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REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

Pony-girl training is one of those wonderful chestnuts of the D&S subculture: grist for enormous reams of fantasy over the years along with some occasional actual experience.

Fundamentally, pony-girl training is a subset of depersonalization and humiliation that has had tremendous erotic appeal over the years for sadomasochists with a particular interest in humiliation. It involves treating the submissive as if she were a pony--or as well as one can do that without running into immutable problems of physiology and psychology. She is required to be naked and to bear a saddle, a bridle, often a horsetail butt plug or similar tail-like apparatus, or even a cart harness. Sometimes she's made to wear decorations like a feathered plume on the head and similar geegaws. She may have to sleep in a barn, to carry (light) riders, or to pull a buggy with her master or mistress in it, this personage urging her on with a buggy whip. She is generally not permitted to speak but rather must make her needs and desires known through horsey-talk, or at least through activities sufficiently equine to be pleasing to her master or her mistress. She generally must eat out of a feedbag, although whether the bag ought to be filled with oats and hay or with some more digestible material is often a matter of serious, almost religious, disputation among pony-girl adherents.

What we've described above is what you might call pony-girl-all-the-way-ism. Typically, the submissive is treated to only the parts of the above that are realistically possible in your average five-room apartment, although there are a number of institutions in Europe and in the US that provide an opportunity for masters and mistresses to take their pony girls, as it were, on the lam for a week or two and go the whole hog. Generally, however, the poor dears are required to behave in this manner only for a matter of hours.

Hope that helps. Best to you and yours.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

Yes, we do talk about Gor somewhat disparagingly, and for good reason. There are some funny elements to this Gorean business, but you are correct to assume that it is both misogynistic and kind of silly. Unfortunately, many people who might be able to find happy lives for themselves as dominants or submissives get lost in the Gorean fantasy.

The Gor books are a pseudonymous series that was written by a college professor under the nome de plume John Norman. More than 20 volumes long, it is a high adventure series notably reminiscent of the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs that was immensely popular around the turn of the century. The premise is that a gentleman of Virginia is magically transported to Gor, a planet in this solar system which we are unaware of because it is exactly opposite the Earth at all times, with the sun between the two planets. On Gor, he finds a civilization roughly--very roughly--equivalent to a fantasist's idea of the Mediterranean world in the Heroic Age, with, as the series develops, an enormous number of technological and anthropological anomalies thrown into the stew: Native Americans, technologically advanced cities, flying machines, and a sinister and threatening interstellar presence hanging over all. Here he is forced to fight for his life--perhaps elevendy-seven times--and to make his way in this new world.

The element of Gorean society that is of most interest to perverts is that slavery is not only legal on Gor but is practically mandatory. While anyone, male or female, can be enslaved, the fact is that the vast majority of slaves talked about in the Gor series are women, and an astonishing number of women on Gor appear to have large breasts, broad hips but not too broad, and in all other ways to be paragons of voluptuousness. Gorean female slaves come in many varieties, but the ones we read about most are various sorts of pleasure slaves, attached either to individual Gorean masters, to the ubiquitous paga taverns, or to some other unlikely institution. Gorean slavery is absolute: a master may abuse, injure, or kill his slave for any reason at any time without concern. Gorean female slaves must submit to an enormous number of daily humiliations: numerous institutionalized and humiliating "slave positions," auctions, nights spent in tiny caged "kennels," virtual nudity even on the streets, etc. At the slightest imperfection of behavior, they can be and often are fed to the sleens, sort of the Gorean equivalent of upper executives at Microsoft: sleazy, reptilian, sneaky, and ultimately deadly.

All of this sounds like a great deal of fun, and in many ways it is. While most of the writing is pure trash--about which more below--you have to give Norman credit for having a genuine enough understanding of the erotic bottom line of sadomasochism that he describes innumerable situations that are hot reading for most of us and seems particularly aware of some of the positive emotions involved in submission, which is odd, considering his generally negative view of submissives.

What is wrong with these books, however, is enormously, overpoweringly wrong. Underlying the ethos of slavery on Gor is a philosophy and belief system--expounded endlessly, repetitively, repetitively, turgidly, numbingly, and repetitively by both its male and female characters--which holds that women are inherently submissive, inherently inferior, and that a free woman is an anomaly who, inside, is inevitably a submissive simply waiting to be enslaved. This view, obviously, stretches the limits of words like sexist and misogynistic to the point where they have little meaning because they are insufficiently colorful to describe what is actually written on the pages of the Gor books. Norman pushes the idea so hard that the main plot of several volumes and a subplot of many volumes describe the haughty and imperious Gorean free woman brought, fighting all the way, into slavery by a combination of circumstance and male chicanery, only to admit by the end of the volume or the sub-plot that she is really far happier as a slave and that, in fact, all women, if honest with themselves, would be forced to admit that they are natural slaves, too. Norman even stretches this to the point where another recurring subplot is of modern Earth women--who, incidentally, are often kidnapped from Earth by Gorean spaceships in order to replenish the slave population--are forced to admit, repeatedly, not to mention over and over again, through the books that all the Earth talk about female liberation is just twaddle, a fact which they finally realize upon their Gorean enslavement. Nice, ain't it?

The danger of the Gor books goes far beyond the fact that they promote preposterously sexist ideas about women. As you suggest in your question, the Gor fantasy is so attractive, has so many elements that appeal to some inexperienced dominants and submissives, that it provides a framework for all sorts of destructive activity within the D&S subculture, from the ubiquitous Gorean sites on the Web and IRC to--it appears--at least one small group of adherents who are actually trying to live the "Gorean life style" literally.

We've been perplexed and very disturbed by the number of people we are aware of who define their dominant or submissive needs in Gorean terms. Rather than to try to develop relationships in which they can actually live as dominants or submissives, finding and making the idiosyncratic arrangements that couples in a power-exchange relationship must always develop for themselves in order to be happy, they accept and try to act within the nonsense ethos of Gor. To these folks, all women are submissives and must address all males with obsequious respect, using a ritualized language and a prescribed series of "slave positions"--in most cases, since the vast majority of this activity takes place on line, positions that are talked about rather than actually assumed. The "dominants" behave in equally ritualized ways, trying to imitate the pompous and vaniglorious verbiage of the Gor "heros," boasting of imaginary adventures, and being hale-nudnicks-well-met all around. Watching these folks operate reminds one uncomfortably of a bunch of people in Vulcan ears and Klingon battle dress, flitting among the merchandise tables at a Star Trek convention while they try to address one another in halting--is there any other kind?--Klingoni.

It's very funny, but it's also very sad. These people, particularly the submissives, seem by and large to be people with genuine power-exchange needs and desires who have been convinced, through a combination of their own vapidity and the social pressures of the net, that this banal playacting is the most that a submissive can have, that fantasy submission is the most that can be. For some of them, of course, the fantasy is all they need or in any case all they can handle. For many, this is not the case, but after a period--generally a short period--of playing at Gor, they give up, unsatisfied, and often abandon any attempt to understand their submissive needs better or to have them met.

We are generally less concerned about the men involved in these fantasies. Although there are no doubt men who play the Gorean game with genuine dominant needs who might, given some introspection and perhaps a little psychotherapy, become excellent dominants, this does not appear to be true for the vast majority of them. The Gorean books have a special appeal for immediately post-pubescent boys who fear and distrust women and who see in the Gorean mythology a way both to get sex--or at least to have women talk to them without laughing--and at the same time to indulge their juvenile misogyny. That there appear to be a number of technically mature men who also play the Gorean game is more of a comment upon the actual maturity of these men then it is upon the appeal of the Gor novels.

We do know of one small group of people who claim to live the "Gor life style" in the real world. According to them, they live a nomadic life, living in Gorean-style wagons somewhere on the North American plain, venturing into town only for supplies as needed and for jobs. All of the women in the group are claimed to be treated as and to act as Gorean slavegirls. We can't guarantee the actuality of any of this stuff, but that's what these folks claim.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

Hi, Doc!

You raise a question here which, although we've never heard it in so stark a form, touches on an issue that comes up in many power-exchange relationships: the relationship of earning money to power and control.

