The not-so mythical submissive loser: a man with great potential

This is a very personal post on a topic dear to my heart.  It is about submissive men, not about submissive women, which is a fascinating topic for very different reasons.  And one which I have also been thinking about, but only skim over here.

My evolving “practice” as a dominatrix, totally unintentionally and rather surprisingly, seems to be taking a direction which includes women and couples.  I always imagined that the people who come to me would be men, but it seems that many men struggle with trans women.  Even within the kink community.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

This extends to sissy sluts—men who dress like sissies and seek to be treated like cock-sucking sluts.  The natural conclusion of the dommes who have been helping me find my feet as a domme have all suggested that me, as a former trans girl, but as one who has crossed the dividing line from male to female, would be uniquely desirable as a guide and domme to such people.

There are many reasons why that does not seem to be the case.  The logic was good, but the reality is that a sissy slut persona is a profoundly fetishized and sexualized state of being which involves some level of being “made” to be something…almost forced past the shame barrier.  And even though there are a group of people who “discover” their trans-ness by watching sissy porn, a popular category of porn on sites like porn hub, this seems so far removed from the experience of transgender girls as to be totally separated.

Why?  Because sexuality and gender are such profoundly different things.  Gender answers the question, ‘who and what am I’?  Sexuality answers the question ‘what turns me on’?  And of course, autogynophilia, a phenomenon wherein a trans woman is turned on because she wants to or has become a woman blurs the lines a bit, the separation of sexuality and gender seems quite clear.

It does appear based on anecdotal evidence that a great many trans girls are submissive.  I find this alien to my own experience, as becoming a woman has made me loathe to submit, except to the most extraordinary women.  I have gone from “generally” submissive to “specifically” submissive.  What do I mean?  That my submission is deeply tied to how I feel about and towards a person who is in my life.  Submission is a form of emotional expression, a form of expressing love.

Why isn’t this post about submissive women?

I do not believe we are born either dominant or submissive. The alpha and beta are made, not born.  It feels like learned behaviour to me.  The truth is that there is probably a bit of nature and nurture, but we could also argue that meek, for example, is not the same as submissive.  The expression is not “the submissive shall inherit the earth,” but rather that the meek, the humble, the honest shall reap the rewards.

Such statement is of course laced with the Western Judeo-Christian mindset, and could also be said to born out of patriarchal power structures.  We have the narrative because it served those in power to have an acquiescent populace.  In effect, there is something about “expertise” which striates society into the governed, the governors, and the ungovernable.  It is the expertise to govern which is harnessed by a patriarchal system, but which can only be fed if the rest of the populace is incapable or unwilling to govern.

The submissive woman and the submissive man are responding differently to the social context.  When a woman submits, is submissive, she is in the flow of what the social system “wants”.  Many men are profoundly turned on by submissive women.  I don’t wish to examine the motives of either party, or why many women feel that submission in this context is a way for them to gain control of, over, or to make sense of their lives in society.  A dominatrix friend who sees a fair number of women clients made this point to me, that many of her clients were doing it to process generalized trauma of their social position or to deal with incident-specific trauma.

What about the submissive man?

This is not what motivates a submissive man.  The reality of what the majority of submissive men express as their “need” or “desire” is very different from the spark which makes them head down the submissive path.  Let’s give the benefit of the doubt for just a moment.  Let’s say that the reason a man is submissive is that he rebels against the grain of society.  He rebels against what society expects of a man, of a male role.  He rejects the model put out by the patriarchy.  His submission is a form of protest.

That sounds both noble and impressive.  There is a growing chorus within the kink community about how the submissive man is strong.  That the submissive man is not a “loser” or a doormat or some sniveling wimp.

And maybe some of them are really that good.

If you spend a few hours on Twitter and look at the feeds of many pro-dommes, they are filled with inane and asinine commentary about submitting.  I guess the defense is that these women are advertising something that these men think they can’t get anywhere else, or that the fact that these women are advertising a service makes it okay or desirable for them to be so inane.  A bit weak.

So why is it so common?  How does a “submissive man” go from the noble rejection of privilege granted by the patriarchy and end up as a sniveling beggar asking a stranger to take control of his life, to humiliate him, to dominate him?  Am I being harsh?  Perhaps.  The topic strikes a nerve.

The most famous book in the D/s cannon is possibly Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.  You would think that as a former male submissive and slave that I would love this book, a book written by a man whose author’s name gave us the word Masochism.  But I hated it.  Sacher-Masoch’s misogyny is a well-established trope, and is a thread which carries through much of his writing.

It is perplexing to think that a misogynist could also be someone who aches to submit to women, or is it?  Is that not what this whole post is about?  Could this form of fetishized submission be more than just a corrupted form of the “noble submissive” described above, but rather this uniquely selfish and narcissistic creature who seeks in the most devious and insidious way to control his own misogyny by “submitting” to a woman.

