I’ve been thinking a a bit about what being a submissive male really means.
We live in a culture that demands submission from men on a certain level, while prizing dominance and independence. There’s been a lot of examination about what society wants or demands from women — and by this I’m just going to limit myself to American society, because I don’t know from Australian or UK culture, even if these assumptions can be applied there — but not, to my mind, what it demands from men.
We want strong, independent men. The frontiersman ideal, the citizen-soldier ethic, the blue collar guy who works all day and then comes home and runs the family and fixes the pipes and spends the rest of his night standing over the interior of a car with the neighborhood guys — that’s what I always assumed being a man meant. My old man — my father — was a man. He had a blue collar even if he did have graduate degrees, he oversaw a shop full of guys, and — most importantly — he was a man respected by other men.
A man, to some degree, commands other men. If he doesn’t command them on paper, if he’s second-in-command, or the guy who really runs the place for the suits, then at least he commands their respect.
If you can’t be this man, then you should be somebody who commands some respect, no matter how small. If you’re not going to be team captain, you should at least be on the team. If you can’t be on the big team, you should at least be on a team.
The problem with that model of manhood is that it’s elusive. For every guy who runs a shop full of workers, there’s twenty workers. For every man who’s king of the hill, there are plenty of workers and drones. For every quarterback, there’s a team, and for every team, there’s a bunch of guys sitting in bleachers. The concept of manhood is thus constantly slipping out of our hands — men spend their whole lives looking for a definition of manhood that they can fit into.
Not just that, but even if our culture heroes are independent and dominant and respected, we prize submission, at some point, in real life: being a team player. A hard worker. A good soldier. Obeying orders.
We say we want “A,” but since most people are never going to be in a position to be “A,” we really want “B” from them. And the difference between A and B is night and day. Manhood and just being some guy. Dominance and submission. Giving orders and obedience.
I suspect that’s one reason why the family is so important to men’s definition of themselves — even if you didn’t get onto the football team, even if you’re not an executive at the office or a floor manager at a factory or a lead programmer at an IT company, you can be the man of the house. On paper at least.
The American male myths are powerful to men because they command respect, even if they don’t give a fig, even if they’re so badass they don’t care for or need your respect. The lone gunslinger. The intrepid detective. The sports hero. The riverboat captain.
These men are not submissive.
And the thing is, I’m not submissive either. I am sexually submissive — I get a hard kick out of bending knee to a woman, to serving her, to being her black knight or her loyal hound or her slave or her dirty little whore. But I do not want to be submissive in my day time life. No matter how much I get off on submission in certain circumstances, there’s still a part of me that buys into the idea that being a man involves commanding respect.
In my career. In my academic past. In my family life. I don’t want to be submissive, or weak, or disrespected, because that kind of submission — the non sexualized kind — is unmanly. A sexual life is a closet, even if it’s a closet that lots of other people are allowed to look in or walk through. A sexual life is, to a certain degree and with exceptions, private.
If I had to say why 24/7 BDSM is something that I both yearn for and suspect I’ll never achieve, it’s because there is no framework for me to be submissive 24/7 in our culture that is not wholly aberrational to most of the people I know and a complete and utter destructive threat to my notion of my own manhood. I’m being honest here — my chosen field requires me to command the respect of my peers and those who I encounter professionally. I cannot afford to be viewed as pusillanimous or weak or submissive. I cannot allow myself the luxury of being wholly submissive, all the time, and honestly, I don’t really want to. My personality is not suited to it. Submission must remain in that closet, even if I let other people in, or talk about it with a chosen few.
It’s not just me. How many dominant women really want a man who is submissive 24/7, to everybody? My wife doesn’t. Lots of other women whose blogs I read don’t. They want men who will submit to them, but they also want men who are real men outside of the bedroom or dungeon. My wife says that a submissive man’s submission isn’t really worth as much as a guy who can command respect in the real world. (Is she buying into the same framework that I’m talking about, or is it something about breaking a man who’s strong being more attractive than breaking a man who’s weak?)
But like I said at the beginning, this model of manhood is elusive. It excludes far more men that it embraces. It is problematic from a lot of standpoints. If you’re not a guy interested in being an alpha male, or at least assertive in whatever area you can be, then you’re left out. Or worse still, left on the sidelines kind of bitching about the whole way the game is played, which is just like being left out, only bitter.
But it’s interesting to me, because I identify as a submissive, masochistic, male. But only to a certain degree. Only to a certain line that I can’t cross. Because submission to a woman in a femdom environment is laudable; submission to other men, submission to the world, submission to most other things — it’s a sign of weakness, even if weakness is what I get off on in rarified circumstances.
I am transgressive, but only to a point, apparently. And that’s a paradox that I keep trying to figure out, to unravel, and have no success at.
