Distinctions regarding obedience

Obedience involving choice (conscious obedience)

Types of obedience not limiting freedom

Obedience of inclination: You obey because you are asked something that you actually want. You are turned on, yearn to feel a cock in you and you are asked to take a cock in you. Obedience is something you choose and you are doing what you would have done anyway.

Obedience of inspiration: You obey because you realize that you want what you are ordered as you are so ordered. The order, and the hotness of the non-negotiable, may make you want things you would not otherwise as easily want; you might find yourself instantly turned on and ready for sexual use as you are ordered to make yourself available. But obedience is still a choice, and an easy one, because you now want exactly what you are ordered to.

Obedience of facilitation: It may be easier to do something you want, but would otherwise be inhibited in doing because you are so ordered. The fact that there’s someone ordering you makes it easier to do things that you want, but that are pushing it a little for you. In addition dominance, being given orders, might in itself excite you in a way that makes you ready to do more than you would otherwise. Obedience is something you choose, and you are enabled to choose something that you want, but that would not have been possible without you having been ordered to.

Types of obedience limiting freedom

Obedience of compulsion: You obey because there’s a consequence in disobedience. You know that if you don’t do what is said you’ll be punished or otherwise sanctioned. You choose to obey because you need to avoid the discipline you will face if you don’t.

Obedience of commitment to your dominant: You obey because you have chosen that you want to submit to your dominant. You have given someone that power, and he may ask something that you don’t really want but that you chose to do because it’s important to you to honor your choice and the submission you have given him. You choose to obey because you feel you are would otherwise betray your commitment to your dominant.

Obedience of commitment to your submission: Similarly to the above you obey because you have committed to submit. You have given up power and it is deep in you that you want to submit and to do it well, and you have to live up to that – for your own sake. It is a more impersonal commitment that has less to do with your relationship to your dominant and more to do with your own personal growth and identity and how you see yourself. Your submission is a sort of institution that you need to uphold by being obedient. You choose today because you would otherwise betray your commitment to yourself.

Obedience not involving choice (subconscious obedience)

Obedience of instinct: You obey because you’re so used to obeying that you think before you act. Think of military drill or extensive position training and the way you are so used to instant obedience that your body reacts before your mind. Obedience is not an (active) choice because you will already be in the process of obeying when you start to consider whether you actually want to obey. It’s still possible that you might actively choose to disobey and literally ‘stop yourself’ from obeying.

Obedience of scope of action: You obey because your instructions shape the way you are thinking. Disobedience is simply unthinkable, not because you reason that you must or because you are committed to the choice of submission, but because not obeying is unthinkable… it violates something in you on a very deep level that’s not as concrete as the above. Obedience is not a choice because there does not seem to be a choice to you. To be free not to obey would take extensive work, as it would take re-programming parts of your subconscious or at the very least active support in recognizing and realizing options other than obedience.

Combinations

Some of all of the above: You may obey, because it’s something you’d probably do anyway and definitely want and need now that you are inspired by your order. The ordering may at the same time lesson your inhibitions making it even easier to say ‘yes Master’. In addition you may know you’d be punished if you did not obey and you wouldn’t want to let down neither your dominant nor your own commitment to be a great sub. Finally you might already be in the process of obeying, out of instinct, when you start considering the whether to obey, or you might not perceive there being an alternative to obedience at all.

… To varying degrees: In many instances obedience may be a mixture of many of the above-mentioned factors and they may play varying roles. You may both feel inspired to want the play that your dominant is ordering but also feel compelled by the threat of punishment (which might just further inspire you). Or your willingness to do something really hard might stem from a combination of your commitment and the threat of punishment. Or you may in part not really consider disobedience and option but this may also because you don’t ‘go there’ because you are so committed to your choice of submission.

Conclusion

Realizing that obedience is not one single thing, but a mixture of a number of different kind of motivations makes  it easy to understand how no two D/s relationships are alike. Subs or slaves are motivated by different factors of obedience and different dominants may inspire different sorts of obedience. I can also attest that the kind of obedience I as a dominant would want from my sub may vary with the girl I am with.

Further it is an important point that obedience is a dynamic concept that may well change from situation to situation and evolve during a relationship. Especially the latter forms of obedience – commitment to dominant, instinct and scope – are something built over time. I have myself felt the motivations of a sweet girl switching from the less limiting to the more limiting forms of obedience and even seen girls slip into the realm of instinct and scope.

Further I think there are grounds to warn against considering one form of obedience better or higher than the other. Making these distinctions may give inspiration to where one might want to go, but do not commit to the fallacy of considering one thing true kink and another not. Kink is true when it’s sexy, consensual and healthy, whatever it is that moves you.

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.