[epistemic status: really, really tentative; I’m throwing this out there to see if other people relate to my experiences]
I am very submissive.
I don’t like leading things or being in charge. It is scary and stressful and I’m not very good at it. On the other hand, while I tend to be a Chaotic Good bastard in relation to authority that I don’t respect, there is nothing more emotionally satisfying than obedience to someone I do respect. There is a very deep sense of rightness when I am following rules which I believe are reasonable. I love being of service; some of my most cherished romantic memories are of being asked to do chores that benefited my partner.
Until a few years ago, I was under the impression that everyone worked the same way I did. However, I have been informed that many people like being in charge of things and having power and do not actually have a visceral reaction of horror at the idea of telling someone else what to do, and while this still sounds totally fake, I will accept it.
My hypothesis is that there are other people like me: people who have what you could perhaps call a “power orientation” to dominance or submissiveness, leadership or followership, being the guy or being the guy the guy counts on. I have a very strong power orientation towards submissiveness, which is why I even noticed it; most people’s power orientations seem to be far milder than mine.
Our culture does not seem to offer many frameworks for talking about consensual power dynamics. In fact, a lot of the time when you bring up the topic, people assume you’re talking about sex. (This is not about sex!) That gave me a lot of trouble identifying as a switch sexually, because it felt like delegitimizing my nonsexual submissive power orientation.
I am aware of two frameworks used to discuss consensual power dynamics, both of which focus on romantic relationships. The first is 24/7 BDSM; the second is Christian complementarianism. Both are unsatisfying.
24/7 BDSM has a lot of accouterments– the collars, the contracts, the protocol, the terminology– that are really off-putting for many people. What if I don’t want to kneel naked when my partner enters the room? What if I feel uncomfortable calling myself his slave and him my master? A lot of the writing about 24/7 is written by people who are jerking off; it can be tremendously difficult to pick through all the “and the slave is under orders to offer me a blowjob once every hour!” to get to the advice. And it really, really doesn’t help with the “consensual power dynamics are all about sex!” mindset. While nonsexual BDSM is a thing even for people who aren’t into 24/7, in the public mind BDSM is something you do to get your rocks off.
Christian complementarianism requires one to embrace a religion which is not actually true, and which comes with a lot of harmful baggage about masturbation, premarital sex, and lust. Besides, because male headship is a commandment from God, it is far too prescriptive. What about male submissives and female dominants? What about– god help us– egalitarians? Many wives and husbands wind up guilt-ridden because they’re trying to live up to a power dynamic that isn’t right for them; many men become domineering, many women doormats; many people are submissive or dominant at a partner who isn’t interested and may not even know what’s going on; many people end up having an egalitarian relationship and simply claiming that it’s complementarian, which confuses the issue terribly.
I hope to open up the floor for discussion of alternate frameworks for consensual power dynamics. Particular questions which interest me:
- How many people who like consensual power dynamics are there? Are we five percent of the population? .01%? Nearly all?
- Do all people’s preferred consensual power dynamics have a distinct “top” and “bottom”, or are there other forms? What do those forms look like?
- How closely connected is neurodivergence and having a orientation towards power? I notice in myself that many of the things I’m currently framing as “submissiveness” could equally well be framed as “autism and borderline personality disorder”. Is this a common experience?
- Do people have different preferred power orientations (including “egalitarian”) in different areas of their lives (work, romantic relationships, platonic friendships)?
- How does the same power orientation look in different contexts? A submissive at work is going to be different from a submissive at home.
- Are there different “flavors”? Mine seems to focus on obedience, service, and being taken care of; what other flavors are there?
- What are the best practices for having a healthy relationship with a power dynamic? What are the best practices for maintaining your independence and self-reliance as a submissive, or not becoming a total asshole as a dominant?
Thing of Things 
I’m glad you emphasised that this is not about sex, because yes, this is something we don’t see discussed and yet it is so taken for granted.
Particularly in the world of work, where everyone (besides being expected to both be able to work alone and on their own initiative and be a good team player) is supposed to want to go further, higher, be ambitious: your CV needs to show you won this, achieved that, succeeded in the other thing. You want to be Top Dog!
Some people are natural followers and that seems to be taken as evidence of weakness, somehow; a lack of self-esteem, self-reliance, independence. How are you going to survive the zombie apocalypse if you’re not the take-charge type?
Part of it may be the 60s rebellion against authority, where questioning and standing up to The Man was the ideal: be the outsider, the Rebel Without A Cause, the person with the guts and brains to stand alone and say “Hell, no!” While being part of the status quo was being a yes-man, spineless, not able to think for yourself, a goody-goody too afraid to break the rules.
I don’t think this is correct. Possibly because I am a natural follower, but I think it’s tougher to keep inside the rules than be the rebel. I don’t admire either Melkor or Feanor.
I hate being in charge, I hated the supervisory position I was given in one job, I much prefer being the support staff, the back-office, getting tasks to do.
That being said, I’m not submissive (I can be quiet and withdrawn and aloof, but that’s not the same thing). I like being given a task, but then clear the hell off and leave me alone to get on with it. Looking over my shoulder makes me twitch.
Respect, I think, has a lot to do with it. I do tend to respect authority (or rather, I don’t think that simply being an authority or in a position of authority is the only reason you need to say “I’m opposed to that!”) but I have to respect you. I don’t care if you’re The Big Boss, if I don’t respect you – well, I may indeed argue the toss with you, and at the very least I’ll be calling you a stupid bastard in the privacy of my own mind.
I will fight about things I don’t agree with, but I don’t get angry in that Enneagram Eight way, where flaring up and yelling is seen as authenticity and sincerity and integrity and they like it when someone pushes back. I stew and brood about things, and boil over only when it’s the last straw.
So definitely not submissive, but not a leader.
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That’s also something that strikes me about American capitalism, and it doesn’t matter if the guy (and it usually is a guy) is Republican/Democrat, conservative/progressive, however you want to break it down. It applies to Steve Jobs as much as Donald Trump.
