This will be a somewhat odd post. The main text is quite small, and will be dwarfed by the prologue and epilogue. But I think it necessary to include the prologue to address some questions that arise whenever someone attempts a definition, and to provide the background for the defintions. And, because the thoughts in this message tie into some other thoughts that I posted a couple weeks ago, and may not be very clear without the earlier post (the propagation of which was, I think, poor, as I wasn't flamed for it), I'm appending that earlier post.

A poster asked in a recent de-lurk, among other things, if "sub" and "slave" were the same thing. An old question around here. Some people insist that there's one and only one proper meaning for each of those terms (and some think it's the same meaning for both terms), while others insist that not only are there no true definitions for these terms, but that the effort to define any terms is marginalizing and oppressive.

I agree that there's no one meaning to either word. There are as many meanings for those words as there are users of them - more, in fact, because many users will employ varying definitions at different times. Communication occurs, to the extent that it does, because enough people use definitions that are sufficiently similar. No definition is "right", it's just that some are more useful than others, either because they permit communication with a larger and more diverse audience, or because they allow more precise communications with a narrower audience.

But while we can't come up with the "right" definition for any word, that doesn't make the effort to define them wrong. First, because as we share definitions we work towards an understanding of the diversity of our definitions, and the common elements within that diversity, and this may help us in making our usages as widely recognized as we can. Or it may help us to speak to specific audiences as precisely as we can. Either makes our communications more efficient.

Beyond this is another goal. Each person's definition is that person's piece of the truth. As we share definitions, we share our truths. Poorly, because a word can only be a poor shadow of the truth it represents, but it is a sharing of truths, and the more we share each other's truths the better we understand our own.

So I'll be offering my definitions of "Submissive" and "Slave". They're not the only ones. I don't claim they are the "right" ones. I won't even *say* that they're the best ones (though obviously I think they are, or I wouldn't use them). I'm not trying to convince anyone to use them. I'm just offering them for your consideration, for whatever value you may find in them.

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Slaves and Submisives

I had occasion once to ponder a punishment. Not mine, but one that a very dear friend was facing, and which she knew would be quite severe. And, having received from her Master a description of the punishment administered (as well as from hir, though she didn't remember it very clearly), I can assure you that few people would have been able to find any pleasure in it (Bob Flanagan might not have found it impressive, but for almost anyone else, it was heavy, though it caused no major or lasting injuries). My friend most definitely did not enjoy it, and does not wish any repetition.

And, yes, sadist that I am, I enjoyed immensely reading of my friend being so stringently tortured. But when the event was yet to come, I had no wish for her to suffer that much (no, really, I mean that, really; fantasies are not wishes, at least, not always).

Yet even with my sadistic side suppressed, I couldn't find anything to object to in the prospect that my dear friend would soon suffer terribly and in ways she did *not* want to suffer (she accepted that there would be punishment, but she had no desire for it). The reason for this was that I knew the offense she had committed, a clear and conscious violation of a known, understood, and important rule, could not be allowed to pass. A punishment, a very severe one, was needed, or the relationship that meant so much to hir would be badly damaged.

In my own and my Liege's concept of submission, punishment had no place. Submit or do not submit, as you wish, but don't waste the dom's time if you aren't going to submit. The only punishment for not submitting is to not be able to submit. Play punishments, though not something either of us were interested in, would have been possible (being both sadists, my Liege and I much preferred torture unsullied by any pretense that it was anything other than an exercise in power and pleasure), as would expiatory exercises (aka penances), should someone need them. But real punishment had no place in our relationship, and no part in my submission.

But my friend was in a very different relationship. Sie was a slave, and wanted to be controlled, wanted this very much despite (or because) of the streaks of rebellion and resistance to which she was prone. Sie had said that it was important to her that she not be able to run over her master and get her way. Sie had been making progress in becoming a slave, struggling, mostly successfully, to steel hirself to the duty to obey and bring hirself to the point of believing that which she had already pledged: that she had no choice but to obey and no options but to be a slave. Until one day, beset by an attack of anxiety, she quite consciously violated a major rule. I don't know why; perhaps she doesn't know why. I do know she was not seeking punishment; she already knew that her master's punishments were not something to seek. But for whatever reason, she did break the rule, and then dutifully reported it. And now, if the relationship was to prosper, there was no way, at least none that I could see, that a severe punishment could be avoided, even though neither of them liked punishment (hir master also saw no reason to seek punishments; if he wanted to torture hir, he would simply torture her because it was what he wanted). A punishment that would have to be severe enough to instill in her a terrible dread of what he could do if he felt it necessary, and, hopefully, once that dread was in place, there would not again be a need for such a punishment.

The punishment was administered, and the relationship continues to prosper. Sie is, I think, now much closer to becoming the slave she wishes to be. All of which is simply some more prologue to some thoughts on how slavery differs from submission.

