FLR / LFA Marriages & Relationships
» BDSM, D/s, S&M: Speculations
(Knowing I’d post something like this is was one of my motivations for posting Pansexual Polyfetishist? Cultural disconnect can easily seem like arrogance.)
Lord knows what goes on in the heads of [gender] at times. … The [female/male] gender is often impossible to decipher.
- Somebody on the web (and edited)
Was the human race created by a singularly mediocre television producer?
Over the last several months of reading the personal writings of people who use female led relationship and loving female authority to encompass their happiness in female dominant / male submissive marriages I’ve come to feel that the movement’s primary source isn’t Elise Sutton or Barbara Wright Abernathy but a man whose successfully marketed pop psychology surely influenced those women’s subsequent efforts.
“Dr.” John Gray.
“From the day a person is born, gender is an easy way to categorize people,” she says. “And when you are the member of one group, it’s easy to notice differences rather than similarities in people from the other group.
Purdue study shows men, women share same planet
Simple solutions presented in self-help books and the popular media are generalizations that “seem to fit people’s experiences, though only superficially.” Because gender stereotypes are ever-present in society, the descriptions in Gray’s and Fein and Schneider’s books “ring true” for many people.
The Rules Of Self-Help Popularity
A common thread I encounter is how submissive males weren’t romantic. Weren’t, not aren’t. In their pre-LFA / FLR past..
Did all you guys really go all those years before she exhibited dominance and
- Often forget to express your pleasure in her looks and clothes
- Forgo the tactile pleasure of massaging her
- Rarely embrace her
- No intimate meals
- Fail to give her presents, flowers
- Rarely tell her how much you love her
I mean – did you really?
I guess so. Hard to imagine a worldwide conspiracy to claim insensitivity. (Then again given the fear of seeming gay … )
Why?
A rhetorical question. You did need for her to take “loving female authority” over you. Without Eros romance dies. And all the small courtesies and amenities that are a natural part of romantic love.
And I congratulate you. You’ve perhaps saved one of the most treasured experiences in life.
Our individual routes to romantic success may strike others as odd - as much of the rhetoric of LFA / FLR does me - but the important thing is finding a path that works.
I still don’t quite buy much of the chastity business as it is presented. But if men enjoy being locked up there’s no reason not to do it.
One of the things that baffled me was the frequent assertion that men are less amenable to control once allowed to have an orgasm. I can’t see having an orgasm interfering with my desire to surrender.
Eventually I realized that submissive men enjoy this kind of control.
So yes the male part of me, that gets so angry at FLR guidelines, likes to prove, even just after orgasm, i know my place. i will make my Mistress proud that she has a cum slut instead of a denied slut.
For those of you whose FLR / LFA blogs are still up five years from now I hope to read of the continued success of your lives together.
For me the joy is in the freely given surrender, giving of myself. If it were something that I should do like brush my teeth or morally right like not kicking cats the happiness wouldn’t be the same.
Prior: LFA / FLR / D/s S&M / DD / HoH / BDSM (Alphabet Soup Anyone?)
Comments
Richard, once again you’re two steps ahead of me! I’ve spent the last month dipping into dozens of blogs on the alphabet soup of FLR, LFA, WLM, and an bunch of other letters. The writings kind of sit in the back of my head for a while and rearrange themselves, and lately it’s been making me re-examine the paradigms of FLRs. I recently ran across an article that helped to start bringing this together for me: Some researchers have “discovered” that in marriages in which men defer to their wives tend to report a higher degree of marital satsifaction from both men and women (Now I’ve got to find that article for you).
My grandfather used to joke that he’d always have the last words in an argument. They were “Yes, dear.”, but he and my grandmother seemed pretty content for well over 50 years. Have some people “discovered” that FLRs are actually somehow better, even though they don’t use the same terms? Note that I’m pretty certain that they didn’t utilize chastity devices or (I’m sure) any kink practices, but they did have a certain amount of respect for each other as persons, and respect for each other’s role in their marriage.
Maybe, just maybe there really isn’t such a things as LFA or FLR, but simply a happy agreement between two people based on respect and desire.
The Edge of Vanilla
Posted by: Tom Allen | September 8, 2006 3:46 PM
‘Defer’ is a tricky word since it doesn’t necessarily mean offered in a deferential way. Even in relationships where I was the more dominant I liked to defer to my lover’s wishes when possible and they weren’t just plain crazy. Sometimes tht meant humoring or just cooperating. And I’m sure relationships where people cooperate are happier.
I’ve often said “Yes, dear” or “Yes, Ma’am” - even to my boyfriends(all of whom have been very girlish). So your grandaddy may have winked even if only to himself as he said it.
Posted by: Richard | September 8, 2006 5:10 PM