The Philosophy of Kink (Part 3)

In the last entries, I detailed how our interactions with the world present challenges to our own pleasure and detailed what a submissive needs to find in a Domme. Today, I want to open our eyes to see the truth we’ve all let ourselves be blind to.

The esoteric secret we all feel in our guts but can’t quite bring ourselves to recognize is that we’re almost always engaging in power dynamics, and it begins at birth. Your parents had to set firm boundaries, sometimes withholding their expressions of love and care for you to learn that actions have consequences. Your employment is contingent upon you being ‘good’ and not ‘bad.’ If you misbehave in a cafe, you’ll be asked to leave. If you fail to follow the laws, you’re risking the chance of being fined or worse, put in a cage until you can be judged by someone with all the power of the state at their fingers.

What underpins all of society is the threat of violence (the denial of privilege and rights), therefore almost everything we do is fundamentally part of a dance of power none of us signed up for willingly, but must perform in order to secure our safety and vitality. Max Weber called this “The State monopoly on legitimate use of violence” (Gewaltmonopol des Staates, if we’re being pedantic).

In his 1919 treatise “Politics as a Vocation” (Politik als Beruf), he defines the State as:
“...a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. “

That is to say, society is built on submission to the state, that no individual can seek justice or conduct violence of their own means, but only through the state apparatus or under state-approved sanction. When corrective action takes place, it is metered out, according to the rules, laws, and traditions of the state (whether detailed in expressed law, oral tradition, or simply implied).

The state doesn’t always mean “government,” in the classic sense here, but simply the community apparatus determined to hold the power to control the use of violence. In the lens of parent-child communities, the parents are the state. When a child misbehaves, even in healthy homes, they are isolated with time-outs, go-to-your-rooms, getting-grounded, sometimes with delayed nutrition or emotional nourishment (which feels like denial). Even if the child is abused and abuse is illegal in the greater community, the child does not have the skills or resources to navigate around the parent to find justice; see how another adult must intervene on behalf of the child upon suspicion of abuse.

This continues through school years, where we navigate social status among peers while appeasing the ‘State’- this time teachers, clergy members, the first non-family rulers over our freedom, working in concert with our parents. College feels freeing for so many because for the first time, our parents are not directly in the picture, but we slowly learn that other, no less powerful groups now hold power over our well being, like Financial Aid and our first bosses.

So, we grow up, spend our entire lives coerced into submission because consequences must be paid beyond merely being unliked for our deeds. As such, this miasma continues to permeate decision-making in adults until they learn survival demands to first consider the risk to stability and status quo before pleasure of others, leaving pleasure for themselves dead last.

This has costs we’ve already echoed: we build thick-and-false walls (Ego-likeness) to protect ourselves from the outside world, and the Ego-likeness is focused on survival, not pleasure or acceptance of our desires.

So, within the framing of our daily, lived experiences as a coercive submission, two things are clear. First, Dominance and submission isn’t some new experience or idea, but an echo of reality: D/s dynamics are the most common experience we all share as humans in society, usually (though not always) as the coerced submissive. Second, upon seeing the ways that society has coerced others and ourselves into submission, it is naturally terrifying to be approached and asked to submit.

This dichotomic paradox is the responsibility of the dominant to resolve, not the submissive, because it is the dominant’s philosophy that must inform their behaviors for congruence to exist (otherwise they say one thing, but do another, as discussed before).

Saying more on the matter risks letting wolves dress as sheep. Dominants, figure it out.