Fractally Kinky

One of the qualities of “fractals” in math is that something that seems very simple actually contains an infinite depth of complexity.  As you increase the zoom factor on a fractal it just reveals more and more detail.  Think about a fern.  When you look at a fern from a few feet away it appears to be a normal looking plant with leaves.  But if you look more closely you’ll see the leaves are actually more like smaller versions of the whole fern, and these “subferns” have there own leaves, which are again small versions of the whole fern.  Like so:

What does this have to do with Dominance and submission?  I think that one of the things that drives those of us into this whole dominance thing is a desire to strip away the thick social layers that interfere with and occlude the omnipresent primitive and powerful sexual dynamics at work in romantic relationships.  At some power level, for example, the first one in a relationship to say “I love you” has put themselves in the weak position simply by being the first one willing to go out on a limb, to bare their throat.  The last one to say “I love you” before a relationship ends is also the weaker.  The other member of the relationship has already moved on emotionally.

This goes back to my post on the difference between implicit and explicit power.  The first and last to say “I love you” in a relationship are implicitly weaker.  People into D/s just want to do a big burn off of all that silly dancing around the point and make it all very clear.  I am weak.  You are strong.  The difference between our power excites  us, and we want to use it in clear dramatic ways.

On the face of it this appears to dramtically simplify things.  But, because  human behavior is fractally complex, it just digs down to a deeper level that is just as interesting and sometimes difficult.  Obvious questions just scratch the surface, like is the sub trying to manipulate the Domme?  Does the Domme actually care about the sub?  Should they?  Is physical punishment really a punishment if the “punished” person likes it?  Etc. Etc.

Yes, it’s more fun for the power structure to be simple and clear, even cartoonish, but that doesn’t mean the complexity has been worked out of the system or that fractions have been reduced to their lowest numbers.  I think sometimes people clueless about power exchange don’t get this.

Meanwhile people in vanilla relationships should do themselves a favor and try to identify the lines of force that are going on just under the surface before it jumps up and bites them in the ass one day.

Assholes get all the chicks

But you knew that.

Now science does too!

So,  how does this “dark triad” fit in with this blog?  Well, obviously the same sociopathic traits described in the article can, if dialed down a bit, be seen as the “bully” or “dominant” traits.  My formulation is that they are not just successful because these types are a hit with the ladies but because these types are usually a hit with the tribe and become leaders.  So basically add Power to the dark triad (which makes it a dark quartet i guess) and you get an unbeatable combination for reproductive success.

My question, since I am most interested in femdom, is what is the female complement to this formula in sociological and sociobiological terms?

Jaded twenty-somethings

A lot of people come to BDSM in middle age. This is usually a result of sexual exploration after becoming bored with a couple of decades of “vanilla” sex.  Because they are middle aged they are generally committed to marriage, children, career, etc.  These entanglements constrain their ability to explore alternative lifestyles deeply, especially when their spouse isn’t equally adventurous.

But things are different now.  For better or for worse the youth of today, entirely because of the Internet, are exposed to enormous quantities of all kinds of pornography.  As a result they are likely to become far more jaded far more quickly than any previous generation as they attempt to ape what they see portrayed on YouPorn.  They are also more sophisticated about sex as they examine direct portrayals of all varieties of human sexual behavior.

It is important to note that they will be learning these things at the peak of their sex drives.  Previous generations had much more limited information at that age.  In times past non-vanilla sexual practices existed mostly as vague rumor.

At the same time as all this is going on, the youth of today are also less judgemental and more open-minded  about things sexual (homosexuality, for example) than any previous generation.

Based on these facts it’s no great leap to imagine that this will lead to an efflorescence of advanced sexual behavior among people in their twenties, before they have children and even spouses.   And whenever we see advanced sexual exploration we see a lot of power exchange play (BDSM, D/s, etc.).

Will we start to see dorm dominatrixes in colleges across the land?  (“Dormination”?)

