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Page Two

So, in the words of a famous nonconsensual beating victim, "Why can't we all just get along?" *grin*.

julian@xxxxx (Phillip-Julian) ( )
, - Monday, August 18, 1997 at 14:12:28 (EDT)

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

In his long critique, Phillip-Julian makes two fundamental critiques of the information that we provide on this site. The first is that he sees us as wrong to criticize the D&S Scene--which he agrees with us is a mystery cult--and believes that we ought rather to demand that that cult broaden itself to include what he sees as "people with our kink." The second is that he disagrees with us that virtually everyone involved in the Scene has an interest in power or powerlessness, whether he or she is aware of it or not, believing rather that many other interests and needs bring people to sadomasochistic behavior. His are strong views, deeply held and clearly expressed, and we have been faced with them many times by many people; we disagree absolutely with both assertions, however.

His first criticism is the easier one to deal with. Mystery cults are bad things. Period. While they do create a comfortable place where people with unusual sexual or other interests can feel that they belong--and most people have a powerful need to feel that they belong--the price that they exact for this feeling of belonging is the adherence of their members to a complex system of beliefs, often beliefs that do not serve them well because they are simply wrong, and an equally complex system of ritual behaviors that demonstrate their adherence to the ideology of the group. Thus, a very common experience of people who have struggled with their dominant or submissive needs for years, who finally believe that they understand them and have accepted them, and who turn to the D&S Scene as the logical place to find partners and support, find instead a narrow and vicious ideology which often is as negative toward their genuine needs as is the mainstream culture. These people must either edit their beliefs about themselves to fit into the mystery cult or behave dishonestly to fit in, and either one can be disastrous for the individuals involved.

Phillip-Julian would have a point here if a good solution to this problem were that the ideology of the mystery cult ought to be broadened by people like us. There are two reasons, however, why this is nonsense. The first is that it won't work. One of the ideological myths of the D&S subculture--the very one asserted by Phillip-Julian in his second criticism of our view--is that people with sadomasochistic needs are not generally fascinated by power. This is, in fact, as close as the Scene has to a founding mythos. Expanding its ideology so as to include the idea that an interest in the assumption or abandonment of control is a legitimate sadomasochistic behavior would be profoundly threatening to the founding mythos--precisely the reason why the subculture has not accepted this idea despite many years of exposure to its reality. In short, the ideology of the Scene cannot be expanded to accept this idea without having to change its underpinnings fundamentally, and mystery cults don't do that.

The second reason is that even if the ideology of the Scene could be expanded so as to include the assumption or abandonment of power, the very structure of a mystery cult, based as it is on groupthink and the holiness of the shared ideology, is hostile to the understanding and development of the entirely idiosyncratic and anarchic nature of power-exchange relationships. Genuine power exchanges share only one mandatory factor: that authority and responsibility are genuinely seized and held by one partner and that control is actually relinquished by the other. All other aspects of a power exchange ought to and must be invented by its partners to serve their own peculiar needs and personalities, to respond to the peculiar set of pressures that they feel both from inside and outside, and otherwise to deal with the practical realities of the world. In order to do this, the people involved must make internal journeys of discovery and also must be deeply involved in one another, not rely on the nostrums and rituals of a mystery cult to solve their very real problems--which those nostrums and rituals can never do.

In other words, the last thing in the world that we think is a good idea for people who have and understand profound needs to assume or to relinquish power is that they become involved in a mystery cult, no matter how inclusive its ideology might seem to the people within it. Such a social group holds only danger for people involved in power exchange and no real answers at all.

Phillip-Julian's second criticism is more difficult to deal with only because our response to it is a hard thing to say to people, and people often respond violently to hearing it. Phillip-Julian says that he sees himself as being someone who is a "creator of experiences. Sometimes profound, sometimes `just' erotic. Pain, bondages, fetishes, are some of the things I use." not as someone who is interested in taking control. He also says that most people in the D&S Scene are there because of these other interests--fetishes, intense physical experiences, whatever--rather than because of an interest in power and that for us to claim differently amounts to a claim that he is "just a poor deluded soul who doesn't realize that power exchange is at the root of all BDSM" and that the same is true of most of the people in the Scene, including its "gurus." In fact, that is precisely what we mean.

There are, no doubt, somewhere in the enormously expanded D&S subculture that has grown within the last few years, some people who have no interest, realized or not, in power or control. There are, for example, many quite conventional men who see the Scene as a good place to recruit submissive women, who, in their view, will make the perfect unargumentative and cooperative housewives and secretaries (they're largely wrong, of course). There are also women with little or no submissive content in their personalities who come to the subculture because they believe that they deserve to be mistreated and abused and that the D&S subculture is a good place to find people who will treat them as they believe they deserve (unfortunately, most of them find what they're looking for). Certainly, there are a very few with a sexual interest in some narrow fetish that is strong enough to bring them to the Scene without any interest in power or control. By and large, however, active participants in the D&S Scene have a significant and moving need either to assume power or to relinquish it. And, by and large, its members either don't understand this about themselves or do understand it and are afraid to admit it.

It is simple to deny that fact, and that is what most people in the Scene do--like Phillip-Julian. But that is simply because most of these people are responding to internal urges and needs that they cannot ignore and then congratulate themselves for having taken such bold and dangerous steps, for putting themselves at the sexual cutting edge--and they certainly have done both--without ever understanding the need to apply to themselves a critical and unyeilding standard of honesty in order to discover the underlying reasons for the needs that move them. This is hardly surprising: that inner journey is laced with emotional landmines and is arduous to accomplish even for those who are used to being rigidly honest with themselves, and most people are used to being precisely the opposite. It has been our experience, however, that those who make that journey honestly and do not accept easy explanations or comfortable nostrums in their own self-evaluations virtually always find an interest in power and control--taking it or having it taken from them--at the heart of their sadomasochistic needs.