That is, success by itself confers this mantle of infallibility. So-and-so made zillions! He’s a self-made man! So we should all admire him uncritically! It’s a real Cult of Leadership, and the idea that okay, some people aren’t natural leaders, they’re natural followers, the “behind every great man – ” notion that leaders need someone to be second-in-command – that just isn’t entertained. So-and-So got there all by his ownsome, through grit, determination, and good old American can-do spirit!
The idea that well yeah, great, he succeeded in business, he was ruthlessly ambitious and he worked hard to get where he is, good luck to him on that, but that does not mean he is automatically entitled to respect – heresy! Do you hate puppies and rainbows too? Success (and wealth as the outward signifier of success) is the only metric that matters.
I see a bit of it about Elon Musk, whom I know nothing of save that he’s some kind of techie business whizz who apparently has made a lot of money out of (so far) great promises but little delivery (to date; his companies do seem to finally be living up to the hype) and every time I ask “But who is this guy?” I get back “He’s Elon Musk!”
“Yeah, but why is he so great?”
“He’s Elon Musk!”
From some of the more starry-eyed types, I get the impression he is the Messiah come to save us all via being really good at STEM and having gotten rich out of it 🙂
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I generally agree, but you’re wrong on the specifics of Musk – he’s made and sold several successful businesses (including PayPal), went from zero to successfully docking with the ISS in 10 years of SpaceX, and Tesla is doing fine. Also note that some of the income the the last two is the “less sexy” products that don’t make headlines – producing rocket engines and batteries from other people.
I think part of why Musk is lionized is that, business acumen aside, he’s a techie and many of his successes are based on technological innovations, not just clever market tricks, particularly in the case of SpaceX and Tesla, which are based in large part on straight-up technological innovations in rocket specific impulse and battery performance. In essence, he’s “one of us”, as opposed to mere marketers like Jobs or buisinessment like Trump, an actual creator who will sit down and actually create something real and useful.
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Not me. Personally, I end up taking Taking Responsibility really seriously, which means I can’t ever really kick back and enjoy the fruits of being on top. Either I’m in the front lines doing the grunt work that needs to get done, or scrupulosity is poking at me. And I really don’t do well in submissive positions. Really.
In work and play, my preferred moments are always when the assumed hierarchy breaks down and people start doing specialist roles. I like it in my gaming when the player/GM boundary breaks down and players start riffing on the world, and I like my current team at work because we’re a very flat collection-of-experts organization, and since replacing any one of us would be very difficult and expensive, the manager doesn’t have a lot of power over us, and knows it.
On the other hand, a statistically-significant percentage of my romantic partners have preferred me in charge, with varying degrees of formality. (Which I can do, but it’s not something I get a particular kick out of. It’s basically just another form of GMing to me.) My own experience would suggest that either people are more comfortable asking to submit in explicitly sexual situations, or there’s just more demand for that than there is non-sexual submission.
Standard provisos about my life not being statistically representative apply, of course.
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I think we’d clash. We might do okay-ish in a work situation, where you gave me the expected tasks and then let me alone to do them, but in the situation you describe that you like it when formal hierarchy breaks down, I can see us having a lot of rows over “that’s not the way to do it”. And if you have the micro-managing gene (the need to be in the front lines doing the grunt work via scrupulosity), we’d definitely clash because you’d be pushing me for “is that done yet? when will it be done? how are you going to do it?” and I’d go along, go along, go along and then eventually blow up at you about “fuck off and let me do this my way, it’ll be done when it’s done”.
And although you say you don’t like hierarchy as such, I don’t think you’re the type to take back-chat from a subordinate so I could see you reminding me forcefully who is the big dog here 🙂
You seem to like someone who pushes back against you? And steps up to take on responsibility and equal leadership? And that’s not me – I prefer clear lines of command, hierarchy, ‘okay so-and-so is the boss’, ‘these are the rules’.
The “riffing off the world” thing you describe would be absolute chaos to me and I would hate it with a passion 🙂
But I definitely would not be submissive to you and I think we wouldn’t much respect each other – I think you’d see me as needing to be spoon-fed or hand-held and too cautious and by-the-book, and I’d see you as a cowboy who likes to make it up as he goes along and has no regard for structure.
Hey, there could be a buddy cop movie in this!
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…I do think this is the first time in my life I’ve been told I’m likely the type who wouldn’t take backchat. I have been described, paraphrasing only slightly, as the backchat that walks on two legs before. (Seriously, click the Really above. It may paint a slightly different picture of me than the one you have.)
And it really does depend on the task, I think. Chairing a convention is different than organizing a volunteer disaster recovery team, which is different than running an open-source development project, which is different than running that same project for the same people as employees, and so on. You need to line up your management not just to what the people under you want, but what the project you’re managing needs.
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I’ve found that people who love being the thorn in the side/the smart arse hate it when it gets pulled on them. You may of course be different, Robert 🙂
I don’t find top/bottom distinctions very useful or indeed very appealing. I like my independence a little too much; in fact, part of the reason I like clear delineations and hierarchy is that I don’t really like people all that much, am very self-centred, and will not be motivated for service/unpaid labour/volunteering/doing extra work *unless* it’s very clearly laid out that “We have a rush order on and everyone needs to come in an hour earlier and stay two hours later for the next week”.
I don’t like open-ended or fuzzy “do whatever needs to be done” because I find that can be exploitative. If you are expected to do unspecified things to get the job done, where does eating into your own time and taking up too much of your resources for no recognition or reward begin or end? That’s not to say I won’t go the extra mile; I have a touch of possible OCD that means an unfinished job will nag at me until I ferret out every last detail (and means I have a “throw in the kitchen sink and all” approach to doing things; I always need to cut, cut, cut for the final reports etc.) but that is more my own interior taskmaster and not to please an external boss.
What really resonated with me was learning about the Theory X and Theory Y management styles.
Most modern businesses are oriented to the Theory Y model and that’s presented as the superior one (the consensus, egalitarian model). Theory X gets presented as fear-driven, authoritarian and even bullying. But McGregor’s theory is more complex than that, and there isn’t “This model is better in all cases” recommendation. Theory X works better in some cases and is often the basis for institutions such as the army or civil service or large organisations. It need not be “workers are all lazy who need the whip instead of the carrot and you have to micro-manage them”, which is how it is mostly categorised because modern society (is supposed to) runs on nice, consensual, equality Theory Y notions.
I did find it very useful in identifying my problems and frustrations with one boss. He was a great guy, but he was definitely in the Theory Y, “what do you think?”, no final decision mode and I’m the Theory X type who likes “you’re the boss, the buck stops with you, give me a final yes or no on this”.
What it boils down to is: I won’t be the leader or the boss if I can possibly help it. I will take your orders if you’re the one in charge. But that only applies in clearly defined situations with rules and structures and hierarchy that everyone recognises and has agreed to follow, and relies upon respect (if I think you’re a damn idiot I’ll probably say so, if not directly to your face). And it most certainly does not apply to my private life, where I very much like doing my own things my own way and am very bad at taking instruction or criticism, never mind orders.
WordPress.com / Gravatar.com credentials can be used.
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how do you define consensual power dynamic and how widely do you define it? i.e. Is someone who is more comfortable relying on an expert’s advice without checking part of a power dynamic or not? this will determine what percentage of the population is part of your defined community.
I think that “top” and “bottom” are essential parts of power dynamic as I understand it. do you have other dynamics you can give examples of?
I suspect executive function problems may be highly correlated with submissiveness, mostly because they make decisions in and of themselves hard, so when someone you trust is deciding for you with your agreement,and does so well in a consistent manner, they are taking a load off your shoulders, literally. You delegated the authority to make decisions to them, so you don’t have to do it.
I think the answer to the last one is both simple an complicated. It is simple in essence: maintain borders – your own, and others’. Always be conscious of the fact you(and other’s) have and are entitled to *choose*, so you can decide “no, this doesn’t fit me tonight/in this relationship/ever”, and you have to honour other people’s choices. It is very complicated in practice, both because being mindful most of the time is hard, and the borders can be breach in ways that are counter-intuitive: i.e. a submissive can compromise others’ borders by not honouring their choice not to be dominant at this point in time, and dominants can compromise their own border by trying to take care of people whom they don’t have enough energy to care for.(can you see I had “the first rule of care is self care” drilled into me ?)
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Data point: I am NT, and I prefer power equality in non-sexual situations. Sexually, power dynamics can be hot, but I prefer switching so it’s still equal on average, if that makes sense.
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You should probably look at Athol Kay’s “Captain/First Officer” dynamic outlined in the MMSL Primer (unfortunately I can’t find a blog post that succinctly describes it) – but it’s basically Christian Compatibility without the religious baggage or “male headship” (that is, the wife can in principle be “Captain” but it’s rarer then the other way around).
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This is important and under-discussed. Thanks for bringing it up.
I find it hard to figure out my orientation. I think I’m happy with moderate levels of either side, with the caveat that other people have to fulfill their role well. I’m repulsed by the idea of either extreme, though I suspect this is due to cultural egalitarian ideals.
A good dominant relationship requires that the sub respects your decisions–they mostly like them, and when they don’t they tell you so as advice, not blame. My current partner sometimes wants me to take charge but then holds me too liable for anything I get wrong, and thus doesn’t work for me. I actively avoid dominance with this person.
A good submissive relationship feels for me like the other person is just that awesome–they should decide what to do because they’re better than you at deciding what to do. I won’t really start bring submissive unless I feel this way, so I can’t tell you a bad sub story.
Finally, I’ll note that authority and needs-prioritization are orthogonal for me. So like, if the monarch demands bananas, and then the vizier marshalls the armies and leads an invasion to conquer some banana farms, the monarch has needs-priority and the vizier has authority. I can understand the pleasure of putting someone else’s needs ahead, but for me it’s healthiest overall to be egalitarian in that respect for most things.
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This highly speculative post will reference this LW post:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/
To me, an egalitarian, consensus based social structure looks like Network 1, and an authoritarian based social structure looks like Network 2 – if you say the networks output “decisions” instead of “definitions” and you reverse the polarity of network 2 – so the central node outputs “commands” which propagate to the other nodes.
And I think the trade-offs outlined in the post apply as well – consensus based social structures “oscillate, or exhibit chaotic behavior, or just take a very long time to settle down” and “requires O(N2) connections”.
Authoritarian structures are “Fast, cheap, scalable, works well to : natural selection goes for that sort of thing like water running down a fitness landscape.” (Text replacement mine)
Carrying this analogy through – I think families operate in consensus mode when thinking about where to go on vacation this summer, and hierarchy mode when OMG THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE.
And even though we operate *mostly* in consensus mode in day-to-day family life, I think everybody feels safer if there’s a person who’s going to start barking out orders when the house catches fire.
I think people have natural instincts for sussing out who in the room is in charge – called “fitness tests” in PUA parlance – and I think if there’s a clear winner things generally go a lot smoother in human groups generally (and families specifically).
This is the problem that is solved by patriarchy, Christian Compatiblism, Captain/First Officer, etc. etc. – IMO.
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If we’re referring to LW posts, Here is a relevant one:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kov/roles_are_martial_arts_for_agency/
Power dynamics depend on more than just personal preference. Context is more involved than merely work/friendships/relationships, and can actively be optimised.
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Thanks for the link – I agree with it – and would like to add that knowing a martial art gives a person the ability to protect. And a scrupulous person might feel a responsibility to protect, knowing how to do so.
“Power dynamics depend on more than just personal preference”
I agree – in fact my thesis is that participating in power dynamics is part of being human.