And isn’t it interesting that traditional, sexually naive bullying and hazing behavior in high school and college have so often taken the forms of non-consensual or semi-consensual BDSM?

Does this mean that bullying behavior in high school, which I’ve argued is a precursor to adult Dominance/submission behavior, will actually merge with an ever lowering age of BDSM awareness?

Q.E.D. Update #1: Large numbers of twenty-something men taking viagra to ensure performance.

Q.E.D. Update #2: Young person’s apparel merchant sells Hitachi Magic Wand “Ultimate” vibrator. (Hint: it’s not for sore muscles.)

More free to be You and me

(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?

Sociobiology

(for Moralia, written from the cave)

I believe that humans are a species evolved from branches of the same bush that produced our closest genotypic relations, apes and chimpanzees.

We know that even higher mammals have a large number of impressively complex inborn “instincts” : behaviors that are pre-programmed by biology, not learned during childhood. A newborn horse, for example, can stand and walk within hours of birth, something that takes a human many carefully supervised months to learn.

It would be very strange if humans did not also evidence similar inborn traits, and indeed we do.

I believe that the urgent will to power is, like many other predilections, something we are born with. Similarly the desire to submit to those who assert and gain power is an equally powerful complementary trait. The dominant can never be truly happy unless they attain the power positions they seek over others. The submissive can never be truly happy unless they are explicitly and sometimes brutally subordinate to those who naturally desire power.

Why evolution has presented us with this situation is irrelevant but not uninteresting. Remember, our instinctual behaviors are much, much older than our higher-brain social and political beliefs, and are, ultimately, probably still more urgent.

The sexual fantasies of submissive heterosexual men, for example, generally involve emasculation by powerful women and cuckoldry by powerful men. Why would evolution preserve such traits which seemingly would quickly be eliminated from the gene pool?

My contention is that the “silverback” dominant males and their equivalents among the females cannot physically monopolize or entirely manage the breeding in a large social group. Individuals willing to train the young without producing most of them are required. As a result, the existence of a separate caste works well for the general population’s growth and maintenance.

This more complex system is so important to the overall success of a colony that I believe the subordinate caste of males and females have evolved to receive the same kind of overwhelming pleasure from their particular service and lowly position that the dominant castes receive from their high position and power.

And so the cycle continued until, frankly, only the last few centuries when the less natural but more ethical concept of the absolute equality of all humans was born and quickly propogated.

But it remains true that that utimate satisfaction and happiness, beyond that which modern ethics can supply, comes only from knowing your own place in the natural order, and explicitly occupying it.

Former bullies

We are all the protagonists in our own life story. As a result we often have a very hard time seeing ourselves in the way others see us.

When a murderous gang member goes to a movie in which the hero is fighting and defeating a horde of murderous gang members, who does he root for? I imagine most of them root for the hero and fail to identify with the gang members. Moreover I suspect they fail to even recognize the cognitive dissonance.

If it’s hard to recognize one’s self in a movie, how much harder it must be to recognize ourselves in our sepia toned memories or the memories of others.

There are many adults who were terrible bullies or “mean girls” when they were in high school. How do they think of their high school selves years later? Do they feel bad or are they proud? Maybe that was the most power they ever had and they think of the period as their glory days? Or are they in denial and don’t even really remember how they acted? Obviously it’s different for each person, but I’d be curious to do interviews with former bullies and their former victims to find out just how different the perceptions are. It’s funny to see former bullies and their former victims being calm and mature with each other at high school reunions.

My guess is that most former bullies have (or admit to) only vague memories of their school age behavior and identity as a bully, whereas their victims probably have crystal clear memories of themselves as “nerds” or “losers” and can probably list any number of specific indignities suffered. The jock remember winning the big game, not spitting on some whimp and daring him to do something about it.

Another thing I’d be very curious to know is how the former bullies and former victims behave as adults. Are the former bullies generally mean to their spouses and children? Successful in business? In prison? Are the former victims now suffering at the hands of cruel spouses, mean bosses and selfish neighbors?

