New Moon: The seat of power

It's Friday, and it's been several months since I had anything to say in a public post that really properly dealt with kink. This is not intentional or due to any lessening of kink in my life; if anything, the kink has increased. But of course, being in the state of mind to practice kink is not always the same as being in the state of mind to write about it.

So hello.

I do have some thoughts about kink this week. I will warn, though, that they aren't going to be as long as they could. For one thing, I have been severely fatigued by a good but consuming situation I won't go into for now; for another thing, I think that there is as much to say about the following mystery by not saying anything as by saying something. But here is that mystery, and here is my musing.

In consensual power exchange dynamics, also known more or less synonymously as D/s (Dominant/submissive) relationships or some variation thereon — actual differences on this front would be splitting hairs — a classic and foundational principle among many, many kink practitioners is that although the submissive partner has nominally ceded power to the dominant partner, the submissive retains the "real" power because they can always withdraw their consent and end the activity or end the dynamic. An opposing perspective tries to simplify matters by asserting that no, the dominant partner of course holds the power by definition, but that's precisely why they hold utmost responsibility for the submissive's welfare. And a middle-way opinion I've also encountered is that the split of power for D/s is actually equal and that the perceived inequality is mere roleplay.

Which of these attitudes are correct? I have disagreements with all of them, and after I meditate briefly on each, I would like to suggest my own alternative. And while I know some of my readers are here for kink posts less than for others, I hope that by reading between the lines here it may become rather apparent how such a key question in kink illustrates a key question in human governance.

A mild content warning applies for implications of abusive relationships and also for a frank mention of others' ugly, unethical sexual aspirations.

"Submission is a gift": misleading concepts of power

A great many kinksters prefer to explain D/s as a transactional or contractual arrangement, though this does not have to be a written one[1], wherein the submissive partner freely surrenders their power over certain areas of their life, bestowing this upon the dominant partner. It could even hypothetically be over all areas of their life, which I have severe ethical concerns about but there is no ontological limit to what areas of life D/s can govern. Either way, this framework of D/s is often summed up with slightly twee phrases like, "Submission is a gift," and I think this is because it feels important for us to emphasize the submissive's agency, no matter whether they're seeking to be treated like a pet, a servant, a slave, or some other intrinsically dependent social construct. The (neo)liberal narrative of modern, mainstream kink revolves around someone simply having a desire to live subserviently, offering themselves to someone else in this capacity, and the someone else agreeing — all of which feels much more palatable to post-Enlightenment rationalist sensibilities than any framings that suggest the dominant partner choosing somebody and imposing submission on them.

None of this is to say that kinksters with liberal values lack fantasies of forced submission. Engagement with some fantasy of nonconsent belongs part and parcel with D/s, since the very objective of granting someone else power over you — even conditionally — is to create circumstances, be they certain hours of the day or most days out of a year, where you do not feel as if you're in control of yourself because someone else is. Virtually every kinkster I know who to some degree practices D/s[2] has also expressed fantasies of ravishment, of seduction, of power abused. But my key point here is not about what kinksters dream of doing, nor even what we actually do, and rather what justification we provide for whatever we arrange between ourselves.

And it's a fair rationale in this case. However, I also find that leaving a defining feature of D/s at "the submissive provides their consent and can withdraw it at any time" overlooks the political reality that Chomsky iconically describes as manufactured consent. On some level it also overlooks basic logic: the submissive may have freely, consensually turned over their power at first, but once they have done this then of course the dominant should hold the power in whatever circumstances were negotiated. Otherwise, what does their dominance even involve? And finally there is a psychological objection: that the longer someone is accustomed to powerlessness, the less likely they are to instinctively know when to exert their agency once more and remove themselves from an abusive situation. How then is their consent revocable?

Past a certain threshold, a dominant partner can simply pay no heed to whether they're holding up their own end of the power exchange agreement; and while the submissive partner may recognize the problem and end the relationship, it very frequently happens that they don't. So even if we want to say submission is a gift, this does not mean a D/s dynamic will always play out in a magical fashion wherein the submissive holds the "real" power all along. Power is far more material than that.