We do not believe that we can change the D&S Scene, nor do we try. Mystery cults are very powerful social phenomena, and we have no intention of sacrificing ourselves uselessly in storming the bastions of this one. What we provide on this site and will continue to provide is an alternative, a place where fantasy is seen as a fun pastime and as a symptom of sadomasochistic need, not as the end of sadomasochistic need in itself. A place where profoundly submissive women who understand the uselessness of trying to hide in the D&S social clubs or who have tried just that and have recoiled can find information and advice based on real experience of real people who have tried to build for themselves relationships based on knowledge of their actual needs rather than on fantasies about them or on pale imitations of them. We make little attempt to convert anyone--simply to provide a small haven of sanity for those who have converted themselves.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

We're about to head out of town for a few days and so won't be able to give you the full answer that you deserve until after we're back and caught up. You find yourself in a position that so many serious and intelligent submissives encounter, and you're asking all the right questions. In brief: you are not expecting too much, you are not asking too much, you are not taking your physical and emotional safety too seriously, and you should not despair that the mass of stuff you see online is all that there is in the world for submissives. What you are looking for is possible, and the questions that you are asking about yourself are not impossible to answer. You should ignore the enormous D&S subculture on line. Please hang in there, and we'll try to write a full answer within the next ten days or so.

......

AND NOW, HERE'S THE COMPLETE REPLY THAT WE PROMISED YOU:

Your experience is similar to ones that we hear about constantly: you went through a painful period of self-discovery, then came online in the hope of meeting people who could help you to clarify what you feel and to support you--in effect to give you a kind of context in which to think and to live. What you have found, unfortunately, is the D&S subculture, and what its members tell you has astonished you, horrified you, disappointed you, and has even caused you to question your new realizations about yourself. In such a situation, most people either succumb to the beliefs of the subculture or reject it completely--along with their own emotional needs. We're glad that you have done neither: you should be proud of yourself.

We want to make this as clear as is humanly possible. Virtually everything that has been told you by the online "dominants" and "submissives" is wrong--profoundly, horribly, dangerously wrong. This is probably hard to believe for someone who has not watched it happen, but the impact of the online world on what was, in the middle '80s, a tiny heterosexual sadomasochistic subculture, its members mostly widely scattered and barely in touch with one another, has been to turn it into an enormous and rampaging mystery cult full of confused people, unreconstructed narcissists, brutal abusers, psychological bunko artists, sexually repressed individuals who have carried their repression into their sadomasochistic activities and who mistake those activities for sexual liberation, self-proclaimed gurus whose self-serving nostrums go unchallenged by the adoring and uncritical hordes--in short, the last place in the world where an honest, self-knowing, and profoundly needful dominant or submissive would ever want to be. Unfortunately, like all mystery cults, it exerts a powerful pull among those people who are fascinated by the emotions and activities it purports to promote. For those for whom the occasional spanking and a rich fantasy life are sufficient and who are willing to sacrifice their own critical thinking to the groupthink of the cult, this is all just dandy. But for those whose needs go beyond the trivial to include a genuine need to give up power or to assume it, the D&S subculture is an emotional minefield. That subculture utterly rejects the idea that it is possible genuinely to take control over another person or genuinely to give it up, most of its members believing instead that the most that is possible is the brief and intense encounter based on the willing suspension of disbelief in both people so that they can, for a moment or two, imagine themselves to be out of control or in charge. Those few in the subculture who understand that more is possible are often horrified by the prospect and consider it, de facto, to be abuse.

In your guestbook comment, you ask questions in two areas: whether what people online tell you is true, and how you are to know what you really need in a sadomasochistic context. We try to answer both below.

You say, "I seemed to be the only one who found being ordered [Eds.: in chatrooms or email, we believe] to appear at some such address to report for my `formal training' by persons I had never met bizarre and ridiculous. It was suggested that mayhaps I was not truly submissive--." Your unwillingness to take such an action has no connection to your submissiveness or lack thereof; rather, it shows that you have not lost your mind or been subsumed by the groupthink of the Scene. First, the whole idea that there is any possibility of "formal training" for submissives is preposterous both in itself and in its implications. It implies that there is some body of knowledge or experience that a submissive must have and that this body of knowledge and experience can and should be conveyed by any self-proclaimed "dominant trainer" to any submissive. The truth is that being submissive simply means that you want or need to cede control to another person whom you love and trust. Living in a submissive relationship simply means that control over you has been taken, in all or in part, by your dominant partner. Beyond that, a submissive and her dominant partner will live however pleases them, do whatever pleases them, not do whatever pleases them not to do. The things that a "trainer" will teach you--in the process of getting his jollies by messing with your mind and your body--will be the ideological beliefs of the D&S mystery cult: the five (or seven or 29 or 164) "basic positions of servitude," how submissives should address dominants, how they should behave at play parties, and all the rest. If you want to join a titillating social club, then you ought, indeed, to allow yourself to be "trained"; otherwise, the whole concept of "training" is beneath contempt.

You ask, "--Must I play `merry go round sex slave' to find out [whether I am submissive]?" No. In fact, you must not do any such thing. The question of the intensity and level of your submissive needs is a very difficult one, but finding the answers to it involves an interior journey of honest discovery which you must make--with help if you are lucky, alone if you are not. The play-party set cannot help you in any way to make these discoveries about yourself, although participation in their activities certainly can alienate you from your own emotional needs. Stay away.