The reason this issue is so thorny for so many people is that it raises values questions that are right at the heart of capitalism and of the reformation--in other words, it speaks to the central values of current Western civilization. One of the primary economic contrasts between the feudal and the capitalist era is that feudalism and the Catholic church which supported it held economic stability and the need for a person to know and to remain in his place in high esteem, while capitalism and the Protestant church, which came into existence in response to the new commercial needs of bourgeois Europe, promulgated the idea that working hard, doing well commercially, and improving one's status in life are precisely the things that make one godly. Consequently, most Europeans, Americans, and many Asians equate, without really considering the matter, their financial status with their qualities and powers as human beings. Obviously, anyone who accepts that equation and who is not very well of financially is likely to consider him- or herself to be unworthy and not very important. Equally obviously, such a person is likely to believe, as you do, that he must be able to support someone in order to be her dominant partner.

We think that's utter nonsense. Depending on the type of relationship you want to have with a submissive partner, we don't see any reason why the question of which partner is capable of making how much money should enter into the consideration of either partner. The idea ought to be that together the partners do whatever is required to maintain themselves and the relationship and that just what is necessary in order to do that is--at least in an absolute power-exchange relationship--the decision of the master. In fact, there are situationd which are very familiar to us in which the submissive partner earns far more and has a far greater earning potential than her dominant does. So what?

We know it isn't that simple. Because of the ideological beliefs that we describe briefly above, many people take actual earnings and earning potential very seriously when the consider questions of power and control in their own lives. But in our view, people who do this are harming themselves and their potential partners dramatically by considering questions when they decide whether to take a dominant or submissive partner which are completely irrelevant. There's no question that many people are attracted to others who seem to have power because of their financial resources, but more often than not these resources have been amassed through inheritance, through fortuitous accident, or in some other way that does not speak to the dominant character or ability of the person involved. We know of submissive people who confuse the power of wealth with the power of personality and are drawn to wealthy people because they confuse them with dominants; relationships that begin because of this sort of confusion are always disastrous.

Doc, if you are genuinely dominant, go and find yourself a talented little submissive, develop a wonderful relationship with her, and if necessary send her out to work. Between the two of you, I'm sure you'll make a financial go of it. But if your view of yourself as a competent and capable dominant is eroded by the fact that you are not financially well off, then you need to do some serious thinking about just what dominance is and what it is not.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

You're not really giving us a lot of information--about how much you've done together, about the nature and intensity of both of your needs, about what you have explained to him--but perhaps we can make a couple of suggestions.

One reason that he might be unwilling to be physically intense with you is that he might be uncertain about what could injure you, what won't injure you, and what precautions to take. There are any number of publications that purport to provide wide-ranging safety and precautionary information for sadomasochists, but most of them are unreliable. The best that we have found is The Lesbian SM Safety Manual by Pat Califa (you can order it from most kinky bookstores or from kinky Web sites that sell books). We explicitly do not assert that everything in any book about safety is reliable, so always use good sense, but we think that this one is the best one available.

Perhaps your boyfriend's reticence stems wholly or partly from one of the classic misconceptions about sadomasochism: that to hurt a submissive person, even if she wants to be hurt and asks to be hurt, is abuse either in the standard physical sense or because it caters to the low self-esteem and self-hatred that supposedly characterizes submissives and masochists. If this is the problem, you may not be able to solve it: many people who believe this nonsense will always believe it no matter what you do. The best approach to take in trying to change this view, however, is to have him do some reading from reliable sources--we certainly recommend this site and Different Loving--and to have him talk to dominant men whom you respect and who might be able to give him a better perspective.

The other alternative is simply to be far clearer and more explicit with him about what you want and why you want it. You mention in your comment that you're having trouble communicating with him about this. Why? Is it an embarrassing matter for you, do you not really understand clearly what your own needs are, or does the problem lie elsewhere? If you can overcome it--perhaps if you tell us more about it we can help you with it--that difference alone may be enough to have him see what you're talking about.

In the final analysis, you shouldn't expect your boyfriend to do anything with or to you that doesn't both please and excite him. Is it possible that he is now doing as much as he can and that going beyond what he is now doing would be, if not frightening or repellent to him, simply uninteresting and uninvolving?

2004 NOTE FROM JON AND POLLY:

Our original answer to the question above is now out of date. We will replace it with current information as soon as we can.

REPLY FROM POLLY AND JON:

We are certain that you mean that you have been a "dominant" all your life, not a "dominate." Your confusion even about so basic a thing as the word that you use to describe yourself is indicative both of your ignorance and of your attitude. You say that you are new to D&S, as you obviously are. Unfortunately, your attitude as expressed here suggests that it is highly unlikely that you will ever be anything but new to D&S.

Submissive women are everywhere around you. If you are genuinely dominant, will stop preening long enough to open your eyes and ears and look around you, and have enough intelligence to power an ant, you will be able to find them. We don't know what friends you have who "fear that as they can see how good a master I would be that their slaves would never return to them," but we suspect that those friends are entirely in your imagination. Please say hello to them for us. If such people actually exist, then they are either simply protecting their submissives from you or are making fun of you.

To be a responsible dominant, one who is able to take and hold control over a submissive woman's life and to make that life better, requires introspection, self-knowledge, hard honesty, and self-confidence (as opposed to bravado and puffery). If you ever want to have a submissive partner who can rely on you and who is happy that she met you, you have to step back and take a long, hard look at yourself: who you are, why you believe that you are dominant, and what you have to offer an actual human being, as opposed to a fantasy submissive from the IRC quadrant of Gor. You must find dominant men with actual and successful experience with power-exchange relationships and try to learn what you can from them about yourself and about the requirements of dominance. Before anything else, however, you must stop flapping your arms, proclaiming your "dominateness," and imagining that you are some kind of gift to submissive women. Right now, you're just another bozo.

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY:

We deleted your second message, which was identical to this one except for the fact that it contained a personal ad. Our policy, as stated on our guestbook page, is no personals in the guestbook.

Our first suggestion is that you read the information posted in our Importance of Taking Your Time and Meeting "Dominants" from Online Safely articles. These pages contain important information about meeting a dominant safely for the first time and about the importance of taking your time before you make any commitments. Any new submissive should read those pages.

We don't know exactly what kind of relationship you're looking for, and we understand that you may not yet know. If, however, you expect to be looking for a permanent and absolute or near-absolute power-exchange relationship, we strongly recommend that you steer clear of "training masters," IRC channels, and local support groups (unless all you expect from the local support groups is information on medical matters and technical considerations).

The very idea of a "training master" is an artifact of the fantasy D&S world. There is no curriculum that all submissives must learn, there is no "training" that works with all or even most submissives, and no "master" can help a submissive person genuinely to understand herself and to develop a successful relationship simply because he believes himself to have answers for everyone. Furthermore, your expressed idea that you have "two online masters" shows that you have a lot of thinking to do. As Moliere knew, no one can be a Servant of Two Masters--no one can have more than one master, no dominant can have more than one slave, and people you know only from online experience are just babies playing games. If you develop a successful power-exchange relationship, that success will be based largely on the fact that you have found a dominant partner who is right for you, whose beliefs about and experience with power exchange fit your needs, and who is in other ways a good match for you (a successful power-exchange relationship must meet all the basic emotional and behavioral requirements of any couples relationship along with the special requirements of a power exchange). In short, anyone who calls himself a "training master" is telling you to run as fast as you can away from him.

Local support groups have a certain value, especially in terms of providing practical mechanical and medical information, but they also reflect the fantasy beliefs of the D&S subculture. It is not possible to meet a good potential dominant partner at a munch, a play party, a support meeting, or an education session. The people you will meet there will be far more interested in getting your pants off you than in a serious relationship. The sad fact is that many newly aware submissives are traumatized by the short-term assignations often entered into by the attendees of these functions, even to the point of deciding that the emotional risks of having their submissive needs met are not worth taking again.

The IRC is even worse than the local support groups. The growth of the online world has led to a burgeoning interest in D&S, but most of that interest is among people whose needs or abilities for power exchange go no further than typing onto a computer screen. This is not what most of those folks claim, however. All over the IRC are self-proclaimed experts who claim enormous experience and knowledge for themselves, who offer to guide you gently into submission, but who at best are liars and at worst are predators who will use your credulousness against you in order to get you in a position where they can get their hands on you. We strongly recommend any sincere submissive stay away from IRC.

