L&R July 2017 Magazine

“Yup,” she said. “You’re submissive.”
That was the moment that tilted my axis. Suddenly I got it (well maybe not suddenly
so much as slowly over the next several years). Submissiveness has nothing to do
with weakness, with immaturity, with neediness, with incompleteness as an adult. It
does not mean that you cannot lead, or that you’re indecisive. It does not mean that
you’re letting your fellow feminists down. And it does not—and this is critical—it does
not mean that you are forfeiting your own happiness for the sake of everyone else’s. It
is not martyrdom, or self-effacement. It is not disappearing into the shadows, or
making yourself and your needs irrelevant. Rather it springs from joy—joy derived
from the knowledge that you have made someone else’s need and desire paramount,
given them pleasure and happiness, because you can—because you have the
strength, and the wholeness, and the abundance of heart and sensitivity that attunes
you to another’s need and fills you with delight in meeting it. At its best, it offers a kind
of peace and serenity, even euphoria, that is most easily accessed when the
submissive doesn’t need to second-guess the desires of her companion, because the
companion has made them clear. Enter the Dominant.
I must interrupt this story to tell you a little paradoxical secret—which is that these
things are also basically true of a Dominant. They just get there really differently. To
grossly over-simplify, a Dominant leads his submissive to their mutual joy. A
submissive follows her dominant there. Some other time I’ll flesh that out. But for
now…
So. I was submissive, apparently. Now all I had to do was forgive myself for that,
which took me a few more years. The things I say above are true, and seem clear to
me now. But at the time, every one of them seemed a break with everything I had
learned as a child, and as a young self-actualising adult who was going to make her
own way in the world. I felt, for a while, that I was betraying every ideal I’d held dear.
After all those years of self-development, I was going to allow myself to disappear into
a man’s control, because it felt good. I felt like a traitor with a terrible, shameful secret,
for a long time.
I’m grateful to the Dominant friend who, upon noting my internal struggle, said, “Forget
all that noise in your head—how do you feel when you submit?” Believe it or not, for
all my liberation, that question had not occurred to me. I knew what people expected
of me, what society expected, what feminism and my mother expected. I knew what
battles I was supposed to continue to wage, and what freedoms to fight for. But it
hadn’t occurred to me that what felt good, and natural, and peaceful and freeing might
also be relevant. Submission felt like a liberation. It quieted my endlessly noisy brain.
What sense could I make of that?