You say, "These ladies [who you talk to online] were truly perplexed about my questions about love and intimacy." Of course. In their sad little world, desperate and humorless, the most that can be hoped for is a few moments or a few weeks of "commitment" from one of the thousands of self-styled "dominants" who fish for needy submissives online. Most of these men have no conception of the fundamental need of deep submissives for emotional safety, for the certainty that they can be completely open and honest and that no matter what they do, they will not be abandoned or betrayed. If any of these fellows does understand that need, they in any case are incapable of providing such emotional security. And the women you talked to? They have either never realized cohately their need for emotional safety, have given up on the possibility of finding it, or are so terrified of the possibility of being completely open and honest under any circumstances that they are happy to participate in a milieu which does not require that of them. You must understand that love and intimacy are not only possible in a sadomasochistic relationship but are mandatory in a healthy one. Your suggestion that this is so amazed and frightened them.

You ask, "Is it so very strange to expect love and exclusivity to go hand in glove with my submission?" In the real world, no, of course not. For most of the people in the sadomasochistic subculture--particularly in its online iteration--it is a very strange idea, indeed. They have invented a little world of "kinky swinging," where people seldom develop serious relationships and where the idea that a woman can be the "absolute slave" of a man she never has actually met and never will meet is taken quite seriously. For the most part, the people in the sadomasochistic subculture were sexually repressed before they discovered their sadomasochistic interests and still are. The cult that they have invented is one of sexual titillation--parties where you get to see all the naked people you want and either spank them or get spanked by them, online venues where sexual matters can be talked about, safely buffered by the most preposterous flights of romantic fantasy, without ever requiring sexual or any other kind of intimacy. In short, the perfect fantasy world for sexually repressed people. Love and exclusivity require, particularly for someone with powerful submissive needs, the very kinds of openness and honesty and intimacy which the members of the subculture vociferously promote but of which most of them are completely incapable.

You say, "I was told that the fact that I placed so much value on my own safety and my own preoccupation with love was proof that I was not really submissive." Like your unwillingness to report for "formal training," your concern for your own safety sheds little light on your level of submissiveness--except in the sense that your need for emotional safety and your fear of long-term loneliness are quite characteristic of deep submissives--but rather simply reflects the facts that you are not fundamentally a self-destructive person (not true, alas, of all self-identified submissives) and that you have not yet been indoctrinated into the subculture's ideology. Whatever you do, maintain that interest in your own safety and your requirement that love be part of your future power-exchange relationship.

You say, "I am unwilling to experiment with my heart and body to find out [the level of my submissive needs]. AM I placing too much value on myself? Am I being arrogant to refuse to experiment?" Your unwillingness to experiment in the ways demanded by the people you've met is yet another proof that you have maintained your sanity amid the rain of demands that you adhere to proper cult behavior. It's ironic that people who claim that their sexual behaviors are aimed at making themselves happy and fulfilled demand at the same time that in order to be accepted, you must abandon your concern for yourself as an individual and throw yourself into the submissive bullpen, available for all self-styled dominants to use. You will, no doubt, have to begin to experiment at some point as you seek the ideal relationship for you, but that experimentation will come with someone with whom you already have a broad and deep emotional relationship, ideally as the last element in the process of discovering whether you two are right for one another.

In short, your confusion at the cult bombast is completely understandable, but it's easy to let that confusion go. Most of the men in the D&S subculture who describe themselves as dominant are, rather, men of very conventional sexual needs who have a long history of failed relationships and who are attracted to dominance and submission because they believe that a submissive woman, once attracted, will be tractable and undemanding and will not leave unless expelled. Even the men who may have some actual dominant talents and needs are captured by the ethos of the cult and become no better than their confreres. They are, as a group, stupid, brittle, humorless, unreliable, insecure, unsympathetic in both senses of that word, and the last people in the world whom a genuinely submissive woman should expose herself to. Most of the women in the subculture, although by and large they are genuinely submissive to one degree or another, are afraid, dishonest, looking for shortcuts and easy ways out, and are in general terrified of the implications of their emotions. Once you understand these things, you will also understand that you can and should dismiss this cult and the views of its members absolutely as irrelevant to you.

Having shed your concern about the subculture and what its members tell you is right and wrong, you're left with the more important question from your guestbook comment: how do I know just what I am and how deep my submissive needs are? And even if I know, what do I do about them? Those questions are a lot harder to answer than the first bunch, but we'll try to answer the first one, at least, here.

You ask, "How can I tell if it is truly submission and not just a lusty spanking that I seek?" And you add the comment, "And there is the strange dichotomy of my personality to deal with--I am a strong, outspoken, and publicly demanding woman. I am accustomed to making sure I get what I want professionally and have a reputation of being a rather cold-blooded bitch. But I am simply pretending to be all of those things (I am daily amazed that no one else senses this). It is an exhausting farce to be so fierce in public, knowing inside myself that I am not." Your comment provides many clues to the answer to your question. The kind of person whom you pretend to be--the demanding and dominating professional--clashes with whom you really are, you say, but if all you needed were a "lusty spanking," that clash would hardly exist. You mention elsewhere in your comments the need which you feel for security and safety in a physical and an emotional sense--far more intensely, it appears, than is the case with the average person. You crave the freedom to express yourself completely and honestly to someone without fear of rejection or abandonment. All these needs and feelings are characteristic of deeply submissive women, needs that are not addressed by kinky swinging.

Still, no checklist of feelings or desires or fantasies can suffice for you to understand both intellectually and viscerally the level and intensity of your own submissive needs nor the implications of those needs for the rest of your life. This is where that inner journey we mentioned above comes in. The personal strengths required of a submissive woman if she is to understand herself clearly and to seek out a happy relationship for herself are rare ones--a fact which is easy to infer from the behavior of the vast majority of the submissive women in the D&S subculture. Many people in the subculture talk about the necessity to be completely honest with self, but very few of them are capable of it, and if you are to succeed at understanding yourself, you must be capable of it: a brutal, unrelenting, unforgiving ability to view your own feelings and strengths and weaknesses clearly. How easy that is to say, and how hard that is to do. You must examine your life up till now through the lens of your nascent understanding of your own submissiveness to try to see how it might have affected you day after day, year after year, and how, in return, your experiences of abandonment and betrayal have reinforced your submissive needs. You must make whatever distinctions you can between your submissive wants and your irreducible submissive needs, because one thing above all others is certain for submissives and for dominants: living with power exchange is profoundly rewarding but very difficult. And if your needs for control or for giving up control are anything less then genuine needs--as opposed to titillating desires--you should give them up, because attempting to fulfill them will bring you only disaster. Although you can be reasonably sure from the beginning that your needs go far beyond the occasional spanking or sexy bondage, you must investigate--through thought experiments and through whatever intellectual and emotional acumen you can bring to the process--where your needs fall within the continuum of power exchange, from an otherwise conventional relationship in which you are always sexually submissive to one in which you are literally owned by another person, literally his property.

What a journey that is! And how easy it is to get lost in it and to lapse into self-serving mush, no matter how sincerely you begin. The best way to do it is with help, with a mentor, whether a dominant or a submissive, who can help you to ask yourself the right questions and who can, gently or firmly, keep you on an honest emotional and intellectual level. Finding such a person, unfortunately, is almost as difficult as the internal journey itself: many will claim the ability and volunteer to help, but most who do are dangers to you because they are utterly lost in the fantasy of the D&S Scene. So seek out such a mentor if you like, but always apply this test to anyone whom you are seriously considering for that role in your life: is this person in a successful relationship that is significantly similar to the kind of relationship which you imagine that you might want in the end? If he or she describes his or her relationship in a way that sounds very good to you, take care to find out for certain that that relationship is what it is claimed to be--nothing is more common in the D&S subculture than people whose public descriptions of their relationships are unconscionable lies. If the person whom you are considering is unattached now but claims to have had a good power-exchange relationship before, make sure that that relationship ended for reasons and in ways that are acceptable to you, and check in every way you can whether that relationship ever existed--we have heard of more prefect submissive partners who, alas, were hit by a runaway car died early of a fatal disease were killed by a falling asteroid were kidnapped by an alien than you can imagine, enough to fill the famous elephants' graveyard.

Of course, even if you find a reliable and experienced mentor who is not part of the subculture, success is not guaranteed. So much of what submissive women find out about themselves during this process of self-discovery is counter intuitive, goes profoundly against the grain of mainstream popular culture and often of the D&S subculture, and is just so exotic that even the most honest and needful person sometimes has trouble accepting them. A person's ability to do this depends largely on her underlying strength and self-confidence, that last attribute being one that is not always held in abundance by submissives who are just coming to terms with their sexual and emotional needs.

Even once you're sufficiently certain of yourself and of what you need, nothing is guaranteed, since you then face the prospect of finding the right dominant partner for yourself. That process, however, is grist for a different response.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

We do have your private mail, and we'll be answering you as soon as we can. Please don't feel that we think that your situation is not important; we get an enormous amount of email asking us for information and advice, and we try to answer it as quickly as we can in the order in which we receive it. The only exceptions to this are cases in which the person writing is clearly involved in an emergency situation or where for some other reason rapid response on our part is crucial. We try to answer those right away.

Please be patient: you'll be hearing from us soon.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

We need a lot more information before we can give you a sensible reply, although we must say that the idea of a "casual relationship with a dominant" seems ill-considered to us. Please give us a little more information to go on so that we can give you some advice that will be to the point.

Before anything else, you ought to spend some time on our Personal Ad Advice pages, which provide a large amount of generic but very valuable advice about meeting a dominant for the first time.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

We're glad not to disappoint you: we certainly don't look down on a relationship such as yours. You and your husband appear to have something both wonderful and relatively common compared to the absolute relationships that we often talk about on this site. The two of you switch fantasy roles in the bedroom--as you say, neither of you feels forced nor is forced to do anything at all--but your sex lives are enormously enhanced by your D&S activities, and we infer that your overall relationship is much the richer for them. We hope that your level of D&S play continues to work for you and that your relationship grows ever stronger.

We do not mention the kind of relationship that you describe very often on these pages. In fact, we don't talk much here even about switch relationships that go beyond the metaphorical bedroom door. This is so because the Internet--not to mention the real world--is full of places that provide information and support for people whose dominant or submissive needs are not so profound that they are the central factor in their lives. This site is unique on the nets--and, to the best of our knowledge, in the real world--as a source of practical and reality-based advice for women whose submissive needs are so profound that they have changed their lives or are about to change their lives in some dramatic way to accommodate them.

Even so, we attempt to provide materials her that will be of use to people with less severe submissive needs to whatever extent we can, and we are pleased as punch that you find our pages a good place to be.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

Well, that varies with a lot of factors, including the libido levels of the partners, the health of the relationship, the physical intensity of the relationship, how comfortable the partners are with one another, and more.

Although couples who have been together a long time tend to feel a little less of the undercurrent of sexual awareness, of awareness of power or powerlessness, than they did at the beginning of their relationship , and although the awareness of that undercurrent can be dramatically reduced by stressful situations about work or other practical matters, most couples in absolute relationships stay pretty aware of what is going on between them and are at least to some extent pretty "interested" in it if not necessarily aroused at all times.

We doubt whether most couples who have gotten beyond the first very intense period of their absolute relationships find the level of sexual "turn on" so intense, day in and day out, hour by hour, that it interferes with their ability to deal with nonsexual activities.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY

Trust--unquestioning but always justified and earned--is the bedrock of all power-exchange relationships; they cannot exist outside of fantasy without it. But it seems to us that your question is not so much about trust in D&S relationships as it is about trust--to what extent it can be required and acquired as well as how to determine if someone is trustworthy--in cyber relationships. So we'll answer your questions in that context only.

You ask, "What differences are there between trust in the virtual and in the actual?" Trust can neither be obtained nor earned nor assured over a computer or even over a telephone, no matter how long you try. The beginnings of a foundation for trust can be built online if the submissive person presses and pushes and makes certain that she asks all the questions she has, challenges all that the prospective dominant has to say that seems odd or unclear to her, and gets answers which are to the point and entirely satisfactory. After a long period taken to establish that there is some basis for potential trust--and for a potential relationship--between the parties, they have to meet before any genuine trust, any earned and justified trust, can be built. In other words, the difference between trust in the virtual and in the actual is that it cannot exist in the virtual and that it can in the actual.

You ask, "Is it unreasonable for a sub--novice or otherwise--to ask for proof of trust from a prospective dom(me)?" It's not unreasonable, but we can't imagine what kind of "proof" can be obtained online. As we say above, it is mandatory--not merely reasonable--for a submissive to establish to her own complete satisfaction that the person she talks to online knows what he's talking about, isn't lying, and in general is what he says he is, but that can only be done to a certain point online, and you must meet and get to know one another well before anything at all is proven.

You ask, "When is disclosure unwise for a sub?" It is always unwise for a submissive to disclose anything that can allow her to be identified or found until she is morally certain that the person whom she corresponds with is trustworthy and reliable to the extent that these matters can be determined online. Ask for references, check them, and be as sure as you can possibly be that the people whom you check with are not idiots or dishonest. Talk with the person online, press him and test him, and if anything sounds funny, ask him to clarify, and if he doesn't do so directly or if it still sounds funny, divulge nothing, and head for the hills. Only after you know a person well online should you divulge anything, and even then, you must realize that you inevitably take a certain risk. Any trustworthy person whom you talk to will realize all of this and will not object to your reticence--if he does object and, after you explain your reasons, still objects, nuke him.

You ask, "How much can a dom(me) ask and what if not everything can be answered all at once--to her/his liking?" A dominant can ask anything he damn well pleases, but see above for what to think and what to do if your reticence displeases him or her. A dominant--online or anyplace else--has no right to know anything at all about you that you do not feel safe in divulging until you trust that person and have made some sort of significant commitment to him or her and he or she has made such a commitment in return.

You ask, "How does a sub know if she is setting herself up for trouble, and what can she do to mollify such situations?" A submissive ought to assume that she is setting herself up for trouble any time she provides another person with information about her that she feels uncomfortable in providing or anytime she agrees to see someone in person whom she has not gotten completely comfortable with online or on the telephone or in a situation where she can be isolated and where no one will be aware of what she's doing and will be checking on her. She can avoid setting herself up for trouble by not doing any of the above, and if she finds herself in a situation where acting with this reasonable prudence requires her to "mollify" someone, then she can assume with certainty that the person demanding mollification is to be avoided.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

Many men who call themselves dominants and may even consider themselves to be dominants--particularly men who do all of their "dominating" online--have more than one "slave." In fact, we know of men who claim literally to have dozens. We do not know, however, of anyone who is actually the master of another person, who actually controls her and literally owns her, who has more than one slave. In fact, one quick but accurate way of determining that a man is not actually a dominant, but rather just a guy who's found out that he can get off by manipulating impressionable submissive women is to note whether he claims to have or claims to want or claims to be able to control more than one woman. If he does, he's a fake.

Actually to own someone, to control her and to take responsibility for her and for helping her and for good outcomes within your relationship with her, is pretty much a full-time part-time job. What we mean is that while it is possible to live a fairly conventional life, to hold a fulltime job and to fulfill the other practical responsibilities of life, and to own a woman, the responsibilities of the ownership consume an enormous proportion of your remaining time and energy. Fakes, poseurs, and "dominants" who have never met their "slaves" in person don't understand this because they have never actually had the responsibility of genuinely owning and controlling another person. What they do have is a fantasy in which they pretend to control, and the "controlled" person obeys when and if she pleases. In that kind of relationship, there's room for numerous "slaves," at least from the "dominant's" point of view--not necessarily from the point of view of his victims, which brings us to your expressed problem.

Let us say that a genuine dominant dedicates all of his time to trying to control and to be responsible for two women. While he may have the ability and the energy to do this in an emotional vacuum, he is not in an emotional vacuum: the needs and fears of the women involved are unavoidable, and taking them seriously is part of his responsibility. One of the characteristics shared by almost all submissive women is their fear of being abandoned--or, to put it more positively, their need for absolute security--and in a relationship in which they must share the time and energy of the person who attempts to control them, jealously and anxiety are so natural as to be inevitable. And jealously, of course, is the sworn and inevitable enemy of security.

In short, there is no way for you to avoid jealousy of anxiety about the other "slaves" of your "master." There is a way, however, to avoid him, which is precisely what you should do if you have deep and persistent submissive needs. If giving up control to someone you can trust and rely on for good reason is crucial to your future happiness, you'll not find it with a man so confused or so narcissistic, so obsessed with his own sexual and emotional needs, that he believes that he can control and provide a safe haven for more than one woman. He will be interested in you only as an idealized object and only as long as you fit easily into his fantasy. That is neither a description of security nor a prescription for the honesty and openness that must underlie any successful D&S relationship.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

You say, "Support groups are a valuable resource, use them as that and benefit." We agree in the sense that support groups can be helpful in providing safety information, technical information, and emotional and (occasionally) social support.

