Self Takes a Holiday

Submissive men are some of the most misunderstood and invisible sexual creatures around. Our voices simply aren’t heard in popular culture, our expression largely relegated to bedrooms, the blogosphere, and fetish clubs. I am a submissive man. Not only do I receive meaning when allowed to express my submission but the way my head is wired, when I submit I get much more intense feelings of sexual arousal than I experience during vanilla sex.

What makes a man desire to submit to a powerful, dominant woman? I’m certain there are as many varied answers to that question as there are submissive men. I can’t speak for other men although I am pretty confident that there are similarities in us all when it comes to our motivation to submit. Men in many respects are given a privileged position in society, simply on the basis of our gender and as a result often enjoy positions with all sorts of power. Men often have respectably high-powered jobs. Often highly visible ones where they have the responsibility for regularly making difficult decisions that affect the lives of others, perhaps many others. They are required to maintain highly polished self-images and required to always feel in control. Constant attention must be devoted to advancing his independence, his responsibility, and his success.

But for many of us, our dirty little secret is that so many of us long to be stripped of power, to be tied down, gagged, spanked, taken, and owned, by an assertive, dominant woman. We want to be made to do a woman’s bidding, in whatever way she finds meaningful and satisfying. For me submission offers the ultimate break from the thoroughly modern stresses on the self. If only for a little while, submission allows me to escape the burdens of manliness while being “ordered” to serve in various ways and yes, at times made to do all the naughty things I often fantasize about. Succinctly put, submission allows me to escape an awareness of self.

Why would anyone want to escape awareness of the self? Because while a self is a handy, even a necessary thing to have, it's also very needy. It requires constant upkeep and maintenance. You have to work hard just to maintain a positive self-image or “to be in control.” Modern Western culture places enormous and unprecedented demands on individual selfhood. The self is an unending project, throughout life, that constantly needs to be built up and defended. It has to prove capable, autonomous and attractive, along with everything else. As such it is a source of stress, worry and pressure. So how does one take a break from self? How does self take a holiday?

For submissive men, we take a break from self whenever we act out our fantasies of sexual domination and submission. Often this involves turning to rituals of sadomasochism with our own partners or turning to specially hired ones (professional dominatrices) and we happily become “slaves” to our submissive desires. Men who crave the company of a dominant woman find her in wives, girlfriends, or in a professional dominatrix, sometimes bringing out the kinky tendencies of their partners and other times tapping into what’s already there and well developed. Some may desire to be tied up, handcuffed, gagged, or bound in uncomfortable positions. Others may desire to be whipped or tormented with droplets of hot wax on bare skin or may long to receive an old-fashioned, bare-bottom, over-the-knee spanking. And still others may desire to be embarrassed, verbally insulted, given commands, made to walk on all fours like a dog, or displayed naked in front of others who are fully clothed. All of these things share a common theme, escape from self. Self takes a holiday as men voluntarily relinquish the top spot, the tables are turned and men become for once the hunted rather than the hunter.

The flipside is that any woman who can lure a submissive man into her lair quickly learns just how valuable a prize she’s gotten and will surely want to keep him happy. Many already know they enjoy this reversal of roles and receive satisfaction in controlling every aspect of their man right down to his sexuality. By literally putting her foot down, upon him, she can demand his servitude and by so doing commands his sincere respect, adoration and worship of her assertive femininity, making him, molding him perfectly into everything she desires in a partner. I think there are many other women, who have yet to experience the inherent delights of commandeering the body of a man, ordering him to humiliate himself for her pleasure, leaving him tied up, helpless and horny, and leaving her mark upon him, both literally and figuratively, but who would find it very satisfying if only they would engage and embrace their dominant sides. If these words resonate with you, making you long for a man you can grab by the scruff of his neck, or order to his knees, or simply allow you to control him with one fierce, all-knowing look, then having a submissive man is for you. Go ahead, say the words out loud: “Yes, I’m a dominant woman.” Wherever your submissive man is, he will hear you.

Submissive men are not really out to ditch their selves. They simply want the fantasy of shedding their own identity, with its autonomy and responsibility, by submitting entirely to the will of another, with sexual pleasure thrown into the bargain, because it's a great reinforcer of submissive acts. There is no clearer way to shed an identity than by changing gender roles. When a man willingly engages in the power transfer with a woman and he assumes the submissive role while she assumes the dominant one, it permits them both to shed their normal selves. Self takes a holiday and this can be a delightful experience for both.

