I don’t have a lot of role-models when it comes to being a submissive. I don’t think I knew of any. I read a lot of people’s blogs or hear them talk, and they mention “The Story of O” or something, and when I think back, I’ve got a jumble of adolescent male media to rely on. Comic books. Horror movies. Heavy metal videos.
I remember the first time something ever just hit my submissive spots was the Afghan Whigs song “My Curse,” which was about ‘93 or ‘94, I think. The lead singer let a female guest sing vocals — Marcy Mays from the band “Scrawl,” I think — and I remember just sitting in a car, listening to that track, feeling feverish about what the words said to me:
You hurt me baby
I flinch so when you do
Your kisses scourge me
Hyssop in your perfume
Oh, and I do not fear you
And slave I only use
As a word to describe the special way I feel for you.
You look like me
And I look like no one else
We need no other
As long as we have ourselves
But I won’t cry about it
Every time you get obsessed
Every time I came undressed
All ugly thoughts are gone
I’m sure we’ll all be friends
I’ll try to break your back
You’ll try to make amends
Curse softly to me baby
And smother me in your love
Temptation comes not from hell … but from above
And there’s blood on my teeth
When I bite my tongue to speak
Zip me down, kiss me there
I can smile now
You won’t find out, ever.
[This song and "Venus in Furs" by the Velvet Underground are pretty much the sole residents on my non-existent "Music To be Dominated To" playlist. Both of them make me feel punch-drunk and hot. I need more.]
I have no idea what that song’s really about — but the way the song uses “slave,” and mention of the blood on the teeth, the scourge of the kisses…Oh, man, that song cried out to me. That song spoke to me. It may not have said what the writer intended, but it said something to me that made me get dizzy and weak and have to get myself under control again, because there was no way I was ready to admit to the world that I wanted to be dominated. I had just asked one of my girlfriends to dominate me before I first heard that song, and it had just been so awkward, the whole thing getting buried under the rug with both of us retreating into vanilla sex. (I later found out, as I mentioned in a much, much earlier post, that she later on went on to became a sub to her next boyfriend. I guess we were both looking for the same thing.) But that song…that song was ripe with the promise of what I wanted. Somebody to fit with, somebody who would fill me and control me and overpower me. Somebody like me. “You look like me, and I look like no one else.”
Other than that, the rest of it brewing around in my head was all vampire movies and comic books. Women in tight outfits who would mind-control the stalwart hero. Virginal Victorian girls who’d been corrupted by the bite of the nosferatu and who now seduced their loving fiancees. Good girls becoming bad girls and taking control. If you know vintage horror movies: Ingrid Pitt. Deborah Foreman in “Waxwork,” (which was an awful movie except for the 15 minutes where Foreman discovers she’s a sexual submissive while in the house of the Marquis DeSade.) The “nice” Bond girls. That ZZ Top video where the sweet girl gets picked up by the three women who look like they pose for Budweiser calendars and kitted up until she was a sexpot. (Man, do they even make those calendars anymore? I remember working at gas-stations in the early ’90s, and they were everywhere. They were kinda tacky.)
If you want to know where the pro-domme image comes from, I would bet money a bunch of it is informed by adolescent male comic books and movies from the ’70s and ’80s, superhero images twisted and altered in the extreme pressure of the teen subconscious like coal until what comes out is the diamond of the latex-clad and tightly -figured super-villainess.
These images and fantasies were a way, I suspect, for the adolescent male to adjust to the fact that the tomboy he played ball with is growing tits. That the sweet girl next door who his parents talk about in glowing terms is suddenly a focus of his sexual fantasies. That the girl who was mean to him growing up is now attractive to him. (I remember hitting puberty and this girl who was a vicious bitch to me for four years was suddenly unbearably attractive to me. That’s a mind-fuck. I remember asking her to dance at a school function, and she just seemed shocked that I could have a pair of balls big enough for those words to leave my mouth. But some of my best girlfriends started out as girls who hated my guts, and if there’s not something significant about that, then I don’t know myself very well.)
The gender that had once just been different now has this power over him — it makes him feel funny — and so women start to fall into two categories, good girls and bad girls. But the problem with that schema is that the bad girls, for all you’re supposed to scorn them, are more fun. So you develop this fantasy that the good girl could become a bad girl. (Not by choice, of course — somebody turned her that way.)
This is just my theory, but it works for me, although it might be limited to the kinds of guys who read comics and watched rock videos and horror movies coming up — which is a peculiar type of male who existed solely in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, I think, although I suppose if you had access to some Hammer films these days, you could still pull it off.
And the thing is, when I think about that plot: “the good girl becomes a bad girl and takes charge” — then, holy shit, I’m living the dream. My church-going, public interest work performing, bustling soccer mom wife is a dyed in the wool sexual sadist now. She’s sexually dominant. Shit, she’s even got a whip. (Okay, a flogger, but work with me here.) It’s one reason why I have no trouble believing that people reading this may think it’s some kind of made up scenario — because this is pretty much dead on the male patriarchal stereotype for what a woman should be: an angel in public, a devil in the bedroom. It’s crazy.
(To draw this out just a bit longer, I have to wonder how my wife sees it: that the man she fell in love with who stood up for her against her family and his when they would get in fights, who is working his ass off to build a future for her and their daughter, who’s in a career that revolves around interpersonal conflict, is all of a sudden a ball-gag wearing submissive, naked on his hands and knees while she works him over with a cock…I don’t know how she feels about that. Er, I know she enjoys the hell out of it, but I don’t know how the transformation feels to her.)
