The Making Of A Dominant
I think The Black Leather Belt is quickly becoming a new favorite, and I am still reading posts (like this one) with a July date on them:
Every 37 seconds, someone starts a thread on Fetlife like this:
“I’ve discovered I enjoy submitting. Can I teach my partner to be dominant?”
And lo, do you hear those horns in the distance? It’s the Pompous Dom Brigade! They are riding into the fray!
Make no mistakes: Pompous Doms are born, not made. They were dominating in their diapers. “It’s not like the army ever trains privates to be officers — that’d be foolish! And everybody knows that they create generals in a secret location under a grassy hillside in the mountains of West Virginia!”
What makes this ranty fun even funner (take that, my second grade teacher!) is the historical blurb that follows, sure to discomfit hetero-nervous male doms everywhere:
And it’s just this kind of thinking — both ignorant of history and dismissive of human endeavor — that creates and perpetuates the imbalance within the BDSM community, one where there are more submissives than dominants.
It’s ignorant of history, because most of what we know as BDSM came from gay male postwar leather culture — a culture where men had to earn their status as a dominant. They weren’t born that way — they worked their way up to being a top by starting as a bottom or a boy.
No surprise, the people who find this news about the history of their kinks the most appalling are generally heterosexual dominant men: “Learn to be dominant? What, do I have to learn to suck a dick to get mine sucked?” (Actual quote from a Fetlife thread where someone asked if male switches could be “real” dominants).
I’m thinking “Son, it certainly wouldn’t hurt your chances!”
Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:
