💾 Archived View for flexibeast.space › gemlog › 2021-04-18.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:37:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
It's taken me many years to become comfortable identifying as ‘a dominant’. A common kink trope is the concept of the supposed ‘natural dominant’: a cis man, before whom anyone lesser will feel faint and compelled to submit. A more general trope is that men just need to have an air of confidence in order to be attractive to women[a]. These two tropes get combined by an army of cis men behaving like entitled douches towards people they haven't actually negotiated a consensual power dynamic with. For example:
It gets somewhat farcical: there are those who describe themselves as ‘ultimate dominates’, the misspelling making it difficult to even _begin_ to take them seriously.
All too many women have had to deal with this phenomenon - not only women who identify as submissive or switchy, but women in general. This, combined with the dominants of the kinkier-than-thou crowd[b], meant that although i was happy to identify as a domme[c], i avoided identifying as ‘a dominant’ for many years.
The problem, however, is that i am in fact a dominant. Not only are RACK[d] d/s power dynamics typically central to my intimate relationships, but i only switch in very specific circumstances (usually involving me having regularly interacted with someone over an extended period of time).
i had a number of discussions about this with one of my current partners, who very strongly identifies as submissive. She was adamant that i shouldn't abandon the term to the entitled and arrogant, and that if i'm comfortable identifying as ‘a top’, i should be at _least_ as comfortable identifying as ‘a dominant’ - she feels i'm dominant in particular more than i am ‘a top’ in general. So i now identify as a dominant, and i'm comfortable with that.
☙
🏷 kink,sexuality,sociology
☙
[a] @sgrstk once said on Twitter, “The only thing more attractive than confidence is intelligence. Don't believe me? Have a conversation with a confident idiot and let me know how horny it makes you.”
Cf. also the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which people with low skills overestimate their skills:
Wikipedia: ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’
[b] i.e. the group who has granted themselves the ‘responsibility’ of deciding who is and isn't _really_ kinky, or is or isn't a _serious_ kinkster.
[c] The ‘feminine’ form of ‘dom’, and not, as a number of people seem to think, just a fancy French spelling of the latter.
[d] ‘Risk-Aware Consensual Kink’.