The 800 lb. Gorilla

I was reading this blog post a few days ago at A Place to Draw Blood Laughing and this paragraph in particular struck a chord with me:

If I wanted to, I could make all kinds of trickle-down analyses of how the roles of my parents led to my kinkiness, and so on and so forth. I don’t particularly want to, and I have no burning desire to know why I am what I am. It’s easy enough to see that their lives influenced my understanding of gender role fluidity, creating an awareness of mixed partnerships of responsibility and tradition rather than handing me off into the world with a simple role reversal. But I don’t think I’m a dom because I have a corporate exec for a mother. I also had a mother for a mother, you know, the kind of mother who makes really good Thai food and likes to play online Scrabble. In short, just a person with some labels attached to her, like me.

And while I didn’t think about it too much this weekend while knee deep in sex and submission and all of the fun stuff, I’ll admit that on the plane ride home, while holding the plane up in the sky with only my sheer willpower, I thought about it, a lot. Because Eileen is skating around my 800-lb. gorilla. The question that used to be phrased in my mind, “What’s wrong with you?” is now phrased a far more healthy-but-still-scary “How did I get like this?” and I still don’t have an answer.

I’ve talked about The Big Scare and how submission and BDSM-as-a-whole is wrapped up in equal parts insanely hot and sexy arousal and creeped-out-fear.  But even if I’ve come to terms with the fact that my own sexual submission is not going to lead me inexorably to a scary place where I don’t want to be, I still keep wondering…why am I a submissive?  Did something happen to me to make me this way?  Do I have issues or something?  I mean, I’m in a healthy D/s relationship, my wife and I have grown closer thanks to our forays into this, my life as a whole is better, I sleep deeper, I’m happier and more confident.  I don’t need to ask this question — I’m not in a dysfunctional relationship that needs to be unwrapped to figure out where the rotten part is.  But like a cold sore in your mouth that you can’t help but touch with your tongue, the question keeps popping up — “What Made Me Submissive?”

And I don’t know.  My mother and sister are incredibly strong women, and my sister was occasionally physically violent toward me well into high school.  I don’t think they’re related to my submission, though.  As the sole male child of a family with strong traditional roots, the older men in the family all told me (when my mom and dad split) that I had to be the man and keep my head down and do the right thing — take care of the family, don’t start trouble, obey your mom and sister.  But my obedience of mom’s edicts and my constant backing down from fights with my sister to maintain familial harmony were all resentful things, full of silent curses and the idea that I was doing what was right, not what I wanted. 

It would be nice to blame it all on growing up in a family with strong females, but it’s a little too on the nose.  And the timeline doesn’t fit.  My first submissive fantasies date back to before my mother became the strong woman she is, and before my sister was old enough to kick the shit out of me in a rage.  I mean, I was six or seven when I started fantasizing about girls at school hypnotizing me and being their puppets, well before mom was anything but a housewife and my sister was anything but a kindergartner.  (Yes, it’s my younger sister who was kicking the shit out of me when I was in high school.  And I’m no slouch — she’s just vicious.)   

Is it my dad? He was easy going, went for strong women.  Maybe it’s something genetic?  Is there a sub “gene?”  I don’t know that he was submissive, though. Or maybe all of this Freudian stuff is bullshit and it’s something different. 

I’ve always gravitated toward strong women.  My first crush was on my mother’s best friend who used to joke about kicking men’s asses into shape.  My first serious girlfriend, when I was twelve, was two or three years older than me and got me to perform oral sex on her nearly daily, whenever and whereever she wanted – even during that time of the month — while only kissing me four times in the whole six-month relationship, and if that’s not a model T&D/service relationship, I don’t know what is.  The pattern is pretty clear when I look back – if I was dating a strong-willed girl the result was a long relationship, if I was dating a strong-willed girl who was only strong on the outside, the relationship was a quick fling.  My friends were aware of the pattern — a lot of my relationships until I came to my senses were very dysfunctional, and my friends would lay down the choice — us, or her — and kind of like the hypnotism dreams of my childhood, my controlled ass would do whatever my girlfriend wanted while blowing off my friends. 