“Context is more involved than merely work/friendships/relationships, and can actively be optimised.”
I *think* I agree – but can you give a specific example of how to optimize, or what to optimize for?
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I don’t agree that leadership and dominance go necessarily together. (I take it that you imply this, but perhaps I’m reading you wrong.) Domination/submission is only the most obvious leadership paradigm, one we’ve all had plenty of practice at ever since the agricultural revolution. Others are possible.
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Sorry to come off as confrontational, but:
Name six.
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For one, “servant leadership” or “the last shall be first and the first shall be last”.
(2) The idea of the “wounded healer”.
(3) “Might does not make right”, or as the version of the Ramayana I’m currently watching in translation has it ” ‘Ethics is what the powerful decide it is’ is what you believe but you are in error”. Dharma not force and strength.
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(4) Mentor and protégé(e)(s) or master and pupils/teacher and students. Especially where “the goal of the teacher is that the student surpass him”.
Now if I can think of another two, there is your six 🙂
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Thank you for the response, Martha O’Keeffe.
(1) and (2) seem like legitimate attempts to subvert sub/dom structures in human groups. Thanks!
(3) I can’t accept because other factors like charisma are more important to leadership then might (And not saying that just because I played D&D! :D)
(4) I can’t accept because there is a clear hierarchical relationship between teacher and student or mentor/protege (too lazy for accents). (The job of leaders, in most hierarchies, is to prepare a promising second for leadership)
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Personal relationships are social and psychological and strongly culturally-influenced phenomena. The subjective meanings the involved people attribute to different aspects of relationships are vital for understanding them properly. Outwardly, it’s trivial to reduce most of human relationships to dominance hierarchies. But you lose significant explanatory, descriptive and predictive power by doing so.
I assume we agree that leadership essentially comes down to solving a coordination problem, and that there is nothing inherently dominant about coordination. I posit that any sufficiently egalitarian leadership relationship is not a dominance/submission dynamic if no involved party perceives it as such (it may be sufficient for the submissives to think it is and the dominants not, but probably not the other way around), and following orders is genuinely voluntary for the followers. Obviously these forms of leadership sometimes lead to a loss of efficiency, but surely it is not purposeful to exclude existing inefficient leadership models from an examination of the possible space of leadership models just because they’re inefficient. Not all organizations have the management needs of the military.
It doesn’t feel like a good idea for me to type out six variations on such a general theme, of which there are nonetheless few actual instances. That would get needlessly theoretical and require me to invent stuff which would just weaken my case. I can give you three flavors that exist in the real world which are dissimilar enough to be interesting. Some of them may map on to Martha’s examples.
1) First among equals
The leader is awarded respect and authority, but not significantly higher status than her followers. Directions from the leader can be treated more like recommendations or requests for personal favors than orders. The leader acts as a symbol or proxy for the organization itself, and any gestures of respect directed toward her are understood to actually be expressions of loyalty and commitment to the group. Loyalty and commitment to the group are strengthened by the flat hierarchy, and this is emphasized in the organizational culture.
2) Leadership as service
The leader may or may not have higher status than her followers. She is a kind of hub the group members organize their operations around. She is seen as providing support services, helping group members focus on their individual areas of interest by providing an interface under which the mundane technical details of coordination, communication and organizational decision-making are hidden from view.
This one isn’t a very good fit with the wider dominance-oriented culture that tends to associate authority with dominance, so lore is required to counteract the outside influence. I have a vague impression that this paradigm is currently gaining traction in management literature, and I would not be surprised if it became more prevalent in practice as a reaction to the increased numbers of women in management positions.
3) Taking turns, or leadership by specialists, or distributed leadership
This one is my favorite, because it’s the loveliest way to work that I’ve come across. Each project is headed by the most capable member of the team. ”Most capable” can mean anything from ”having the most relevant knowledge and competence” to ”having the time and energy required for handling the responsibility” or simply ”she volunteered for it”. It probably requires exceptional people (members who are too dominance-oriented might disrupt the balance), but I can attest from experience that it does work. The obvious apparent failure modes of too many people claiming leadership in one situation to none doing so to prolonged negotiations over who should lead to the same people always stepping forward just don’t happen with a good team that is well balanced, used to working together and doesn’t repeat the same task. The team literally leads itself. No loss of efficiency.
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Dust Bunny – Thx for the thoughtful reply.
If I understand the thrust of the conversation, “leadership” is based on prestige, and “dominance” is based on ability to enforce unpleasant consequences for non-compliance.
To clarify: I didn’t explicitly state this (which is on me), but I actually think “dominance” includes some mix of prestige and the ability to enforce etc. Obviously, it’s better to be in a more prestige-based relationship, but both things have a role in, as you say, solving the coordination problem.
(When folks use the word “patriarchy” they’re usually thinking the latter but I think folks are wrong about this – also the BDSM connotations don’t help)
Importantly, the structure and efficacy of hierarchies to solve the coordination problem isn’t dependant on whether they’re prestige- or consequence-based.
Does that make sense?
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roe,
The term ’prestige’ has unwanted connotations for me. I prefer ’status’ and my use of that word in my previous post should probably be read as referring to the phenomenon you call prestige, unless I misunderstand what you mean by it. I use them interchangeably in this post.
I wouldn’t say your summary of my position is accurate. I do not equate dominance with force quite as straightforwardly as you put it, nor do I see prestige as some more desirable alternative to dominance. Instead we agree on the relationship between dominance, prestige and force where dominance includes some mix of the other two, as you put it. While the three can be separated conceptually, in real life this is much harder. There are causal links between them in all directions.
We also agree that since prestige is just a form of dominance, leadership based on it is just another dominance hierarchy. But I would question whether prestige alone is any kind of basis for leadership at all. It just leads to a subtler kind of coercion through group pressure or some other mechanism. This is probably what caused the misunderstanding, as you could say that, from my perspective, the triad effectively reduces to force, more or less overt.
