NSFW- How do you handle women who desire to be submissive?

Just so that I’m clear, are we talking women who are take-charge kinda gals in the rest of life, and the desire for submission is in the bedroom only, or women that you thought were really dominating actually don’t want to be that way just in general? Basically, what’s the nsfw part of this question?

In my experience as a pornographer, people are nearly always the opposite in the bedroom of what they’re like outside it. So people who are aggressive and take-charge in their daily lives tend to be submissive bottoms, and those who are meekest in their daily lives tend to be raging, aggressive, dominant tops in the bedroom.

That said, I’ve had experience with a heavily submissive girlfriend back in the days when I was still in denial about being asexual. In fact, it was because she was so submissive that I was able to please her even though I had no interest in sex. For example, tying her up and gagging her, then completely ignoring her while I did my laundry and piled my clothes on top of her was a huge turn-on for her. It was the humiliation of being ignored and pushed aside which gave her her jollies, and I got to have a “beard” while keeping my asexuality a secret.

I’ve given an extraordinary amount of thought to this subject. The desire to submit and be controlled seems as common in men as in women, though men may not admit it as readily, or as early in intimacy.

My layman hee hee opinion, based purely on my own research, is that almost everybody longs for a protected state, where they’re not expected to be in control of anything. It’s like returning to a worriless state of childhood but with an adult sexuality attached to that desire.

There’s a freedom in not having to make decisions. There’s permission to respond to various stimuli in ways they might not normally because it takes the guilt away from the enjoyment. It’s not their fault if somebody made them do it.

That’s pretty simplistic. Human sexuality is very complicated and individual but of all the fetishes, I believe submission is the most common.

Enjoy taking the role, if you can. Some partners might surprise you with their ability to appreciate switching . The submissive often makes for a talented domme.

I agree with @Blueroses summation on this. This is not a uniquely female trait. Look at all the judges and men in power who seem to like to visit dominatrices. I think if in their every day life they have to be strong and be the decision-maker, it is a release and a relief to hand that control to their partner in the bedroom.

He is not talking about females in general, just the ones who act like this, and how to deal with it. He is not generalizing all women, or saying the trait is unique to women. Unless I missed something. My wife is way too submissive (or passive?). At any rate, I deal with this by being frustrated and quite unsatisfied.

I was with one girl in particular who fits your description here. She wasn’t like super take chargey in the rest of her life, but very independent and not afraid to let you know how she feels. In the bedroom, she was very submissive…. so I gave her what she wanted.

Nothing she wanted particularly offended me, and a lot of it was fun….. so I had no problem helping out. If you have an issue with that type of thing, you’ll just have to measure in your head whether you like her enough to do it, or if you can compromise something… or if you want to move on.

@Aethelflaed I mark everything nsfw lately if it has sex in it. HATE having to edit q’s. These are women who are really dominating and take charge in general life and suddenly start acting so submissive when we are getting sexual I think they are kidding at first.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Ok.
So, what about this is an issue for you? What would you rather have happen?

@Aethelflaed, It is

1) comforting to know from the responses above not that uncommon to have this happen and I should be prepared for it

2) I am not thinking in terms of wanting something else to happen. I am thinking, each time “Okay, she has this desire to be submissive, whatever, she’s cool, this could be fun. What the hell do you ask a submissive person to do that they would like doing? Am I degrading her somehow, ten minutes ago she was bossing people around. How the hell did this happen to me again?”

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought So, when you say “submissive”, do you mean, take a more passive role in sex, in maybe a more traditional gender roles kinda way, that you become the aggressor and she doesn’t, or like more bdsm play submissive?

It is really common to want to be submissive in sex, for both men and women. And it seems much more common than wanting to be domineering in bed; it’s not uncommon for subs to have to switch so that everyone can get their desires met.

@Aethelflaed I am sure it is very common. At no point am I trying to generalize submissiveness to an entire gender.

My curiosity is not about those partners who adopt a more passive role in sex, or even those women I have been with who are more outgoing. It is generated by those women who unexpectedly explicitly jump into bdsm roleplay when I had no idea it was coming, and how to get better at handling that.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Say, “wooh, hold up there – don’t you think we should talk about this first? Establish what each partner wants, doesn’t want, figure out a safeword? Here, I have a checklist of possible activities we could do with each other. Maybe you could elaborate on what kind of sub you are?” Also, not to be all judgy when I wasn’t really asked to judge, but you should definitely be talkin’ about that stuff first, and it’s totally ok to insist on talking about it first. Safewords = good.