But was that the submissive in me trying to get out, or was that standard teenage male do-anything-for-sex at work?  I’ve got plenty of friends who became zombies when their girlfriends started having sex with them, and none of them let their wives peg them while whipping them with a belt ten years later.  (No, really, a couple of their wives still talk to me.)  I gravitate toward strong, dominant women even now as friends, simply because there’s less headaches, less awkwardness, although my wife notes that many of them tend to be very…clingy, even as friends. 

My wife, who knows me better than anyone, and is possessed of great insight when she wants to be, was talking to me about certain shifts in my personality.  Previous to our involvement in BDSM, I wanted the straight-white-male Holy Grail: The Threesome.  I had even gotten her to agree to one if we could find a friend who was a) clean enough to satisfy my wife’s exacting standards, and b) discrete.  But now that I’m  subbing out to her, now that we’re drunk on sex and horny and willing to try absolutely anything, the whole poly thing has almost zero appeal.  Because my submission is hardcore monogamous.  My wife is My Mistress, in all of the cheesy capital letters you want.  She is my Queen, my Master, my Goddess.   If we ever go to a BDSM gathering, I don’t know that I could handle using terms of address and devotion to anyone else, I don’t know if I could handle any kind of shindig where the subs were supposed to sub for everybody.  Because only one woman has earned my submission and proven herself to be a Mistress who I want to be nothing for, who I want to be property for. 

And my wife’s theory — I know I drifted there for a minute — is that I had a lot of fucked up relationships with women.  And between all of the familial pressure to be “the good kid” for my mother and to tolerate my sister’s craziness, all of the bad relationships I had with women before I met my wife where I did all of the work and got nothing, those natural submissive tendencies I had got buried.  My submission is monogamous, it’s focused on one woman, because all my life I’ve been looking for a woman whose control isn’t toxic, isn’t manipulative and utterly selfish, but in its own way generous.  For me to submit, I need to trust — for me to bow my head, I need to believe that the other person’s ownership will be caring even if it hurts and gets awfully dirty.  I get off on being a good boy, on being praised for being strong and taking each blow like a man, on how I’m strong and comfortable enough in my own skin to let a woman fuck me in my ass while I’m collared and on my hands and knees.  My wife occasionally talks about me like I’m her dog when we play and the collar I wear is a choke-chain for pit bulls, but I’m a good dog, a loyal dog, the kind of dog the family cherishes.  Slavery to me is ownership and utter submission to my wife’ will, but it’s not exploitative or dysfunctional.

Or maybe all these theories are wrong.  The other day, at Fetish Lore, there was a thread about boot worship.  And I get right the fuck off on boot worship.  A long pair of black boots with lots of buckles and straps makes me goofy and stupid and twelve years old again, fumbling around with a bra in the bushes with my girlfriend.  And I always thought the boot fetish came from having a major submissive/arousal/crush on Mary Poppins when I was 9, to the extent that I said that my little mini-fetish dated from that movie.  But watching it again a little while ago, I was shocked to realize that my memory of the movie was all wrong, that she didn’t wear boots at all in the scenes I remember her being booted in.  My memory was faulty.  I suddenly had no explanation for my fetish other than “just because.”  What I thought it was about, it turned out to not be about at all.  And maybe any answer I do come up with here will be elusive like that — it’ll make sense until I really look it over again, and I’ll be left back here.

I never ask this about my wife.  I never dissect her past to ferret out why she wants to fuck me with her “cock,” why she gets gooey-wet-and-horny when she smacks me in the face or spanks my ass or puts clamps on my balls or nipples or cock, and I know for a fact that she had the most normal rural upbringing I can imagine.  So why am I worried about it?  Everything works.  Everything’s great.  Is it really necessary to cut the goose who lays the golden eggs open in order to figure out how it all works?  And would any answer actually hold up, or is it all just going to be boots and Mary Poppins again?