The legendary and wonderful Molly was a bit irritated by my saying that, in one sense, submission is simple. See  here.

This isn’t another instalment in an argument. Peace has broken out. I love and admire Molly, and she thinks I’m sort of ok.

I meant that obeying an order is usually simple physically (psychologically is a whole different question). Therefore a dom may say his or her order is “simple” to obey. While deliberately ignoring how far from simple it is, in psychological or political terms, or in any way other than physically.

That is, a submissive doesn’t need to be an Olympic athlete to bend over a desk. But there are many other reasons why that may be difficult for the submissive. When the dom says it’s “simple”, he or she is deliberately ignoring a lot of complicated things,

What’s worse, the dom is ignoring those psychological truths for fun and sexual pleasure.

But doms, even twoo-doms, often don’t tell the absolute truth, in a scene. For example, a dom might say the submissive is a silly girl, or silly boy, when the dom knows perfectly well that the submissive is anything but silly.

But being put down a little can make the scene hotter for some submissives, so things like “you silly girl” get said. Sometimes what a dom says, in the heat of the moment, is intended to create a scene and make it sexier. When we’re doing that, we are not on oath.

Anyway, I want to explain why the stories in this blog are written the way they are. 

The first issue is that almost all of what I write in this blog is based on things that actually happened. I’m only one of the people who took part in that experience, so there’s a whole story or side of a story that isn’t told.

There’s always at least one woman involved in the story. Sometimes there might be two or three perspectives on my actions as a male dom. But I can only write as me, and what I did and what I saw, heard and felt.

An observant dom learns a lot by paying attention in a scene, but it’s still not telepathy. The submissive is another person, with their own thoughts and feelings. 

When I write about a woman (or women if it was a threesome or some other complicated arrangement), I think I have three duties. 

1 I have to preserve their privacy. She (or they) shouldn’t be identifiable, not even by people who know who I am. I change things, cunningly, to make sure that people, sexual partners in particular, preserve their anonymity. I can’t give an example of what I do, for obvious reasons, but sometimes I’m pretty damn clever about that. 

2 I should write about the information the woman or the women gave me about what she/they thought and felt about what was going on.

In writing that, I should always respect those women as people, sexual human beings, and never write about them as male fantasy figures. Though I should write about how sexy they were/are, and the pleasure they gave me and (though it sounds immodest even to mention it) the pleasure I gave them.

3 I should not presume to speak for them. If a woman came, I can say that she came. If she said something nice to me, or critical, I can tell you that. But I can’t presume to get into her mind and tell you what she thought.

I can report responses, actions, things said by the submissive. i try to do that in a way that gives a real sense of both her and me, and makes it reasonably clear what she thought, in general terms. That includes when she was thinking I’m being an idiot, which i try to be honest about.

So I’ll write about her words and sounds and movements of her body, which say a lot, but I ain’t no ventriloquist. And she ain’t no sock puppet.  

So in this blog you get bits of my inner monologue, but not of hers. To me, that silence is an act, or omission, of respect. 

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.