Someone dropped me a link to this video advertising Wodka Vodka. It’s an amusing commercial, featuring a woman getting jobs done thanks to a quick internet ad and a succession of helpful horny slaves.
However, it particularly caught my eye because of a post I recently stumbled across from San Francisco’s Vinyl Queen. In it she lists the efforts she goes to in order to get a client to actually show up at her play space. The vodka commercial is entertainingly unrealistic, but it wasn’t until I read her post that I realized the extent of the gulf that exists in professional BDSM between advertising and closing the deal. For a lot of her new clients…
These men ultimately hate the fact they can’t rid themselves of this part of their psyche, so it comes out sideways in their dealings with the ONE person who can offer them a brief respite from their desire to submit/serve/be tortured—you get the picture. So instead of my calendar booking up like a medical office, it fills up in a manner unique to this profession. Enter: The Hand Holdee
Despite my website being very detailed and clear about my interests and limits, the Hand Holdee loses all semblance of reading comprehension and memory. It’s like he WANTS me repeat what he KNOWS is on the computer screen in front of him. He is so conflicted internally that he has to hear the words he wants come out of my mouth so he will feel more secure in the days/weeks/or months leading up to our time together.
So for a pro-domme advertising and marketing is only a starting point. Ironically enough, and to tie it all back to the starting point of the post, for vodka marketing is pretty much the first, last and only point that matters. The basic product is interchangeable, varying only slightly depending what filtering is done and what water is added. So, as this fascinating article describes, how you market it is key. The Wodka of the kinky commercial is actually trying a new approach in that respect.
“These men ultimately hate the fact they can’t rid themselves of this part of their psyche, so it comes out sideways in their dealings with the ONE person who can offer them a brief respite from their desire to submit/serve/be tortured”
Acutely observed, as one would expect from someone with her level of experience of male sexuality in all its conflicted complexity.
What’s lacking is any theoretical explanation.
I’ll offer a personal view based on my experience as a progressive and fellow-traveller of the feminist movement. Feel free to shoot me down.
Male sexuality and ‘masculine’ identity are social constructs grounded in a socio-economic reality and a culture that are still overwhelmingly patriarchal.
As far as sexuality goes, this boils down to the myth of the omnipotent phallus. In sex, men are powerful, active penetrators and women are weak, passive recipients. It’s ludicrous of course, but it’s still deeply ingrained in all of us. Any sign of intimacy, or helplessness, or dependence in men threatens this myth, and with it, acquired male sexual identity.
Some men sense this and try to rid themselves of the emotional amputation that results from it by actively seeking helplessness or pain. In terms of sexuality, now that being gay is not the taboo that it once was, male submission is the final frontier, where some of us choose to boldly go.
But the residue of patrarchal toxicity remains.
Thus many men’s experience of this level of helpless dependency and vulnerability, even if deeply desired, leads them straight into a terrifying head-on collision with the myth of phallic omnipotence – both in its psychological and its physical manifestations.
In the light of this, it’s unsurprising how many men seek, indeed experience a profound need to be dominated, but that this is still for the most part the love that dare not speak its name.
I’m most decidedly not an expert on this area. So speak with no authority. However, I’m not sure I necessarily agree here.
You seem to position male submission as a reaction to the standard definition of male sexual identity. Something actively sought after as a taboo and choice. That seems odd to me.
Firstly, how would you explain female submission? My observations are that female submissives seek much the same kind of dynamics and activities as male ones. Clearly that’s not a reaction to male sexual identity. It’s possible that two similar behaviors result from completely different sources, but that seems a less than satisfying explanation (Occam’s razor and all that).
Secondly, what about the early age that kinky and submissive tendencies often manifest themselves? I can trace my first excitement at the idea of control and restraint to around the age of 5 or 6. It’s possible that I was already reacting to the patriarchy and the standard models of male sexual identity, but I think it unlikely. I suspect it was either built into me from birth or learned via interactions I had as a child that are far too subtle and obfuscated to be able to trace clearly.
I’m not saying the factors you list don’t shape how male submission is viewed. Just that I don’t see them as causal.
In the case of seeing a pro-domme (which triggered this), I think there are a lot of factors at play which can result in the kind of strange behavior described. Most people are not used to explaining their sexual fantasies to strangers. That creates stress. Seeing a sex worker is frowned on socially, which means more stress. It also has legal implications, the risk of which these guys are probably ill-equipped to assess. And if you know your marriage and career is on the line if you’re found out, that might also create irrationally assessment of risk. I can also imagine if you’ve been dwelling on a particular fantasy for years and have finally plucked up the courage to act it out, the urge to ‘get it right’ and make the risk worthwhile could be overwhelming. I suspect most of VQ’s first time clients are not looking past that first session. That’s all that exists for them when contacting her.
None of this is saying that there isn’t a problem with male submission in culture. It’s largely invisible. And when it does surface it’s either treated as weakness, a joke, or stress relief for powerful men. There’s no real place for it outside these stereotypes and that undoubtedly leads men to treat it as a damaged part of themselves. But I’m not sure I’d connect the dots around that quite as you have.
