Why I don’t call myself ‘dominant’ anymore
I’m not identifying as dominant anymore. The label doesn’t fit me like I thought it did.
I’ve just spent too much time on my knees in the past year… the kink police have found me and they’re making me give the label back!
Not.
The decision started with a reflection on some recent play I’ve shared with some lovely people:
Why do I call myself dominant, I wonder, when I am fingerfucking a partner’s cunt with one hand and choking her with the other, and she rises up off the bed, unasked, to sink her fingers into my cunt. And I collapse into her, overcome with desire?
Why do I call myself dominant when I’m making love with B^2, my submissive partner of six years and my partner of one year, who is biting me and gripping me and telling me to do things with my hands and mouth that I would never do to B^2, who is giving me amazing head and not stopping until most of my bed’s surface area is puddles?
Why would I worry if these moments are really about dominance or submission, when there could be something far more interesting at play?
It turns out, when I look more closely, the dichotomy between dominance and submission—and then the term switch, which is what, the power-exchange version of bisexuality, with all its baggage?—really just doesn’t describe my lifestyle, my practices, or my belief that sexuality is fluid and particular. And it honestly never has. I had this revelation a couple weeks ago when I first saw the word “rolequeer,” in a blog post about partnered dance, another group activity that usually involves picking one of two clearly-defined, oppositional roles and sticking to them.
There doesn’t seem to be an agreed upon definition of rolequeer within the kink scene, similar to how the word queer is not so much defined by a set of characteristics, but by what it isn’t: a participation in a binary way of thinking about sex and desire.
So here are some of my working definitions of rolequeer:
Rolequeer is the woman at last year’s south camp who taught two people how to fist—while she was actually being double penetrated by them at the same time. That was some of the most interesting, powerful shit I saw all year.
Rolequeer is how I feel when I’m giving a blowjob and discover I’m able to deep-throat for the first time. I tell my partner I’m going to use him to get myself off after I deep-throat his cock a few more times, and he leans back and immediately, authoritatively, says, “Six.”
And rolequeer is what it looks like, minutes later, when I’m straddling that same partner, being penetrated from below, gripping his neck firmly and preparing to spit in his mouth; I do it, and when he swallows I hold his mouth open with my thumb and say, “Thank you, Sir.”
Rolequeer is what happens when I finger-fuck my partner’s butt while sucking his toes. I have to separate my mouth from them and catch my breath to tell him to cum in his own face, moaning, “I’m yours.”
“You’re mine when you come in your face for me,” I hiss.
It took me far too long to understand that the labels dominant and submissive didn’t serve me anymore. I actually had some of these beautiful experiences and wondered, is this what submission feels like? And if so, am I less dominant when I am being submissive … is it some kind of a sliding scale? Like you can’t be both at the same time, and be other things, too.
It seems my partner, in contrast, has had no trouble with this idea. I was really confused the first time I told him he was dominant and he told me I was wrong. Here was a man who loved to hurt women, who got hard from choking me and spitting on me and watching my face twist with disgust, who seemed to always get what he wanted. I asked him how he would describe himself instead.
“Picky.”
He thought about it quietly, and explained to me that the label never really interested him, in so far as so many dominant-identified men in the scene are inconsiderate, coercive, unattractive douchewaffles. (Someone has to say it.) And he’s not one for pretense or concern for what other people think of him—that’s one reason he’s so goddamn attractive to me.
When I reflect on how our sexual dynamic has evolved over the past year, it makes sense; we have both wondered aloud, “Am I being submissive to you right now?” Some nights it really feels like I am, when I want to cook him the best dinner his kitchen has probably ever seen on a Tuesday night, and then get on my knees and try my hardest to give him the best head of his life. (True story!)
But we’re both incredibly picky. At the end of the day, neither of us is doing something we don’t want to do just because the other person says so. Our play is not coercive like that.
A lot has been said more eloquently than I could put it about the dangers of upholding a binary view of power-exchange. And just as I strongly believe, albeit controversially, that the scene’s consent-as-permission model is so Fucked and Useless that anyone who plays in a dominant or top role should be taken to task for any and every problem that arises within it, I now believe that I can’t identify with the role that holds the privilege and power in this system if I really want to change it. And I really do.
Because the thing is, we live in a systemically oppressive culture. I’m not going to argue this point if you don’t agree with me—show yourself out. And rather than subvert that culture, the BDSM scene in many ways serves to amplify by asking people to label themselves in relation to the power and control that they might exert on others.
When I started identifying as dominant in the scene, pretty much from the outset, I did it on the one hand to give myself as much cultural capital as possible, at a time when my sexual interests and my role in B^2’s erotic life were constantly questioned, and on the other hand to protect myself from predatory men. But it didn’t protect me. I’ve had my boundaries violated anyway and my trust betrayed anyway.
But still it gave me pause when I unchecked the dominant box on Fetlife last week. Not calling myself dominant anymore still felt like giving up what little privilege and power I had, and why would I do that?
Isn’t it gross how much that question sounds like the kind of question a bigoted or wildly uninformed person would say to a transwoman—why would you want to stop being considered a man, why would you want to give up that power, when being a man is so clearly better, easier, etc?
Of course, what this argument misses is the fact that it isn’t really you who has the power in the either case; the power we think we have is really just the extent to which good things will happen to us when we conform to cultural expectations. Within BDSM, we might think the system is giving us power, but really we’re the ones serving it when talk about D/s.
I get excited when I read what little else has been written about rolequeerness in the scene, as a “traitorous” relationship to dominance and a celebration of vulnerability:
…. “The erotic climax in a rolequeer scene is when someone safewords, when the bottom says “no” to the top and means it, when the top makes themself obsolete, when the bottom takes the top’s power away or the top freely gives it to them, if there’s even a “bottom” and “top” to begin with. Rolequeer play is two people submitting to each other simultaneously, Submissive solidarity within the context of a scene, Submissives retroactively withdrawing consent from Dominants they’ve played with and infiltrating Dominant headspace to become double-agents, and Dominants getting excited when that happens. You might be a rolequeer if: you think it’s incredibly hot to watch someone remove their own restraints.”
Isn’t that kind of really cool, actually?
So I guess that’s me, for now. CQ, not dominant, not submissive, and sure as hell not a switch.
And I’m not trying to say I’m some special snowflake, either. Most of the people I know and love in the kink scene play like this already, but call it something else. I hope they feel inspired to give rolequeer a chance with me.
But don’t expect much else to change about me besides my self-labeling—OKCupid still thinks I’m more dominant than just about any other woman on the site; I still go my own way; I’m still B^2’s master, Daddy, captor, slave-driver, or whatever titles we’re playing with at the time. And I still want to nail a bitch to my wall like she’s the most important motherfucking painting ever fucking introduced to a nail. But those facts have exactly no bearing on the head I gave my boyfriend until my saliva pooled in the creases of his unzipped pants last night, and never will.
—
Postscript:
“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” Michel Foucault, the Subject and Power.
“I am living today as someone I had not yet become yesterday. And tonight I’ll only borrow pieces of who I was today to carry with me tomorrow. No I’m not gay. No, I’m not straight. And I’m sure as hell not bisexual.” Andrea Gibson, Andrew.
“It was as though I’d spent years on my knees and one day someone peered down at me with a friendly smile and said, “What on earth are you doing down there?” He didn’t scorn me or cajole me or pull me to my feet. He just made standing up feel like an option, where it hadn’t before. He made it feel safe. And when I stood, trembling, he was purely delighted to share uprightness with me. He didn’t just see me as equal to him; he showed me how to see myself as equal to him.” Rose Fox’s livejournal.
Communication or Lube. 