I once thought that slavery was a particularly intense form of submission, but have come to see the two as distinct phenomena, not just different points on a continuum. Briefly stated, I see the fact of choice as the essential element in submission, and the lack of choice as the essential element in slavery. The relation of this to punishment is that a true punishment is not needed, and perhaps not possible, in a submissive relationship. The submissive is there by choice, remains by choice, and serves by choice. No punishment is needed to have someone do that which she choses to do, and, since if she does not choose to serve, she is free to leave, punishment to compell obedience is not appropriate, and arguably not really possible. A slave, OTOH, does not have choice, and is not free to leave. The slave must obey, or the relationship that is as essential to the slave's happiness as it is to the master's will fail, and therefore reinforcing a slave's will to obey with a dread of the consequences of disobedience, may, at least for some slaves, be a necessity.

A sub, at least in my style of submission, obeys and serves hir dom by continually choosing to do so (one description I have used is that a sub is under the dom's command rather than the dom's control). The sub could at any time decide not to obey, and so, when the dom says kneel and the sub kneels, that is a gift to the dom; the harder the submission is, the greater is the gift. Submission in this view is a continuous, or at least continuing, gift of loyalty and service. It could be withdrawn at any time; that it is not is part of the gift the sub renders to the dom. If anything other than the sub's love and loyalty and desire to serve produced the obedience, then this precious gift would be tarnished.

A slave has no choice. Hir great choice has been made, one ultimate gift of hirself to her master/owner, and from that time forward, till she shall be released by her master, or by some momentuous event, she does not have any options but to obey and serve. Sie is under the control of the master. By that I mean not that she is some kind of robot; slaves, rather than being automatons, are highly autonomous possessions. But while a sub receives a command, then chooses whether or not to obey it (usually w/o much consideration; the reaction may be nearly instantaneous, but there is still and always will be that process of receive the command, accept the command, obey the command), a slave will (usually) have no choice in whether or not to obey (the middle step of "accept the command" is not part of the process), so the slave is reacting directly to her master's will rather than to hir own, hence the assertion that a slave is under her master's actual control.

Since her obedience to any particular command is not a gift (though it is something she wants to give) but is instead something that the master has an absolute right to expect, to overcome any weakness she might feel and reinforce her obedience by dread of the consequence of resistance does not contradict the basic elements of the relationship. However, if punishment were persistently required, and this did not decline over time, then a master should, IMO, seriously consider whether the decision to become a slave was not either premature or simply ill-considered, for if it is primarily fear of punishment rather than a will to serve (reinforced, to some degree, by fear of punishment), then
a) it appears that the slave has not yet been successful in making the internal commitment to obey, and
b) the relationship is, if not already abusive, certainly in danger of becoming abusive.
The master should, again IMO, address this situation, to do what she can to help the slave to complete the internal commitment, and, if unable to accomplish this, should release the slave.

All of the above, of course, is highly simplistic modeling of extremely complicated processes that never work in reality as they do in the models, but the models are offered in an attempt to approximate the processes so that they can be studied and understood.

********

[Note: being unable to ever stop fiddling with my articles, what follows has been modified slightly since the original post; the changes, however, are only in the style, not the substance.]

 From: [email protected] (Steven S. Davis)
 Newsgroups: alt.sex.bondage
 Subject: Power Exchange and Personal Realities
 Date: 27 Nov 1995 19:58:59 GMT
 Message-ID: <[email protected]>
 Summary: A discussion of reactions to "absolute lifestyle" d&s
 Keywords: TPE Power Exchange

Before sharing an edited version of my response to my correspondent on this situation, I probably should state where I "am" as regards this lifestyle. I've engaged in some long debates about what is often called "total power exchange" or "absolute lifestyle d&s". My comments have usually been a rejection of the position that a power exchange that is less than 100 % is a false power exchange. I don't doubt that "total" power exchange exists. There are, in fact, people prepared to obey any order, including the command to kill or to die, that the object of their loyalty issues, and to do so w/o reservation. But I don't believe that there are many such people among those who are in "total power exchange" relationships. If nothing else, most people retain the power to decide that the dom has become irrational and need not be obeyed while she remains irrational. So the relationships aren't "total" or "absolute". But they are real power exchanges, even if they are "only" 95 or 99 or 99.44 percent power exchanges.

What this means is that the sub has altered the facts of her life. Sie has made a vow, and internalized that vow, in such a way that hir reality has been altered. That this change affects a person's "intellectual, emotional, and psychological" reality, not the external facts of her existence, does not make the change any less real. What this also means is that, within a *very* broad range, the sub genuinely has no choice. It is not, for such a person, the case of choosing to obey; the choice to submit fully was made, and now, except in certain extreme circumstances that will probably never occur, there *is* no choice for hir. It is not a part of hir reality. It is no longer a matter of what the person chooses, it's a matter of what the person *is*.

This tends to disturb some people for whom such a reality is simply inconceivable. Not surprisingly, the persistent denigration of one's choices, and the rejection of one's reality (and the implied questioning of one's competence), makes DNTPEs (damn-near-total power exchangers) angry, and has made several feel that they and their lifestyle were unwelcome on ASB.

