Dominology 103: Honesty

As a dominant, you're taking responsibility for seeing yourself and your submissives through some perilous emotional territory. You're also equally responsible to both yourself and your submissive partners, to ensure that those journeys satisfy as much and many of your mutual and separate needs as you can safely manage.

At first this might seem pretty daunting. But keeping one thing in mind will make it easier. In a way, your leading this journey is itself to some extent the destination. It's a bit like being a cab driver for a passenger who just wants to take a ride. There's not really any particular place you have to find. You just have to pick them up, take a safe little trip, and get them home safely. In between, you simply make it as interesting as possible.

There's a more subtle point in that. That is that you have to be driving. If that person doesn't realize that you're driving, or that the car is moving, or if they can't see the scenery rolling by, or if they have to take the wheel at points, then they've been just as short changed as if you don't return them home afterwards and make them walk the last few blocks.

To push this metaphor just a little bit further, the passenger may also be a bit understandably irate at the end if any of those instances are the case. They key to preventing this negative outcome and keeping it positive is what I call accountability. It's a somewhat nuanced aspect of the responsibility that I've brought up elsewhere.

To put it another way, when you're being dominant, the submissive has to realize that you are, or else it's cheating. It doesn't always have to be some formal agreement, or spelled out in any elaborate way. It doesn't have to be scheduled or measured and can be completely spontaneous. But the submissive has to consciously realize that some part of their volition has been surrendered to you in some way.

It can be as complex as a personal little ritual involving putting a collar around her throat to denote that the rules of playtime are now in place, or it can be as simple as showing the girl a certain grin or a look in your eye as you reach for her hand to lead her off to do something a bit crazy. As long as it's a communication from you to her that you are leading this step in the dance and creating that understanding that the credit, good or bad, when it's done, is going to be on you, then you are doing it right.

Cheating is doing it wrong. What do I mean? Why is it cheating? First, you can't be sneaky about this. Remember that part of your job as a dominant is satisfying your submissive's needs. The most constant and potent of those needs is simply the security and structure of your guiding whatever aspects of the situation that she has entrusted you with. This has to be a conscious matter. If you give her that grin, reach out and take her hand, then she is following you. If she is following you, those few paces that she takes under your guidance is giving her just as much as she's giving you.

But, if you 'cheat' and say something like, 'Uh, the there's free beer over here' or somehow trick or persuade her without taking that accountability, she gets nothing from it. It has to be a committal expression of this wish on your part or you are getting compliance and offering nothing back in return. You have to consciously and visibly take responsibility for it to count.

Second, recall my scary funhouse metaphor. You take her hand and lead her through this scary amusement park funhouse or rollercoaster. When she comes through all the strangeness on the other side, that release is part of this on-going intimacy building process. That process is what will allow her to follow you into scarier places the next time, and the time after that, to suspend more and more of her own inhibitions and to give more and more of herself over to you.

On the other hand, if something goes awry, her knowing that you will be there so she isn't alone, dealing with it all without the structure and guidance that she needs is also something that is necessary to the process.

As a dominant, this is the long game that you play. Anyone who thinks that deep levels of submission can be just offered up in a few minutes, or even in a single session or two or three has never put serious work into this field. Don't feel badly if you don't understand what I'm talking about, right now. Trust me, you have wonders to discover.