On Sinful Sunday I wrote the words, “submission is simple”. 

Those words aren’t entirely true, to put it mildly. I put them in the post because they are, or can be, part of the dialogue between dominant and submissive. The dom may say, “It’s simple. You just have to do as you’re told. I’ll look after the rest.” 

It’s only a limited sense in which submission is simple. If you are the submissive, and your session is going well, and the dom and sub are in synch with each other, then the submissive’s choices are indeed simple. If the dom says, “bend over the table”, or “onto your knees,” or simply, “stay there, don’t speak and don’t move”, the submissive knows what he or she has to do, and does it. 

Simples! 

But the process of acknowledging one’s own submissive desires, as you become sexually active, or at least thinking and desiring sexually, is not simple. That can be a long and hard process, as my acknowledging my own domness was.

The process of going from ordinary head space to a submissive head space, in the interaction between dominant and submissive: that’s not simple at all.

Doms do things that they think will help the submissive make that transition, which vary from person to person. Currently, I give lots of hugs and cuddles and the occasional smack on the bottom, and lots of praise and reassurance, slowly heading to the first use of the command voice. That’s with my lovely girl. If it were a different submissive the approach would be different. 

Like any dom, I can only provide an atmosphere in which it might feel both safe and sexy to submit. The mental work of shutting off the usual rush of thoughts, focussing on the moment and then “dropping”: that’s done by the submissive. 

As a non-switch I don’t have direct, personal access to what moving into the submissive headspace is like.

But just as submissives know things that help bring out the domness in their lover, doms know a certain amount about how submission works and even (imaginatively) what it feels like to enter it.

All lovers work out as much as they can about how and what their partner is feeling, drawing on lovers’ intuition, observation, sand listening.  

So when I said, “submission is simple”, I meant it as a piece of dom rhetoric, the sort of thing that I might (and do) say to the woman in that photo, at about that moment. It focusses only on the part of submission (being told what to do, and doing it) that is – in one sense – simple. 

After that it gets philosophical: nothing is simple, and yet everything is simple. 

I’ve been thinking about this Amy Winehouse song for a while now. It’s an odd song. 

In places it sounds like a frustrated submissive telling her dom to lift his game and take over, stepping up to his role. 

Bdsm si! El patriarcado non!

In other places (more often, to be honest) it sounds more like a woman who’s completely internalised patriarchy and sexism. As such she expects a man, any man in any relationship, to take charge. Because that’s the only way it’s right for men to be.

Not because the two of them agreed for it to be that way, maybe after a discussion in which the possibility of other power balances and imbalances was at least recognised. 

Because her man doesn’t tell her what to do and is emotionally open, she’s uncomfortable. She accuses him of being a “lady boy” and asks him if he’s gay.  

Sometimes it sounds like a bdsm song to me: “Dominate me, Henry” . Other times she sounds like those mad, angry Christians who complain that boys are taught to be softies, and go apeshit when gays and intergender people are treated as anything except punching bags. 

In the video, the problem is that the guy drinks and falls over a lot. It completely misses the point of the song. It’s not about drinking problems, it’s about the man and woman having completely different ideas about their roles.

Still, if you were directing a video with Amy W in it, I can see how “drinking and falling down” might have occurred to you as a theme. 

Anyway, I still think the song is hot. Not for the best reasons, but there it is.