Poverty and Dommes

Bitchy Jones just posted about a video on YouTube involving a young — 22-years old — woman who is in the nascent stages of pro-dommery. Normally, I am loathe to link to Bitchy’s site for fear she will turn her anger toward me, but the video stirred up a lot of thoughts in me.

The first, and most important thought, is to wonder where all of the poor male submissives go for relief. That sounds snarky, but really, I have to wonder what all of the poor subs do. The girl in the video equates a man letting someone be in charge with, you know, taking them on thousand dollar shopping sprees, and as such she’s already priced herself out of the league of most of the people I knew when I was her age, and frankly, most of the people I know now. (Doesn’t she know we’re in a recession?) It also creates the somewhat entertaining image in my mind of bargain-basement professional dommes demanding Wal-Mart gift-cards as tribute, or canned goods.

And here’s the fundamental disconnect for me: if you need my money, you’re not in control. If I’m paying you, even if we call it “tribute,” or a “tithe for my Goddess” or, I don’t know, “wergild for her self-respect,” than I’m the one with the power. The whole thing becomes a commercial transaction, and like any commercial transaction, all of a sudden it gets opened up to market forces: I can hunt for better prices, better service. Competition suddenly becomes a factor.

More than that, when it’s a commercial transaction, it becomes like a night in the strip-club: I know that no matter how nice this girl is being to me, I can never trust its genuineness, because at the center of it all there’s a financial stake at work, and that financial stake is wholly based on me believing she buys into this. I can never trust that she really is interested in me — er, I guess in this case, that she really wants to punish me or think I’m a worm, which might be more true than not.

It’s why I don’t really dig on strip-clubs, and only really ever went to one once or twice. While I’m there, I think these hot girls are genuinely enjoying my company, that there’s this untapped populace of hot, surgically enhanced girls who are somehow really into middle-aged guys and love to show them their breasts. (I call this “The Rock of Love” segment of the population.) And they don’t want to strip, but they’re paying their way through college. (Back in my younger days, we used to call the roll of bills my friends brought to a strip-club “the college fund” simply because of that ubiquitous justification. And, because in a few of my buddy’s cases, I think it probably was their college fund.)

But afterwards, I realize that the girls who make the money are the girls who are best at creating that illusion — that make me think they genuinely like me. They might. They might not. (I suspect the latter — I mean, five minutes of rubbing her crotch on my lap is not really the basis for the germ of a friendship.) But regardless, I can’t trust it. And so the same thing goes for a domme that I’ve got to pay. I would never be able to trust the relationship, and because it’s sexual, because I’m having this button pushed which is situated right there at the nexus of my heart and soul and cock, that submissive button, I would be tempted to build the whole thing up into more than it is. The feelings submission creates in me are too powerful to do anything else with.

I mean, maybe it’s too much to ask, and maybe it shows how fucked up BDSM is on some level, but if a girl is going to hit me with a flogger and call me names, I want her to like me.