One of our first contributors sent us a range of very eclectic, very sexy photos, many of which were immediately re-blogged. Among them, ze sent a photograph of a bound, erect penis: essentially, a cock shot. Exactly as ze described it in hir email, the bondage is beautifully done. The man’s penis strains, his stomach muscles are tensed, his skin flushed with trapped blood. It is, undoubtedly, a beautiful cock in bondage.

When May and I sat down and opened the email to look through the images, the cock caught our attention.

“Should we post that?” I asked.

May shrugged. “My instinct is yes.”

“Hmm,” I said. “My instinct is no.”

We have yet to resolve this between the two of us, so I thought I’d throw it open to a bit of discussion here, and find out what you, the audience of the blog, think.

Can a cock shot be submissive?

I can explain, to some degree, why my initial instinct was to say no. The reasoning is threefold.

Firstly, because I do have a personal wariness around cocks that should be acknowledged. I am not a big fan of the penis, in general. I find the entire contraption a little off-putting, and wont to spit acrid goo at me. And where erotica is concerned, they’re just not to my taste. I have thousands of images in my porn collection, and not a cock shot to be found.

Secondly, because I do see a tricky distinction here between masochism and submission. I have often identified scenes that focused intensely upon the weapons and gear of kink as sadomasochistic, but not as D/s. This is another instance of the nuances between top/bottom and dom/sub, many of which are fluidly defined from person to person. A person in pain is not submissive. A person in bondage is not necessarily submissive either. But how to convey that distinction, merely a matter of attitude, in a photo?

Following from that point, the third: I’ve realized that I make a connection between character and submission. That is, for me to feel that a photo portrays an instance of beautiful submission, it must first convey a person who will enact that submission. An amputated body part is not, to me, enough.

In my gut, this is a matter of emotional connection. I have no emotional connection to this particular body part. As such, while I find the photo evocative and masochistic, nothing about it says submission to me. The cock has no eyes to cry with, no lip to quiver, no knees to kneel upon, no body to hunch, to protect, to evoke my dominant instincts. I do not care about it, beautifully bound though it is.

But perhaps this is an unfair bias I’m inflicting upon the Male Submission Art audience, to shy away from cock shots and their ilk. In all honesty, I don’t know. I know my personal tastes run deep, and are often counter-culture. We don’t have enough suggestions yet to get a truly fair sampling of what people are interested in.

So tell me. Can a cock shot be submissive? What do you think?

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We played earlier this week. It was a good scene; there were knives involved, and face slapping. I knew from our conversations that submission is sexually linked for him; I was a bit more sexual. It ended quietly. He spoke about where he’d gone, and what he’d felt, and I did a bit of the same, but in the end, really, I was surprised.

For me, nothing changed.

For him, that scene fit his idea and definition of submitting. But for me, it didn’t. It just was. I just was. If that’s what domination and submission means, then I dominate everyone I play with. (I have had people argue that I do dominate everyone I play with, because I am “naturally” dominant. I have no idea what that means.)

My ideas about domination and submission are changing. I wish to still accommodate differences of opinion; I realize that relationships are possible with different expectations and opinions, much in the way of the recent scene I’ve mentioned. But the idea of “submission,” for me, is going deeper. Is becoming more rarified, and more intense. More (and I hesitate to use the word, because it has horrible connotations in the scene) true.

It is for this very reason that relationships created with an established power dynamic from the very beginning wig me out. I have never in my entire life started a conversation or a relationship out with the idea that I’m the dominant partner; the thought of doing so makes me simultaneously infuriated and nauseous. I like it even less to be approached by people who immediately qualify that they are submissive. Men and women I don’t know who want to submit to me. I bet there are some of them reading this blog. I know you’re out there.

You have no idea what submission means to me. You and I are not speaking in the same vocabulary. How could we be? We just met.

Submission means different things to different people. It means different things to the same people in different contexts. It plays in shades, degrees and variations. It comes in stripes and spots and purple sprinkles. For the context of this blog post, I will attempt to explore what the hell I mean when I say that word. What I want it to mean, although I accept that I can’t always get what I want.

Submission.

I have a hard time coming to terms with my “dominant” tendencies, the part of me that demands submission. Devotion, surrender, control. There are little voices that like to whisper: you think I’m awesome? You think I’m powerful, worthy of respect? You think I’m qualified to play with your mind and your emotions?. . . Really?

