Anyone who’s trying to fully understand domination and submission has quite a lot of reference material to help them along, but there’s a problem with information on topics outside of the mainstream. It’s that you never know if you’re getting accurate information or just the ramblings of someone writing fan fiction. As an example, there’s this article about masochism by The Awareness Centre, written by a woman named Karen Dempsey. Karen has an MA in creative writing, and it shows here. In the article, she unequivocally states that all masochists get their personality from overcontrolling parents and that’s it. Now, just as only a Sith deals in absolutes, the same can be said for kink and creative writers. There’s no way to enter a blanket statement like that and expect it to be accurate for everyone. It’s certainly not accurate enough to run with it and offer advice on the subject. It’s the same thing as a doctor pinning every ailment on patients not washing their hands. There’s never going to be one answer for everything and passing it off as fact can be damaging. With that being said, there’s a pretty good article on domination and submission that has good information for you.
This article was published in 2024 by Psychology Today and they have some good background information on what makes a person dominant or submissive in the bedroom. It’s very dry reading, so if you want to read the whole thing, make sure you’re fully awake or you might struggle to stay awake with it. It’s also important to understand that their conclusions aren’t going to fit everyone. The nice thing about the article is that they talk about drivers for sexual dominance and submission and that’s what we’re going to focus on here.
We’re Wired for D/s
The first point the article makes might be its most important. It states that humans are not the only mammals to practice dominance and submission. It can be seen in other primates, as well as in dogs. On top of that, it seems to stem from subcortical circuits that are hardwired in the brain. It’s not just dominance or submission, though. We’re all wired for both, and it doesn’t end there. As they put it, “The best place to start this discussion is by pointing out that all of us, along with several other mammal species, appear to possess subcortical circuits for sexual dominance as well as submission. One example that we can probably relate to pertains to female dogs, who sometimes mount other females or legs of humans. Such seemingly ‘perverse’ acts are controlled by sexual dominance circuitry. But both types of circuits are connected to the brain’s pleasure centers.”
So, to unpack that, it basically means that we can all feel pleasure from both dominance and submission. It’s part of our make-up, just like the need to eat and sleep. Being able to enjoy both allows us to reproduce twice as often as enjoying just one.
We’re All Switches
That doesn’t mean that we all secretly want to switch back and forth from dominance and submission without realizing it. In fact, the majority of people want one role or the other, and don’t switch. What it means is something a little bit deeper than that: “And this is why the authors avoid making hard-and-fast distinctions between dominance and submission—for humans, too, seem capable of shifting from one role to the other. And even though most individuals prefer a single sexual stance, each role seems to offer its own gratifications. Going beyond this viewpoint, it’s useful to explore the paradoxical possibility that there can be submission within dominance—and dominance within submission.”
That’s saying something that many new submissives or dominants don’t understand right away. It’s something you have to learn through trial and error and it’s really the basis for the whole D/s thing. As a dominant, you also have to submit with your actions. That doesn’t mean a dominant is simply doing what the submissive wants and lying to themselves about it. It means the dominant has an innate desire to properly dominate and care for the submissive. You have to care for the submissive enough to take their needs into consideration and give them the dominance they need to exist and it’s the same thing for the submissive. The submissive must submit physically, sexually, and mentally, but be able to dominate emotionally. By getting the dominant to care for them and feel the need to protect and guide them, the roles are complete, and the relationship is whole. If that doesn’t exist, you run into the same problems that all D/s practitioners experience at some point. You get a dominant who’s really just in the lifestyle to get laid, and a submissive who’s just hoping to trade the occasionally spanking for free room and board.
Flipping is Normal
There’s one bit of common knowledge that’s been going through the BDSM world for a long time and it’s usually pretty accurate. That doesn’t mean it’s always accurate, though. It simply tends to fit a large number of practitioners, even if it’s not the majority. That’s the idea that your D/s role in your day to day life is the opposite of your role in the bedroom. That means if you have to be in charge all the time when you’re at work, you probably want to submit in the bedroom and vice versa. It makes a lot of sense. When you’re constantly under the stress of being in control, you need that release to reset you. That’s the reason there are so many porn sites dedicated to male submission. When you’re trying to enjoy pleasure, you want all that stress to be taken away, along with any decision making and just let someone else be in charge of you. Then that notion gets taken to the extreme, because everything in porn gets taken to the extreme at some point.
You end up with popular adult content that’s dedicated to feminization and humiliation. If you’ve never heard of feminization, that’s when the guy is forced to take on the traditional female role during sex. The women will usually put on a giant strap on and penetrate his anus. She’ll often dress him up in pretty clothes and make him wear a wig and makeup. There doesn’t even have to be a woman. The next level of feminization happens when a straight man is turned into a woman by another man. To understand that you just have to know that “We might similarly view males and females as embodying “active” and “passive” relationship predilections. So, nurturing the recessive part of their relational beings may at times offer them satisfactions unavailable through enacting their primary circuitry. Add to this the likelihood that men may eventually tire of regularly having to be in control, it’s fairly easy to see why many males would find tantalizing, the idea of practicing a new form of control through fantasizing, ironically, the novel pleasures of totally relinquishing that power.”
What it All Means
What does this all mean to you? Well, it doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s not going to change your desire to dominate or submit. It’s not going to inform you on how to do those things, either. It’s simply meant to give you a deeper understanding of what D/s is. It’s not about always being the “alpha male” or the “good girl”. Those two things barely even exist. In fact, no human on the planet is constantly in charge of every situation he’s in because of his alpha maleness. It’s complete bullshit, and if you try to be that guy, everyone else will see right through it as a desperate attempt to cosplay as something you saw in a YouTube video that was actually selling you clothes, or cologne, or some stupid supplement meant to increase your T-zone or whatever the hell they call their cellulose pills. The same goes for the good girls out there. No woman is completely selfless and subservient. Wives have just as many needs as husbands and they need to be met. It’s those women who wrap themselves up in the lies they tell themselves about fulfillment through service that end up cheating on their partners. They get to a point where their fake persona has needs that a person in a functioning relationship doesn’t, and they seek out that rush of being at someone else’s mercy elsewhere.
If you want true fulfillment then you have to accept the fact that you need stimulus from both your dominance and submission receptors. That doesn’t mean you’re not a dominant or a submissive. It means you understand that you’re always both things in some form. Dominants submit to the wellbeing of their submissives and submissive dominate their dominant’s emotions. That’s why Mommy Porn always ends with the Christian Grey character (yes, I just had to look up his name for you) taking in his submissive secretary as his defacto sugar baby. The story starts with him dominating her as his sexual prey, but he’s really only doing it to introduce her to her true self and take care of her so she doesn’t have to use her brother’s email address (ugh, it really is a bad series) anymore. She submits while dominating and he dominates while submitting. That’s just the way it is and the more you understand that, the better you’ll be at practicing the role you’re inhabiting. You’re getting brain pleasure either way, so just go with it!
Dominate and Submit with Us!
If you’d like to share your own D/s journey, all you have to do is send it to submissions@allaboutkinks.com! It can be as revealing or as conservative as you want it to be! AllAboutKinks.com is all about learning and growing and the best way to do that is to share what you’re doing with the community!
We can’t wait to see what you send us and you’re going to love seeing it up on the site! Anyone can comment on them and talk about how much they love them. Give it a shot and let us know what you’ve been up to. You can also let us know if you’re trying out something new that you learned on the site! It’s how the community is supposed to work and there are never any limits that you have to worry about! We’ll deal with all that stuff so you can just focus on enjoying the experience! We hope to hear from you soon as you make your way through all the nuances of the lifestyle. Be sure to write to us and let us know what you’re exploring and learning and don’t be afraid to get weird with it!
By the way, if you want to watch a movie about D/s that’s actually good, check out Secretary with Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. It’s a much more honest look at it than that other atrocity!