So what's left for the newly aware submissive? How is she to learn, to discover the depth and intensity of her needs, and then to find the right dominant partner for herself? There's no easy answer to this question, and even the hard answers are partial at best. But that's how things actually are, and the wish that they could be somehow different and easier does not make them different and easier. Most people who we know who've found good partners and are now living successfully in power-exchange relationships have found them not within the D&S subculture but rather lurking around its edges. Serious and genuine dominant men face the same problem that submissive women do in terms of looking for sincere partners: they might find them anywhere, but it seems that the subculture--online or in support groups--is the best place to look, since there are so many self-proclaimed submissives there, and yet these dominants soon discover that some of the submissives they find are either insincere or nuts. So they lurk around the edges: they post personal ads or watch personal ads looking for sincere submissives whose personalities attract them. Those are the people who you have to look for and among whom you're most likely to find a sincere and capable dominant partner whom you can love and who will love you.

As for learning about submissiveness and examining the depth of your own submissive needs, the best suggestion we can make--in fact, the only suggestion that we can support--is that you find a couple or couples who live successfully in the kind of relationship that you think you might want, and ask them for help. You must be very careful, however. Many couples, especially online, claim to have wonderful, happy relationships when, in fact, they have never even met one another in real life or, if they have, have a relationship that is very much less than they claim for it. Before you accept a couple as having any sort of help to offer you, make sure that you have verified with your own eyes and onsite, in real life, in the same room with them, and for a significant period of time that they are what they claim to be (be very careful, however, that you have not run into a couple whose relationship is failing and who are "trolling" for new meat; these are very common and must be avoided at all costs).

REPLY FROM JON AND POLLY

The question of how to move from fantasy D&S to a relationship where you actually come into contact with your partner is among the most common that we get. There are lots of ways to do it, but all have their drawbacks.

Probably the easiest way is to join a local social or support group for D&S'ers. We don't recommend this option because we have found, through numerous first, second, and third hand experiences, that most of them are made up largely of very confused and dishonest people who find solace, up to a point, in being among people who will support and verify their usually toxic beliefs about themselves and about power exchange. While it is certainly possible to meet good, sincere, and honest people through such a group, it's not all that likely, and you must take great care among these folks that you take very little at face value and make sure that you know someone in whom you develop an interest and feel certain of that person's understanding and control of himself before you allow him to lay a finger on you or to have any serious emotional effect on you.

Another easily accessible approach are the scores of kinky want-ad sites available on the net and of telephone contact services and personal ads in local alternative newspapers in most large cities. All of the precautions that we mention above for the local social groups apply doubly to these venues, but we certainly do know people who have met partners in these ways with whom they have developed excellent, loving, and permanent relationships.

There are also several Internet-based mailing lists which welcome submissives with open arms, but most of these that we know about have the same drawbacks as the local social groups.

We never like to speak so darkly and pessimistically of the venues available for submissives to meet dominants easily, but that is the way things are. You may find in the long run that the best place to meet a dominant partner is in the supermarket or the laundromat--or perhaps through a submissive friend or her dominant once you develop those sorts of relationships.

We are aware of a large number of sadomasochists who consider themselves to be Wiccans.

While the question of where to meet dominants (or submissives) is one of the most common we get, the most common is probably the question of where to turn in time of confusion or trouble. This is a very difficult problem. There are a number of self-described "kink-friendly" psychologists and psychotherapists in this country--in fact, there's even a list of these folks available. It's very hard for us, however, to recommend the people on this list, since the publisher of the list makes no attempt to verify the bona fides of the people on it and since several people on the list who we do know of we think are pretty nuts. As we mentioned above, there are mailing lists on the net that purport to provide support and advice to submissive women in times of trouble and otherwise, but most of them, in our experience, are unreliable and worse than nothing.

We get an enormous amount of mail asking for help, advice, explanation, but, as you can imagine, our time is limited. We do try, however, to provide all the help we can in as timely a manner as is possible--we know that there is virtually no other place for many submissives to turn for reliable advice and support. If all else fails, Antoinette, try us (g). By all means, take the time to go through our Web site in detail; there's an enormous amount of good information there.

The D&S subculture is a tough place for submissive women, and many tragedies happen there because people go too fast, don't know themselves well enough, and don't take their responsibilities toward one another seriously. Despite all of that, however, many good people do meet one another, form lasting and loving power-exchange relationships, and live happily ever after. We wish you the best of luck, and, despite all of our shilly-shallying, we invite you to contact us if we can help.