-paltego
Hi paltego,
Thanks for your thoughtful response – just what I was looking for.
First up, I don’t consider myself an expert. In the area of psycho-sexual theory I’m largely self-taught.
You wrote: Firstly, how would you explain female submission?
That’s a very good question. To put this in context I’d say that the young child’s initial search for pleasure is completely undifferentiated. That is, babies are what Freud calls ‘polymorphously perverse’ – they take pleasure in any which way they can, whether they are m or f.
Then, in the long period of development that goes from 0 to adolescence and beyond, they acquire socially-prescribed notions of what is and is not admissible in the realm of eros. You can think of it as a long road with checkpoints manned by thought police.
A couple of points to bear in mind here. Not all the prescribed behaviours are mutually consistent. Men learn to be phallocrats, i.e. to believe in the overriding authority of heterosexual sex involving an erect penis inside a vagina, and the virtue of the ‘active’, ‘powerful’, penetrative’ male compared with the passive, submissive, receptive female. Later, they learn that there are powerful social sanctions against forced entry (although some do not).
The realm of the psycho-sexual is the realm of contradiction and paradox par excellence. Females obviously learn a different set of assumptions based on the all-too-obvious anatomical differences between them and males, and the dialectic that flows from them.
Another point to bear in mind is that, due to the associative power of the brain with its myriad neural interconnections, virtually any object or any behaviour can become eroticised. I never cease to be astonished by the diversity of fetish objects and BDSM behaviours.
So it’s easy for women to eroticise submission, and for men to eroticise domination. And there’s a lot of BDSM and D/s activity that simply re-enacts tropes that are grounded in traditional patriarchally-sanctioned roles. But it’s also the case that modern women, particularly modern feminists, feel conflicted.
Thus one feminist writer I came upon felt it necessary to say:
“…women need not feel guilty about the degree of infantilization and strangely perverse, politically incorrect, often sadomasochistic fantasies which turn us on…” Quite so.
You talk about the early age, say 5 or 6, at which kinky tendencies manifest themselves, and I agree. There’s abundant evidence that this is the case. But it would be wrong to ignore the enormous amount that has gone into the development of an individual’s sexuality, including all sorts of tendencies, preferences, fetishes, conflicts, and bizarre ways of resolving those conflicts, between birth and 6 years, even if these remain latent until adolescence.
I agree that this development is enormously complex and obscure, and that it’s frequently difficult to unravel the causal connections in particular individuals. But in the case of men, when you look at groups, and start asking questions, you frequently come across themes (or should it be memes?) that suggest a deep sense of mental distress caused by the war of attrition that men are obliged to wage against themselves in order to acquire the standard phallocratic sexual identity.
Quite apart from submission, it’s difficult (for me at least) to understand cuckolding and forced feminisation, unless one assumes that some kind of repudiation of phallocratic taboos is involved.
As for the practical hesitations of men who are considering employing the services of a pro-domme – I have no experience of this. It has never occurred to me to go down that route, although I would never stand in judgement over those that do. But I can understand the multiple anxieties that such a recourse might generate.
I think it’s hard to get deep into these type of discussions without data. The engineer in me wants to jump up and down and say ‘Prove it!’ Which of course is difficult verging on the impossible. But anecdotal only gets you so far and without a way to test a theory it remains no better or worse than any other theory.
Having said that, I will venture a little further down the discussion…
You seem to be positioning male submission arising from a reaction where female submission arises from an acceptance. That seems odd to me. I recognize that as a correlation to society, but it seems contradictory to position the same result arising from two opposing inputs. Or at least more of a complex rationale than seems necessary.
Personally, I believe that the things that influence development are likely to be subtle and incredibly hard to isolate. As adults we look for clear causal relationships and, seeing a patriarchal society with a phallic focus, take that as our driver. I’d suspect it’s things like the short sundress a favorite aunt wore on a summers day, a childs insecurity after being lost at a fair, throw away comments from a mother about young girls, the early social groups he or she mixes with and how they’re supervised, etc. etc.
I thinking why someone is kinky is like asking why they’re extroverts or introverts. Or why they’re got a short temper. Or why they’re prone to mood swings. Or why they like women with big breasts. There’s probably some collection of reasons deep in their past, as well as a genetic disposition, but it’s going to be impossible to tease out what it is. It’s different for each person and it’s impossible to run controlled experiments.
I will agree that (however you get there) male submission is then twisted and reflected by the cultural standards of today, which is not at all aligned with it. And that it causes a great deal of mental distress for some men. But that seems to be an issue of compatibility rather than causality, which is what I took from your first comment.
When it comes to things like forced feminization and cuckolding, I think it’s important to be very specific about the specific dynamic in question. For those activities in particular I think motivations can vary significantly, so you need to sub-set before looking at the underlying issues.
-paltego
It is always nice to get credit 😀
Good article you build around the link, though.
Keep it up.