Love in Dark Settings

A due warning to all you folks who find discussions of real-life leather to be squicky: You'll want to skip this entry.

Background to my mentoring entries.

*** 8 November 2008. Mentoring: Leather Seminar #1: "Basics of Resistance Management."

My apprentice and I just had our first leather seminar. The idea for this came from a dominant's post at FetLife. She (I think it was a she; I don't have her account in front of me) said that she had given an assigned reading to her boi: the boi was supposed to read essays in Leatherfolk and write down answers to questions that the dominant had prepared.

Well, me being a graduate of a Great Books college, my automatic response to an assigned reading is not to assign a written composition but to hold a seminar. So I told my apprentice that we would be holding seminars on readings that I assigned to him. His reaction - you may recall from an earlier entry - was "SQUEEE!!"

I decided to take our initial reading from one of my favorite newsletters, Simply Service. (The newsletter's e-mail list has additional issues.) It's devoted to the topic of service-oriented submission. The article I assigned my apprentice was from Issue 1, "Basics of Resistance Management." The issue is available online, if you want to follow along with what I've written below.

My initial question for the seminar was, "Why does the author consider a submissive's resistance to be a bad thing?"

Here are my very abridged notes from our discussion. Let me emphasize that these are my paraphrases of what we discussed. I wasn't taking word-for-word notes, just jotting down keywords to remind myself of what topics we covered.

Noakes (my apprentice; we've become more formal in public): "The article is written from the point of view of a TPE (total power exchange) relationship or master/slave relationship, not from the point of view of other types of DS relationships, which are more likely to have the submissive showing a combination of submission and dominance."

Me: "The submissive who wrote the article seems to suggest that any good outcome to resistance management will consist of the dominant reinforcing his orders. But the dominant who writes the accompanying article states that 'sometimes the solution [to the submissive resisting orders is for the dominant] just to say, "I know this is difficult for you, but my orders stand."' The 'sometimes' suggests that the dominant will sometimes change his mind about the orders, in reaction to the submissive's resistance. Why is there this difference in emphasis between the submissive's article and the dominant's response?"

Noakes: "It's very difficult for submissives to think about dominants changing orders, because that means that the dominants sometimes give the wrong orders. It's much easier to think about changing yourself, becoming more obedient."

Me: "What are the dangers of the submissive always following orders?"

Noakes: "Trying to suppress one's resistance can lead to the submissive becoming less and less able to take independent action, and the suppressed resistance can eventually result in an explosion--"

Me: "But the article writer agrees about the dangers of suppression, doesn't she? She specifically says that it's a bad idea for the submissive to 'stuff' her resistance."

(*A pause as Noakes and I clarify what scenario we're talking about.*)

Noakes: "Well, if the submissive voices her resistance, the way the article writer says, and the dominant's response is always to tell her, 'You need to follow my orders,' then the submissive might become more resistant to the dominant's later orders."

Me: "Is it always a bad thing for the submissive to resist orders?"

Noakes: "I think it depends on what type of relationship the dominant wants. If he just wants to have a submissive following his orders, then it would be problematic if the submissive resisted his orders."

Me: "Are there any disadvantages to that type of relationship?"

Noakes (laughing): "Well, you know what I'd say, Sir - I think the dominant isn't taking advantage of the submissive. The submissive can be there to serve as a warning system to the dominant, to alert him to when he's made the wrong decisions. For example, if the submissive mentioned in the article doesn't want to wear her collar to a family function, maybe it's not just because she needs to overcome feelings of unnecessary shame. Maybe it's because, knowing the dominant's family as she does, problems really would arise if she wore the collar to the family function. Maybe the dominant should be paying attention to what she has to say about this."

Me: "So the dominant isn't taking full advantage of all the skills that his submissive possesses."

Noakes: "Exactly, Sir. You know, you and I aren't joined together at the hip. When we go to the same place together, we talk to different people at different times. If someone acts a certain way toward you but then acts a very different way toward me, it could be helpful to you to know my perspective on the other person. That's why it helps to have more than one perspective in a DS relationship - because it allows the dominant to have a wider view of the world."

Me: "Let me move this discussion to another situation. The author assumes that the submissive's role is to become less resistant, and that the dominant's role is to help her improve her character in this manner. But what if the submissive's real problem is that she isn't resistant enough - that she doesn't resist orders when she should? What can the dominant do in such a case?"