Analyzing the theater of sexual power is the real point of this blog, and I am making my methodical way toward it, so what is the pattern of sexual behavior engaged in by former bullies and former losers? Do bullies become sadists and dominatrixes? Do losers become submissives? My guess is that in many cases this is what happens. Starting slowly in college it begins to become uncivilized to practice naked implicit power, at least in public. Fraternity initiations are a kind of exception, but they involve both explicit and implicit power as well as quasi sexual activity.

But between consenting adults, anything goes in the bedroom. All it takes is an open mind or a compelling fetish. So how do bullies, mean girls, and their victims act in this context?

I can only speak for myself. I was the victim of bullying until late in high school and, true to form, I discovered many years later an intense desire to submit to women sexually. I even married something of a former popular “mean girl” years before I really noticed my sexually submissive nature. Lucky for me she was more popular than mean. Though it is titillating for me to fantasize about her tormenting me in various ways, I am much better off with someone who loves and cares for me.

Explicit and implicit power

Explicit power is the power an institution gives to an individual over other individuals. Basically anyone not at the bottom of an org chart has explicit power over all those below. An “institution” in this definition means anything from a family unit to a primitive tribe to the largest armies, governments, and corporations. Usually, but not always, there is some kind of official contract, constitution, job description, or other definition of the limits (or lack of limits) to this kind of power.

Implicit power exists when an individual controls or has the potential to control another individual or group in the absence of any “official” agreement. This type of power dynamic is more interesting. It is organic in that people with implicit power have to realize on their own that they have it, and then have to decide what to do with it.

Implicit power is much more common than explicit power. Every romantic relationship contains an internal implicit power dynamic. Who pursued whom? Who said “I love you” first? Who said “I love you” last? Whose career is more important?

Every high school in America is practically paralyzed by a conflicting, operatic jungle of both strict explicit and fecund implicit power dynamics. The teachers, administration, and, to a ridiculously puny degree, the student government have all the explicit power. Meanwhile the popular kids and bullies (who are often the same) have so much implicit power that they control the experience of the average student in most of the ways that actually matter day to day.

One of the things that makes the high school power experience so fascinating is that those with implicit power, the jocks and beautiful girls, are spontaneously discovering their power and then wielding it with a casual and breathtaking cruelty worthy of Genghis Khan.

That these dynamics are inborn and natural is almost indisputable. Leaving aside observations of similar dynamics in many social mammals, especially primates, the simple fact that these implicit dynamics arise in virtually every high school in essentially identical ways in different societies and times in spite of explicit attempts by school officials to dampen or eliminate them is proof enough. (For a fantastic analysis of the stereotypical ways groups of high school girls self organize see the book “Queen Bees and Wannabes“.)

That these dynamics are more powerful than the explicit power structure is also clear. Witness the ineffectual strategies parents and administrators devise to try to address bullying. If a student is bullied they have a choice. They can keep it a secret in the hopes that the bully will mostly leave them alone, in which case the bully wins. Or they can “snitch” on the bully, something the implicit power structure tellingly considers a near capital crime. Should the victim report their problem then the situation may be addressed in some way in the short term, but in the long term the problem is almost always made worse for the victim and the bully wins again. There is no witness protection program for high school snitches, and extreme bullying often can only be addressed by the victim changing schools. And the bully wins again.

So why is the situation so stacked in favor of the bully? And where do bullies come from? And where do the victims come from? These are the kinds of questions that fascinate me and that I will write about in more detail in future posts.

Alphas

Who do you boss around? Who bosses you? Why?

I am most interested in romantic/sexual power, in particular female romantic/sexual domination of the male, but that subject can only be understood in the context of general human power relations. In turn sexual power dynamics help us understand general human power relations because sexual power is small scale and uninhibited and is therefore closer to the state of nature than the complex artificial, socially moderated power of politics.