Power Exchange

(I’ve been picking at this note for almost two weeks. I don’t know if I really can express the confusion and doubt the issue inspires.)

Sorry, I don’t remember the artist’s name. I think this was from an illustrated edition of Venus in Furs.

Utterly unhumble I ache for humility. I don’t lack self-esteem. I’m no one’s inferior. But I can’t forget the soul ravishing delight of placing someone - if only temporarily - above me. Worship is a very questionable word. But some of us are so constructed that we can with sanity offer it to a special other.

Enough of the purple patter.

Looking for BDSM interaction outside of straightforward sadomasochism will be the tricky part of this endeavor.

I’ve only experienced being an emotional bottom, submissive guy, slavish person with one person. My prior partner and I had known each other for years before falling in love and combining it with power exchange.

I know her passions and aversions, strength and weaknesses, virtues and failings. This rare and comprehensive intimacy only strengthened the surrender. My adoration was offered to an individual that I knew beyond label, role or other generic attributes.

The more time we spent together the deeper, happier surrender became.

For me to try D/s with someone else will require, if not exactly unlearning all that, a very different approach. Achieving, much less recreating, that quality of sharing is as probable as my winning the lottery (I don’t buy tickets).

In my inexorably complicated way I’m trying to fashion a new model within myself.

Let me preface the next paragraph with an acknowledgement of those for whom it is untrue.

With some wonderful exceptions - many submissive men writing about their dominant partner rarely seem to capture a distinctive relationship. The funny thing is often been the case in vanilla marriages. Whenever some guy says “the wife” I wonder if he thinks of her as doing other than preparing “the food,” taking care of “the kids,” and being on “the bed.” I know my shudder is a sign of being overly finicky. But why not say “my wife?” (Well, now you know why, people have applied that badly abused word - cynical - to me. Cynics are frustrated idealists they say.)

Service bottoms have it easy, don’t they?

On the web I’ve read the words of female tops - dominants, sadists - who spark admiration, affection, and - yes, nothing unwholesome in this - desire. A good deal more desire than the prefab dominatrix creations on the pay sites. Some of them are my muses. This is merely a blog but we all need our inspirations.

So it isn’t impossible that I’ll run across a D/s top around here that will induce real instead of merely technical respect.

There’s also degradation. While I think of it as emotional S&M, degradation is a part of power exchange. While being subjected to it by someone for whom you care enriches it, that isn’t a prerequisite. (Though explaining it is nearly impossible to humiliate me even if I can be degraded may be a challenge.)

But I can’t yet imagine offering homage to a label or role. Titles and honorifics are feeble entitlements. But men who pay professional dominatrices and play with strangers at fetish problems don’t mind this.

Offering adoration, as a mere performance, is something I may to adapt to if I don’t want to give up the idea of experiencing D/s ever again.

You may be thinking: don’t settle for less. It is a convoluted erotic algebra: desire, need, possible options, appropriate compromises. I don’t think there is only one solution. The equation can only be tested in reality.

It wasn’t a problem when power exchange was merely the stuff of masturbation. How easily I knelt. But it was to someone I created.

Yep, I sure am difficult all right.