(inspired by zesje!)
Post-feudal societies strongly discourage what I consider to be our genetic tendency to order ourselves in genetically inherited dominance roles. Modernism has decided, probably for the best, to embrace the fiction that all are born equal, with equal potential to lead or follow.
But I find it extremely telling that in situations where people are less constrained by these ideas you see a flowering of dominance and submission to the point of caricature.
Exhibit A: Homosexuals, especially male homosexuals. Once a homosexual “comes out” they exist in a kind of freer space than heterosexuals. Society has no clear expectations of them. Additionally they have lived at least part of their lives unnaturally constrained by society and therefore have less respect for its rules.
As a result they have created a wild array of cultural behaviors and models from leathermen to “bears”. Many of those behaviors take the form of BDSM and Dominance and submission.
Exhibit B: The online “game” Second Life.
Due mostly to easy anonymity and profound lack of precedent, an even denser profusion of sexual and cultural behaviors can be found on the Internet. This is particularly true in the online social experiment known as Second Life where there is essentially no social friction, so people behave in any way that suits them.
To me this is like dropping iron filings around a magnet. They are small so friction is negligible. They are free to align themselves into the magnetic lines of force which surround the magnet, making the invisible visible. Dropping a few hundred thousand people into Second Life with no social constraints and no actual object to the game other than to find fun makes their deep, instinctive desires and behaviors visible as well.
So what do we find in this neo-primordial ooze?
It turns out that the “mature” areas in Second Life make the San Francisco Halloween Parade look like a Methodist Bake Sale. Sex roles are entirely fluid and, in support of my point about the state of nature, there is an overwhelming amount of BDSM and Dominance/submission. Total freedom of identity and behavior has quickly produced, among all the things it could have produced, the world’s biggest S & M party.
And, in further support of my theory, there are many more submissives than dominants. (Even most of the Dom/mes are themselves “switches” with Dom/mes of their own.)
This makes sense because while a group can function well with a single leader and virtually infinite submissives, too many leaders will create internal strife and disharmony.
An advocate for the devil would say that this is all easily explained by the fact that the BDSM crowd is concentrated in SL because it’s so hard to follow their kinks in the real world. A strong argument, but I say there is a prior question, the exploration of which is the whole point of this blog:
Why are there so many kinky Dominance/submission-oriented people in the first place?
And how many more would there be if society didn’t stigmatize it so much?
Tags: bdsm, Dominance, femdom, Second Life, Sex, submission
