CaringandReal
Posts: 1397
Joined: 2/15/2008
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quote:
ORIGINAL: anniezz338
"So, what is submission to me? To me, submission is a desire to be special or significant. My earliest fantasies, and they were when I was very young, always involved being somehow chosen and desired."
My first thought was that really sounds more human than submissive. Would the need for approval and attention be submissive traits or just a person being needy?
What do you guys think? Just pondering.....
I think submissives on average, are more narascissitic than most people. This may be more true of women then of men, due to the different ways in which we are raised, but I am not sure about that. Not enough assoication with male submissives, alas! When this narcissism remains the standard variety, it is more human than anything else. But if a submissive person follows it to its roots, she may see that it's not just that she just has "..a desire to be special or significant." Typically, a submissive person has a desire to be special or significant to an authority figure whom she, at minimum, admires. Further, fantasies about being somehow chosen or desired are very common among submissive women (again, I can't speak for men, I just don't know), but I see/experience such fantasies as quite frequently desires for objectification, a desire to be seen and treated as a more or less passive physical object that is acquired and used, and, of course, one that has great worth. I think many submissives perfer not to be the actor, the one who picks and chooses, but perfer the role of the acted upon, someone that is plucked up because she stands out in a field of hundreds or thousands of other flowers.
This is why I see Collarme and similar personal-ad sites as very screwed up, dynamic-wise, as they appear to foist the role of "actor, picker and chooser" onto the submissive women who get so much mail. Still, there are ways to get around that topsy-turvy awfulness, I believe... or I wouldn't still be here. :)
As far as the need for approval goes (not something mentioned in the quote, but I agree with you that it is quite closely related), I see it as natural submissive behavior, but again, only in response to a very special sort of authority figure. I see it as an essential trait, in fact, if the type of relationship you crave is very extreme, very unbalanced in terms of power. It makes perfect sense to me that when you give up control and/or someone else takes control that there would be an inequality, an uneveness in need and that the person with less power would need more than the person with more power. Doesn't it to you? Need, in fact, seems to define who has the power in most relationships.
When you are powerless in terms of another person, it's natural to become dependent upon them in various ways. The need for approval was a central pillar in the long, loving, and rich master-slave relationship I had for so many years: it flowed from me to him quite naturally. He chose whether to feed it or ignore it, and I also felt that as fitting and right. Control relationships are supposed to be imbalanced, and the more extreme the control, the more imbalanced they get in terms of need. The master doesn't feel as much need, because the slave is always right there ready and obedient, quite willing to fulfill his every need. The slave, however, depends upon the good grace and kindness of her master to get her needs met--and in some relationships this is never a given. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, if both people relish this sort of thing. I and my former master most certainly did. :)
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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: The desire to be special or significant - 
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