Noah -> RE: the femine whiles problem (12/23/2005 4:27:53 PM)
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ORIGINAL: DeepWaters However if your Dominant truely cares for you above his own needs, then he will discipline you, and hold constant his level of discipline no matter how you beg and plead... For some of us controling your behaviour and molding you into the perfect vessel for our use and an extension of our will is far more important than getting our rocks off. Am I missing something? This just sounds incoherent to me. The prior sentence seems to say (correct me if I've misread) that it is a good thing for a dominant to put his needs behind those of the submissive. Isn't "putting the other's need before my own" a pretty good generic definition of what submission to a lot of people? How hard is it to turn this over and see a manipulative submissive getting over on a chump dom, in the model you flesh out in the OP? Imagine a sub with an agenda of arranging for herself an an external source of discipline so that she can remain forever an emotional child subject to external control rather than grow past and transcend the forces and events which may have lead to her manipulative tendencies? She gets to have a life that looks from the outside like the life of a mature, whole person, without taking responsibility. Is here any worthwhile notion of human maturity which doesn't incorporate responsibilty somewhere close to its center? This sub only has to steer a course between punishments without ever having to confront her actions or possible actions and their real-world results. This manipulative sub has pulled off her crowning manipulation the day she gets this dom to relieve her of her responsibility for herself, in my view. And neither sub nor dom has learned anything about life; maybe some things about techniques of manipulation and punishment, but nothing of overarching value. This looks to me like Dominant as enabler of immaturity and very much opposed to any notion of assisting another human being in their journey toward genuine growth and fulfillment of personal potential. And in the second quoted sentence we get this stuff about molding a perfect vessel for our use, an extension of our will... which is more important than getting our rocks off. So first of all isn't this vessel we're molding designed to get our rocks off sexually and in terms of power dynamic and in any other way we choose? If it isn't then in what sense is it the perfect vessel for our use? So I'm very confused by this original post, not that I don't get confused a lot. The thread generally seems to be revealing a lot of either/or thinking, my response so far included. But there are other ways to think. Some people are highly manipulative. Some of these are women. If one of them is going around trying her damndest to manipulate everything with three legs, and them whining and moving on when she succeeds at the thing she is trying so hard to do, well can't we all see that the world will keep giving her exactly what she is demanding of it? I think she will find what she's actively looking for--ways to remain manipulative, first of all, plus an unending string of disappointing relationships--rather than what she may be giving lip service to. If what you want is a computer program that executes elegantly and economically then you shouldn't pick up a hammer and nails to build it. If what you want is light, flaky pie crust, then you shouldn't reach for a bag of fertilizer and a rototiller. If what you want is a relationship that isn't one more instance of you manipulating your own way into ultimate unhappiness, shouldn't you set down the tools of manipulation and pick up the tools of openness and communication and genuine surrender? I'd like to share an additional opinion here. I think it is crap to suggest this firm and uniform discipline at all times stuff. First of all it is clearly based on rudimentary notions of behavioral psychology. Behavioral psychology was abandoned a long time ago by the people who invented it when they saw, in the results of rigorous scienbtific experiments, that it didn't tell the story of human behavior in the way they had hoped it would. So here is an approach based upon a notoriously failed theory. As if that isn't bad enough, this approach doens't even employ what knowledge was gained in the behavioral research. Behaviorism isn't utterly worthless of course. You can temporarily derive gross behaviors with its techniques. In lower animals the behaviors can be made fairly durable, even. You can teach a pigeon to peck here rather than there by behavioral techniques, teach rats to speed through mazes, but research shows that far better results obtain--in terms of producing durable behavior changes--by not being uniform with reinforcements. Irrregular schedules produce desired behaviors almost as fast and the behaviors produced this way are far more resistant to being extinguished when compared to behaviors produced in response to rigorous reinforcement schedules. If you have to crack some whip each and every time your subbie steps out of line, haven't you been trained and manipulated to precisely the same depth and degree as your collared subject? I see two beings chained to a reinforement schedule and not a whiff of liberation anywhere in the picture for either one of them. But people aren't pigeons or rats. Behavioral theory doesn't explain nor allow reliable, effective manipulation of complex human behaviors. If you and she share some kind of rat fetish and she is willing to pretend to be subhuman and you are satisfied with subhuman-level responses, well rock on. How's this for an outlook, a way of describing things based on which a person can try to proceed and then see how things go: People really are responsible for their behaviors. It is how the world is, like rainy days and gravity it just comes with the territory. Pretending that you can be ultimately responsible for your sub's behavior, or share ultimate responsiilty with her dead father, under this view is like pretending that it won't rain or that half the time the rain will go up and make things dryer o the ground. It just isn't that way. I mean really, if you and her father are the engines of her behavior, and you are of the same species as she then mustn't your father and someone else be the engines of your behavior? Or do we live in a universe where the innie of the species is in no sense a moral agent--she bears no responsibilty for her behaviors--but is only a pawn in the games of the outies?
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