Submission Works Because Of The Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

For a brief period when I was much younger, I genuinely believed that I could only submit or be subjugated by a person who was smarter than me. Momentarily, and very simplistically, it made sense to me that intelligence was a good enough reason to view someone as superior, and they had to be superior for me to submit to them, right? The fallacy of my logic crumbled quickly as I parsed through the various factors that seem to make people superior to one another. Things like success, education, income, gender and social demographic are what usually govern the politics of “superiority” and applying any of those to my relationships felt counter-intuitive. Why would you borrow an extant (and often oppressive) social hierarchy and reapply it exactly as it is to your personalised version of a sexual hierarchy?

Actually, I understand why you would do that.

For one thing, if you are attracted to power structures (and you don’t quite understand them yet), there are many prototypes that just exist around you in society. It explains why, as a teenager, concepts like abusive patriarchal men or old smug professors seemed attractive. It’s packaged, mass-produced power. They are like the McDonald’s of power structures—easy, probably bad for you, cheap, accessible, pervasive, momentarily gratifying, artificial, self-serving and exploitative, rotting your guts—and it is so natural to be tempted towards that kind of reasoning if you already feel the desire to be subjugated. It is the kind of reasoning that has you define “better” by a social standard and believe that if someone is “better,” they must be superior to you and if they are, it makes sense to submit to them. I thought smarter meant better so I went looking for smarter believing that when I found it, the submission would just come pouring out of me and when, naturally, that did not happen, I went looking for personalised, directed misogyny so it would cast its existing systems of control over me in an eroticised rendition of the patriarchy (which felt enough like agency because I was self-aware and technically opting for it). As crazy as it sounds now, it made a lot of sense to me before I was old enough to vote.

But it didn’t actually work.

I did not submit. The reason abuse was the only gratifying form of love with my former owner was because that was the only way I felt subjugated by him. I often joke that I didn’t submit to my former partner, he colonized me but there is a wealth of truth inside that quip. He had a tremendous amount of control over me, there were tonnes of fear-based systems of enforcing that control in place because while I wanted to be in a relationship where I felt helpless, powerless and controlled, there was no way I would choose to yield to him. I cannot bend my knee to a man who believes I should because he is a man. I would sooner stick a flaming hot rod of rusted iron inside my chest. He had to take me over, he had to force my will and keep me there with him because I had no choice but to stay, and any talk of secession would have been met with the rigor of a colonizer slighted by whispers of an independence movement. I hated being with him but I loved how being with him made me feel. I could not stand him as a person but I loved how he broke me down and how that trauma felt inside my head. Every moment of being with him felt like being robbed of dignity, which sounds like a bad thing, but I say it as a hot thing (which is the bad thing, actually). However, it did not feel like submission.

Because I would never allow that.

Captured resistance felt more comfortable, or at least, it felt safer. I know it seems a bit insane that abuse felt safer than submission, but perhaps, it will make more sense once I explain.

Far be it for me to define submission, but I will say, I never feel like I am submitting if I don’t choose to do it. There’s something active about it. It’s not something I am being made to do, it’s something I am opting to do of my own volition. You can make me lick your shoes under threat of something or other, you can make me sit quietly through a beating I don’t want, there’s something in there for me in terms of helplessness but it doesn’t feel like submitting until I want to lick your shoes and I want to be quiet. That’s very difficult. Primarily because it actually cannot be logically reasoned. My juvenile attempts at seeking existing “superiority” in people did not work, partly, because I don’t think the choice to submit to someone has to do with them being better. Not for me, anyway. It doesn’t happen like that. I find, i want to submit when I like the person to whom I am attracted, and many things factor into liking someone, but once I do, and I wish to express that, that is when the submission actually pours out. It’s, apparently, how I want to express love.

It’s one of those wonderful things about D/s, the hierarchy is entirely of your own creation and it works because you believe in it. There is no reason why it is justified except that those are the roles the parties involved wish to be in. It works because of the willing suspension of disbelief. It works when you don’t reason your way into it, don’t try to borrow power from existing structures, don’t need to justify why someone is allowed to be superior, don’t have to reason your way into being lower or explain it by identifying the flaws that make you deserve that. It works when you just believe in the construct because that’s what you want. That’s really hard. It is hard for me because I am genuinely bad at suspension of disbelief. If you aren’t familiar with that phrase, it was coined by Coleridge, to describe the concept of suspending a certain line of critical thinking or reasoning in order to enable immersion in a speculative narrative or world created by a writer. You gotta believe the world exists as the writer says it exists in order to enjoy it for what it is. If you question the premise or reason too much about whether that world could even exist, you cannot appreciate it from the perspective of the characters. It’s a cool principle and it definitely has its place in literary interpretation and one would think as a writer I wouldn’t be so shit at it, but I am. There’s a reason why I skew so heavily towards realism in writing style and don’t really engage in a tonne of alternative world-creation, and while that doesn’t disable suspension of disbelief entirely, it makes it much easier. It’s easy to believe in a world that looks almost like the world you’re choosing to disbelieve. It’s exactly why repurposed patriarchy seems like it could be attractive in power exchange. It’s easy to believe in because it looks almost exactly like the world in which you disbelieve.

However, submission does not. It is a whole new world in which the hierarchy exists because it exists and the story is really about what you do within it. It’s not about questioning it, justifying it, cowering because you have no choice, determined whether it is reasonable and explaining why you should be submissive. You just choose it and then you just continue to choose it and if both parties didn’t, the power equation would be different. As the submissive, I empower the dominant, as the dominant, they disempower me. Those are just the roles we choose and when you stop searching for reason, you have to admit that those are the roles you want to choose.

That’s what is really hard.

It’s embarrassing to want to be submissive. It’s so sincere and explicit and willing to immerse itself in a world of our own creation, like a child playing house. Sentimentality and games. All at once, too old a soul, and one that is too childish. Yet when you do it, when you do suspend disbelief and accept your place as a character in the construct, and stop focusing on how you feel about how it looks, it’s exactly who you want to be. When you let the outside world disappear, it’s as magical as you thought it would be.

It’s just hard to believe in magic. So silly. Yet, I do.