What Submissives Looking for Dominants Typically Face

The following text excerpts are from email that J, our submissive friend who got those abysmal responses to her personal ad which are posted on the Wasteland page, has written to dominants who have responded to her personal ad. We've also included comments from J to her mentor about these dominants. We present what we consider to be the best of these writings here.

On Mixing Spirituality with Sadomasochism

One of the most common maladies we see in new or inexperienced dominants is an inability to feel good about their sadistic and controlling tendencies. Some dominants agonize about their "evil" feelings consciously and guiltily. While they remain unresolved, they make lousy dominants: they are likely to tell a submissive that she needs professional psychological help because of her "sick" desires. Others find some sort of magical system, an unrelated philosophy or way of thinking that they can nevertheless use to justify their desires to themselves. To such dominants, sadomasochism is much more a spiritual or social or political activity than it is sexual. In the letter below, J explains to one such dominant why she does not want to pursue a relationship with him.

"I've told you many times that I believe you really *are* a dominant and have the potential to be a very good one. Unfortunately--and I am offering this up as something I think you should think about, because it will save you years of grief and suffering if you do--I do not believe that you have even come close to resolving the inevitable inner conflicts that real dominants do eventually have to resolve.

"Essentially, you are a good person. You are a good person who likes torturing girls, who thoroughly craves power over the life of another human being. From my point of view, that isn't a bad thing at all. It is, however, something that has to be dealt with psychologically. The only appropriate way of dealing with it is simply to admit that this is the way you are and that there are females out there who would welcome that attention--and then go on with your life.

"My mentor is also a *nice person.* He's a nice person who enjoys power and inflicting all sorts of discomfort on females. He likes doing it because it is intrinsically pleasurable, and also because he likes the after-effect in the submissive. He enjoys seeing that intelligent creature, broken down, helpless, defeated, groveling at his feet. So do you. But because you cannot accept that this is simply the way you are, and that it is entirely unlike what is to be found in the nature of most human beings, you grasp as sociopolitical theories and spiritual ideologies.

"My friend, you will search forever for the *pure* submissive, and you will *never* find her. Submissives submit because they want to, because they need to, because it *does* something for them emotionally and psychologically and physically. They don't do it because it is something built into human nature (just their nature), or because it fulfills some spiritual need. The need isn't political, isn't philosophical, isn't spiritual at all. It is psychological and it is sexual, and it is *not* normal by the world's definitions.

"The difference between serious life-style dominants and submissives and the play-party people you so detest is not in the purity of their spiritual motivations. The difference is that life-style people have a genuine kink for power, and all of the activities of S&M are subservient to that desire for power or powerlessness, and they eroticize it. The dominant doesn't beat the living hell out of a submissive because that is the sociological order of the universe, or because clear-cut power relationships are politically desirable, or because it is his spiritual duty to do it. The submissive doesn't crave the feeling of her master's arm inside of her intestines because it's something spiritual. The submissive doesn't do the dishes, or scrub the floor, or obey every order because that is her spiritual nature. She is *not* ignoring her own needs in order to serve the needs of the dominant at all. She is fulfilling her need by serving her dominant.

"The damn thing is sexual, Master X, and you can jump up and down and insist otherwise all day long, and it will not alter the truth of it. You do what you do, and want to do what you want to do, because it is thrilling for you, because you get a high off of doing it, because there is a rush from it that makes you willing to walk on hot coals in order to be able to do that. The submissives, the real ones, do what they do because there is a rush in it, because it does things to them emotionally and physically, because it is the highest form of sexual expression there can be, the highest level of personal fulfillment there can be. *Everything* is sexual to a true dominant and a true submissive because every aspect of their lives reflects the power structure, and that power structure is the focal point of erotic fixation. The *kinky swinger* crowd, as my mentor calls them, and as you have come to hate them, have no such fixation. They are sensation freaks, in search of greater and greater sexual highs, but quite dedicated to expressing themselves in an entirely autonomous and independent manner.

"In order for you to find what you seek, you will have to get over your obsession with sociological, philosophical, political, religious justifications for what it is that you want. You want it because it is your *desire,* not because of some abstract thought process. Desire generates the compulsion, dedication, obsession with power, not any of that other stuff you are so fond of fretting and stewing about.

"It's all about personality and sexual fixations, Master X, not spirituality at all. There is no true dominant who is not a psychosexual dominant, and no true submissive who is not a psychosexual submissive. That is the motivation, that is the obsession, that is the fulfillment. If you want spiritual purity, seek out a good church, and leave the submissive population alone. None of this is about spirituality in any sense.

"Yesterday, I wrote my mentor a note telling him about several perfectly ordinary things that I haven't managed to get done. They all need to get done. They aren't *sexual* things. Applying for my father's life insurance isn't sexual in character. I just haven't been able to get them done. He told me that he would give me until Friday to get these things done, and if I hadn't done them by then, he'd take over, and I would be "sweetly obedient" and get them done under his direction. I melted inside. The mere wording of the statement was erotic for me. The idea of obeying him was erotic. If he took over and I did it all under his direction, I would be erotically stimulated the whole damn time I was doing all of these perfectly asexual things. That is the nature of the power fixation, not just for me, but from what I have seen, for *anybody* who has it in them to truly submit to another human being. That sexual charge they get from it oils the gears, makes it possible to accept it. You are simply deluded if you think it works some other way. It does not."

On the Horrible Responses Submissives Get to their Presonal Ads

In the excerpt below, J explains to a rather defensive dominant who disapproves of our Wasteland page why she responds the way she does to some of the jerks who write her and why it is important that examples of such correspondence be seen by other submissives.

"I am not offended by a short response to my ad. I am offended by a hateful, flippant, or posturing response to my ad. I get many of them. I get short responses that are not like that, too, and you don't see them on that site. Generally, followup correspondence is much more detailed, but there is simply no way that I will permit myself to be put into the untenable position of having to defend myself with a total stranger.

"One of the quotes on the [Wasteland] Web page was "Are you for real?" I responded simply, "Yes, I am." He never wrote back. He just wanted to insult someone. I had one correspondent you wrote to me and started off by telling me how paranoid he was because my internet address was ibm.net. He then followed that up by another paranoid frenzy because I have more than one Internet address. So do you. *That's* supposed to be suspicious? I do not find it a point in someone's favor if they assume authority they don't have, demand respect they have not earned, express paranoia without cause.

"Let's be realistic for a moment. If the idea of having a woman with two children doesn't appeal to you, don't answer the ad. That's simple enough. I don't hide the fact that I have children. I have had several *dominants* correspond with me, sometimes for weeks, and then been told, "Well, i don't like the fact you have kids, and I don't want them." Fine, they don't have to take them. They aren't going to take me either. As far as I'm concerned, they had a fat lot of nerve responding to my ad in the first place. I have many responses to my ad demanding an immediate response. My ad clearly states that I have a mentor controlling things. One fellow wrote me a short note demanding that I call him immediately. I referred him to my mentor. He wrote to my mentor demanding an explanation. My mentor told him to read the ad and talk to me for a while. He wrote back to my mentor, more hostile this time, and demanding that I move immediately to secure a position as his slave, without so much as telling me his name first! My mentor informed him that even if he was foolish enough to enter into this type of relationship based on that little familiarity with someone, I was not (he didn't mention that he wouldn't let me anyway ). The guy wrote back a threatening letter essentially offering to beat my mentor up. How dare he challenge what *He* wanted?

"I've had enough of these silly people, and calling someone out in e-mail is pretty damned silly. The note mentioned at the Web site from the guy who never learned to read or write? I wrote him back telling him that I would not tolerate this sort of silly behavior. He wrote back! Twice. He was surprised that I was offended. He told me that he was merely trying to demonstrate how *aggressive* he was. He demonstrated how stupid he is, and nothing else, but he was genuinely shocked that I didn't respond favorably to that.

"The 22-year-old boys, and there have been many of them, who write to tell me that they expect my complete subjugation to their every whim, and then, when asked, admit they've never had a d/s relationship, have no idea what the word *absolute* means, and often don't even have any direct life experience in controlling their own lives, let alone someone else's, are not people I am going to be fond of.

