What I take away from the "Gift" dispute.

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What I take away from the "Gift" dispute. - 12/16/2006 6:54:27 PM

Noah

Posts: 1660
Joined: 7/5/2005
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The gift/not gift dispute as it is conducted here every week or so tends to bring confusion, discord and antagonism moreso than insight, I think, but hope springs eternal.

I my experience, conversations about what a thing is are generally fraught with hazard unless either:

(A) the matter at hand is strictly factual or

(B) the people having the discussion are careful and intellectually generous in an effort to achieve mutual clarity rather than just score dubious points in a tired old pissing contest.

Some people in this ongoing discussion hew very close to a particular dictionary definition of the word gift. This is the one which refers to some notion of conditionedness.

The fact is, there are other "official, you can look it up" senses of the word gift. Few if any of them have the same requirement of altruistic spirit. Your dictionary may not list these other senses but if you go to one of the dictionaries on my shelf you will see well over a full page of very fine print given over to several well-documented and well-accepted senses of the word gift. Since all these various sense of the word gift are well established in our language I think it is fatuous to compare every use of the word gift in these forums against only one of the several definitions.

Do you suppose we could take into account the full range of meanings of the word gift? Could we then examine in which ways it does make sense to describe submission as a gift and in which ways it doesn't? In some ways and for some people it seems helpful and in other ways and for other people it seems less so. There seem to be some well intended, bright people in each camp (and yeah, some tiresome boors) so I really think that we could have a productive conversation if we stay away from all the ontic language, take the wide variety of WIITWD into acount, and look at "submission as gift" from at least as many points of view as there are definitions of "gift" in the OED.

For someone to come along and say ".... hogwash. it ain't a gift" seems just as vain and just as in vain as saying the opposite. Do we really imagine that this is the sort of thing where there is a black and white fact of the matter? Some issues are like that, that is they are plainly factual. Other issues aren't. We can evaluate them, assign kinds and degrees of positive or negative value.

Those who say that one can't apply the word gift unless there is no expectation of response are making a claim that is opposed to our common experience and directly contrary to what is found in any top quality dictionary. There are lots of perfectly common uses of the word gift that don't impose unconditionality. A lot of them are bundled under the #2 definition of "gift" found in many dictionaries which amounts to: "A thing given."

That covers a lot of ground.

And as for those who complain that if you give something away you don't have it anymore, have you ever given someone else pleasure? Do you now roam the world personally pleasureless?

Have you ever given anyone a good idea? Or a cold, for that matter?

I really hope that complaints like "What you give away you no longer have" are meant to be funny. Because, well, they are laughable if offered in the kind of categorical language we so often see here.

I have a friend to whom I occasionally give gifts. My giving of a particular gift can be an instance of the Twue, Exalted Giving, I suppose, a pure gush of generous recognition and love desiring nothing in return. But can it be this even if I happen to know this friend well enough to "expect" in some kind of way that, yeah, when my birthday rolls around he is likely to "gift" me back? Does the fact that I expect that he'll probably give me a gift someday really mean for you that my gift is no gift, since my gift wasn't given "without expectations of anything in return"?

The mere expectation that something will come back doesn't seem to me to rule anything out automatically and all by itself.

And the often cited claim that any giving which is pleasureable, meaningful or otherwise rewarding for the giver is not giving in the first place, well that just sounds wacky to me. Must we be absolutely emotionally neutral or negative in our gift giving? Should I not give you a new swimming pool because of the risk that you might one day invite me to cool off in it? "destroying" the giftishness of the gift? WTF?

Now let me give you an another example.

There, that sentence was my example.

That sentence was an example of a use of the word "give" which you have probably accepted without argument a hundred times this year alone. Am I failing to "give" you an example if I am expecting or even hoping for mutual understanding to result? I can benefit from our mutual understanding so by the rules of some posters here I did not TRUELY GIVE you an example. But that is just silliness, isn't it?

Of course I gave you an example.

Nothing could be clearer to see. The word "gift" has more than one sense. That is a fact. And in my opinion (and in the opionions of the lexicographers of every dictionary I have ever read) it isn't the case that one sense is the be-all and end-all while the others are bogus.

In fact, the differences between the many various senses of the word "gift" are interesting and worth exploring, in my view, specifically in terms of what that exploration might shine light on in the way of power exchange relationships.

So yeah, let's highlight that special, restricted, sublime notion of giving which some people have such an irrational fetish for. Let's even promote awareness of it. Let's bring out also the senses in which the idea of "giving submission" fails to capture something in the dynamics of BDSM relationships as viewed by some people who are worth listening to.

Let's also highlight that one definition of the word gift is "A thing given." Like the car Dad gives junior on his seventeenth birthday, with the condition that Junior buy his own gas and insurance and not carelessly (or angrily) crash through the garage door every week. Does anyone really want to say that this is not a gift because the giving gives Dad pleasure and the gift arrives with conditions?

And isn't this a pretty decent analogy for the submissively oriented person who throws her lot in with a particular dominant type? Especially if she throws in her lot based on a informed presumption that he will behave responsibly and not carelessly or angrily drive her through the garage door every week?

Maybe I just don't have my shorts twisted up tightly enough. To describe either of these things (car or submission) as instances of giving just doesn't make me all nervous and jerky. It seems to work good.