Nonconsensual hierarchies and manipulative submissives

Lest I seem too critical of the neoliberal view here, let me now turn to the claim that the dominant partner naturally and straightforwardly holds the power. While it can be tempting to adopt that stance as a logical opposite of the submissive partner holding the power, it often leads down reactionary rabbit holes and simultaneously erases various common, already neglected challenges in D/s of all political persuasions.

In defense of the "submission is a gift" crowd, I am quite convinced their slogan and attitude arose in response to highly questionable essentialist ideology that used to pervade older generations' kink discourse and that still persists in nakedly patriarchal, white supremacist sub-subcultures. Such ideology asserts notions like some people being "inherently" dominant vs. "inherently" submissive[3]; it takes fantasies of slavery-based societies in earnest, never ever stepping outside of bombastic language to clarify what's just a game to them. Because these kink communities are where highly dangerous people can hide most easily — actual fascists walking among the Nazi uniform fetishists, or discussion forums where it's impossible to tell which men want to rape women on breeding farms and then rape their own daughters and so on — I find it best to never get involved in such spaces. Thus, I understand the instinct to directly contradict their opinion by discursively placing power in the submissive's hands.

But even without bringing in ideology, it's also outright nonsensical to assert that when power is exchanged in D/s, the submissive partner has always surrendered all of their power. Besides how few D/s dynamics are truly all-encompassing, there is a difference between claiming to surrender power and factually doing so. Although a submissive may defer to their dominant in specified matters, there is no guarantee; it's perfectly normal to assert one's autonomy even when one aspires not to, or the submissive's disobedience could even be something that each partner enjoys. Likewise, plenty of D/s agreements contain provisions for how the submissive's obedience is never as important as their self-preservation, which does potentially leave an important degree of power in the submissive's hands as long as they're willing to exercise it.

Most troublingly, though, being the submissive partner does not exempt someone from abusive behavior. A submissive can nominally cede power and still function in ways that exploit their dominant. They can manipulate, lie, commit infidelity, even commit assault. They can demand greater submission than the dominant is comfortable with; the dominant goes along with it because they're pushed into believing it's what D/s "has" to look like. The submissive can become deleteriously dependent or expect their dominant to be "on" at all times for them. And no matter what anybody claims, these risks can never be wholly eliminated because most human beings have forms of power they cannot simply give up, whether those forms be class privilege, whiteness, male identity, generic social capital in the couple's peer group, or the power that is created by emotional attachment itself. Those of us who are responsible for someone or something else have an innate drive to believe we are good at taking care of our charge; this desire is easy for someone else to put toward their own selfish ends.

"Power isn't really exchanged," except that it is

Given all the problems posed so far, I somewhat understand why some people both inside and outside of kink may be left feeling it's more pragmatic to say that D/s is actually just a kind of roleplay. The partners in the dynamic claim to be exchanging power as a shorthand for pretending certain fetishized acts are happening under certain fetishized conditions, but it's all smoke and mirrors.

I think this argument can especially tempt a unique flavor of kinkster I've gotten to repeatedly encounter over the years — someone who is fundamentally still embarrassed about their own desires, maybe even to the point of viewing many fellow kinksters in a derisive light, but who has still become dedicated to relentless analysis of kink psychology because it at least feels safe to engage with the "meta" of kink even if doing the kink itself feels uncomfortable. And while I sometimes feel sorry for a person with that behavior pattern, in my opinion they are at least very, very, very close to being right about what D/s involves underneath all the jargon and aesthetics. Assuming that two or more people enter into a power exchange relationship with full consent, risk awareness, and underlying respect for autonomy, they are agreeing to create an ephemeral construct and to go through the motions of whatever they agree is sufficient to sustain that construct, until whatever point where they don't want to anymore. It's a game. It's theatre. It's kayfabe.

Except that as anyone who plays enough games, performs enough theatre, or follows enough pro wrestling should also know, and as anyone who thinks about social constructs like gender or race should know: a construct can still have material effects. Power is an illusion, except that it's not. Power isn't exchanged, except that it is.

There is a term in magic for a real thing that emerges from an unreal substrate: an egregore. Many egregores arise in kink, and as I have shamelessly quoted before and will quote again[4]:

You can't practice magic while turning up your nose at it.

Taking a permanently ironic position toward D/s will at best leave someone frustratingly deprived of how D/s feels when it's legitimately and ethically practiced. At worst, it will leave multiple people hurt as their sincere investment becomes experimental fodder for a person who tries to keep their emotions pathologically invulnerable.