I don’t agree that leadership must necessarily be based on any aspect of the triad. I believe leadership can (and ideally does) exist independent of all three. Which brings us back to my original assertion, in slightly different terms.
(I’m also not sure I agree that it’s a prominent misunderstanding of patriarchy that it is based on force. It’s certainly a conceivable one, but it’s not one that I’ve encountered among the feminists whose ideas I am regularly exposed to. Of course I tend to forget ideas that I find too dumb to take seriously, so there’s a possible filter effect. I’m sure you can find support for any idea among the unwashed masses, but I wouldn’t know whether it’s a genuine belief for them instead of just a simplification they would endorse without thought, or whether it is common enough to warrant paying attention to. I’m not willing to accept a simple assertion that it is.)
The critical ingredient I prefer my leadership relationships to be based on is trust. Trust serves many of the same purposes prestige does, but is more direct and doesn’t generally involve a hierarchy. Prestigious and trusted people are believed to be ”vouched for”, competent to the task, honest, reliable, to have benevolent motives, and share relevant goals with the people they lead. Prestige is an order of magnitude (or three) weaker evidence for any of these than trust is, but in larger organizations, where networks are not tight, you need prestige (or enforceability) to complement trust or you will have an insufficient basis for coordination. Trust gets diluted to nothing after going through two nodes in a network. Prestige might even gain significance the further your distance from the prestigious person is, and it applies to entire communities simultaneously, whereas trust is a relation between two individuals.
Trust and prestige may naturally both be present at the same time, but in that case it’s the trust that fuels the leadership, not the prestige. If I am to benefit from leaving the coordination to someone else, I have to be able to trust that the decisions they are making serve our shared organizational goals, and that they do not unduly sacrifice my interests as an individual. For example, I expect that I will receive due recognition for my successes, to keep as much of my autonomy than is practical, that my input is valued, and that the leader will explain their decisions to me if I ask them to. I expect to be treated with respect and not to be on the receiving end of displays of dominance, to be allocated my share of learning opportunities, and so on. Prestige doesn’t really come into whether these conditions are met or not.
(I honestly have very little good to say about prestige or status, and can hardly speak about them without attacking them as unmitigated evil. If I exert effort, I can muster enough charity to accept that maybe prestige is based on a useful, value-neutral human instinct and is not hopelessly corrupted in all possible environments. But as it exists in the real world the nicest things I can say about it are
1) that it’s unavoidable and necessary
2) that for many purposes, it is enough to be able to trust that others will cooperate with someone instead of trusting the person, even if those others are reasoning similarly as you are
3) that just sometimes, perhaps more often than chance, someone’s high status and good reputation is an accurate reflection of their character.
– But if I exert no effort I revert to seeing prestige as an unholy union of hearsay, groupthink, halo effect and pro-establishment sentiment. It is easier to gain prestige through just about any form of cheating, pretense, lies, bought visibility or clever branding of irrelevancies than it is to actually be excellent AND gain prestige through whatever means are left for morally upstanding people. Case in point: marketing and PR.)
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“Do people have different preferred power orientations (including “egalitarian”) in different areas of their lives (work, romantic relationships, platonic friendships)?”
Despite being a sub in a 24/7 D/s relationship, outside of that relationship I have usually been very dominant. But I don’t think the difference comes from romantic vs. non-romantic interactions very much. It’s more like, if I can identify someone who is obviously better suited to make decisions than I am, I want to follow them. And otherwise, I don’t want anybody getting in my way, and it’s extra freeing when people are actively following me. So in practice my orientation depends on who I’m dealing with. When a person I’m submissive toward is interacting with me at the same time as a person I’m dominant toward, it can be very disorienting.
When I say “obviously better suited to make decisions”, I don’t necessarily mean that I’d believe that upon reflection. I can go very subby around anybody who speaks and moves sufficiently dominantly, at least until they do something spell-breakingly stupid. And you can see those instincts expressed it in the way *I* speak and move when I’m in control as well, if you know what you’re looking for. But I can also mark a person as “dominant” despite a total lack of lizard-brain-level dominance signals from them.
The style of dominance my brain is most comfortable with (when I’m in a dominant role) seems to be many-to-one, something like “goddess with worshipers” or maybe “guru with disciples” as opposed to “master with slave”. I find it stifling and sort of tiring to focus most of my attention on a single sub, and I think that’s most of why I’ve been the sub in nearly all of my romantic relationships. I want the intimacy of romance in my life, and intimacy doesn’t jibe with my style of dominance. Most of the times when I’ve been in sexual/romantic relationships, I’ve been submissive, but it’s not the case that most of the times when I’ve been submissive, I’ve been in sexual/romantic relationships, and most of the time when I’ve experienced a D/s dynamic, I’ve been dominant.
I loved being a stripper. Some people experience that as “there are a bunch of people with power over you for whose pleasure you dance”, but I experienced it as “there are a bunch of people entranced by me, gathering for the privilege of watching me dance, and coming forward to my altar to pay tribute at my feet”.
The *flavor* of my D/s experiences does change when sex is involved. I feel much more of a sexual charge from a predator/prey style dynamic (regardless of which role I’m in) than from master/slave, and I think this is why the service part of my 24/7 relationship feels quite distinct from the sex part. “My service is not about sex” is mostly true for me, even though offering sex is an important part of my service because it’s important to my partner. I was about to say, “But the non-24/7 predator/prey part of my relationship *is* about sex,” but it’s a lot more accurate to say that the non-24/7 sex part of my relationship is, at least for me if not for my partner, about predator/prey, an not so much about service.
I can think of one truly egalitarian friendship I’ve had, ever. I seem to feel a power orientation with pretty much everybody.
In summary, my experience of D/s isn’t especially straightforward.
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I might be completely misunderstanding things, and/or someone might say that this practice is actually pretty unhealthy, but I have type-2 bipolar, and my girlfriend has exclusive right to determine whether I should endorse any particular feelings about myself or, in situations where I’ve already gone ahead and endorsed something (because never ever endorsing them myself is not always practical), to override my endorsement.