Most of your comment, however, describes and defends the D&S play parties that your group sponsors. Your claims about their relative safety and your assurances that they do not promise what they cannot deliver miss the point of our criticism of such events entirely. Play parties and similar events promote a concept of and approach to sadomasochism that is toxic to people with deep dominant or submissive needs. They learn at these events that the activities of kinky sex--spanking, whipping, bondage, exhibitionism, etc.--are the essence of D&S rather than the profoundly and intimate relationships that are the only answers for people with deep dominant or submissive needs. They provide an environment where casual sex, certainly not always coital sex, is presented on a platter, easily accessible and meaningless. But those with deep submissive or dominant needs are inevitably confused and alienated by such trivial treatment of their most important desires, often to the point where they conclude that they must repress those very desires because even the people whom they felt would understand and support their needs do not and are, in fact, often hostile to them.

We have nothing against support organizations or even play parties--for those for whom sadomasochistic sex is simply a particularly piquant sexual recreation. But those are not the people whom we attempt to address and to help in these pages.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

The salmon-peach (not pink) background was chosen by Polly, who is very submissive (all sides of her). She chose it because she originally needed a way to distinguish our site visually and because it alludes to "Peachum," her last name. Also, she just likes it. It probably appears pink to you--and all sorts of other pastel hues to others--because of variations in the abilities of various software and video-display cards to display colors accurately.

In any event, pink would have been a fine color as a background on a site dedicated to submissive women because it refers to the cute and childlike qualities that are inherent in them. We are not happy with the concept of "sides" of people, one of which is inevitably seen as dark among many sadomasochists, because we don't think there's anything the slightest bit dark about either sadism or masochism, dominance or submission and because people are whatever they are as a whole--are not conveniently subdivided. The "dark" idea may refer for some to the darkness of a closet, but while we certainly understand the importance for most submissive women of hiding their needs from most people, the last thing that we would want to support editorially or graphically is the idea that submissives ought to remain closeted.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

No woman makes a "choice to become submissive." A person either is submissive enough to be aware of it and to need to deal with it or is not. A woman can make a choice whether to try to repress her knowledge of her submissiveness or even totally to ignore it, but those are other matters.

The question you ask about the connection of childhood sexual or physical--and we would add emotional--abuse to adult submissiveness is one we're asked often in many forms. Unfortunately, this is not an area that has been studied scientifically or even statistically--as is the case with all sexual matters, reliable data about the backgrounds of female submissives are impossible to obtain because people are generally unwilling to talk honestly about such matters. The best we can tell you, therefore, is based on our anecdotal experience of knowing hundreds of submissive women over the years well enough to get accurate information from them about their backgrounds. This anecdotal information does not in any way support the idea of a causal relationship between childhood sexual or other abuse and adult submissiveness.

It is true that many female submissives were abused as children, but we have no reason whatever to believe that the percentage of submissive women who suffered such abuse is any higher than the percentage of women with abuse in their backgrounds who have conventional sexual needs. And while it's also true that many women's first memory of a sexual response to sadistic behavior is associated with a memory of abuse, the incident of abuse involved almost always takes place beyond an age where basic sexual and emotional orientation is already well established. In our view, there is nothing to suggest that these remembered incidences of abuse are causally connected to submissiveness; rather, they may provide for some girls the first palpable incident where their sexual submissiveness is consciously engaged.

We have found one element that does seem to be in the backgrounds of virtually all submissive women: they were forced to accept levels of responsibility in a family well beyond their abilities to cope with at a very early age. We have some doubts about whether these experiences are any more causal than is sexual abuse, but, unlike sexual abuse, they seem to be universally in the backgrounds of submissive women, at least in the English-speaking world.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

We don't know anyone who is honest with herself and who finds cybersex to be "satisfying" for long. What we're curious about, however, is why you feel the need to "cheat safely" on your partner and hide these fantasies from him. It goes without saying--so, naturally, we'll say it--that any power exchange must be founded on honesty between the partners if it is to survive as anything but a sham. Can you tell us why you don't share these fantasies with your partner?

2004 NOTE FROM POLLY AND JON:

The kinky personal ad listings are down until we have the time to update them. The personal-ad advice pages are alive and kicking; they start here.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

You ask several troubling questions here, troubling for different reasons.

About pain: while all submissives enjoy pain to a greater or lesser degree, many are certainly at the lesser end of the curve. But the question of how much pain you enjoy is very different from your fears of being injured, and we'll deal with the second one first. You ask, "How do I talk about this? Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do this and still be submissive and not sound like a baby?" To begin with, you talk about your fears about pain and injury by opening your mouth wide and talking about them, loud and clear. If your dominant partner has done anything to make you feel that you cannot or must not tell him exactly what you feel and think whenever you feel the need to, then you are with the wrong person, and you should run as fast and far as you can from him. The most fundamental necessity for a D&S relationship to work is that the two people involved must be almost obsessively open and clear with one another. So shout out your concerns, and if he can't take the shouting, point him in the direction of the highway.

Your apparent concerns about expressing your fears somehow not being consonant with submissiveness are nonsense. To be submissive simply means to want to give up some or all control over your life to someone else. To be submissive does not mean that you do not say what you think, act aggressively when you feel the need to do it, use any particular vocabulary, or any other silliness of that sort. To be a successful submissive means always to say what you feel and think without fear and to be with a partner able and willing to hear you and to make good decisions based in part on what you say.

Now on to the business about not liking too much pain. That doesn't make you a "baby" or anything at all except a person who doesn't like too much pain. You should understand, however, that in periods of high sexual excitement, you may find not only your tolerance for but your desire for pain to grow dramatically--especially once you find a partner whom you trust completely. But if you find in the long run that your tolerance for pain remains very low, then you need to make sure to find a partner whose interest in pain is minimal or who is willing to take your fear of pain seriously into account.