Noakes (after pausing to think): "There are a couple of possibilities. One is that he can train the submissive to obey only his own orders. In such a case, the submissive will become very dependent on the dominant. . . . Oh, I know what the other possibility is. (*Laughs.*) He can make the submissive's act of resistance against him be part of his training for how she should resist other people."

Me: "You mean, when she stomps and says, 'No! I won't do that!' he should say, 'Yes! That's exactly what you should say when those other guys give you orders!'"

(*We both laugh about this possibility for some time.*)

Me: "There's a third possibility you didn't mention: the dominant could encourage the submissive to resist him at appropriate moments."

(*I cite an example from our own relationship. Noakes gets a bit shy talking about it, as he always does when I mention the handful of occasions when he has told me he doesn't wish to follow one of my orders. But he agrees with me that this sort of training can be helpful.*)

o--o--o

My notes got a bit garbled from that point foward. We talked about the special needs of bratty submissives, and then we entered into a concrete discussion of ways in which my apprentice has been resistant - both ways in which he should be resistant and ways in which he shouldn't. I see, in looking over my notes, that we didn't discuss ways in which he should be resisting me and but currently doesn't resist me. We need to have that conversation at some point.

Then I asked him what red flags indicate when he's resisting me. He said that if he asks me to repeat what I've said, it can be an indication that he's not paying sufficient attention to me, and if he tries to avoid a topic, it can be an indication that he's trying to avoid carrying through in doing something he feels I want him to do.

He mentioned a family matter as an area where he has been resisting me, and we discussed that at length, in a fruitful manner, because I realized I'd been misjudging the emotional effects of him voicing his frustration about that family matter in a "ranting and raving" manner, as he put it. Then I mentioned a couple of areas where I felt he'd shown unhelpful resistance, both of them areas we'd discussed in the past: him not completing assignments I gave him, and him not alerting me to the fact that he'd strayed from his duty. The latter problem happens much less often than him immediately alerting me to the fact that he has done something he feared he shouldn't have done, so I didn't see this as a serious problem, just as an area where he could make improvements.

The lack of his follow-through in completing assignments is a serious problem, and is tied in with an area of my own resistance, namely my unwillingness to do anything that might be perceived as "strange" by the rest of the world.

Mentoring is easy for me, because I can easily explain the mentoring aspect of my relationship to the rest of the world. But I just finished writing a letter to some vanilla folk, explaining to them about my relationship with my apprentice, and I realized when I reread it that I hadn't said a single word about service. Mentoring in personal relationships is common; service in personal relationships is not, at least not in our culture. So I have a strong resistance to letting service enter into my relationship with my apprentice, not simply because I'm better at mentoring than at ordering service (I have more experience at being mentored than at serving), but also because I worry about how my apprentice and I will be perceived by vanilla folks. So we agreed that this was an area where I needed to do more work, because Noakes wants to serve me, and there's a part of me that wants him to serve me that I haven't fully tapped into. And giving him assignments but not requiring him to complete them isn't going to help the situation at all.

In that respect, I told him, I was very glad when I realized recently that I was going to be depending on him heavily to obtain items for me online over the winter. I can't use the excuse I usually use for not letting him serve me: "I don't really need this service." In this case, I absolutely do need his service if I'm to stay offline and get writing done this winter. He said that this type of service was easier for him as well, because he could always use some excuse to not go do research for me at the library, but since he's online during the day anyway, he doesn't have any excuse for failing to look up things for me online.

Another topic we discussed was communication. In this respect, I turned out to have a more finely tuned ear than my apprentice. I have to, because he (being 70% submissive and 30% dominant, by his estimate) always sees me as the dominant and him as the submissive, so what manner we communicate in doesn't affect how he regards us. Whereas, while I list myself as a dominant at FetLife (because I'm not planning to enter into any leather relationships as a submissive), I'm actually a 50/50 switch in terms of temperament, so I depend heavily on language protocol (things like my apprentice calling me Sir) to put me into the right mindset.

I told him that I thought that a lot of our troubles in that regard arose on my side: I spend so much time acting toward other people in an egalitarian or submissive manner that I sometimes don't take charge of my apprentice when I should, because I'm carrying over these other roles into inappropriate parts of our relationship. Sometimes this inappropriateness shows itself through me letting our communication get more egalitarian than is appropriate for the particular topics we're discussing.