It is just… a fact of the relationship, that while I might be better-qualified to describe my emotional state and my opinions of myself, and to choose whether to endorse these things, than most people, I am *not* the authority when my girlfriend enters the picture.
So that might be an example of this consensual power dynamic in a specific area of life. But maybe not.
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Oh yes this is me. I’m not an unusually generous person but *being pleasing, doing chores and anticipating needs* is my default approach to both showing affection and resolving conflict. I’m supposed to be an artist but I suck at being my own boss. I’m not a BDSM person but I enjoy being a PA/loyal sidekick kind of sub (sexually or otherwise). I DON’T like punishment, I will assume I deserve it and be sad.
Actually, hilariously, take my current job: my manager and I are the only two full-time staff, so it’s a very intense working relationship. My previous manager was hyper-focused and competent, and we used to call ourselves ‘captain’ and ‘number one’. We, surprisingly, responded to no longer working together by starting a D/s relationship, and we had a very conscious process of rejecting one power dynamic and establishing a new and more comfortable one. My new manager is laid back and does not inspire that level of confidence/trust/fear, and so we can’t work together at all.
To respond to some of your specific points:
-Pain and the BDSM aesthetic are boring and distracting.
-I don’t have a psychiatric diagnosis, but I am aware of recurring scrupulosity, executive function issues and low self-esteem, and a supportive ‘top’ seems to really help with this. (Though I’m not sure how much this differs from having a normal partner who monitors your behaviour and cares).
-As the PA/sidekick, I feel more pushed to arete than when I’m on my own. I want to impress, I think? I have approval from a moral authority? I want to be a good asset and public representative for my ‘top’? I think a D/s relationship would need to use at least one of these tropes.
-On that note, what can D/s and corporate culture learn from each other?
-I can manage people (‘switch’?) and it feels right relationship-wise, but logistically stressful. Being managed (by the right person) is both logistically and emotionally more effective.
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Here via Tumblr. I have preferences, but don’t think they’re coarse-grained enough to fit into a simple top/bottom picture.
I enjoy a lot of leadership tasks: teaching, moderating discussions, keeping track of whether people are following the rules and speaking up if they’re not. I don’t do well at aggression, but I do do well at calm direction types of tasks.
On the other hand, there are some tasks that I’d rather put other people in charge of. I have a friend who likes to order dinner for everybody at restaurants (we share a bunch of dishes when he does this) and some people seem to find this intolerably bossy. I love not having to make the decision myself.
I like doing servicey tasks for others, but don’t like having my status diminished for doing servicey tasks. Maybe that adds up to being a switch?
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No, ideally in a servant and master (not meaning in a sexual or D/s sense) there is a flow between both parties; respect on both sides. The service is worthy when it is done well or for a good cause/to an honourable master; the servant is honoured for good service, loyalty, competence.
There shouldn’t be a sense of diminution for serving others, or “So-and-so is only a servant/is in a lower position”.
It should be like a dance: one party leads, the other follows, but both move to the same music 🙂
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I wasn’t trying to imply that subs should be demeaned, just that, taken as a whole, the information I’ve provided about myself doesn’t support the hypothesis that I’m submissive. (In practice, I also don’t trust real doms to behave like ideal doms, and that is one of many things that makes me less interested in being submissive. I find it hard to say what kind of person I’d be in a kingdom if ideally moral kinky people, because I have not had the pleasure of visiting such a place.)
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*kingdom of ideally moral kinky people
Damn my clumsy typing fingers.
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Quoth Ozy on Christian compatibilism:
“Many wives and husbands wind up guilt-ridden because they’re trying to live up to a power dynamic that isn’t right for them”
It’s interesting you say this, because this is exactly my experience, but in the opposite direction. Ie: I was trying to force my relationship/marriage into the egalitarian progressive ideal, when something like Christian headship turned out to be a better “fit.”
We’re not doing anything as extreme as 24/7 or strict patriarchy, there’s just an ambient sense that I’m the dominant partner. And I’ve found – subjectively – that accepting authority makes me a more responsible and motivated husband and father.
Oh! That’s what I wanted to say about best practices – authority and responsibility have to come as a package. If they get decoupled, trouble follows.
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I would say that I generally prefer to be the person making decisions in any given situation. There are two ways this ties into my autistic tendencies (strongly suspected by many parties, some professional, but not formally verified). First, I find violations (through arguably reasonable, commonplace circumstances) of my (arguably unusual) preferences to be fairly distressing. Even when I decide to fulfill a social obligation through enduring a deviation from my preferences, I am bad at disguising my distress. Second, I am bad at telling whether people have misgivings about my proposed course of action. That is, if they literally say “Fine,” I initially assume they are fine.
It has come to my attention that asserting my preferences can often be something that occurs in a bullheaded, unilateral manner, and disappoints other people. Often these people only inform me days after the fact because they are so yielding a by nature that they initially feared confronting me. It takes me a great deal of effort to express how grateful I truly am for them engaging and asserting themselves, because I am so frustrated that they deceived me in the first place! Why are other people so good at this?
In the face of so much social pressure upon entering college, I have attempted to become more caring and helpful and self-sacrificing, which mostly means in practice more scrupulous, and as a direct result (I had very few tendencies in this direction beforehand; while mood disorders run in my family I’d previously manifested as a more benign, sanguine type of manic depressive) developed an anxiety disorder.
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Something I find interesting about this is how it plays out between different people. I had no idea how much I liked being dominant until I met somebody who needed it. I had always thought that a dominant person would be someone who was naturally full of energy and decisiveness. Instead, I find that I only acquire those qualities reactively, in response to someone’s expectations.
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Isn’t all of this is somewhat taboo in western culture?
We’re supposed to be egalitarian, not hierarchical. Equality is a sacred value. It is hammered home to all of us that you can’t have dignity without equality.
