LEADERS, MASTERS, AND DOMS
This little essay may probably be the one that sends people flying over the wall so hang on. I'm going to enter territory that violates a strongly held principal, and that is the idea, usually true, that there is no such thing as a "true master or true dominant," that such things are subjective in the extreme. Well, I'm going to get in your face on this and say that yes, there are masters and dominants that are born, not made and if they are made it is in early childhood.
And I'm go to go one step farther. No one who has been a submissive, a slave or a follower, can ever, ever hope to be a leader, a dominant or a master. The mere fact that they were willing to be any of the former disqualifies them.
Alright, now that you are all preparing to brandish your torches and pitchforks, let me explain how I have come to this idea. It starts with my own marriage. We identify as a two dom/me couple, but the truth is that we are a dom/top couple. I love my wife dearly but while she can top, she really cannot dom her way out of a paper bag. Of course it is so much easier to use the two dom/me phrase so we will keep it, but that is the reality.
And that got me to thinking, heretical thinking which of course is my specialty. There are some canards thrown around in the BDSM/leather world (and I chose the caps/lower case for a reason, I truly believe leather to be an inferior lifestyle to BDSM, hell most of the time I think it an inferior lifestyle to delivering pizzas for a living!) and these particular ones involve the notion of rising through the ranks. The person starts out as a lowly minion, a submissive or bottom or even slave and then somehow miraculously, by a set of wearying dances, is transformed into a leader or a top or a dom/master.
It don't work that way. Furthermore it cannot work that way, not with humans it can't.
If we look at the great leaders of history, none of them were followers. Is it possible to find a submissive moment in the lives of Alexander, Caesar, Atilla, Genghis Khan or Napoleon? Even our two great presidents, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, while they wore a uniform, were not given to following orders. In fact aside from them our greatest presidents have never worn a uniform, or if they had it was mere formality. Jefferson never fired a gun except in hunting, Lincoln spent a brief time in the militia and was unimpressed, Franklin Roosevelt, who may have been the greatest leader this country ever had, never served anything but a desk as Secretary of the Navy. The notion that somehow leaders are formed by following orders is nonsense. The fact they are willing to follow orders in the first place proves that they are not leaders. They are merely organizers.
So after a lot of thought, I've come to the theory that dominance is something that is hard-wired into us. A dom can bottom for the sensation, but will not tolerate being submissive. A leader will chafe under the leadership of another and strive to get out from under that situation by any means necessary. A master cannot tolerate being a slave and will rebel. What is key is not the physical experience but the mindset. A dom who is bottoming will always top from the bottom because he cannot help but to and has no reason not to except in the imagination of the top.
So let us face a couple of implications of this head on. As you all know, I'm a firm believer in switches. I think that if people are happy switching roles they should by all means do so. But let us understand that is a role thing, not an inner mind thing. It does not relate to the basic power of their personality. I'm inclined to think that switching is a top/bottom thing rather than a dom/sub thing and we just use the words because they are convenient. The person who is dominant in business may bottom and think he is submitting, but at heart he is in charge and at some level he knows it. You cannot tell a dom by the physical role, you can only tell by the mindset they bring to it. The same is true of the submissive. And we have to be careful not to make value judgments here about the roles and the definitions. There is no better or worse. There is merely what makes people happy in their lives. My argument is with an idea.
And where did this idea come from? Well, you can guess, from gay leather, from whence cometh all things hideous. stupid and shameful. It all goes back to the funny hat and dead cow brigade.
Let's go back to the great leaders. Can anyone imagine Alexander the Great starting out as a slave? Of course not. And Napoleon may have began as a junior Lieutenant but everyone around him recognized the marshal's baton in his knapsack Of course the leatherfolk do not realize this. They know no more of history than they do of anything else, as their idea of history is which motorcycle gangs mutually fisted each other in 1953. When dealing with them we must remember that these are people who think that the behavior of shell-shocked misfits following The Great Patriotic War are still norms to be followed.
And one of the ideas they brought back with them from the foxholes was the peculiarly 1940s notion of rising through the ranks. The recruit, otherwise known as the fresh meat, started off learning such arcane mysteries as shoe-shining and the proper way to be sodomized by a motorcycle and then, after this holy apprenticeship, was ordained a master and given a silly hat to commemorate the occasion. This served two purposes. First, it maintained an illusion of military order in their group. Second, as there was always a shortage of fresh, lily-white bottoms to go around, insured a supply of fresh meat for the damned chicken-hawks in the stupid hats. But here is the problem. NONE of the people who went through that can be considered a master! The mere fact that they were willing to tolerate being a slave in the first place disqualifies them!
And do not hand me the nonsense that they had to go through that to be involved in S/M. That is nonsense. There was never anything that prevented them from going off on their own and finding partners. As I have often said, if someone in a funny hat and vest with silly pins all over it said that I had to serve an apprenticeship in order to tie up my girlfriend I would have laughed in his face. No, they felt a need to fit in, to become part of the group. Leaders do not need that. They just take over when they walk in the door. And they can walk away just as quickly. Leather, as opposed to BDSM, is all about groupthink and no leader can come out of it.
You see the key to real leadership is not how one is viewed in a closed group. The key is how one is viewed outside of that group. And if you want to see how little real dominance, mastery and leadership there is in the BDSM/leather world, see how the people in it relate to damned nillers. See how much mastery they show with their craven whinings about SSC and RACK and now their spirituality crap, all designed to make the mighty nillers not persecute them! If they were real masters they would be thinking in terms of persecuting the nillers. No, there are no marshal's batons in those knapsacks. They may be good organizers, and they may be good a pretending that they are masters to people who pretend to be slaves but there is no mastery to be found among them.