@Aethelflaed seriously, I am asking this in all sincerity, If you ask a sub what she wants, aren’t you killing the fun for her?

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Well, I can only speak for myself, but, hellz to the no. Most of the fun for me is in knowing that we’re using this as a way to build communication and trust, and that there’s a constant renegotiation of consent, which requires explicit communication. And I have yet to learn of someone within the bdsm community (ok, who isn’t totally on the fringes and gets ostracized…) who wouldn’t require communication on the issue.

I don’t know if powerful women have this desire to be submissive in the bedroom, or if there are women who like being submissive in the bedroom and some of them happen to be powerful outside it. However, in my experience, people like to play, and most of us are capable of playing many different kinds of roles. The more powerful a person is, the more likely they are to be able to think quickly and creatively, and they more likely they are to like to play.

I was brought up to believe that women wanted to be equal. This notion of the “little woman” who wanted to be bossed around and told what to do was a myth, I believed. It was sexist and denigrating to women. What women really wanted, I believed, was a man who would both respect them and treat them as an equal in all ways that they wanted or that made sense (physical differences are real).

This made me comfortable, because I didn’t actually believe men had any more inherent power than women. I felt that it would be healthier for men to do many things that were considered to be feminine, like feeling and talking about feelings, and listening, and not feeling like we have to be the leader or we are nothing. I liked just being a person, not having to play a gender role.

But there are a lot of complicated things going on in relationships that create problems for me. Some of them seem like they are the opposite of each other. For one thing, I need to be desired. I need to feel utterly desired, or I can feel like I am pushing myself on a woman, and that she is just doing stuff for me because she knows I want it, but not because she necessarily wants it herself. I want her to want me inside her because she wants is, and because she really, really, maybe even desperately wants it, not because I really really desperately want to be inside her.

On the other hand, I always want to feel free to take my pleasure that I really really desperately want. I want to “take” it without feeling guilty like I’m doing something she doesn’t really want.

What this means is that at the same time, I want to be utterly submissive and to have her take me, and I want to take her knowing that she welcomes it. Submission and domination at the same time. Well, to act them both out at the same time is kind of a mess, so you kind of have to take turns. Maybe you take turns slowly or quickly, maybe you even bounce back and forth between the roles and maybe at the end the roles relax into a combination of both for both people at the same time. I don’t know.

The way I see it is that it is “play.” It is a kind of theatrical speech in which we are communicating the depth of our desires, our desires to have and to be had. Our desire to know our desire is welcomed, and our experience that we are as utterly desired as we desire.

I want her to take me. It shows me she means it when she says she loves me. Perhaps I should explain that the language of sex is the language I trust. A woman can tell me a million times that she loves me and I will doubt. But when she goes apeshit over my cock, I will believe. I don’t think you can lie with your body the way you can with words. She could try to be faking being apeshit over me, but I don’t think she can do it. With the body, I believe, you can always tell. Even when someone is acting, they can be acting something they believe, and they can be acting something they don’t believe. You can always tell which is which.

In other words, it is ok to act. It is ok to fake an orgasm. The faking is not the problem. The problem is where the motivation for the faking is coming from. If you are motivated to act pleased because you love the person, that is very different from being motivated to act pleased just because you want them to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. Faking isn’t necessarily a lie.

Part of getting to know someone is working through this stuff. And yes, that does mean talking about your roles and what is acceptable and what isn’t. You can do that because you are playing. In order to play well together, you need to know the rules. Once the rules are set, you can free yourself to fully play the role.

So there are times when my fantasy is to get totally medieval on her. I want her to be so into me that anything I do to her makes her feel good. And there are times when the fantasy is reversed. I want to know that she is so attracted to me that she can’t stop herself.

Part of it is about pushing the boundaries of what you’ve done before. A lot of the subtext here is about trust. You trust the person enough that you will put yourself in danger of being hurt knowing the person won’t hurt you on purpose. Sometimes, the idea of pain is like a gift to the other person. I let you hurt me to show you how much I would give to you. And then you channel the pain into pleasure anyway in the weird way that happens when you are in that altered state of mind that you get into during love making. But that’s bdsm, which goes a step further than basic submission.