Edited reply follows

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I suspect that real power exchange is as hard for some people who do what we do to understand as it is for most vanilla people to understand wiitwd.

IMO, much of this stems from problems people have with the morality of power exchange, and the discomfort they feel about the issue of power exchange and responsibility. Since the cornerstone of the ethics of wiitwd is consent, the paradoxical nature of PE consent - that one consents to no longer have any consent - is confusing and deeply distressing to some. Also, for many people, the idea of one person truly ruling, or truly hurting, another is morally unacceptable, so, while they get as hot as do the rest of us (I say that as if they were the minority; I suspect that, among BDSM players, they are probably the majority) by the idea, they can only reconcile it to their ethical systems by believing that it is a game in which the sub/catcher has final control, and if she obeys/endures, it's because she wants to do so (which is, on some level, true, but it totally overlooks how the need or commitment to submit can override all other concerns, so that while a person who has sworn to obey may in fact be "doing what she wants" by obeying, the order she is obeying may yet be truly horrific to her and something she utterly does not want - it simply is not so horrible as to overcome her submission). By assuming, as X does, that submissives are manipulators who are always in real control and are getting exactly what they want, X evades the question of the morality of her dominating and hurting someone. Not many of us are ready to admit that we really want to hurt or control another human being simply because *we* enjoy it, so we go to great lengths to tell everyone, most of all ourselves, about the mutuality of it, and how the catcher wants it as much or more than we do, in fact, we're just doing what the catcher wants (the manipulative little snot ;-> ) so it's all OK, we're good people, really we are....

All of which is true. It just doesn't alter the fact that we do what we do because we want to do it, not because we're overcome with altruism.

Aside from not wanting to admit to our own desires (this coming, of course, from the person who blames everything on "S." - no, it wasn't me who was looking at that woman's snug top and suddenly had an image of taking a boxload of pencils, sharpening each one to a very sharp point (as the busty woman watched, struggling futilely while tied to a chair) and then, one by one, jabbing the sharp pencils deeply into her bare breasts; that wasn't me who wanted to assault and hurt the woman, that was "S."; yeah, right), there's also the issue of responsibility. Not the responsibility for our desires and acts, that was covered in the above discussion. Instead I mean responsibility for ourselves and others.

Many people, including many doms, don't really want to be responsible for another person, such responsibility scares them. If they do what we do as a game in which the sub retains control, then the sub is also retaining responsibility, and the dom is relieved of that heavy and scary burden. Anyone who does not play the game the same way, anyone who takes real control and accepts real responsibilty, is threatening to some players, because to play the game that way undermines the comforting thought that the dom *isn't* ultimately responsible (also, to back up a bit, anyone who doesn't play the game the same way, who sees it as real and not a game, is undermining the "legitimizing myth" which enables many of us to do what we do without moral qualms; this is, IMO, part of why people can become so hot about the subject).

There is, however, some accuracy in the assertion that there is some reward for whatever we do or we would not do it, it's simply harder to explain when the reward isn't "I did act X to get act Y done to me", but is instead of the sort of "I live my life in X way because I seek Y in my life". Explaining the satisfactions of a life choice is much harder than explaining what one gets from a scene. Also, "reward", in this context, can mean "suffering less", i.e. "I do this because however much I may dislike what I must do, I can bear it better than I could bear the shame of a broken vow, the loss of the life that I need, or the shattering of my identity".

BTW, one point that occured to me as I was discussing the fact many doms don't want to accept real, ultimate responsibility. We are programmed in our society to take responsibility for our lives (obviously, for many people, the programming doesn't work) and, as appealing as we may find the idea of giving up responsibility*, actually doing so is hard. I suspect that you are already quite aware of that fact, as it seems to be something with which you are struggling. That you must obey Y you seem to be OK with, but that Y has the responsibility for your life, not you, seems to be a lot harder to accept.

My situation was, of course, different in many ways; my level of submission was lesser, and I retained unrestricted exit rights (also, the type of submission that is a continuous gift is quite different from that which involves one ultimate gift; the former is only possible when one has the choice to stop giving one's submission). Still, it was a situation that I badly undermined by not being able to let go of responsibility, to stop worrying about Z's life and whether I was an intrusion in it, and simply let her know what I needed, and then leave it to her to deal with it.

* - [A note to ASB: knowing the person involved, and trusting her judgement about her dom (which has been affirmed so far by the events in the relationship), I know that "giving up responsibility" does not mean that suddenly the slave's ethics are tossed away and hir obligations ignored. It does mean that the task of working out how to observe her ethics and meet her obligations is now shared, and the final decision as to how to accomodate her other obligations with her life and duty as a slave now belongs to her dom. This is, of course, a great responsibility for the dom and a very significant decision for the slave, one which should not be made w/o great care, and one which, IMO, was in this case made with due care and deliberation]

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    Steven S. Davis  *  [email protected]  *  [email protected]
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