not go there again. Which includes talking that over with a variety of her friends to try to pick things out.

And at some point, one of the people she was talking about her relationship history with, asshat ex and before, said, "You know what you sound like to me?" And said she sounded like someone who was wired up like a submissive, but who hadn't the experience or knowledge to figure out how to deal with that without turning into a doormat, and who had had partners who were willing to take advantage of that set of psychological hooks.

So she came to me, as the out submissive she knew, to talk to about this. And we talked. And after a bit of thinking, she took this fellow up on his offer to give her a grounding in managing her own submissiveness to see if she felt better for it. I got tapped, sort of, as her spotter, as someone she could talk to about the experience of being a sub, as someone to give her advice and resources, as someone who would understand things.

I watched her flower.

The joy she took in the early parts of that relationship was amazing. The way she took to the discipline of the d/s and the focus it provided her got her stable and secure in a way I had never seen her. He took care of her in quiet, straightforward ways; she commented more than once, in stunned tones, that she did things with him that the asshat ex had tried to coax and berate out of her for years.

Even the difficult times -- and there have been more than a few of those -- she has tackled with dedication and devotion, with the support of the commitments she's made and the simple not wanting to disappoint him. She's given up smoking, she's learning to draw boundaries to keep her family from taking as much advantage of her as they have in the past, she looks at the terror of having all of her emotional issues in relationships coming up faster and hitting harder than they have in the past and says, "This time, I'm going to work through this shit."

And she has patterns to work through and break, and is utterly frustrated by them at times, and is working on building up the capacity to choose, to act freely rather than constrained by fears and phobias and the scars of past damage. She talks at times about feeling like she's in a cage with the door open, and is trying to work up the guts to escape so she can be with him.


And so when I see people going on about the abuses of BDSM, I find myself thinking of her, and the way she's been building herself away from being readily abuseable by dealing with someone who respects who she is and how she responds.

(This post was written with her permission, her dom's okay, and her pre-posting approval.)

Face of the Scene

Pantryslut on LJ writes in a post titled "on the Fetish Flea, and the scene in general":

Really, I don't think it's nostalgia that has me remembering a time when "the scene," that is, the public face of BDSM ("our community," however you want to put it) was much, *much*, MUCH more diverse. D/S was always the predominant flavor, of course, and that's always chapped my ass a little bit. But there were all sorts of ways to do it, and all sorts of folks to do it with, including a hefty dose of queers, and a lot of dominant women, and quite a few just kinky weird folks doing whatever the heck they felt like at the time.

Now, there's a definite predominating dynamic.

It's male dominant, female submissive.

In fact, it's a little more specific, but I am having a hard time right now explaining exactly how. But, you know, women are there to be displayed, men are there to display them. Women are there to give blowjobs and accept spankings. Men are there to dole them out. Women are on their knees, or on leashes. Men hold the lead. Women smile and flirt and tilt their heads, or they stare at their feet. Men bare their teeth and joke about "if you know any beautiful young Scorpio women, send them my way."

It's also aspirational, with people aspiring to be more and more submissive, give up more and more control, and not just in scene. And you're supposed to have one role with one person. You can switch, but that means you top person X and you bottom to person Y, not "yesterday I tied you to the bed and cut pretty designs into your chest, and tomorrow I think I want you to spank me."

Which of course reminded me of maymay's There is so little space for me:

The overwhelming feel of the event was decidedly…patriarchal. "This is a flirt-heavy zone," the greeter told us as we entered, and proceeded to inquire about Eileen's weekend. Maybe "flirt-heavy" is just the PC word for meat market now. Maybe that's too harsh, but there's no denying the implication that men would do the purusing and women would be the pursued. There's nothing wrong with that (putting my head in Eileen's lap at a party was how we got together—quite the forward thing for submissive male to do, many people would probably think), but the expectation is nauseating.