It is all mummery and illusion.
This little essay may probably be the one that sends people flying over the wall so hang on. I'm going to enter territory that violates a strongly held principal, and that is the idea, usually true, that there is no such thing as a "true master or true dominant," that such things are subjective in the extreme. Well, I'm going to get in your face on this and say that yes, there are masters and dominants that are born, not made and if they are made it is in early childhood.
And I'm go to go one step farther. No one who has been a submissive, a slave or a follower, can ever, ever hope to be a leader, a dominant or a master. The mere fact that they were willing to be any of the former disqualifies them.
Alright, now that you are all preparing to brandish your torches and pitchforks, let me explain how I have come to this idea. It starts with my own marriage. We identify as a two dom/me couple, but the truth is that we are a dom/top couple. I love my wife dearly but while she can top, she really cannot dom her way out of a paper bag. Of course it is so much easier to use the two dom/me phrase so we will keep it, but that is the reality.
And that got me to thinking, heretical thinking which of course is my specialty. There are some canards thrown around in the BDSM/leather world (and I chose the caps/lower case for a reason, I truly believe leather to be an inferior lifestyle to BDSM, hell most of the time I think it an inferior lifestyle to delivering pizzas for a living!) and these particular ones involve the notion of rising through the ranks. The person starts out as a lowly minion, a submissive or bottom or even slave and then somehow miraculously, by a set of wearying dances, is transformed into a leader or a top or a dom/master.
It don't work that way. Furthermore it cannot work that way, not with humans it can't.
If we look at the great leaders of history, none of them were followers. Is it possible to find a submissive moment in the lives of Alexander, Caesar, Atilla, Genghis Khan or Napoleon? Even our two great presidents, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, while they wore a uniform, were not given to following orders. In fact aside from them our greatest presidents have never worn a uniform, or if they had it was mere formality. Jefferson never fired a gun except in hunting, Lincoln spent a brief time in the militia and was unimpressed, Franklin Roosevelt, who may have been the greatest leader this country ever had, never served anything but a desk as Secretary of the Navy. The notion that somehow leaders are formed by following orders is nonsense. The fact they are willing to follow orders in the first place proves that they are not leaders. They are merely organizers.
So after a lot of thought, I've come to the theory that dominance is something that is hard-wired into us. A dom can bottom for the sensation, but will not tolerate being submissive. A leader will chafe under the leadership of another and strive to get out from under that situation by any means necessary. A master cannot tolerate being a slave and will rebel. What is key is not the physical experience but the mindset. A dom who is bottoming will always top from the bottom because he cannot help but to and has no reason not to except in the imagination of the top.
So let us face a couple of implications of this head on. As you all know, I'm a firm believer in switches. I think that if people are happy switching roles they should by all means do so. But let us understand that is a role thing, not an inner mind thing. It does not relate to the basic power of their personality. I'm inclined to think that switching is a top/bottom thing rather than a dom/sub thing and we just use the words because they are convenient. The person who is dominant in business may bottom and think he is submitting, but at heart he is in charge and at some level he knows it. You cannot tell a dom by the physical role, you can only tell by the mindset they bring to it. The same is true of the submissive. And we have to be careful not to make value judgments here about the roles and the definitions. There is no better or worse. There is merely what makes people happy in their lives. My argument is with an idea.
And where did this idea come from? Well, you can guess, from gay leather, from whence cometh all things hideous. stupid and shameful. It all goes back to the funny hat and dead cow brigade.
Let's go back to the great leaders. Can anyone imagine Alexander the Great starting out as a slave? Of course not. And Napoleon may have began as a junior Lieutenant but everyone around him recognized the marshal's baton in his knapsack Of course the leatherfolk do not realize this. They know no more of history than they do of anything else, as their idea of history is which motorcycle gangs mutually fisted each other in 1953. When dealing with them we must remember that these are people who think that the behavior of shell-shocked misfits following The Great Patriotic War are still norms to be followed.
And one of the ideas they brought back with them from the foxholes was the peculiarly 1940s notion of rising through the ranks. The recruit, otherwise known as the fresh meat, started off learning such arcane mysteries as shoe-shining and the proper way to be sodomized by a motorcycle and then, after this holy apprenticeship, was ordained a master and given a silly hat to commemorate the occasion. This served two purposes. First, it maintained an illusion of military order in their group. Second, as there was always a shortage of fresh, lily-white bottoms to go around, insured a supply of fresh meat for the damned chicken-hawks in the stupid hats. But here is the problem. NONE of the people who went through that can be considered a master! The mere fact that they were willing to tolerate being a slave in the first place disqualifies them!
And do not hand me the nonsense that they had to go through that to be involved in S/M. That is nonsense. There was never anything that prevented them from going off on their own and finding partners. As I have often said, if someone in a funny hat and vest with silly pins all over it said that I had to serve an apprenticeship in order to tie up my girlfriend I would have laughed in his face. No, they felt a need to fit in, to become part of the group. Leaders do not need that. They just take over when they walk in the door. And they can walk away just as quickly. Leather, as opposed to BDSM, is all about groupthink and no leader can come out of it.
You see the key to real leadership is not how one is viewed in a closed group. The key is how one is viewed outside of that group. And if you want to see how little real dominance, mastery and leadership there is in the BDSM/leather world, see how the people in it relate to damned nillers. See how much mastery they show with their craven whinings about SSC and RACK and now their spirituality crap, all designed to make the mighty nillers not persecute them! If they were real masters they would be thinking in terms of persecuting the nillers. No, there are no marshal's batons in those knapsacks. They may be good organizers, and they may be good a pretending that they are masters to people who pretend to be slaves but there is no mastery to be found among them.
It is all mummery and illusion.