Believe to Understand

My submissiveness is something that I have to some extent always been aware of. I didn’t discover it as some sort of epiphany. To be sure I didn’t explore it, never wanted to explore in fact until well into my middle age years. Nevertheless I always knew it was there. I was raised in the normal way, conditioned with the societal expectations for a male, pressed into that stereotypical masculine mold, but over the intervening years, more and more I pondered the undeniable conflicts that were evident to me in how I behaved and how I felt, especially as I related to women. In the beginning I tried to make myself believe that I was simply a little more in touch with my feelings than other guys, the sensitive type who was perhaps just wired to express and feel my emotions on a different, deeper plane. In some ways I admit I was actually a little fearful to acknowledge, much less look at in a serious way that part of me which I now define as “submissive” because early on I associated the little I did understand about it as being something feminine rather than masculine.

Society puts a great deal of pressure on us as people to conform to gender roles which are the collective expectations of behavior based on one's gender and that is just as true for females as males. Most men feel pressured to act masculine. To behave in a way that might cause a man to appear weak, emotional, or sexually inefficient to others is a major threat to his self-esteem. To be comfortable, men need to feel that they are decisive, self-assured and rational. It is very stressful when a man is made to feel that he has behaved in an “unmanly” fashion, or sometimes even if he feels his thoughts have been “unmanly”. And conversely, acting “manly” we believe results in increased social validation. Men learn to appraise situations using the schema of what is an acceptable masculine response rather than what might be objectively the best response. As a result men often limit themselves to a certain range of "approved" responses in coping with the stuff of life. We feel compelled to repress expression of tender emotions and instead to show our emotions only according to traditional masculine customs because being perceived as emotional by others will be interpreted as acting feminine. We feel obliged to conquer in regard to sexual matters and work.

These are some of the reasons that explain my reluctance to delve into the disconnects that to me were imminently apparent, between how I felt about things and how I behaved and why for a good part of my life, I refused to acknowledge much less explore my submissiveness. Perhaps it is simply a function of aging, that in time we grow more secure and self-confident and slowly but surely, the opinions of others, the expectations of society become less important in comparison to our own perceived needs and our desire for contentment. I happen to know that many submissive men do not come to truly understand and embrace their submissiveness until mid-life and sometimes even later. I understand this because questioning one’s gender identity is scary stuff, and exactly what is required before a man can explore much less come to understand and ultimately embrace submission. You must first believe and only then can you understand.

I’ve reached a point in my own life where there is no longer any plausible deniability when it comes to that part of me which is defined as submissive. I have not only come acknowledge it but to some degree to both understand and embrace it which has in some measure contributed to personal contentment. Yet believing, understanding and even embracing is only a part of the equation. Once you believe your submission and have embraced it, in a real way a type of the mythical “Pandora’s box” has been opened for you. Now you deeply feel the need for an outlet to express your submission, a person to whom you submit. In this alone, will real contentment be found.

In some ways, “discovering” and embracing submission has for me only resulted in the substitution of one kind of stress for another. Instead of the stress that resulted from forcing myself to stay “inside the box” with respect to behaving in “manly” ways, now I face the stress of “being” submissive without an available continuum for submissive expression. For me submission is not about the availability of a kinky sex partner. It is about finding a confident, assertive, deliciously dominant woman who shares my own interest in having a committed, intimate, female led relationship. The sexual aspects are of course a part of that and if she happens to enjoy the spice of kink, so much the better. But the issue is for the most part the availability of someone to whom I can submit, serve, pleasure and empower.

Since I first came to grips with and gained some understanding of submission and dominance and relationships involving the dynamics of power exchange from the perspective of SM, I quickly learned that dominant females were in that environment, in relative short supply. Finding one for a relationship such as I envision seems actually a pretty daunting task. However I do feel that surely albeit slowly society seems to be changing. The old gender role models are now being called into question. While still far from perfect, I think that more and more doors for women are being opened which were for so long wrongfully closed to them. As women assume greater leadership and fill roles in industry and government, formerly reserved for men, perhaps more and more, women will begin to question the antiquated gender roles impressed on them by society. To some degree I think this is already happening as many women I meet are no longer willing to accept anything less than parity in a relationship. Perhaps the next logical step for them will be the desire to lead in relationships. Yes, I do feel that as patriarchal society continues to slide, a transition to a more matriarchal society seems imminent. For submissive men like me, that would be a welcome change and hopefully will make it easier in the future to find women who not only accept our submission but will desire and embrace it. In the meantime, I will continue to search for the special woman that I desire. To believe is to understand, to be certain, yet to act is the precursor to having the object of one’s desire and needs.

Artwork credit: Talantbek Chekirov