"My ad is very clear about what I want. Yes, what I want is very much to the point. Once I have committed, what I want can quickly become irrelevant. Only someone who is completely self-destructive would enter into an absolute relationship with someone who she does not know, who has expressed no willingness to get to know her, and who offers nothing in the way of fulfilling *her* needs. The time when a submissive *must* be concerned above all else with *her* needs is *before* she commits to someone. My mentor makes the remark that it is sadly the case that a submissive whose greatest desire in this world is to be little and helpless must first be big and strong or her life could be destroyed.

"I do not enjoy being demanding, but I have more than enough experience in what can go wrong not to be willing to submit to *anybody* who stomps his feet. I am not *weak* at all. I have no basic *need* to be treated badly, callously, thoughtlessly, unkindly, not by anyone. I will not roleplay. I will not *act* submissive when I am not submitting to anyone in real terms. I will not *accept* misbehavior in a dominant that I would not accept in a non-dominant. I know just exactly and precisely what I *need,* and I will find that, eventually."

On Sadomasochistic Relationships and Children

"The master *can* do anything, but that doesn't mean that he *should* be willing to do anything. I am not a slave now. Nobody owns me. I will insure that this situation [emotional abuse and abandonment of her children by a former master] is *never* repeated again. My children will *never* suffer because of my needs again. It simply will not be allowed to happen. Whoever becomes my master will start out by knowing that I have children, and he will convince both me and my mentor that he has the desire to be a parent to my children, that he has no will to harm my children, or me, and that this is a particular challenge that he feels he can take in stride. He will do that *before* any commitment is made by me."

On How Scene Players Often Ignore Reality in Preference for Make-Believe

J writes here to a sympathetic and intelligent dominant about how the preference of fantasy over reality, so common in on-line areas such as chat rooms and message boards, leads to individuals who are incapable of responding to a serious personal ad honestly or even of taking it at face value: since everyone "pretends" in the chat room or forum to be much more than they really are, since everyone plays a role, a genuine for-real submissive looking for an equally genuine dominant must also be pretending, and the words in her personal ad shouldn't be taken seriously.

"It's too bad that it made you so uneasy about the whole thing though. It is fairly common in the Scene environment for people to talk and talk and talk about what they do, and they really don't do very much at all. In Jon and Polly's interview on the IRC, Polly talks about listening to people talking about "anybody who is hit with a riding crop 50 times is going to bleed." She says that she has been struck by a crop in excess of 500 times on multiple occasions without even bruising, which is a physical thing that takes place in S&M that even I, with my limited experience, have personally observed. So you have to assume somebody is lying about what they do and what they know, because the statement just isn't true at all that 50 hits with a crop will necessarily cause bleeding.

"People in the Scene community feel very free to modify the truth (which is to say "lie a lot") about what they want, and what they are willing to do. They are playing a role, and when they come face to face with someone who wants something real, most often they decide that he or she is mentally ill. Too bad. It makes life rather difficult for the rest of us. My ad says I have children, but respondents ignore it as if I made it up. My ad says I am only willing to accept e-mail as an introduction to a real life relationship, but they ignore that too. My ad says that I want a control freak, but they ignore that. My ad says I'm a masochist, and they ignore that. My ad says that I have a mentor who controls my behavior, and they ignore that.

"The truth is that so much of what is seen in the Scene, and certainly in the cyberspace end of the scene is pure fiction, that I can't even really blame them for not taking anything I say seriously. Most of the people who post ads and respond to them aren't serious at all. They are simply playing a game. People who are playing games don't want reality, they want something that sort of looks and feels like reality. The reality scares the shit out of them."

Where are all the Dominants?
A Few Distressing Statistics

J writes here to her mentor in the Fall of 1996.

On the Mentality of "Dominants" Online

When you post a personal ad for months at a time, you begin to see certain patterns. Certain types of responses repeat, over and over. J describes one such "dominant" pattern in the text below. If you see the sort of analogy she talks about below in one of your correspondents, you are, without question, dealing with a completely clueless man.

