This post has been a long time coming.
Everyone is allowed to have limits. Even if they’re submissive. Even if they’re submissive women.
Everyone needs to respect other people’s limits. Even if they’re dominant. Even if they’re dominant men.
In fact, I think submissives need to be particularly aware of our limits, and dominants need to be particularly careful of them. Before we’re anything else, we are full and vital human beings with desires and needs of our own. The most basic need: to be treated with respect. A dominant who doesn’t respect his or her submissive, no matter what kind of pain, punishment, or humiliation the dominant is doling out, is no longer domming. They’re abusing.
Submissives are also allowed to have desires, and we deserve to have partners who attempt to fulfill those desires as much as anyone else does. Don’t call my submissiveness, my relationship, or my love for my partner into question simply because I say there are things I would not do, or because I have needs of my own which I am not willing to ignore. I am not a blowup doll. Blowup dolls can’t submit.
Wonderfully put Ms. Elodie. Respect is deserved by all, whether you’re submissive or dominant.
Indeed. Something like this shows a lack of respect I can’t countenance.
“Many men seem to be confused on the issue of female domination …. He gives, she takes. That is what female domination is about.”
“My current slave …. was a spineless wimp with no ego and was willing to do anything to earn a place at my feet.”
The physically stronger dominant, I think, needs to be even more careful than other dominants, and that tends to be the man.
I’m curious about your use of the “even if they’re submissive women”, “even if they’re dominant men” here. My impression has been that those categories get extra social pressure not because women are expected to submit, but from the opposite direction, because as feminists they are expected not to, and dominant men are seen as embodying the patriarchy. Has your experience been different?
I think that post you linked may be written more as erotica than as absolute truth. K often says (and I want him to say) things like, “what you want doesn’t matter, you exist for my pleasure,” but we both know these things are completely untrue. It’s deep play where the facts are contrary to the words, and where the actions would seem to be contrary to the feelings. While there’s a layer in which it feels real, we both know it’s make-believe. We play the roles that give us the most fulfillment and pleasure, and the roles go deep, but they are roles.
Submissive women get it from both sides. We get told we’re naturally submissive all the time, even more often than we get told by submitting we’re bowing to internalized misogyny and the patriarchy. (At least in my experience.) I think every dominant woman has tales of men trying to tell her she just hasn’t found the right man to submit to.
People like to tell women what our sexuality really is or should be constantly — it’s a barrage that begins early (earlier all the time, it seems), and doesn’t stop until we’re dead. The messages we get are contradictory in every possible way. Blocking those messages out is difficult and exhausting. Most of them are the background noise of our culture, but we also get told directly and personally (usually, but not always, by men) that we are wrong about our expressions of sexuality or what we believe about our own sexuality. “Kinky” or not, we all face people who don’t respect our needs and limits.