In a comment to my previous post ‘Masochist vs Fetishist vs Submissive‘ Saratoga asked an interesting question.
Do you think your feelings of submission, as distinct from masochism or fetish, are different for you, than, say, for me, because yours involved Pro Dommes with whom you don’t have a non-professional attachment, whereas all of mine, save one instance, were lifestyle, relationship- or association-based FemDom experiences?
Saratoga
In many ways this is an impossible question to answer, given I don’t know know what his feelings of submission are. I’ve also only had vanilla relationships prior to getting involved physically involved in BDSM, so I don’t even have a good comparison to make in my own life. However, it did seem an interesting thing to think about in general terms. What are some of the potential difference between professional and non-professional play?
In a follow-up comment Saratoga likened pro-play to an unhealthy snack as compared to a good balanced meal. I don’t like that analogy at all. An unhealthy snack suggests something bad for you, a guilty weakness that you’d be better off resisting. That doesn’t align at all with how I feel about my sessions. Despite that, the food analogy, always a popular one in this kind of context, does have some merit.
I’d liken a professional session to a tasting menu in a high end restaurant. It’ll probably showcases techniques and ingredients you might find it difficult to replicate at home. With the right kind of chef in the kitchen it’ll probably be designed and prepared with intensity and passion. It can deliver an out-of-the world experience for a few hours. I’ve had some restaurant meals that have almost been spiritual experiences the food was so good. But it’s a context free, self-contained experience. It stands alone as a very pure event. There’s not all the shared emotional history and deeper connection that you might get with a specially prepared home cooked meal.
The purity of a professional session is a mixed blessing. On the downside it means dealing with a very disconnected world. There’s a session and there’s normal life. If you can’t deal with that kind of discontinuity then professional play probably isn’t a good idea. It also limits the evolution of the D/s dynamic. Even when you session regularly with the same pro-domme (as I do), it’s hard to create a sense of continuity between sessions. On the upside, there’s no emotional baggage to interfere with the dynamic. No residual tension, unspoken issues or unresolved arguments. There’s just a dominant woman, a bunch of equipment design to fuck someone up and a naked willing submissive.
It would be a mistake to confuse this purity with emotional simplicity. I think it’s instructive to compare a pro-domme session with a casual, just for fun, sexual encounter. To the outside observer these might look like very similar things. The activities are different, but they both involve people outside a relationship engaging each other in intense physical sensations. Neither of them feature any kind of emotional commitment or a broader context. And yet, in my experience, they are very different. The fun sexual encounter is just that, fun. It’s an emotionally light, physically pleasant way to pass the time. In contrast I’ve experienced incredibly intense emotions in sessions. I’ve been pushed into places I never knew existed, and headspaces that left me buzzed and happy for days. There’s an intensity to BDSM play that can work well even without the richer emotional context of a deep relationship.
Given a lot of this post featured pro-dommes along with a food metaphor, I thought this would be a particularly apt image to use. This is Mona Rogers, a pro-domme from NYC, feeding dinner to one of her slaves. I don’t think he’s getting a tasting menu. If you’d like to try that rather cool doggy helmet our for yourself, her contact information is here.
This photograph is from Serious Bondage.
