The Inner Dynamics of Scenes - Dominance and submission

Dominance and submission (Ds) are parts of everyday life. When we play with it in fetish we are distilling the natural dynamics of power, status and authority - subverting these normally hidden forces by making them conscious and acknowledging and intensifying the pleasure they give us.

Choosing romance

Romantic stories, songs and poetry define love as the ultimate mutual gift of self. 'Falling in love' gives the impression you are beyond making choices. The greater the surrender the more intense and real the love. So it seems that in this idea of love it is similar to twenty four hours, seven days a week (24/7) 'sub-space' - that state of mind/body a sub gets into during intense submission.

Yet we spend an amazing amount of time imagining, and therefore setting ourselves up for, this emotional ride; so there is choice but without us being fully aware of the process. Ds relationships play out this fantasy to the extreme but in a different way. The romance of Ds is that we negotiate a free and informed choice (thus undermining the fantasy of love as out of control). Yet we talk about people who are naturally 'sub' or 'Dom' and people who are repelled by one or other role for themselves, yet love their partners in it. Where is the choice?

Power on one level is about choice both personally and socially. The limitations on the effects of your choices measure the amount of power you have. You make choices for yourself and they influence others. In the right situations you apparently make them for others and others make them for you. But choice is limited by your status, body, self-awareness, knowledge, values, history, relationships, and goals. In turn it affects all of these.

Status and authority

Status and Authority are interrelated, being about social position and central to the way your choices affect others. Authority is the formalisation of Status. It tries to apply choice to it. But Status is more than the external choices you make, it is the way you feel about yourself and your situation. It is how these feelings are communicated through you and what others feel about the messages they are receiving and giving on this emotional level. For many, personal power is your capacity to make choices about these things.

Status is the dimension of communication and relationships that is relative to social positioning; it can be higher or lower but in daily life is usually continually changing. Authority tries to capture Status and marry it to Power, stabilising it through ritual - a process that limits, allocates, measures and legitimates them.

Higher or lower Status is not necessarily conscious. You are not always aware of how influential you are, how your choices are affecting your relationships and how others perceive your importance. A rock star can commit suicide because they do not feel about themselves what everyone else sees. A manager can have formal Authority, apparent higher Status, and feel very self-important yet everything they do is organised by their personal assistant, who has apparent lower Status. Who has the power?

Power plays

In Ds you decide to play out the crystallised pure elements of the emotional power dynamics that in everyday life are mixed up together. So the Dom has the apparent power, the right to decide what will happen within the games. The sub is the receiver of their gifts, carrying out the orders. The source of both their pleasures is suspending disbelief by wilfully forgetting the inherent limitations.

Some of this is agreed to consciously by negotiating differences in the unacceptability of different activities. Other limits go unacknowledged. For instance the fact that the game is about pleasure means certain kinds of attention will be paid to each other.

In other relationships the Dominance and submission is secondary to the goal and is continuous negotiated; in erotic Ds the Dominance and submission is the goal and so becomes the focus. The roles are clearly drawn and as such they can be refined, exposing their inner workings.

So we hear the saying in BDSM that “the sub has the real power” regardless of how it appears. The Dom is allowed to take charge because the sub gives them the Authority to do so. However there are other subtler dynamics that continue through the play after the roles are decided.

Communicating your desires

The fantasy is the Dom as the artist and the sub as the canvas while emotions are the paint and the activities are the brushes. Whatever the Dom decides has to go through the communication process in order for the sub to get it. The activities can be anything ranging from everyday things like washing the dishes and vanilla sex through to hardcore fetish.

But every artist has to understand their medium. This is where the metaphor breaks down a bit, because the Dom is not separate from their medium and artwork - the scene relationship is the real creation. The sub and Dom share limitations that arise out of who they are, what they want, how they feel about themselves, their knowledge, what they are capable of and their feelings for each other. How these relate to each other is the communication process and can add or subtract from it. In Ds, like any personal relationship, they must be understood if the relationship is to achieve its possibilities.

Words aren't enough

The most overt problems are the limitations of words. Then there is the effect of the nonverbal. This is where it gets interesting because it is harder to talk about the presence that you feel, that is shared, in empathy. It is the means in everyday life through which status, trust and chemistry are communicated. It is how your thoughts and feelings get across to others even when you are trying to hide them. People still pick up something - not always the details - just that you are upset in some way. The better you understand and trust yourself and this non-verbal communication the deeper and more intense the play.

Power, Status and Authority underlie every communication and relationship. A lot of people do not like to think that it has a role in love and sex. They want the romance of love as natural chemistry shared, a flow from love at first site to lifetime commitment. This is part of Ds too. It is part of how you choose your partners whatever role you want. The difference is that where the mainstream fantasy of love wants to hide the feeling and role of power and status, in Ds we focus on it. (CM)