Even the men, the poor ignorant sods, are succumbing to the peer pressure. (Maybe that's because most of them are spineless bastards to begin with who are just aching to be told what to do. Oops, maybe that was too harsh again.) You see it in their ridiculous bait-and-switch routines where the submissive men pretend to be dominant only long enough to get the woman to bed with them. Then they turn around and get on their hands and knees and start talking about how pathetic they are. This is probably one of the very few times I'll actually agree with those men: they are pathetic, and I'm not only ashamed but enraged to be thought of as similar to them, not to mention just how many things are wrong with the very idea that this tactic might actually work out well for anyone.

I'm jealous of the submissive women for whom this kind of space must be an incredible cornucopia of sexual celebration. I bet they actually had a blast at the art show. At the same time, I'm sorry, for their sake, that this potentially wonderful environment is all but destroyed by utterly disrespectful men.

Now, I'm light-years from being experienced with the way things are in the "scene", as I'm pretty much a private player and always have been, but I've seen bits and pieces of this in a lot of the online conversations I've seen and the references people who actually do nonprivate play or interactions make. And I can't say I know how it used to be, any more than I can say I know how it is now.

If I make it out to the Flea this weekend, though, I'm going to look and see what I can spot.

How hard do folks here find it to find diversity in their kinked communities, or niche communities that are friendly to their particular things? For people who have been around the scene for a while, how has the diversity changed where you are? Has the community fractured into splinter subcommunities, have people gone more private in disproportionate fractions, is it the big town luxury of having kinksters one can afford to dislike? (Thinking of Trinity's comment on Little Light's small town queer folks post on Feministe, here.) And how can it be fixed?

Fear and Sex and Power

(Well, I appear to be on staff here now. I considered doing an intro thing, but I'm terrible at explaining who I am. Hi! I'm Dw3t-Hthr, I'm (for stuff that may be relevant here) an introspective poly genderqueer sub with a thing for altered consciousness and an interestingly tense relationship with boundaries in a non-scene-delineated relationship in which the formal power exchange started I think about a year and a half ago, and I rant a lot. Hi!)

I was talking the other evening with a friend of mine who had managed to shed some of their fear around sex and sexuality and was exploring a bit what it meant to have done so, and wound up thinking a bit about some of my own experiences, and how they interact with matters of kink.

I was sexually assaulted when I was fourteen.

This did a lot of things, but the thing that gets me most is the way it linked fear and sex. Especially the concept of first sex with a new partner. And I've never had a mature sexuality that did not have some of that flavor of fear touching it, though now that that's over half my life ago, it's less of a constant awareness and more of a "Damnit, stubbed my toe on that thing again." Most of the time.

For the decade or so after the assault, whenever I started a sexual relationship, it was with that fear pushing me. I refused to admit it to partners, because it was my own private nightmare and I couldn't figure out how to talk about it. Once I got past the part that was beginning a sexual relationship, the vast majority of the fear became irrelevant, so I would stifle it and lock it away until the really scary stuff was over, and then I didn't have to deal with the emotion.

With my most recent ex, I told him that I was frightened, and when we got around to sex, I shoved the fear in the closet until it became irrelevant and went away again. But it was something, to be able to tell someone, "This terrifies me, so's you're aware."

With my most recently developed sexual relationship, I made clear that the whole thing terrified me. And we started to negotiate around it -- I need an overnight, not an evening, so I have time to be not afraid in if I manage to get there, for example. So there's time to let things settle. And we got our night -- after a couple of times when the sexual tension had gotten to a point that I didn't care about doing the sane thing, doing the thing that was acknowledging the fear and he would hold me and murmur that I'd told him I needed the longer time, and he was going to respect that. And when we got our night, he had me bring up some music because he knows I find that soothing and it keeps my mind from spinning out of control. And he held me, and took everything very slowly, and watched me with this expression of obvious wonder that included some intense, focused gentleness, noticing when I was hitting too much terror and starting to lock up, watching the emotions start to dissolve and flow away into a space where I wasn't afraid anymore.