"I apologize if I came across as hostile. What you are in no position to understand is just how many men I have had correspondence with who use a wide variety of inaccurate analogies, and unlike you, they have no idea that there really *is* a difference [between the analogy and the reality of S&M]. I know this because I've actually met one or two of them. They have an oddly politicized idea of what d/s is all about. Somewhere along the line the d/s world has attracted far more than its fair share of essentially vanilla men who are disenchanted with modern women, and who see in the bdsm community a group of women who they imagine are desirous of whatever it is they think they are offering. Basically, they think women are inferior creatures, and they really think of submissives as "old fashioned" girls. In short, there is a short circuit somewhere in their neural circuitry that makes it nearly impossible for them to understand the basic concept of erotic power exchange on any level at all. I had one of them tell me that he didn't think that d/s had anything to do with sex! Well, for him it obviously doesn't, but that isn't quite true for most of the more serious practitioners of the art. The corporate analogy is a very common one in this group, as are military and police analogies. I tend to become more than a little defensive when I see it, and if I have misjudged you based on my prior negative experiences, I apologize for it."

On the Role of A Mentor In a Search for a Dominant

Many of the people who initially respond to J's personal ad notice what she says about her mentor and are extremely suspicious about it. They want to know, in detail, exactly what role this individual plays in her life and why he is controlling this part of her behavior. They suspect him of being of conventional sexuality and ignorant of power exchange. They suspect him of trying to take her for himself and of thwarting them. The text below should help to dispel some of this confusion by explaining the actual--as opposed to imagined--role J's mentor plays in her life. Most dominants also want to know why her mentor isn't already her master. The simple (and, one would think, obvious) answer to that is that J's mentor had long ago found what he has been looking for all of his life, the right submissive for him, and he is completely satisfied with her. We follow this description of her mentor's role in an email discussion she had with a rather paranoid person who decided that both J and her mentor are actually looking for a meal ticket rather than for a dominant for her.

"I can be fooled, but my mentor can't. He's spent too many years being a dominant himself (really since he was a young child) and counseling dominants to be susceptible of that kind of deception. Besides, he doesn't have my *needs* driving his decisions for me. I will not abandon correspondence because I become hysterical and frightened of someone unless I can justify it based on something other than my former bad experiences and gut feelings. He won't let me.

"We had an incident about that just this last week. A dominant who has been writing, and who pleases my mentor quite a lot, and me some of the time, has been saying things that trip my *hot buttons.* I was ready to never talk to him again. I got hysterical about it. It didn't matter. It isn't my decision. I was told to *cool my jets.* I had a 48-hour-long *freak out* during which I refused to even speak to my mentor, but there *is* a power exchange there, and I *did* calm down, and I *know* that I need the control and protection he provides to me, not to mention the understanding and compassion, so I called him and it was all worked out very quietly and definitively. Was I punished for *acting out?* Well, I expected to be, but no, I wasn't. My mentor makes a distinction between panic and defiance. He does not *punish* fear. He would have punished defiance.

"I am not allowed to meet with, call on the telephone, scene with, or maintain any contact with any *dominant* without his direct involvement. I will not commit without his permission. If I found that I was actually falling *in love* with someone, and he said `that's it, this fellow is out because I say so,' that would be the end of it. After over a year of being my mentor, my mentor knows just about everything there is to know about me. He knows about my sexual experiences, in detail. He knows my problems. He knows my childhood. He knows me better than I know me. All of this was true *prior* to his deciding that he would be willing to control me until I have a master.

"As far as my mentor is concerned, I don't have any problems that could not be dealt with best by having a master of my own, and his control, however good it may be, and however necessary it is at this time, is not what I really need. He has a very definite mental picture of the sort of person I must have in order to be happy and contented in my submission. While he *cares* about how I *feel* about things, what I feel doesn't have any decision-making power. He decides, not me.

