Roles and nakedness

Submission is often seen as accepting a ‘role’; the role as a slave, a submissive, a little one a pet. The wish to submit oneself is sometimes, especially from those for whom pleasing is among their greatest wishes, accompanied with the wish to become ‘just what Master desires’. In more sexually driven wishes of submission the transformation is often central; often a submissive might wish to become a whore, a slut, a fucktoy and so on. Seldom do you find a submissive wishing to submit to ‘just be herself’.

On the other hand, as a dominant, I could never really dominate, nor love (for me really two sides of the same coin), my girl for something different than the one she is. Of course we change, and to say that you will not find ‘flaw’ in the one you love, that you won’t find stuff that you would rather be without, seems to me to be something either said when much in love or a mild lie.

To make ourselves into a Pygmalion and create what we love, not from ivory but from a human being, seems to me like an act of violence to what is human. To love one for being exactly what one longs for is to love the projection of something in oneself. Being in love may well be ‘finding’ that bit that one longs for in someone else; but loving a person is what comes after the projection, it is when one discovers that she is not the picture of one’s longing, but finds that one loves her for just what she is. Pygmalion, like Narcissus, loves nothing but the echo of himself, just like a dominant never will reach beyond narcissism – the submissive never beyond self-annihilation – if dominance is about creating the slave in the image of the Master.

Nonetheless submission is a transformation. Submission is not about roles, but about nakedness. What I am striving for as a dominant, is not that my girl becomes something diffeferent for me, but that she becomes herself for me. Submission is the stripping of the submissive, the constant insistence on not to let anything be between me and her. If she pretends to be something that she is not, or to like something that she does not, she holds part of herself from me and offers me a picture of what she imagines I want instead. To love is to accept everything about another, my domination is insisting on having it all.

Transformation lies in the stripping. The new lies not in holding a new mask up between her and me, but in letting all the masks fall and thus allowing her to be something new, something different, that is also her. Those new things can seem like many new roles (and this is from where the misunderstanding of roles comes from), but the point is that they are not; that the newness of submission is not in taking on new roles but exploring all the things that one can also be when one allows the common mask to fall.

What I love about being dominant is ironically the ability to set free; the ability to – through the insistence of stripping away control, to play roles, to pretend – to release something that is beautiful, unique and completely mine as well as hers.