There’s a spectrum of activity. Following orders. Spanking. Cuffs. Blindfolds. Manacles. Various machines and other forms of bondage. Whipping. Insertion of every larger objects in various openings in the body, etc, etc. Some people go much further than others.

I think what is probably most important is the mind-fuck games. Playing roles such as being slaves of various kinds and engaging in demeaning services for the partner. You look at these things from the outside and they might look disgusting and fucked up. But looked at from the position of the sexual symbology, these roles say some very important things about what the other person means to you. It is only, I think, through these roles that you can get at the emotional intensity necessary to truly express the depths of some of these feelings.

Or maybe that is only the case for some people. I know that, for me, emotional intensity is extremely important. I thrive on it—good or bad. I’m sure some would judge me to be kind of messed up for that, and you could point at me and say I was mentally ill, and you’d be right. I do have a diagnosis.

But all my life, I have had a desire for a love so intense that it was as if we were both living inside each other’s heads. That was the connection I wanted. I wanted it to be absolutely clear that I was no longer alone in this universe. I wanted an utter and complete connection with my lover and to have them be me. No separation.

Of course, as I grew older, I came to accept this was not possible—at least, not in the way I had imagined it. I think that the games we play in intimate relationships are designed to create these feelings about each other in us that are as intense as we can make them. In raising the intensity, we try to break through those things that hold us back from love and trust, and sometimes we break through to that place where we can’t tell the difference between us.

These games are trust games and they are love games and they are “there is no difference between us” games. Some of us need the intensity more than others, and why that might be is a subject for another question.

When your girlfriend asks you for these things, she is telling you, I think, that you have her permission to try to break through her boundaries. She trusts you and is willing to go one step further. How you take that next step determines whether you will get to take another step. If you hold back too much, it may try her patience and she may not feel like you get her. If you go too hard, she may feel the same. But it’s always that way between lovers. There is much to try, and a narrow navigation channel.

When you throw something at someone without warning (something like submission), it is a challenge. Can you handle it? Can you go with the flow? Are you creative enough? Sensitive enough? Can you respond well even though you have no idea what is going on?

How do you handle these women? You handle them like individuals, not like a class of people. The only response can be individual. It must be born of the moment, of what you bring and what she brings. If you want to dominate, it has to be a sincere desire to dominate. To bend this woman to your will because you truly desire her and there is nothing else in your mind. If this is true, she will feel it, and she will open herself up and trust you. If you are faking it just to please her, then just stop it. There is no point.

It is the emotional truth that is important here. It is the emotional experience and intensity. You can play her like a violin if you want. Maybe she just wants to be played, but in my experience, you have to love the violin and only want to play the song it wants to sing. Playing just because the violin will let you play is not enough and can be disastrous, emotionally. Sometimes people open up too fast, and you have to be wise enough to know when to say no. This is a game, but it isn’t a game. We play, but the the most important thing in the world is what we play with.

If there is anything fake within you, don’t do it. But if your sincere wish is to play this game with this woman because you want to see how close you can get—then that is your ticket to being fully comfortable as a dom.

I am submissive and I like to be handled by having my feet restrained and being examined by a naughty doctor.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought, we are all individuals and as such (and I know I am stating the obvious here), you can’t assume anything. You have to have a conversation. There are different levels of submissiveness. She (using the word she generally rather than specifically) might just want you to take a lead role in the bedroom. To be that traditional ‘masterful’ male in that you run the show. Move her around. Decide what happens next. She might have little desire to be tied up or she might love being seriously dominated and all layers in between. You have to have the conversation.

I think part of the desire to be submissive is also about having the freedom to be a bit kinkier. In some ways we still condition our daughters to be good, to be refined and polite. To be overly sexual is perhaps somehow still dirty and nasty (not in a good way). Look at the continuing discord between attitudes to male and female sexuality. Women who have multiple partners are still called sluts, slags, whores by some. In contrast, men who do the same thing are heroes. Not by all and I hope these attitudes are reducing but they still exist. So being able to hand control to their partner lets them off the string subconsciously. I am not a psychologist and I am making some big suggestions here. These are just my thoughts on why some (not all) women might like to take a submissive stance.

Agree @Bellatrix. Well put.

I would add that there is so much tension and repression in maintaining control and keeping power in life every day that the sexual release crosses the line of emotional release.