It could just be me. I, at least, find it very uncomfortable to think about power dynamics in personal relationships. It goes further than just having egalitarian relationships as a preference: only my system 2 believes it’s possible that no one is being wronged when there is asymmetry.
If these intuitions are cultural and shared and not just my quirk, it’s probably part of the reason why language for discussing consensual non-sexual power dynamics in relationships doesn’t exist, and why people are often slow to admit that they may have preferences that deviate from the egalitarian norm.
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I’m a teacher, and there are moments when teaching can feel like the best kind of consensual power exchange: the student willingly does the assignment I give her, and solicits my feedback on it, because she thinks she has something to learn from me and trusts that the assignment I give her is going to help her learn in a way that is going to help her grow. Sometimes she even willingly subjects herself to the pain of receiving criticism from me because she trusts that the criticism is constructive – that it will build her up and make her stronger. And like in a lot of power exchange situations, I only have power as long as she willingly gives it to me, I can’t make her learn against her will. (I can enforce power in other ways, like by assigning grades, but that’s not really what I want to be there for…and even that I can only do as long as she remains in my class, which she can get out of if she really wants.) So it’s been odd reading about D/S and power exchange there, because the teacher/student situation obviously isn’t sexual in any way, at least it shouldn’t be and isn’t for me, but some of the same dynamics are there.
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> Are there different “flavors”? Mine seems to focus on obedience, service, and being taken care of; what other flavors are there?
The first thing that comes to my mind is that the “taken care of” part can flip.
The classic example is Frodo/Sam. Frodo is in charge, but his energies are completely consumed by carrying the ring. Sam obeys, serves and *takes care of* Frodo.
This sort of relationship seems to require an outside mission. It doesn’t need to be saving the world, but Frodo’s efforts need to go to something more than himself. Fortunately, worthy tasks are not hard to find.
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That reminds me of the discussion about sidekicks on LW. Even people who like to challenge authority and be in charge find it easy to be a sidekick in the presence of a worthy collective goal. If your goals are stopping Sauron and keeping all your fingers, it’s better to be Sam than Frodo.
I’ve seen it in the military: in battle all the usual wise asses shut up and scramble to do what the sergeant says. It also happens a lot in sports. When a team is mediocre, you often see clashes between different guys wanting to be alpha dogs and get the most money / endorsement / status / groupies. When a team has a realistic chance of winning the championship suddenly everyone falls in line in pursuit of that goal. Then the next year the same team is slightly worse and the same players who sacrificed for each other start petty bickering and power games.
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I’m pretty sure that this isn’t related to autism, I know quite a few mildly autistic people who, while not actually seeking power, have no foibles about being the person to make decisions about what’s to be done.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as dominant and submissive. I don’t trust authority much. I don’t get any kind of warm glow by subsuming my judgement to others. If someone else is leading I’ll be quietly double checking their choices.
When there’s nobody very bossy around I tend to end up making the decisions for groups I’m in a fair portion of the time which I don’t mind but I find “followers” to be highly frustrating.
I find myself thinking “Oh for gods sake! Stop blindly trusting me to know what’s best! Think for yourselves! Argue with me! I make mistakes like anyone else!” and as such I tend to get on quite well with people similar to myself who aren’t dead set on either dominance or submission.
I suspect dominant personalities would find me annoyingly rebellious for by failure to utterly trust them while submissive personalities would find me a weak leader since I try to get them to contribute to choices.
In team situations I find the most satisfying role is a supporting role where I’m neither ordering or being ordered.
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Wow, this post is eye opening! It helped me put to words something that I have long felt but not acknowledged.
I have an intellectual belief that my romantic / friendly relationships should be purely egalitarian and at work I should be a team player and listen to my bosses. My actual temperament is that I love to take charge, don’t mind being forced to make decisions on any issue whatsoever, don’t get along with other type A personalities and argue with my bosses to exasperation. Upon reflection I also notice that my most cherished friends / romantic partners take charge or have forceful opinions only rarely and only on issues that they have overwhelming authority and knowledge. In those cases I’m very happy to cede control. So the power orientation that works for me is that 10% of the time they know better I let them take charge, I take charge on the 10% when I know better and the 80% when no one does.
With that realization, here’s the important question: what should I do about it? Should I embrace this fact, stop striving for unattainable egalitarianism and attract the 90% submissive people? Or am I just being an asshole 80% of the time, imposing my will on people who just don’t have an appetite for conflict, and losing out on learning / following opportunities myself?
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Egalitarianism isn’t unattainable, c.f., my own life experiences. You should just keep in mind that not everyone shares your preferences for power dynamics and organization (and everyone very definitely doesn’t share a preference for socially-approved egalitarianism).
On the other hand, egalitarianism is the social default, and I think one should consider it owed, in the sense that one should always be ready to treat strangers as equals until you’ve established your mutual preference. You can always choose reject someone else’s will, or cease to project your own, but no one can expect you to dominate them or submit to them just because that’s their preference.
All in all, with lots of different organizations and lots of different dynamics, I think that self-sorting (combined with awareness of what your actual preferences are) works pretty well. It has for me, at least.
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OK, so I don’t usually post but this is very interesting. So…
As far as I know I am neurotypical. A bit weird maybe but neurotypical. But this sounds related to my observation of… we always thought of it as alignments in real life? By instinct I react really strongly against unjust rules – I want them changed – because rules being unjust is Wrong and Bad, where someone more towards the chaotic end of the spectrum could just ignore them, because who cares? And I’m a rules-follower; I like obeying rules when they aren’t Wrong. Ditto doing stuff to help people out (though that one is definitely not sexual; I want to make all my friends cookies. And in my case while I like doing stuff for people it doesn’t have to be by their request so long as I’m sure they’ll approve and it’s for them. Like tidying up or cooking something when it wasn’t my job.) In a social situation I’m most comfortable following a leader, and – while it rarely comes up – do best when I’ve got a strong sense of personal loyalty. (Most groups don’t have a leader like that. Some do.) I can fall into the role of the Highly Reliable Supporter quite happily, I’ve done that – is that what you mean by being the guy the guy counts on? – but while I can lead if I need to, it isn’t as instinctively comfortable, and it results in a significant amount of stress. (I originally ended up doing it because I was being the Highly Reliable Supporter, and part of that was running stuff if the person I was supporting couldn’t make it.)
