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MidnightWriter -> RE: Topping without dominance... (3/17/2005 10:01:35 AM)
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Taggard - wouldn't that make you a "ballroom top", rather than a "ballroom dom"? [;)]
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ORIGINAL: TallDarkAndWitty
I think it comes down to desire. I really have no urge to dominate anyone else. I love to be served. I love to own. I enjoy tying a lovely little thing up and doing all sorts of wonderfully sensual things to it. But when it comes down to the whole dominance/submission thing...I am just not into it at all.
Perhaps our understanding of what d/s is differs.
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If you want to serve me, great...but don't expect me to give you menacing glares and use a commanding tone of voice. Don't expect to tremble in fear at my wrath. Don't expect to have me put you in your place for sassing me. It just isn't my thing...
Menacing glares? Fear of my wrath? Taggard - you've been watching the wrong movies.
I don't do painplay as punishment - mostly, I do it as reward. (OK - I've done a few punishment scenes that included pain, but at a total of less than 1 per sub per year, it's not really what anyone would call a habit.) My most vicious punishment to date has been (and will doubtless continue to be) "bad sub, no scene - go to bed".
The menacing glare is pretty much reserved for youngsters who are misbehaving in public, or for playing "let's make funny faces" with the wee ones.
The look that my slaves never wanted to see is interpreted by most others as "ohhh - how interesting". Raise the eyebrows, small smile, looks like I'm taking a mental note - largely, because I'm planning an upcoming training session with someone who has just failed to meet my expectations. No cause for anger, just gotta work on correcting that behavior.
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I really think I have come to realize that the only person I want to dominate and control is myself, all others should serve me because that is what they need and desire.
While it's a truism that one cannot dominate another without first controlling oneself, there's more to it for me than "you may serve me if you wish to".
There is an actual energy exchange. Not as in "I worked off 120 calories doing that flogging, they'll scurry off and fetch me some coffee", but on a quasi-mystical level - what the Chinese call chi.
(Everything below this is my experience/perception/style - those who do it differently are hereby acknowledged. Full disclaimers are in force, okay? Flames you really MUST send are more welcome in my mailbox than here.)
Domination is not me glowering at someone, riding crop brandished menacingly, while I growl orders. Domination is me controlling their actions by simple force of will. This necessitates training and a fair bit of intimacy - energy flows best where it's flowed before. I could, I suppose, bark orders into someone's face - but I'd much rather make a quiet comment that had the same effect on the sub.
It's remarkably difficult to explain in text, and modern medical science is barely beginning to understand the ways in which energy flows from one person to another - but it's there, and real, and that's where domination takes place for me.
Decades ago, I saw a master who was not out at all - and I'd never even considered d/s an option for real people, and only fantasized about bondage, because nobody did that for anything but porn, either. He was my regional manager in a direct-sales organization - meaning, I ran a crew that sold encyclopedias door-to-door, and he was my boss/trainer. He taught me about sales - and what I learned is part of the reason I avoid television - you can do lots of nifty things to people without them ever noticing it, and the fun kids down at Madison Ave. know most of the tricks.
As an example of what could be done, he had me pick, at random, one of the women who were waiting for a job-placement interview, which we were holding at a Holiday Inn. During our poolside interview, he quietly told her to take her shirt off. She was surprised, and asked him if she'd heard correctly. He repeated the command, again quietly. She looked around the pool area, blushed, and told him that she really couldn't do such a thing. He smiled pleasantly, assured her that she'd be hired whether or not she complied, and repeated himself: "Take that shirt off, now. While you're at it, take the bra off as well."
Her bra and my jaw hit the floor at about the same time. No coercion, no promises, no threats - just a simple expression of what he wanted her to do. Quiet, reasonable, and totally determined. I expected her to get up and walk away, but he expected her to strip to the waist - and she did.
I learned a lot from that old con artist, and in retrospect, his beautiful wife's behavior makes perfect sense when I view them as a heavy d/s relationship. My early practical, non-business uses of this skill were regrettable - I went a tad power-drunk. Ashamed of what I'd made people do, I quit doing it at all - until over a decade had passed, and I tripped across a submissive and found a new use for that skill.
It would take one helluvan actor to make that translate to film, which has always struck me as why bdsm porn doesn't ever show this - and, conversely, why I'm not much into bdsm porn.
Taggard - you're a ballroom dancer. With a good partner, you've occasionally led someone through a move that they'd not done before, that you'd not discussed - you just led it, and they followed. It's not growling, it's not explaining, it's simply wanting them to do it, and they do. Sure, there's frame and cues and you're a good lead and all of that - but it has, at its core, an element of d/s - you lead, they follow, no problem.
That's where it lives for me, anyway.
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