A developing theory of relational D/s

To avoid such issues while still acknowledging that neither the submissive nor the dominant holds all the power, I would thus like to propose that when we ask where the real power lies in D/s, we are making a category error by assuming the real power ever consistently exists on any side of the slash. D/s is an activity, not a status — a verb, not an adjective. Depending on the circumstances in which D/s is practiced, "where the power really exists" will vary wildly.

Of course, I understand why fellow kinksters may grasp for pure D/s mechanics that hinge on all parties involved being initially free agents negotiating as equals. It flows from how a lot of our in-group discourse generally relies on Euro-colonial capitalist values of atomizing individualism, where singular beings' choices do not create network effects and do not come laden with preexisting conditions. But for myself as a collectivist, communitarian, amateur complexity theorist, or whatever other word fits best for me here, while I do strongly value autonomy[5] I find that these days I want to emphasize what might be called autonomy-in-relation, while individualism itself is a cultural toxin fueling a good part of the ongoing polycrisis.

Where kink is concerned, although I am of course anything but a naysayer about kink itself, I must maintain that no kink is innately positive. Most kinks are morally neutral, and the context for how and why they are practiced is what will lend them positive value or not.[6] In some kinks' cases it is very hard to come up with a good how or why. I've run across some people who have made intentional "abusive relationship roleplay" seemingly work for them, but it's such a complete minefield that I suspect those lucky practitioners are exceptions to some terrible rules; likewise, for every person of color who engages in race play kink for reasons that I cannot possibly unpack or critique, there are hundreds of white people whose engagement in race play simply cannot be anything other than a moral failing. Some of my own kinks are minefields as well, and I'd like to be the first to admit that I shouldn't be practicing them if I can't do it appropriately.

I digress somewhat, but I am just trying to give other examples of how kink does not occur atomistically. And from there, I'd like to venture that the directionality or equality of power in D/s depends rather a lot on who is practicing it, how they are practicing it, and why they are practicing it.

In my vision of an ideal D/s dynamic, what this directionality will look like is that the submissive legitimately cedes power while the dominant takes legitimate responsibility, and that this takes place in a well-developed societal framework such that culturally any covenant between the partners is nullified if either side abuses their role — and that there are robust network supports in place to assist in the dissolution or restoration of that covenant depending on what's right for those circumstances. But —

And this is a quite significant but —

This is not at all what's happening with every current, active D/s dynamic in this world. All kinds of other things can be happening with those.

I will leave you on this note for today. Whenever I next write about kink, or at least about D/s itself, I should probably write a broader review of what I consider best practices for ethical D/s, but I couldn't have started something like that without addressing this crucial mystery up front.

[1] Some people do put it in writing, but this is an aesthetic choice only, even if it can create some mechanical implications.

[2] There are plenty of kinksters who do not practice D/s, and even some who do not practice any part of the BDSM acronym. This fact does not augment anything I'm saying above, but when it comes to people who oppose kink for left-wing political reasons I find a common failing on their part is that they assume all kink involves D/s, and D/s is the actual substance of their discontent. Given that some D/s-avoidant kinksters even oppose D/s for the same reasons as anti-kink leftists, this entertains me slightly. I will have to write a separate post eventually to more directly unpack why I find their mutual stance so woefully misguided, although in a way this post here does serve as part of my argument.

[3] Replaying the usual fascist misinterpretation of Nietzsche's master vs. slave mentalities. I wish that more people actually comprehended Nietzsche, and given his expressed attitude about right-wing politics, I imagine he would have wished the same.

[4] From the politically messy, erratically written, yet distressingly endearing Practical Magic (1998).

[5] From which the anarchist side of my politics appears.

[6] This is very old conceptual territory for anyone reading who has already followed my writings on FetLife for years, but I'm rephrasing it here, and nowadays I will also go a step further to say that a kink involving inherently nonconsenting parties (e.g. children, non-human animals, dead people, or any fetishistic rape) are a key exception to value-neutrality because of how it relies by definition on violation.

Thank you for the read and for bearing with me during this especially overwhelming time — not only for me, but for all of us. Next week's post for the holiday Gŵyl Fair (Imbolc) will be for paid subscribers only, and so will the following week's post on animism, gender, and color theory.