CaringandReal
Posts: 1397
Joined: 2/15/2008
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Ok, here's my take on it.
One is a psycho-sexual orientation and also--secondarily I think--a role; the other is strictly a role or a job. The first is primarily defined by how you feel inside: your tastes, your personality, your emotional makeup, although later it can come to mean your relationship to your partner. The second is defined strictly by the relationship you're in and not at all by inner makeup. You're a slave if you are in a relationship in which you are completely owned property with no rights or control except those given to you by your owner, rights which can be taken away at his or her whim. Until that point is reached, you are not a slave, not matter how strongly you want to be a slave. An unowned person is not a slave, because you can't have a slave without an owner. They may be a former slave. But that is not the same as currently being a slave.
Some people want to experience slavery and some don't. Some will experience it and some will not. It's the experience, not their desire, that defines whether they are a slave or not. I'm not saying their desires for powerlessness aren't deep and strong. I'm just saying you cannot be a slave until you have an owner.
And yeah, there's a great deal of confusion over this, which is why the talks about the distinction never end. Submissive can be used to refer to your emotional makeup and to a role as well. So there's a tendency to think slave is the same way. But being owned is central to the definition of being a slave...and you can't be owned by empty air.
If being a slave hadn't become this silly bdsm "status symbol" we wouldn't have half this amount of confusion, because nobody would care if they weren't a slave, nobody would be trying to qualify themselves as a slave. The trouble is, a lot of people do care, because it's seen by many, maybe particularly by the dominants they talk to, as better or more intense or more favored than the role of a submissive. So subs find themselves wanting to call themselves slaves even if it's categorically impossible due to their not having masters.
While I'm here rambling, I think I'll add that there's a lot of romance involved in idea of being a slave. It sounds like this special wonderful exaulted attention-rich role, in which you are at the center of it all. And maybe some couples who call themselves master-and-slave do romanticize the roles that way. But it isn't necessarily that way. Sometimes being a slave means that if there are other non-slaves (vanilla and or submissive) around, your needs and desires will come last. You're the slave, it's your job to accept whatever you're handed out, after all, whereas it is not the job of people with other roles to do so. You are also often held to much harsher standards of behavior and punished more severely if you do not live up to those standards or perform your duties satisfactorily or do any of the emotional futzing around/gaming that a vanilla or even a sub partner can get away with. You're there solely to do your master's or mistress's will, and the better you are at doing their will, the more that will be demanded from you.
If you want to be a slave it really helps to have a big masochistic streak. It becomes one of your comforts. Some slavery position are easy, due to the fact that the dominant wants to take care of you and make you extremely happy all the time; masters who are also daddies are often like this. But many master are not that way. It not an easy thing, having your desires thwarted at every turn, but that's often what an experienced prospective non-coddling master will do to you, to test your mettle, to see how good you are at obeying, to see how much you can bear (not just of work or orders, but also of insult and injury), how well you bear it (i.e. do you complain a lot or get passive-agressive or try to intellectualize/rationalize your way out of something difficult or unhappy?). They want to see how much you can or will suffer for them, as often that's part of the job description, given the often sadistic natures of many dominants who want to own another human being. A slave is a big investment in time and energy, and prospective owners who know what they are doing don't want one who doesn't understand his/her role and place and won't give them something significantly worth having in exchange. That something worth having is absolute obedience or as close to it as a human can get. And yes, absolute obedience sounds nice, terribly romantic in fact, on paper (or in pixels). But it reality it can mean a great deal of pain, much of which you may have to learn to deal with or deal with and process on your own, if your owner is not the coddling type. There are great many rewards to being a slave, in my opinion. But they are often not the ones people without experience in this role imagine that they are.
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"A friend who bleeds is better" --placebo
"How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home." --thomas harris
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RE: Slave VS. Submissive - 
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