But of course, such a man is not a submissive, but is still-born.  They top from the bottom from the outset.  Indeed, the essence of the book, to me, was how the protagonist loses control over Wanda, the woman he manipulates into dominating him.  I found the whole thing really troubling.  On every level.  That book absolutely traumatized me.

First, there are the logical-rational reasons.  A man open’s up to his deepest, darkest desires to his partner.  She uses this desire to humiliate him and to leave him.  It just feels so toxic.

But it is the other reasons that freak me out.  For this, I have to go back to the beginning, to my mother.

I came from a broken home.  My parents may have had a wonderful marriage for a while, but that happened before I was born.  By the time I came along the party was over.  My father was not present, my mother was stressed and not coping, and I was a baby with the same needs as any baby: a stable, nurturing, loving, warm home environment—exactly what didn’t happen.  My question to self is whether this made me a misogynist on some level.  It certainly profoundly affected my relationship with women and set me on a lifelong path of seeking to understand women.  And the answer to the question to self has to lie within my truth as a trans woman.  That my need to either “cure” myself of any potential misogyny or fear of women, or to prove to myself that I am not a misogynist, or even that I am worthy of love, is what drove me to having a sex change.

I go back to my answer to the question from an amazing and renowned dominatrix who asked about my journey, about my own feelings of submission…and my response was that being submissive was my only way to survive being a man…that my rejection of man’s role and persona in society was like an allergic reaction to which the only antidote was to submit to a woman, to devote myself to her, not just one, but to all.  And that over time, the need to show that I really meant it, made it impossible to not change sex.

My mother was a truly stunning woman.  This is not the musings of a besotted or idolizing child.  Her younger sister was one of the faces of an era.  She was on many covers of the most coveted fashion and society magazines of all time.  She knew how beautiful she was, and radiated absolute confidence.  My mother, on the other hand, suffered from an ugly duckling syndrome so profound that she never escaped it.  But to see the two of them standing next to each other, you can see how much more delicate and majestic my mother was.  Half a head taller, with a more refined and delicate bone structure, the pictures of the two of them standing side-by-side at my aunt’s wedding are astounding—they are both beautiful, laughing, surrounded by the prime of New York society, but my mother looks other-wordly.  

I cannot help but feel a sadness for her in that she never accepted or realized her full power because she never understood just how colossally beautiful she was.  And how this eluded her is beyond me.  I have a picture of her at the White House on the arm of one of the most dazzlingly gorgeous men of the age, a world-renowned singer.  The two on a first date.  She should have been an escort.

My siblings felt that she was a “whore”.  I felt sorry for her in a way that is provoked by tragedy.  By this I refer to the original form of Tragedy.

To me, what is relevant in this idea is that my mother had it all, but seemed incapable of setting the right course for herself, which might have begun with recognizing her power and strength as a woman.  But what she had instead was this tragic inability to see who and what she was when she looked in the mirror.  And as a result, she was a victim.

Of course, the patriarchy loves to turn women into victims, loves to keep them down, fundamentally insecure, controllable.  This suits a world of consumerism, suits male vanity, is toxic for so many reasons.

What is wrong with the “male submissive” described here when they are from the mold of Sacher-Masoch is that they are taking advantage of this state that a woman might find herself in.  They are taking advantage of the weakness of women within a patriarchal construct.  When I think of the most narcissistic act, it is what Sacher-Masoch’s character does in Venus in Furs with the expectation of a different outcome.  This isn’t just some isolated incident, however.  It plays out all the time, all over the world.

At a cocktail for dominant women a few days ago, one of the ladies there recounted to me the trials and tribulations of her relationship with her husband who cajoled, manipulated and finally begged her to enter an FLR (female lead relationship) with him.  She was loving it, just as Wanda did, loving the freedom, loving life.  She recounted that he was expressing feelings of it being more than he bargained for.  In other words, that he was seeking to control it.  Or that he had a fantasy and the reality was not exactly what he wanted.

I think of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken.  What I am thinking here is that these men have a crossroads and the wife chooses the path that they do not.  Her fantasy is different than his.  And this is inevitable, but it also misses the point.  And it makes me wonder if there are two kinds of submissive men [I am sure there are actually more].  On the one hand, you have this kind of submissive man described in the book Uniquely Rika, which should be on the reading list of every couple considering FLR.  On the other, you have the legions of men on Twitter who have inane reactions with pro-dommes, or people like Sacher-Masoch, who are fake submissive, or worse, misogynists.

Tell me what isn’t misogynistic about the desire of a “fake sub” expressed by so many Twitter men towards pro-dommes when they fetishise them, ask them to dispense kink, or ask them to dominate them when they are in full “loser mode”.