How are your shorts today?

If we choose to explore the range of meanings available in characterizing submissionas a gift I think we can do it with more clarity and less rancor if we avoid saying things like: "This IS/IS NOT That" "Submission IS/IS NOT a gift."

The paragraph you just read has an implied "should" in it. That is a pretty good sign that the point I was making had to do with a matter of evaluation rather than simply with a matter of fact. I was expressing an opinion and the opinion followed an account meant to sketch the plausibility of that opinion.

My view of submission in general has been illuminated by some of the talk about it being (usefully viewed as) a gift. Including some of the talk in favor and some of the talk against.

Over the years this ongoing conversation has shown me how submission can indeed be seen as a gift. Similarly I'm grateful for what has been brought out in certain posts which reject the notion of submission as a gift. This all works and works well without ever bringing up the topic of whether--in some fundamental, real deal, bottom line sense--submission IS or ISN'T this or that.

In my view that is a question which is about as helpful as "how much would a triangular smell weigh on the moon?" It looks just like a question and indeed the sentence is an interrogative one. But when you lift its skirt you find nothing worth getting into, eh?

I don't think it hogwash to highlight the ways in which submission is or isn't a helpfully seen as a gift.

I do think it is hogwash, however, to reject the whole area of exploration based on an insistence to focus on just one of the several dictionary definitions of the word "gift" at the expense of all others.

I mean give me a break. I'll give you one later. I promise.

As for the talk about how submission can't be a gift because it is something inside you, a character trait can we compare submission to loyalty?

A certain person may consider herself "born" loyal. It is a core character trait for her. Just the way she operates. But loyalty is not loyalty if it goes in all directions at once. It must go here rather than there, to this person, thing, or idea rather than somewhere else. If you told me you gave your football loyalty to the NY Jets till they went to play in New Jersey, well, okay. You're a loyal person. You "gave" your (innate) loyalty in that direction until they inspired you to withold it. All those words seem to work just fine. Just as, in general, the language of giving seems to work just fine in regard to submission unless someone stacks the deck by refusing several well-acepted sense of the word "give" and insists that the whole English speaking world is wrong, wrong, wrong when they use the word "gift" in any other way.

Not that idiotic things can't be said in terms of "giving submission", too. But idiotic things can be said about anything.

And by the way, those who say sibmission can't be a gift because it is just an expression of self--for them--are quite unfair to all those people who instead choose carefully and willingly to submit to another person without any deep sense of need to submit.

Come on, picture two women who are behaving in just the same ways toward their partners, ways we commonly think of as submissive. One of these women constantly goes on and on and on about her "slave heart" and how she has no choice in her behavior, that she is absolutely driven to every act of submission. The other woman has no such predispositions. She just really cares for her partner and sees that this behavior pleases him, so she gives him this behavior.

Just what is the problem here? Is it not "submission" in the second case because it voluntary rather than "driven by deep-seated needs"? It seems to me that every time she is submitting to his will, she is ... submitting to his will.

Is the person who submits in response to some irresistable interior urge "more" submissive that one who does so quite freely in the face of a lovely range of viable alternatives?

Then again. do the wonderful range of acts of submission she (the non-slave-heart submissive) gives her partner not count as "giving" just because the word submission might appear in the sentence?

Now let me give you another sense in which someone might choose to employ the word gift in this conversation.

One sense of gift which appears in any competent dictionary is the one that has to do with a person "having a gift for" something: music, gardening, torture, what-have-you. So let's think of a person who has recognized or at least suspects that she has a "gift" for submission in this restricted sense of the word. She decides eventually to bestow or offer this "gift" of hers to a particular dominant. Now, if you won't allow me to say "give her submission" will you at least allow me to say "bestow her gift for submission"? And if the answer to that last question is even a qualified yes then maybe we are just splitting hairs to say that this is an okay thing to say but "give one’s submission" isn't.

So:

My answer to the question "Is submission a gift" is not to approve or disapprove of the word "gift" in the question. Instead my answer is to cast a suspicious eye at the word "is." This word, though small, can be a great irritant to a discussion, often without the source of the irritation ever being recognized.

I would like to propose a related, alternative inquiry. In what ways is it helpful or unhelpful to conceive of submission as a gift?

Some people see their relationships as voyages, even though every day they wake up in the same spot. I suspect that to view a relationship as a voyage could be very helful in many regards, with some negative potentials lurking as well.

Some people are comfortable talking in terms of "working"on a relationship. Others get the screaming heebie jeebies that such a word should be used in such a context. Personally I don't see work as a bad thing. I see it as a productive thing and the idea of engaging efforts which will be productive for my relationship is a fine idea to me.

Given that you might personally choose not to employ the word gift or the notion of giving to your relationship, can anyone explain to me... in a way that doesn't fly in the face of the dictionary and common sense... why it would be that someone else who finds value in using the notion of "submission as gift" should abandon the value they find there?

My advice to any noobs on the relationship prowl is: Comb the profiles and message boards for the names of anyone who insists that that you do or don't see submission as a gift. Put all the names in one pile. Either limit your partner search to these people only, or mark them all "reject" because they all have one thing in common which is way more important than the definition of a word.