There's a space in that wide-open terror that's not far off subspace, was one of the things I learned there. Going to the place where it feels like someone could do any of a range of things, has this sort of ultimate power aimed at vulnerability. That was why I always squashed it and put it to the side before, because I couldn't face that level of risk, and I knew that the teetery vulnerability of that new-lover space would fade once the new was over.

He opened up the space where I could ride through the fear rather than hide from it. And where I could learn the trippiness of acknowledging the risk of opening up and do it anyway.

And while I didn't ask him until months later, I'm pretty sure that that was a big chunk of what set the tone for our power relationship -- the shape of his intense, vibrant carefulness pulling me open and letting the emotions flow without doing me harm. Keeping me safe through it. And it's a cradle in which the hair-pulling rough sex is still that gentle, safe world to me, even when I get a sharp edge of fear in it, because I've been through fear and back with him.

I was reading back posts in Maybe Maimed But Never Harmed when reading blogs that commented on the femsupremacy thing, and came across this one -- a very different experience, a differently framed interaction entirely, but there's still that thing in there that I recognise, the emotional vulnerability, the riding through it.

The being okay afterwards.


(And I have places I could go with this -- stuff about kink with emotionally damaged people (you know, normal people), the way assault damage (and other PTSD experiences) can interact with sexuality, the entire altered consciousness angle ... but mostly I just want to leave it at 'the being okay afterwards' and see what other people make of my ramblings.)

Gender Supremacists in BDSM: A Difficult Confession

I was just thinking of a comment of Verte's in another thread, wherein she mentioned asking people into male-supremacist BDSM "why they get off on it"

and I was thinking that it seems to me that they're not just getting off on the idea of a world following the dynamic they like, but interpreting the world AS secretly following that dynamic. And I don't know why that is, but my guess is insecurity. If you know something secret about women or men that they don't admit to, you don't have to feel like a pervert or an outcast or a nostalgic, reactionary person.

Why am I mentioning this? Because of an old, completely cringeworthy personal diary entry of mine from Feb 2001 (at the time -- though it should be obvious -- I thought I was straight. I was also trying to use "femdom" as a way of making myself more feminine. I'd always been more comfortable androgynous or masculine, but felt ashamed. When I discovered the Scene, being a feminine top seemed a good compromise and I tried to shoehorn myself into it for a while. Later I let go of that and realized that I didn't really want to be feminine, even in a dominant way.)

I realized something today: I never thought I saw things along gender lines, but I'm now realizing that I do. i just see things along backwards gender lines. :) I am beginning to think that maybe the reason I'm still a tad confused by Maledom/femsub relationships is that in some fundamental way i see things the opposite way. I always used to think I was totally egalitarian on this -- equality, M/f, F/m, But I am beginning to believe (to my own disquietude) that what I have is not only a preference but perhaps a paradigm. No, I don't wnat it to be one -- I want everything to be equal in my own eyes... but right now I think it's not.

I say this because I think of the Femdom as the ultimate in the ideal of a female -- a sort of goddess nature that I strive toward and can't help but believe other women strive for as well even though I know their quest for their inner divinity doesn't have to take that form. I say this because I see male bottoms the same way -- as a perfection, as this noble form that exemplifies what the male essence really is. I know it's not actually true, but it is what my instincts tell me: that all the male posturing, endless male jockeying to be at the top of the sexual totem pole, subjugation of women in the not-too-distant past, etc is all an illusion, built on fear of losing power and becoming what they truly are.