"There are probably thousands of very good dominants out there, but that doesn't make all of them right for *me,* or me for *them.* I am far from inconsistent in my submissive needs. I have very limited control over who owns me in the final analysis. My mentor has that ultimate power. He sees me as a traumatized child, and he is looking for someone else who will see me and respond to me in that same way. He wants me to have someone who will accept me as I am, provide the discipline and control I need, provide the pain and humiliation that my masochistic little nature requires, and who will also provide me with a safe environment in which I can be myself. He wants someone who will *put me his pocket and keep me there* all safe and sound from the outside world.

"He is looking for someone who will never abuse my children. He is looking for a nice kinky perverted controlling *daddy* for me. ... Of course, that doesn't preclude working at all. My mentor's slave works, and always has. He tells her what she can or cannot do, which [work] she can or cannot take, and he gets all the money and controls how it is used. He indulges her at times. Does one not occasionally indulge a loved child? [Eds Note: Change "occasionally" to "often."] Of course, one does. Buying a child a special treat, or letting her have something she wants badly, does not indicate a lack of control. As long as it's *his* decision to do it, not *hers.*"

Here is the conversation J had with the confused and suspicious dominant who had read the "Wasteland" page on this site and then somehow concluded that she and her mentor are looking for a sugardaddy to support them both. Equally common paranoid responses are to imagine the submissive doesn't exist, the mentor doesn't exist, or even that they both do not exist. See another submissive's Laughing Gallery for some of the insane rantings and imaginings about the mentor-mentee relationship entertained by conventional men who, despite all their big words and posturing, are totally clueless when it comes to grasping real power exchange. J's "dominant" (heh) correspondent's remarks are in quotation marks.

"I am not particularly comfortable about discussing more intimate details until I have a much better feel for what you want and who you are."

I think that my ad is pretty clear about what it is that I am, and what it is that I am looking for, and I would recommend you read it more carefully.

As for "who" I am, you know as much as I am willing to provide to an absolute stranger based on four, no five now, vague e-mails.

"I've already told you somewhat of what I am and I've also told you somewhat of what I want."

No, you have not done anything of the sort. You have told me your career choice and general location. You have told me that you always wanted a full-time d/s relationship, but have provided me with nothing that would indicate that you understand what that involves. You admit to never having had such a relationship, and having only done "scenes" with former partners. That is hardly enough for me to assess your abilities in a real life, non-role-playing environment. You offer nothing specific about what you want or need at all.

"I assume you let your mentor read all this and you both put a measuring stick to this so to speak."

That is correct.

"I'm wondering if you both can tell a sincere guy from a bogus guy."

I don't have to do that. He has to do that.

As I have already said:

My mentor is a lifestyle dominant with over 30 years of experience. He counsels dominants, submissives, and couples. He is not my master, nor is he interested in recruiting me as a slave. He does, however, control my behavior as far as finding a master is concerned.

I think his years as a peer counselor, and his years of experience at successful long-term d/s relationships, and his recognized expertise in the bdsm community argue in favor of his abilities.

"I really think a phone call could sure save both you and me a lot of time."

I am not interested in saving time. I am interested in doing it right.

"I will not do anything that would ruin my Engineering career that I've worked hard for."

I haven't seen any indication that you've been taking any chances at ruining your career or anything else for that matter.

"By the way what do you and your mentor do for a living?"

Go back to the Web sites I referred you to, and you can find biographical data on my mentor. At least as much as he is willing to provide for you.

"Does your mentor also control you as far as raising your children?"

When he feels that is necessary for my stability, yes.

"See J, I run into premade families all the time and I find that all they really want is to be bailed out of their situation."

You really don't sound like someone who has the slightest interest in assuming the responsibility for real human beings in a real life ownership sense at all. You want benefits, but worry about costs. Most dominants see the costs as just part of what has to be paid, and they also see the difficulties as just one more challenge to their ability to fix stuff, which they enjoy quite a lot, btw.

"Just like you, I want to know what's in it for me?"

If you are sufficiently unfamiliar with the concept of a real life master-slave relationship to be able to ask that question after *reading* what was contained on those two Web sites, you very likely wouldn't appreciate it anyway.

"I think if you want to know more about myself and what I want, then start asking me a lot of questions. I'll answer."

I have, and you've refused so far. In fact, this particular note is almost paranoic in its focus. I have no further questions to ask you.