I don’t know how much this varies with different areas of my life, but so far it mostly seems to be “not much.” When I was in college I did better in classes where I liked and looked up to the professor – same thing. I mean, there’s a difference between “I know the kitchen being dirty annoys my roommate. Oh hey, it’s dirty, why don’t I clean it so she doesn’t have to” and “OK, this professor is awesome, I’m gonna write a paper she’ll have fun reading” and “Oh, hi, boss. Sure, I can run the meeting for you” and “You know, so-and-so has been having a hard time lately, and she likes my lemonade, I should make some” – but those all seem related, all based around supporting and caring for people (and occasionally wanting to impress them), and that seems to be the basic dynamic I automatically fall into in… almost all cases. It just seems to be my default mode of interacting with people I like.
And for the last question – it’s never been an issue? I think because mine is so much milder than what you’re describing, and it’s more focused around caring for others than being cared for. And… I am by nature very inclined to trust my own judgment. So that probably has an effect too.
… but I think it’s still the same kind of thing you’re talking about? Just much less intense.
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I read your blog quite often because your brain seems more similar to mine than anyone I know IRL. I’m not neurotypical, obviously. 🙂 Might be autistic, idk. History of problems functioning as an adult.
One of the things that is helping me get over these problems is accepting my power orientation. It seems like deep down I enjoy leadership and taking charge. I used to repress that really hard, so much so that it made me mentally ill. Most of that repression was because I’m female, part of it is from my family and the roles they tended to cast me in, and I think a good chunk of it is from the way I understood Catholicism when I was a child.
I used to think I was very submissive and that maybe what I needed to function was a Dom to take over my life for me. But it turned out that in practice I hate submitting to men. I can submit to women without getting annoyed (in fairness, there is a tendency in my local scene for Dommes to be legitimately impressive, charismatic and highly skilled whereas the male doms think it’s enough to just show up. Probably a selection effect of people who step outside default gender roles, but the net result is the women feel more worthy to submit to.) I like being beaten but submissiveness is not me, at all.
So I’ve been working on developing my own leadership qualities and comfort levels with power. At the moment I’m still uncomfortable with official leadership roles but I tend to often take over and organise in group situations. Not so much because I want to be in charge as because I’m smart and I tend to quickly see what needs to be done. Having that quality combined with a total reluctance to step up as leader, as I have had for most of my life, was AWFUL and frustrating and usually led to me mentally checking out while my team did things in a stupid way. In fact refusing to acknowledge my own power orientation made me into a passive aggressive dick in a lot of ways. I wonder if the guys I “submitted” to could pick up on the intense contempt I felt for them while I did it. I hope not, they didn’t deserve it.
Working on the leadership/power stuff is helping me be more functional in general. I used to feel like I needed someone to need my work or I couldn’t focus on it. I dropped out of my research degree because the research didn’t matter to anyone but me, and I have a weird codependent relationship with my boss in my current job where the fact that he relies on me helps my motivation. I think as I come to see myself as someone who can legitimately be a leader, I won’t have that sense of needing someone else to give me direction.
Anyway, that was a lot of words, sorry. Hope they help you with your data gathering!
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I have BPD as well and I might be autistic as well. I also have a strong preference for being in charge and I hate when people tell me what to do, even if they’re right. Therefore I don’t think it’s your autism and BPD that makes you submissive.
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Outside of a sexual context, I don’t know if I can separate my submissiveness from my anxiety. When my anxiety is at its worst, submission to a trusted individual is more like a soothing mechanism than an inherent property of my life. When I’m not depressed and anxious, I can take power or leave it.
I’m also on the autism spectrum. A lifetime of relying on others to tell me the “right” thing to do has left me helpless in many situations. Social settings are the worst for this, so I tend to find a friend or partner who is socially adept, and have them instruct me on how to behave.
I don’t know. I am pretty independent and competent. When my brain is telling me that I’m not, though, submission is a huge relief.
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One of the things that struck me is that these sorts of power dynamics are lovingly analyzed a lot…in fiction. The Leader and Lancer. The Prophet and Machiavel. The King and Champion.
I found my “power orientation” in the labels of Enforcer, Blue or Green/Black Ranger, and even as Card’s writing rankles otherwise, Bean instead of Ender, etc.
Maybe this is because the conflict-driven nature of narrative media often means that everyone on screen is filtered through power dynamics. The more intense dramas usually composed of endless power plays between the characters, while others go for community/team-building for its core ensemble, along with the internal hierarchies that entails. I’ve kicked around posts even analyzing the ideal friend-group composition for those Seinfeldian slice-of-life anime. Certain dynamics have to be present in order to enable maximum shenanigans.
Fandom loooooooves its labelling, as epitomized by how ubiquitous Hogwartz House sorting seems to be, but that labelling and categorizing can also serve as great codifications of power dynamics. Consider the tropes based around the number of people within a team. Dynamic duo, power trio, elite four, five-man band, six-student clique, magnificent seven, each contain various configurations of internal power frameworks, many with their own trope name.
So the terminology is kind of there, just only for objectified characters. But thanks to art/life imitation in either direction, I’ve still found the concepts fairly applicable.
(There may be similar analogies present within sports teams. The baseball battery, relief vs. ace pitcher, star player vs. team captain, offensive vs. defensive player, etc. Or the type of role a person goes for in a MMO. Clearer, crafter, guild leader, raid leader, healer, tank, scout, so on an so forth.)
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