I don't like that I have this feeling -- I know it is not true, and everyone is everywhere along this spectrum. But I can't shake it, and that is what makes me find Maledom/femsub so odd. I can't imagine that any woman in her right mind would be submissive. Not that I think it's wrong in any way... just that it leaves me confused. I can imagine easily a woman submitting to another woman -- then she'd just be lower in the hierarchy than the other woman who Doms her. But I just can't picture why someone who has the inner force and actie spirit of Goddess would choose to give herself over to the sublime passivity that for me is the domain of the guys, I know our culture says the opposite, and I myself tried to fit into the "passive, feminine girl" mold -- and only felt natural when I let that go. But i am universalizing my experience here, and that's not good.

Why am I? I don't know. Rationally, rthere's no reason for it. Rationally, I see that many people see men the way I see women, and women the way i see men, and such views have limited both. But for some reason, my instincts tell me it just makes more sense one way than the other.

Yowie. Yuck. Ewww. Gah.

But re-reading it, I DO remember feeling that way. And I DO remember having no idea why, feeling that I was being unfair, etc.

Now that I think about it years later, having been exposed to tons of different BDSM dynamics and people, being comfortable with my bisexuality, having played with women, dated a woman, etc...

...I really think that came from insecurity on my part. I was a very new top, and very young (21, at the time) and overwhelmed with new feelings. I was frightened because I knew that society in general thought I should submit to men. And in the dungeon I was seeing men let down a facade of dominance and become comfortable and open in a way I often didn't see from men with macho walls up.

So I suppose it was easy for me to look at men who were behaving nastily or who seemed insecurely macho and grin knowingly and think "I know what you REALLY are..." (and of course, that meant that what had been a threatening or uncomfortable interaction with a sexist fool could become a sexual fantasy about what might happen when he let that facade down... ;)

Applying this to male tops, I can easily imagine similar faulty reasoning on their part too. Silly as it looks to most feminists, there are a lot of men out there who feel insecure because feminism has shaken up what's expected of them. Witness how incredibly incensed men can get about minor points of etiquette, like whether or not women want doors held open for us any more, and how rude or disorienting this is for some men.

As silly as I find all that stuff, it's not hard for me to think myself into the place of a man like that and think that, perhaps, believing in some secret kernel of submission in all women could make him feel just a little less threatened and bewildered. If he's not secure enough to let go of that thinking... well, that's where some of the pushy insistence that all women submit (or should) could come from.

As far as the submissive people who are into gender supremacy, that one I can't wrap my head around as easily because I'm not submissive. But I suppose it could be similar. A straight man comes to terms with the fact that he yearns to be a woman's slave, but still feels emasculated among his straight male peers -- and BAM! secret truth: Women are Superior Goddesses and patriarchy is bitter fear of The Real Reality. A straight woman finally manages to escape the pressure of what she deems a "feminist" life path/demand set, and BAM! "we're all unhappy with 'the feminist new order', deep inside..."

I don't know. I'm embarrassed at that old post of mine. But I do remember thinking it. And I remember the thought that most straight men were liars, that they secretly yearned to be mine, under it all... it was an exhilarating thought.

Remembering it, I'm not surprised that some immature people would be stuck there.

Infantilizing...

...no, not the fetish.

a bit of good discussion at the end of the comments to this

some of it pretty personal to get dredged up in an entry rather than comments, so I'll quote a rather generic piece of joan's comment and my response in there:

Joan:

But, especially in the spanking fetish scene, that infantilizing of the person who's on the bottom often extends outside of role play and is just an attitude that makes me feel like, wow, these people are in a time warp and think it's the 1950's and women are children who are always trying to "get away with things" and need to be put in their place. And by put in their place, I'm not even talking about spanking - I'm talking about the way people talk to each other, the attitudes of who knows what, who knows better than who, who should be looked up to with fluttering eyelashes, who is - basically - the classic patriarch figure (even with women tops).

Me:

AHHHHHHHHHH okay.

this makes a lot more sense to me now. thank you.

that whole "I'm a BRAAAT! *batbatbat*" thing.

Yeah, I puzzle over that too.

I don't really have the same experience of it being overwhelming though. In a few of the rural communities where most people are M/f, yes, I do see it.