It’s intoxicating, the thought that I could reach out and take that. That I could go to a club, post my photo on a list, or hell, write a craigslist ad demanding submission from strangers. Men would fall down for me. It would be so, so easy. And it makes me sick to think I’m tempted by that. Even the smallest part of me. What kind of men would they be? What kind of person would that make me?

I get that it’s hot, I get it. Power is delicious no matter what end of the spectrum you’re standing on. Oh god, dating a man who jumps when I say, strips when I say, fears me, follows me, spends the whole first date in a sweaty-palmed frenzy, I get it.

But I don’t do it. It takes so, so long for me to play that game with people. I’m frightfully bad at being dominant. Actually dominant, the way I think of dominant.

A part of submission is choosing not to fight back. choosing to support a power structure wherein I rule over you. How can you choose that, how can you support me, if you don’t know me? And if you’re smart and thoughtful and have worked long and hard coming to terms with your submissive nature, how can you then take something so valuable and just drop it in my lap?

Fuck, don’t give that to me. Don’t give that away to anyone, but least of all to me.

Do you realize that in so blithely handing your submission over to me without knowing my qualities, you have devalued all of the work I’ve done in my emotional journey to accept my dominance? I want someone who submits to me consciously, who’s worked hard and respects me because I’ve done the same.

Submission, especially well thought out, careful, loving and intelligent submission, is not a gift. I don’t just take it and play with it and own it merrily until I wear it out and send it to Goodwill. It is an exchange. Do you know what you demand of me, when you submit to me? That the more power you give me the more responsibility I have? (Secretly, I am Spiderman.)

I want you to dominate me.

Do you have any fucking clue what you’re asking?

What part of domination and submission says that the dominant’s part is easy? That we can just hand out sentence without remorse? That we can accept devotion without personal recriminations?

Maybe you think I’m an appropriate person to submit to, but more important than your opinion is my own. It’s my life, after all. Am I an appropriate person to submit to?

If being dominant is being given complete, utter, total control over another person in emotional, physical and mental aspects, how much fuckupery can be caused by one simple, stupid mistake? I hate mistakes. I hate them, but I make them. If being dominant is being asked to take responsibility, what do I do when I’m tired and don’t want it?

Submission as I want it is not giving all these powers up to me. It’s giving them up and then having the courage and intelligence to still be alive, well, and supporting me when I mess up and it all comes crumbling down.

Sometimes when I’m very, very small and sleepy I ask May questions. “Will you still love me if I don’t reach my goals?” He laughs, and he kisses me, and he says yes. He always says yes.

And I cry. I cry like a lost child, I cry because I’m terrified, because it is so fucking scary to exist in a world that demands so much. My world. My standards, my goals.

Many people who decry instant power dynamics say that submission is about trust. How can you trust someone with your submission if you don’t know them? But there’s another side to that, as there always is.

It’s not just “Do you trust me to dominate you?” It’s “Do I trust you to submit to me?” Do I trust you to catch me when I fall, comfort me when I cry, allow me the insane luxury of believing, just for a little while, that I’m as worthy and valuable a person as I want myself to be? Do I trust you to understand how hard I’ve tried and how much I want from you and from myself, and how desperately I want it?

Do I trust you to still love me if I fail?

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So I mentioned a bit back in my sex post how I was maybe-just-a-little-bit avoiding an extremely nice man from the sex positive community. And then we got thrown into a bunch of social situations together, and I realized I was also maybe being a bit of a dipshit for rejecting a man because he likes sex too much (shut up, I can be clueless too,) and we decided to have dinner. Which we did, last night.

He picked the restaurant. I wasn’t expecting that, used to meeting on a street corner and then hemming and hawing about saying things like, “Well, I’m really up for anything you’d like . . .” and “I mean, lots of the food is good here,” and “no, I’m okay with Indian really, I just had it two nights ago but I do like it quite a bit . . .” and such. If making social plans is a test of domliness, I fail. I totally flunk.

But he picked it, and it was good, and I remembered after a few minutes about the thing where my generation is socially stunted in the dating scene because we never go on actual traditional dates. At least that’s the case with everyone I know. So having him do that was sweet and very nice in a masculine “grr!” kind of way, except I totally wasn’t expecting it and the generation gap kind of threw me off my game.

