TPE as Self-Help

Returning to BDSM profiles with greater experience and wider understanding makes for fun, sometimes glum reading.

So many guys want to be disciplined in a comprehensive way. It isn’t some game in which they are required to remember some arbitrary rule. These fellows want a dom(me) to force them to become better men.

It as if one is being asked to become a parent, Daddy I guess in my case. A laughable image if you had a manic depressive monster for a father as I did.

They want to be remolded, remade as it were. Submission as a form of self-improvement.

Taking a broad view of contemporary culture this isn’t that odd an expectation. Self-help books are a huge part of publishing because people are always seeking to discover the trick, magic thought or device that will give them better lives. They turn to fads, gurus, religions, therapies promiscuously.

Why not ask another to assume authority, take responsibility: to do the work for them. To force them to act in the ways they know they should. To supply the willpower.

This is all rendered blurry by the hot thrill of being made to do something. And - oh, yes! yum - order me, punish me for my failures. Make me beg, repent, grovel for my imperfections. (I’ve spent a few thousand hours imagining that. Surely that I had my penis in hand was only a coincidence.)

And while some dominants shake their heads at the prospect of such a time-consuming, demanding, unlikely task, others thrill at the prospect. This is what TPE or lifestyle BDSM means to them. These tops relish the prospect of assuming absolute governance of another and creating afresh the person who has become their slave. Eventually, as some blogs reveal, the reality - tedium, failure, repetition - sets in.

Most tops I think prefer to be involved with people more given to self-actualization and realization. It is more fun to be with someone who is your equal except in certain contexts.

I worry about someone whose life is so fully governed by another. If managing your money, taking care of yourself at the behest and under the guidance of another what happens if you lose them? If the order of your days depend on someone else’s will what happens if the top becomes ill or dies?

Not that I don’t think some sort of total power exchange is absolutely impossible. But it would require to exceptional people and very rare affinities.

I’ve made a couple of posts about this on my new site Fetish Meme.