You say, "In this new relationship I have, we have discussed trading roles, he being submissive and me dominate. Can this be done? If so, how?" These are very troubling questions because they suggest that you are almost certainly with the wrong partner. What he is suggesting to you is called "switching" within the D&S subculture, and many people do switch with their partners--in fact, we believe that the majority of people in the public D&S subculture switch at least occasionally. But people with very serious submissive or dominant needs don't switch--the very idea is preposterous to them. Jon could no more behave submissively except as a grotesque charade than he could fly to Mars by flapping his arms. Same with Polly in terms of behaving dominantly toward Jon. For people with deep sadomasochistic needs, dominance and submissiveness are not merely roles played to increase the intensity of sexplay. Our dominance or submissiveness are central to our personalities, central to our lives. Jon is always dominant, and Polly is always submissive, although those terms do not necessarily limit how we behave in our interactions with the outside world--but in any case they are not simply roles that we play when they are convenient or exciting for us.

If you are deeply submissive and have no dominant needs, you cannot switch with your partner without engaging in a level of emotional dishonesty that will, at the very least, be emotionally damaging to you--not to mention downright ridiculous. You can't be taught or teach yourself to have dominant feelings or needs, and if your partner is a switch and really does need to submit to his partner at times in order to be happy, then, once again, you are with the wrong partner.

You have a lot of thinking to do about the depth of your submissive needs and their implications, about how to live your life and who to live it with. If your submissiveness is of central emotional importance to you, then the rest of your life may be very different from the way you expected it to be till now, and you must be very careful--almost certainly more careful then you have been so far--about whom you choose to live it with.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

A submissive is any person who has a genuine and persistent desire or need to give power over him- or herself to another person or institution. A slave is a person who is owned by another person or institution.

Simple, right? Yes, it is. But, as they have done with many other simple ideas, the members of the S&M Scene have been busily inventing all sorts of nonsense to confuse the straightforward meaning of those words. Some of this confusion comes out of simple ignorance. Some of it, however, is intentionally created in order to make it easier to use and abuse inexperienced submissives.

Some people in the Scene will tell you that a slave is anyone who is or who pretends to be submitting in any sense to anyone else. Someone whose only connection with her "dominant" is via a computer screen, who has never seen and will never see her "master," is, according to many "informed members of the Scene," a slave. According to some of these folks someone who is "auctioned off" at a fantasy "slave auction" at a playparty or fundraiser or in an IRC group is also said to be a slave. To many of these fakes, a woman who sometimes participates in spanking, bondage, or some other form of sadomasochistic sex with her husband but who otherwise is co-equal within their relationship is a "slave."

Other gurus of the Scene will tell you that a person who wants to give up power starts out as a submissive but, as he or she becomes familiar with all the right buzz words and all the proper etiquette, magically becomes a slave.

No doubt all sorts of other silly faux definitions of these very simple words have been developed by members of the S&M subculture. Anyone who has any hope of understanding what is going on around or within her will simply ignore the noise.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

We fear that you are as ignorant of history and as ideologically confused and naive as are most people who profess themselves to be "libertarians."

In fact, history is rich with circumstances in which people entered a condition of slavery voluntarily for all sorts of reasons, some involving direct duress, some not. All that slavery requires is that the slave belong literally to the master--that she cannot disobey him in any substantive matter. Polly's condition meets this test--in fact, it does so in more detail than has the condition of many chattel slaves historically. Calling her what she is should be an insult to no one except the aggressively uninformed.

Your view that "my political outlook is libertarian/anarchist, which at bottom is a [sic] consistent opposition to all forms of slavery" is pathetic. As holder of a "philosophy" which exalts the allegedly self-evident rights of the individual above all community and group interests, you ought to be the first to recognize and to support Polly's right to live any damn way she pleases. You'd do well to ask yourself why you do not.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

While we can't give you credit for irony, we do thank you for displaying the typically ignorant and sexist view of women held by mainstream culture. Perhaps you ought to read your comment and ask yourself who's being whiny.

Yes, much on our site is critical and for good reason. Judging by your assumed name, you have some pretension to being a dominant, and it is precisely dangerous fools like yourself of whom we are critical. We hope that someone helps any submissive woman who has the misfortune to fall under the control of a man with sexist views like yours.

What we expect from "a group of men who take sexual pleasure in controlling, humiliating, and inflicting pain on women" is that at the very least they be free of sexist stereotyping; anyone who is not will find it impossible to hear what his submissive partner says to him clearly which makes him a danger to her. We also insist that they recognize the full and equal humanity of their submissive partners and that they take serious note of their responsibility to meet the needs of those women.

You may well need glasses, but it has nothing to do with what's on our pages: we have no pale-blue-on-pink material. Perhaps your video card is as incapable of presenting an accurate rendition of what is on our site as your mind is of freeing itself from sexist bigotry. Have a nice day.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

You raise several issues here, all of which are somewhat difficult for us to understand, since your objections either don't reflect what is on our pages or seem to chastise us for the audience whom we've chosen to address. We'll take on these issues one at a time.

Nowhere on our site does anyone imply that dominants do fall "fully-formed from a tree, that there was no development in the character of a dominant, that he might as well be god." We do, however, state clearly that it is absolutely impossible to "turn" a man of conventional sexual needs into a dominant. Although several of the submissive women whom we quote extensively do describe their relationships with dominant men who are fully developed and fully formed, they nowhere imply that these dominants were born that way nor that they fell from anything, much less a tree. What's more, both in our section entitled "Qualities of a Successful Dominant" and in several of our letters to dominant men, located in our "Conversations" section, we talk at some length about the kind of development that a man with dominant fantasies or interests much go through in order to become successful at what he wants to do. We suggest that you and your husband read these.

