One great way to infuriate a dominant is to claim you’ll do anything. It’s like a red rag to a bull. The typical response is either to reach for an extreme form of play (‘go fetch me my branding iron’) or to propose a very un-fun type of play (‘go clean my car while I watch TV in sweatpants’). The idea being to demonstrate that the submissive better be careful what options he or she open up. Mistress Matisse wrote a column some years ago that covered the topic from the dominant point of view pretty well.
I definitely understand that viewpoint when playing with someone new. In that case communication to set expectations is vital. In past posts I’ve termed the failure to do so Meat Loaf syndrome – ‘I’ll do anything for you….but not that‘. However, I do think it’s a viewpoint that sometimes gets pushed too far. BDSM negotiation isn’t divorced from the normal conventions of discussion. Being a dominant doesn’t give you a right to abandon common sense, and ‘anything’ is always contextual.
If a partner asks me where I want to eat tonight and I reply “Oh anywhere really, you pick,’ nobody would interpret that as carte blanche to do whatever they like. Dumpster diving behind Pizza Hut is out. As is booking tickets for a 6 hour flight to the New York restaurant scene. And if they know I’m horribly allergic to crab, my answer doesn’t mean I’m willing to swell up and die in the local crab shack. I don’t have to specify these things because any friend or partner with half a brain will understand my ‘anywhere’ response as being implicitly qualified.
The same thing goes to BDSM negotiation. Assuming we’re somewhat familiar with each other, then ‘anything’ means activities the same as or vaguely within touching distance of stuff we’ve tried or discussed before. And if there’s something new that a dominant would like to try, then the ‘anything’ response is a great cue to suggest it to me as an option. As a submissive I like to give my dominant choice and flexibility in a scene whenever possible. It seems odd to punish people for trying to do that by deliberately picking the worst possible interpretations of their responses.
Having referenced an article from Mistress Matisse, that gives me the perfect excuse to feature an image of this rather fabulous lady. This is an old shot recently republished on her twitter feed, and captioned by her as “Behold me as a little baby dominatrix! Look how scowly and stern I was! Rar, fear me! (That didn’t last very long.)” Her professional site is viewable here.
Very well said, and I love the expression “implicitly qualified” regarding wide open statements.
It boggles the mind how many people out there have not taken the time to consider the reality beyond their fantasy. So many subs mass mailing any pretty woman with a riding crop in her hands – desperate to “offer everything” – when what so many really offer is only everything they themselves want.
Thanks Aarkey. I’m a fan of pointing out implicit assumptions and qualifications. 🙂
-paltego
Aarkey hits the nail on the head.
There’s submissive males, and then there’s faux submissive males, who are into a form of submission that I call ‘letting HER have YOUR way’.
In the past I’ve shied away from this kind of prescriptive judgement, but I see so many complaints from dominant women about how difficult it is to avoid being pestered by arseholes and narcissists that I think we have to accept the fact that a lot of what passes for ‘submission’ is the worst kind of camouflaged phallocentrism – what Bitchy Jones in her swansong calls ‘eroticised patriarchy’.
I have some sympathy for guys who misunderstand submission, given the very screwed up messages out there. Although I’ve no sympathy for guys who pester dominant women inappropriately. To err is human, but there’s no need to drag others into it.
I think it’s also complicated by the broad and often inaccurate use of the submission label. A lot of what gets described that way is masochism, or fetishism, or even just sex with a D/s slant. Guys claim to be submissive when they’re actually kinky, and looking for a person that shares their kink rather than a dominant.
-paltego
I think the most important part of that sentence is the word partner. In the context of a close relationship, I’d love to hear that my partner is fine with whatever kind of play I choose tonight. But if I’m just getting to know someone, I’m not interested in being expected to read their mind, and if you say “anything you want” to someone without getting to know them, you can’t be very bright.
Even leaving out more extreme or potentially dangerous kinks like knives and suspension, fairly mundane stuff can easy cross someone’s hard limits. For example, it’s hard to do serious damage with one little needle, but if you have a needle phobia then telling someone “anything you want” is pretty dumb if you haven’t both agreed that needles are off the table.
Yes, I agree. As I commented in the post, if you’re playing with someone new then clear communication is vital. Dominants aren’t mind readers and limits are often non-obvious. But if I’m playing with a partner (or anyone who I’ve played a lot with), then we’re already working from a common understanding. If we’ve previously done a nipple piercing scene, then I think it’s implicit that other types of piercing are options on the table. And maybe some stuff in the same ballpark as piercing (like sutures or staples). If for some reason that’s not true the onus is definitely on the submissive to make that clear (e.g. “I’ll let you pick, but no piercing tonight because…”). On the flip side, the fact I’ve done piercing in the past doesn’t mean I’m automatically up for a knife scene, even if I let my partner pick the scene style.
-paltego