Not surprisingly, my apprentice was totally unaware of this. To him, I'm always Sir, no matter how he addresses me. Whereas my alarm bells go off the moment he stops calling me Sir, because I feel an immediate drop in the DS level between us.

In some cases, this isn't a problem. If he has stopped calling me Sir momentarily because he's absorbed in providing me with bits of military history, I'm not going to interrupt the flow by requiring him to adhere to protocol. But sometimes his failure to call me Sir occurs when he's resisting me: he'll say, "Yeah, okay," in response to an order I've given him, precisely because he's mentally resisting the idea that he should carry out the order. In such cases, he needs to either discuss his concerns about the order with me or say, "Yes, Sir," to indicate he understands he's been given an order and intends to comply with it.

While my apprentice is very skilled in language protocol, I think there's still room for improvement. He has a tendency, for example, to voice desires as flat statements or orders rather than as requests. I tended not to quash this during our first year-and-a-half together, because I saw this as an encouraging sign - a sign that he was willing to retain independence in areas where it would be appropriate for him to remain independent. But at this later stage in our relationship, when he clearly realizes that I want him to grow more independent and more resistant (he's one of those submissives who isn't as resistant as he ought to be), I think it would be helpful for him to learn to voice more requests - for example, to leave phone messages saying, "I'd appreciate it if you would call me back," rather than simply saying, "Call me back." This is not only for my sake (though it does jar me when he issues orders to me), but also because this sort of skill is helpful in vanilla life. If you flatly state that you are going to do something that affects another person, or if you flatly order someone to do something, it can come across as ruder than making a polite request - even if you expect your request to be complied with.

I might add that the first time I ever saw this principle put into action in the leather world was when I heard a master tell her slave, "Sit! . . . please." There was no room left there for the slave to think, "Eh, what the heck, she might or might not want me to sit." But the master was polite, which impressed me. There just isn't enough politeness in either the leather world or the vanilla world.

This topic of how to voice desires is old ground between my apprentice and me, but I don't think Noakes had realized, till we held this conversation on communication, how very attuned to language protocol I am, and how I use it as my primary system for determining his state of mind.

Finally, in our discussion of red flags, I mentioned that there are two topics that used to cause me to panic when talking with him, but no longer do.

One was my gender. With virtually everyone else in the world, my gender (if they know what it is) is a major issue. I've lost track of how many people have "considerately" told me that I'm demonstrating the wrong gender behavior for someone who is [insert here the opposite gender of my biological sex]. Having heard this a few billion times after I first came out genderwise, I became very, very paranoid as to whether I was acting in the "proper" manner of the gender that I had to "prove" to everyone I was.

In actuality, it's impossible for me to demonstrate the wrong gender behavior for someone of my gender, because I'm androgynous/gender-neutral. I'm naturally going to act in both a masculine and a feminine manner, and most of the time I'm going to act in a manner that's in that overlap area between male and female. But it's certainly possible for me to demonstrate the wrong gender behavior for certain social situations; being aggressive in the predominantly female slash world would be just as much a faux pas as not being appropriately aggressive in the predominantly male leather world. Different types of behavior are needed for different gender-segregated social settings.

This is a distinction most people don't make; they assume that a person's gender behavior reflects what they are, rather than reflecting the needs of a particular social situation. It's a distinction that I had to develop in my own mind, and I was aided by my apprentice's absolute acceptance of whatever gender behavior I chose to engage in around him. (It helps that he's a slasher. He knows how to squee.) So I no longer go into a panic when someone says something that suggests I'm engaging in the wrong gender behavior. I simply ask myself whether that person is concerned about my gender identity or about my behavior in a social situation. If it's the latter, then I can learn from their criticism. If it's the former, I ignore their remarks.

The other red flag that no longer troubles me was anything that would trigger my fear that my apprentice would run off with the first dominant who showed himself to be more masterly than I am. I was helped by learning that my apprentice had the exact same fear: he occasionally is afflicted by the irrational fear that I'll dump him in favor of a better-behaved boy. Once I'd learned that, I realized how unlikely it was that he'd leave me in favor of someone else.

"Mutual insecurities," I told him, "can be a good thing."