Losers are not attractive.  Ever.

Do we despair for the submissive man?  Perhaps, because society does not accept that a man would turn his back on the “gifts” of patriarchy and choose to submit to a woman.  But there are also a fair few out there whose motives are clean, who love this way, and who find themselves with women who are capable of receiving.

In conversation with a new dominatrix friend, she said that the most valuable lesson she had learned from being a dominatrix was how to receive.  In a way, this is a gift to women.  It is also something I have always struggled with, and which my first domme attempted to address without much success.  Bless her.  It is also something which I am conscious of as I set out to learn my heart as I become a dominant woman.

And I might note that the importance of all of this to me is quite profound.  When I look back at my mother, I don’t just see her, but I see men who loved her.  I see men who submitted to her, who gave everything they had to her, who lost themselves in her.  And what I also saw, was how these men, one in particular, fell by the wayside, because she regarded them as weak.  Some of that had to do with her own inability to love herself, to see her strength, to inhabit her own power.

These men, to her, were “losers”.  Weak men.  But this wasn’t just about her, because in certain ways, I sympathize with her.  She came from an era that lionized the man as provider.  She wanted a man who would keep her.  Not just financially, but who was also confident and strong enough in himself to keep her in her place.  She wanted to be treated like a lady.  To be treated like a princess.  But she also, sadly, liked a man to ignore her, to not meet her needs, to deny her.  She needed a “daddy”.  She did get what she wanted, but unsurprisingly, it never fulfilled her.

My observation of her loves and relationships and sense of self has created a life of turmoil in me.  And it only gets worse.  It is inevitable that for a girl, the most seminal person in their lives as women, no matter the quality of the relationship, is their mother, first and most important role model.  I can’t escape that my mother represents on some level this archetypal figure, the mother.  So what if I missed the lessons growing up?  I was trying too hard to be a boy.

Instead, I resented her mistreatment of these men who loved her.  But I also understand her.

Who wants a loser?

I’ve been talking a bit with friends about the differences I am finding between submissive men of different nationalities. That is a somewhat hilarious and curious cultural post for another day.  But it proves my point…that the cultural context we sit in drives something as deep and fundamental as our sexuality, our means of expressing ourselves and these needs.

The temptation to let a dominatrix be ‘mommy’, or any woman for that matter, is a temptation to abdicate responsibility. In conversation with a client who enjoys being treated like a dog, not because he is a dog or into puppy play, but because he enjoys being humiliated and denied his voice or any choice (in session he can only express himself through dog sounds—panting, barking in various tones).  I get it.  He is a businessman, a pillar of his family, to his friends, to his community, a decision maker and rock to everyone in his life.  Being degraded and humiliated in this way, gives him a few hours where he is totally controlled, and it recharges his batteries for the way his life is.

But for those of us who are drawn to submission for other reasons, such as to celebrate a woman as a goddess, to celebrate her divinity, one can only do it by being fully in our own power.  Being the opposite of a ‘loser’.

What does that take?  That’s the kind of submissive man I respect, would want as a client, would want to work with.

As an ex-man it is also the kind of submissive woman I would want to be.  I don’t know if I would ever have felt this way had I been born female, but I think not.  I think this is a legacy of my own manhood, but as I meet more and more submissive women, both in personal and professional contexts, I am discovering that I probably have this wrong.  Service is profoundly satisfying for the same reasons, to a particular kind of submissive heart, no matter what’s between their legs or on their chests.

Someone I have a massive crush on told one of my children, knowing that it would get back to me, exactly what she was looking for in a partner.  She was throwing down the gauntlet.  She was saying “this is the bar I need you to jump over for me to even consider you.”

And I think that for most women that bar is going to be defined by: being emotionally available, being at least financially independent but more likely providing, and by being confident enough in their own skin to bring surety and calm to her.  I don’t think that many men can hit the trifecta, which is why cynically I think that a lesbian relationship offers more to women, but on a more practical note why so many women are increasingly eschewing the traditional relationship model so that they can have their needs met without the high cost of a male partner who fails on one or more of those criteria.

We all change over time.  My ex became a weak, uninspiring, and dependent woman who was domineering and demanding and not much fun.  I am currently without career and unable to retire.  Not a good place to be.  I find myself relentlessly interested in not being a loser.  And the persistence and existence of providers in my life, is one of the profound motivators for me, even more than the friend I love and referred to above.  

And this is really crucial.  For my friend, it would be for her were I to meet her criteria.  But for providers, I do it for me. And I have to say that doing it for me is a far healthier place to be and to strive for.

My conclusion?  The submissive man needs to be relentless in his desire to be the best him possible.  For as one lady chum said to me, “who wants putrid roses on the altar to a Goddess?”  Nay indeed.  Bringing your best self is worth working on, and is just the ticket to a happy life.