But... hmm. What exactly does one DO about that?

Because some of it IS an ageplay thing, a particular sort of "little girl" role.

And I don't always know quite how I feel about carry-over. I'm sometimes really bothered by it, and sometimes really not at all.

Because on the one hand, yes, it seems a bad place to linger. And what does it mean that adult women want to see themselves that way a lot of the time?

But on the other, it seems to me like that's about childhood more than gender. It seems to me that, with the bratty bottoms twirling their pigtails at least, the fascination is with the idea of being a spoiled -- as in, beloved yet unruly -- little girl.

And that seems to me like it's tied more directly into wanting to re-write, re-experience, or play around with a certain idealized form of girlhood to e me than like it's about sexism.

But then the question becomes: what about the tops? What about "Daddy"? Where's he coming from?

I know plenty of "Daddy" types who I think are doing it in a healthy way, but they tend to be queer. I don't know as many straight Daddies at all, in general -- but with the online ones, certainly, there's an infantilizing element that goes beyond role and gets... squicky for me, too.

But again, how much of it is carried over into offline M/f D/s, I don't know myself. You suggest a goodly amount and I see no reason to doubt it.

So... hmm. Where does that leave us? I don't know either.

"How a Girl Learns To Say No..."

More linkifyin', this on the potential positive effects of D/s dynamics:

When I first met Julie, she had low self-respect and poor self-image. She was, at that stage, still in an abusive relationship. She was the classic 'victim'.

Then she met me. I made it my business, as her Master, to make her into someone that she loved for herself. A person who valued herself, and thereby who acquired value, someone who was valuable, because she valued herself.

Now, time for a simple comparison. When I first met her, her need to please overrode every other impulse, and she set her own value as being lower than that of anyone else, and more specifically, lower than that of any man who showed an interest in her (yes, I include myself in that - but wait for the conclusion, please!)

Yesterday, she told me about her latest attempt to find herself a man of her own age to give her the BDSM loving that she needs.

....Many women, I think, will be familiar with the routine. She approached him, on a site devoted to alternative sexuality. His response was to ask her to perform for him on webcam. She told him this was not available, and he was, shall we say, a trifle rude in his response to that. Pause for a moment, dear reader, and contemplate what she might have done before her relationship with me...

Now that you've imagined that, let us look at what I taught her, what she learned by being my slave:

Her response was calm, collected, and polite. It was also to the effect of, "No, thank you. I deserve better." She stood on her own two feet to say that, she didn't need me or anyone else. She's a highly sexual being, and she certainly has a strong desire for a partner, but she is no longer the shrinking, insecure woman she was, who would let any jerk order her around.

I don't like to take credit for it, because she is the one who has done all this, she is the one who has moved from where she was to where she is. Nevertheless, she is kind enough to say that she appreciates that I gave her the ability to make that journey.

Personally, I've seen the same thing. If a submissive person (actually anyone, really) wants to believe in herself but has trouble, a person that she respects and trusts reinforcing "Yes, you do deserve better than that jerk/deserve to do that thing you've always wanted/have it in you to accomplish that difficult task" can work wonders to help her get there.

"I believe in you" is a good thing to say to those you love. You should all go do it. So should I.

Service -- reposted from comments to another post.

I originally said this in comments to another post, but I'm reposting it here because I want to think further on the topic:

I think a big thing that doesn't get discussed in these interminable "how much D/s is too much?" headspinning games is:

the concept of service.

Many, if not most, of the "slave" types that I have met are not so much looking to lose their freedom or not make decisions so much as they are looking to serve. They feel called to some kind of life of service, and want to be part of relationships or dynamics that allow them to serve well.

To me, the dominant partner in such a dynamic is not so much The Boss making All The Decisions as she is someone who provides the opportunity for the submissive to be of service to someone. The service is more important, for most I've met, than the decision making.

There are of course many people who do have the Stepford attitude, both male and female: decide everything for me O Sir/O Ma'am. They tend to proliferate, a la roaches or paramecia, on the internet especially -- as do the sorts of "Master" they want.

But in the real, dedicated, M/s community *I've* met -- it's Service that matters most. Obedience is secondary.

Do I know some people who I think overvalue it? Yeah. But I only consider myself qualified to offer relationship advice to people I know. And I find the more I get to know people, the more flexible I realize their power dynamic actually often is.

Yes, even the masters and slaves.

I first really noticed this with an old play partner/buddy. He wasn't my partner, in service to me, etc. But we were friends, and we'd play. I started to notice that he would do all sorts of little small things for me, totally unprovoked. Make little arts and crafts projects to give to me. Clean his car if I mentioned I didn't like it not to be tidy. Small things like that. I didn't ask for them, not at first. But when he did them, and I was impressed and grateful -- his face would warm like the sun. He loved to do those things.

I didn't really know what it was about. Gradually I realized that my buddy was what they call a service oriented submissive. That all was part of what he wanted to do and enjoyed about (mild; remember we were mostly all just buddies) submission to the people he was friends with.

At first I'd always assumed that I wouldn't like service oriented people. I figured that they were servile, and unsure of what they wanted. I felt sure that they would be unhappy, always giving other people what they wanted and never paying attention to themselves. But observing my friend, I realize that the small acts of service that he would frequently do made him happy. He really enjoyed giving toppy friends little things that they wanted.

And I don't remember him being chronically unable to stand up for himself. I do remember a couple of situations in which I thought he was a bit too flexible. But I don't remember times when something was important and he didn't tell us to shove it if we were being jerks.

So I started to realize that for a lot of people who feel called to SM slavery or other forms of deep submission, what it's really about is something similar. Service. Feeling pride in service will given. Of course they enjoy their place in the power relation -- that's part of the definition -- but it seems to me like enjoying that is more about kink and fun, and the service is the real calling.

I don't mean to say that there are never problems. Some people get very into the idea of behavior modification, and even those words make me cringe (if you want to know way too much about why, go have a look at ballastexistenz and look up any references to "the Judge Rotenberg Center"). I remember talking to a certain couple in the local MAsT group, who mentioned to me a persistent problem that they were trying to correct.

The issue was that the dominant wanted his submissive to speak in formal, polite ways: "Yes, Sir." "Please, Sir, may I ____?" etc. She had a rather gruff manner -- think New Yorker, though I don't think she was one. She'd lapse into "Oh, yeah, yeah." when she was supposed to be being formal. It drove her dominant absolutely up the wall.

They described an absolutely sitcom quality carnival of follies coming from attempting to modify this woman's behavior. No matter what they did, she could not speak this way. They were both very distressed about it, as she clearly wanted to change but simply could not.

To my mind, this is where the dominant partner in the relationship cuts his/her losses. If a person simply cannot change something, no matter how much D/s is put behind it, that's just a facet of that person. If he really absolutely couldn't stand it, to the point where it was dealbreaking, then that would be time for a dumping. If not, then that would be time for him to learn to deal with it, and choose some other ritualized behavior to demonstrate her politeness or her elegance or her service, whatever it was that the polite way of speaking was supposed to demonstrate.

So it's not that I think that anyone can do whatever they want, or that I believe that strict behavior modification is a wise thing for people to do. What I do think, however, is that service oriented submission is a valid life path, and that setting up power relations with such people is not inherently limiting, oppressive, restrictive, or bad.

I think if people want to challenge long-term D/s, they should at least be aware of the stress many people put on service, and be able to either argue

that it too is a bad thing from a feminist viewpoint

or

that it isn't relevant to the issue at hand (this would include, of course, a discussion of why it is not)

or

that it doesn't do enough to divorce long-term D/s from problems. This discussion should include, bare minimum, discussion of the nature of service and how it is given and accepted.