Oh, did I mention he’s a top, by the way? That’s important to the story.

And then it was super loud. We had noodles (I had pad thai, dear god, I love pad thai. If I’m ever stranded on a desert island, just air drop pad thai, seriously) and the restaurant sat us at a long communal table. So that was funny, because I was trying to not-quite-shout “I like blood play a lot” while the girl next to me quietly choked in her soup. Him: “What?” Me: “Blood play!” Him: “Sorry, what?” Me: “Blood!” Girl next to me: *choke*

But conversation flourished along, helped out generously by him asking tons of leading questions in a very clever way which I totally noticed and was quietly amused by. (I also flunk at getting-to-know-you conversations, by the way. I’m totally resistant to getting to know people. It’s like a disease.) And we had a lot of fun, and talked a lot about the difference between the East Coast and West Coast communities, which was fascinating, and I reaffirmed my earlier suspicion that he is in fact a very nice, very articulate man. And very open, and very laid back in just the kind of way I find to be lovely, because it means not putting pressure on me. I get the feeling that this man has literally built up years of experience learning how to not put pressure on people. (Can I also mention as a sideline that I find that hilarious as well, because he was an interrogator? In the armed forces? Talk about putting pressure on people.)

And we turned to kink stuff, and he asked me what I liked, and I laughed and mentioned I’d just written a whole post about some of the weird shit that I like that I don’t tell people about when they ask me what I like. I ran the list off, and we chatted about fear play and emotional play for a bit. And then he said, “Are you the same way when you bottom?” To which I replied, “I don’t bottom.” To which he reacted, “Oh.” And conversation moved on with nary a hitch.

Now although I will occasionally kick and scream a bit over being pinned as a bottom because I wear dresses (note to me, write a post about subliminal orientations expressed through clothing) I wasn’t expecting that from him. (And bless his big burly heart, he didn’t even blink. Good for him.) Because, see, he’s seen me in kinky contexts before, and I’m just . . . not a bottom. And I’ve told him before I was a top, although I hadn’t realized that saying “I’m a top” is apparently not the same as saying “I’m not a bottom.” The term for that is switch, by the way. Which I am currently not.

I won’t kick and scream over being pegged, not this time. Because I actually think he asked me that because he’s the type of guy who just doesn’t assume things about the people he meets. (And okay, yea, maybe he wanted me to be a bottom, but seriously, plus several thousand points for not losing interest.)

Eventually we escaped the loud restaurant and the choking girl and sat on a bench in Union Square. After some chatter I figured to bite the bullet and said, “So, I have to tell you honestly that I just don’t see us being sexually compatible.”

Seriously. I actually said that. I’m so proud of myself. (In case you haven’t caught on, I’m actually not as blunt in person. In fact, I am maybe a bit obsessed with not offending people, but that’s an issue for another day.)

He didn’t blink at that one either. Instead, he talked about tops learning from each other, and expanded experiences. The he started in on a thought about wild horses. I think I can remember it pretty close to verbatim:
“And as for sexual experiences, y’know . . . I like to think of wild horses coming together, in such an incredibly strong beautiful union. And you see, the mare’s not the weaker of the two there, she’s just as powerful a being.” Although no, he said it better than that.

People actually say things like this! I now have proof! I find that amazing. And not in a scornful kind of way, but in a gratified, amused sort of “I can’t believe you just pulled that off and didn’t sound ridiculous” kind of way.

At this point I was thinking, Holy wow, that’s a great line, and you’re a great guy, and that’s so incredibly not arousing. And also Too bad you’re not submissive.

Which caused the logical part of my brain to step up for a moment and think, Eileen, that very attractive man just compared you to a mare and offered you wild-horse-style sex. Have you not been paying attention?

And I thought back, Um, yea, but . . . not submissive.

And the logical part of my brain went, SO??!

And then I realized that I have never in my life been sexually attracted to a man who wasn’t, in some way, submissive. Which was an amazing revelation I probably should have made several years ago, but for some reason hadn’t actually figured out. It was like watching part of my brain gel.

And the date ended with a hug, and we wandered off to separate corners of the night. He’s kind of an awesome guy. I think we’ll be friends.