Kai is Female. Kai is Submissive. These Facts are Unrelated.

Sometimes I wish I had more contact with male submissives. This might seem like a strange thing to wish for, but it’s true. I was friends with a couple of them in college, both of whom had enough switch in them to act as my Dominants on the few occasions when we scened together. One of them had his own steady Dominant (he and I almost ended up dating… neither of us really tied BDSM play to relationships, so there was no conflict), and the other had used to be his girlfriend’s sub before they broke up. Both topped me in scenes, true, but they had more submissive in them than Dominant and that was likely the role in which they were more comfortable. One of them is now (as far as I know) living a more vanilla lifestyle, and the other I have no idea about at all… though I imagine he still retains an interest in play.

I suppose my thoughts on this are more related to societal gender roles than anything else. I do not like the fact that this is true, because I keep my BDSM separate from my views on gender and gender-identity. As a bit of background, for those reading this who do not know me personally, I’ve always had a bit of a fluctuating view on gender, and for a long time I’ve been much more comfortable projecting a certain amount of masculine or androgynous mannerisms than I have been projecting feminine mannerisms. This is just me and how I view myself. It is impossible to really concisely explain the tangled web of issues, influences, factors, and finer points of how I perceive myself as a gendered individual, but perhaps I can pare it down to some relevant bullet points for the time being.

-Expressing my feminine side makes me feel weak.

-Expressing my masculine side makes me feel in control and unafraid.

-I still have days (fewer now than when I was in college) that the image I see in the mirror does not quite match up with the self-image that exists in my mind.

-I am against the concrete setting of social gender roles, particularly when doing so is more discriminatory than it is a reflection of what people actually wish to be doing.

I feel like I’m on slightly slippery ground here, because I don’t particularly want to be lumped in with radical feminists or women who hate men or women who think that women are better than men etc. etc. None of these are the case. The issue is more like I hate it when women are told that they have to be a certain way or do a certain thing because they are women. If your thing is to keep house and cook for your partner, cool. You should do that. If your thing is to work as a high-level executive and know all the ins and outs of a business enterprise, you should do that. If your thing is to put three hours into making yourself look pretty every day, right on. If your thing is to wear jeans and t-shirts and spend your days drafting new layouts for parking lots, go to it. The point is that all types of women exist, and one set of standards doesn’t fit all; it should just be about doing what you’re good at and/or what makes you happy, not about, “You’re female, therefore you are supposed to do this thing.” I can even accept it when DW says that women’s bodies are less biologically suited to strenuous physical tasks than men’s bodies. Why? Because it’s true. Sure, you’ve got your female bodybuilders and such, but your average male is always going to be bigger and stronger than your average female. Does this mean that women are weak or that they can’t play sports or have physically demanding jobs? Of course not. It’s simply an issue of BY DEFAULT these are differences which exist physically between men and women.

Make sense so far?

The bit where this gets into my desire to know more male submissives is based around the number of female submissives I have seen around—predominantly on the internet. For me, one’s choice to be/orientation as a submissive has nothing to do with gender or gender expectations. It’s kind of like how sexuality isn’t actually rooted in gender-identity: You’ve got your men who like women, women who like men, men who like men, women who like women, plus all of the non-binary configurations that you find out there. Being female doesn’t automatically equate to being sexually attracted to males. Likewise, being female doesn’t automatically equate to being a submissive. This is evidenced by the existence of female dominants and male submissives. A woman being the submissive of a male Dominant doesn’t indicate that women are naturally submissive to men, and it doesn’t indicate the “natural order of things.” It is a preference and a role that lies outside of the purview of defining what a man or a woman is “supposed to be.”

I have been thinking about this more because lately I’ve seen/heard a couple of female submissives say that they have an easier time submitting to men because men are “naturally dominant.” Personally, I take issue with this idea. I accept that there are specific women who feel this way about their interactions with men, and that’s fine. What I don’t like is this being made as a blanket statement. It’s like when I took issue with the preface to Story of O, in which Jean Paulhan used it to make a sweeping generalization about the nature of women rather than the nature of submissives. Actually, I’m not a fan of sweeping generalizations in any context ( < / end sweeping generalization>), but I suppose what really concerns me is the idea that there could be any number of people out there who think that women choose to be submissives because of some primal instinct to occupy a position inferior to men, to serve men, to cater to men, when really it’s just the desire to put oneself in the hands of a dominant figure, gender aside. One of the people I was most submissive to in my past was another woman, so there is no way to convince me that female submissives do it to occupy their “rightful place” in regards to males.

And so… I want to know more male submissives so that I can feel like this balance exists. I want to talk to people who are submissives who can be so without being concerned that it will be interpreted as something they should inherently do based on their biological form. I want to know if submissive men ever feel the inverse of this: That society would look down on them for wanting to put themselves at the feet of a woman, or at the feet of another man, because this is not what men are “supposed to do.”

I do not think that my being female has anything to do with my being a submissive. I do not think that anyone’s biological sex or gender-identity has anything to do with being a submissive. Or with being a Dominant, for that matter. I do think that there are people out there who think that they are related, though… Perhaps they are even the same people who think that proclaiming their Dominant status grants them the right to tell any submissive they meet to get on their knees, or that a D/s relationship = a sanctioned abusive relationship. Or, perhaps they are people who are established in the “scene,” whose own personal views on BDSM have been formed by their personal views of societal gender roles. I, myself, do not know.

But, being a female submissive, sometimes I feel very much like I want to know males who have taken this position.