In any event, this site is dedicated to providing information for submissive women, and what we say directly to dominants is bound to be tangential to the goal of providing experience-based resources for submissives. We have, in fact, talked about opening an area for dominant men, but our experience with trying to talk substantively to dominant men in other areas of the net--in news groups and on mailing lists, for example--has been both frustrating and essentially useless. It is much more difficult to find genuinely dominant men than it is to find genuinely submissive women, and the enormous number of confused dominants and pretend dominants on the nets has so far made it impossible for us to overcome the noise level in order to find them.

The final issue that you raise and that we must address is one that we hear about often: the problem faced by a submissive woman who tries to turn her non-dominant husband into her dominant, which may be precisely what you are trying to do. Like many women in that situation, it is desperately important to you to succeed in this project. Your negative description of "women who are unhappy in their marriage and go looking outside the bonds of their commitment and honor in order to fulfill longings--" makes it perfectly clear why it is so important to you. We share your belief that trying to save good relationships is a very high priority, but you must know that no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you persevere, no matter how badly you want, no matter how important it is to you, you are highly unlikely to succeed unless your husband is that extraordinarily rare man who has serious dominant needs of which he has been unaware--or unless your submissive needs are pretty superficial.

The problem that you describe is so severe and so common that Jon wrote an extensive article about it. The article is called "Pearls Before Ponygirls," and we strongly suggest that you and anyone else in your position read it.

The Submissive Women Speak site is dedicated to one simple idea: the provision of practical, reliable information and advice to submissive women based entirely on real experience. We don't address the problem that you describe in a way that suggests that it can typically be solved successfully because it cannot typically be solved successfully. For us to say anything more positive about the probable outcome would be neither practical, reliable, nor based on experience.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

We're glad that the site is helpful to you and that you enjoyed "Violence in the Garden." While we still wish that it had been included in the book for which it was originally written, we can't help but feel that having it here has exposed it to far more people who need to read it than ever would have read the book.

We want to address your view of our negative assessment of what you call "the play party crowd." Please don't feel that we're critical of you, because we understand the difficulties you face and all of the confusions involved in trying to find the right person to be your partner, but it's ironic that in the same email you should comment on how difficult it is for you to find the right partner for you in Los Angeles and also be critical of our view of casual D&S. It is largely because casual D&S is not any of the good things that you say about it that you are having this difficulty.

While it is true that play parties do offer an opportunity for "like-minded people" to network, the like-minded people are seldom or never of a mind or an ability to take on a longterm and committed power exchange. Several years ago, one of us (Jon) coined a term for the people addicted to the play-party scene: kinky swingers. Whatever they may say--and subterfuge is as endemic to play parties as it is to locker rooms--most of the people at these things are there largely for the thrills. As a rule, they have not taken the internal journey necessary to discover the depth of their submissive or dominant needs, and they settle for the intense but essentially meaningless thrills of the play party. Rather than to be an impetus for further self-discovery and eventual commitment, for most who attend them, these social events serve the purpose of avoiding precisely that.

You are correct when you say that "the Scene, flawed as it may be, can provide an extremely valuable sense of community, which was sorely lacking in my first D/S relationship, and might possibly have spared me a good deal of anguish over the `unnatural' acts I was participating in." The S&M subculture, as we point out at some length in our IRC Speechs, acts much like any traditional mystery cult: its gurus create an orthodoxy of belief and catechism ("safe, sane, and consensual," for example), its members participate in a semi-secret society that has its own vocabulary and special meanings, and the people in it develop a feeling that they are special and better in some way than the rest of humanity. It's warm and fuzzy, all right, but it's all nonsense. The essence of a good sadomasochistic relationship is that it is anarchic--in other words, that it is developed independently of irrelevant ideology and is designed solely to meet the needs of the people involved. The S&M subculture claims to support that sort of development, but in fact, if anyone within it tries to develop a relationship that is outside of its narrow ideological parameters, they are ostracized.

You are also correct to state that play parties "provide about the only outlet for the sadomasochistic desires of some of us not fortunate to have already found the master of our dreams." We understand that this is not obvious, but the experience of that outlet--its banality, its superficiality, its alienation, and the ignorant ideology that it promotes--leads you away from finding the relationship that you need rather than toward it.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

No, unfortunately, you do not hold alone to the idea of "women being by nature submissives." It is one of the fundamental assumptions of most civilization at this time. The reasons that this is so can be speculated about endlessly and are moot; the idea is, however, preposterous--or, in any event, we know of no data that support the idea.

We think it's probably true that most women have to a greater or lesser degree submissive fantasies. In our experience, however, the same can be said with equal certainty of most men. It is, in fact, rare to find a man or woman who has not had submissive fantasies, although this may not seem to be the case, since getting people to admit their deepest sexual fantasies, the ones that embarrass them and move them the most, is extraordinarily difficult. Of all human behaviors, the one most difficult to learn much about in practical terms is sex: people are far more prone to lie about it than about any other element of their own personalities.

We are not distracted by the concept of political correctness, either positively or negatively. The sad fact, observable by anyone who is honest, is that the belief that women are essentially submissive--or its handmaiden, that women are essentially inferior--has been the cause of enormous suffering and misery for the last eight thousand years or so and remains so today. That's one reason why it's so hard for genuinely submissive women to admit their needs to themselves or to others: it seems to play into the biases and bigotries that have allowed women to be oppressed in most civilizations whose histories have come down to us. So you are right at least to this extent: it takes enormous strength of character and self-confidence for a deeply submissive woman today to admit to her submissiveness. But that's the only thing that we can agree with you about.