Originally posted by Ladyvet
Gwen,
What first made you decide you're a sub? Have you tried restraining yourself, if only symbolically? Are you comfortable with the thought of relinquishing your power over yourself to your boyfriend? If so, and you truly consider yourself to be sexually submissive, I think you "count." However, your orientation might change with experience.
Rather then type this all out again, I'm going to copy/paste something I posted to another group a while ago. For some background stuf, There was a discussion about different sexualities and I talked about being a sub and a lot of people didn't really get it, so I posted this. There's a bit of pretty elementry explanations in there, but I'm sure you can just ignore what's not important.

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OK, so here it all is out in the open. I'm not prone to tiptoeing around anything and I sure feel awkward about doing it about this. I do it all the time. It's really the only part of myself that I don't share with most people, although I feel awfully fake for not being open about it.

In writing this, I am of course considering the possibility of this post coming to bite me in the ass, since it would take VERY little effort to find out who I really am based on what I say here, and who knows, maybe some potential employer will want to check up on me twenty years in the future. As we know, Usenet is forever.

So here it goes...

My sexual orientation is multi-dimensional. Rather then being somewhere on a line between straight and gay, I have considered many different factors in defining myself. I have decided upon a simple(fied) three word phrase: "submissive masochist straightish." Most of my other likes or dislikes are results of those three being true.

They are ordered by how important they are to me. It's more important to me that I can be a submissive than masochist, that I can be masochist over straightish. I don't think that that's absolute, though. For example, if Al decided he never wanted to top me again, I would probably stay with him. But if he found another girl to play with and told me to have sex with her, I would do that, because I'm a submissive first. Make sense?

Because straightish merits little discussion, I'll ignore that for the time being and go into ones that are more interesting, and which I had a harder time with.

Some -brief- history:

Between the ages of three and thirteen: They were all rape fantasies in one way or another. Almost every sexual fantasy I'd ever had. They all involved me being forcibly controlled by various people or groups. It ranged from aliens in my younger days to mysterious, dark, powerful men. Sometimes it was an imaginary society. Oftentimes there was no identifiable controller. That was not important to me. The important part, the part that excited me, was the ways I was forced to do things. The way whoever or whatever it was hurt me and made me unhappy in the fantasy. I experienced the most intense sexual feelings of my life imagining pain and suffering.

For a large part of it, it was not overtly sexual. It didn't involve *sex*. Shit, I didn't fantasise about sex as in intercourse at all until I was past 15 y/o. I do recognise the feelings I had as obviously sexual now, but at the time I wasn't really sure. I had a way of just concentrating on the part of the fantasy that I cared about and made me feel good and ignoring the rest. I think I understood basically what sex was and that you like it when you're older, but I had a fairly poor grasp of it, being sheltered.

It's weird, looking back now; I came up with ideas in my 9 year old mind that I'd find later on in pretty hardcore BDSM literature. Ideas that certainly weren't presented in any media I was exposed to when I was a kid. Actually, I had very little concept of what BDSM was beyond a vague idea of a dominatrix archetype and had never thought it was connected to me at all.

By the age of around 13 or so, I had realised that the way I thought wasn't the way everyone else thought and I had better change it. So, for a while, I abandoned my ideas about sexual slavery. They were getting a bit boring, anyways. I took up really lame fantasies about the really stupid boys I knew. Nothing particularly interesting. I eventually gave up on it. It wasn't at all exciting for me to think about kissing whoever I was liking.

Around the beginning of last year, I somehow started being less afraid of going where I wanted on the Internet and came across BDSM literature... At first I didn't even connect it with myself. But it was pretty damn cool. I tried to get the boy I was dating at the time to play a bit with me but he wasn't very interested.

And since then I've just been learning off an on the way I do.


Now for how things are now?

I love being submissive. It means, when Al and I are in our roles, he controls me. It goes deeper then that, of course, but it's rather complicated. He bought me a collar when I was in Glasgow. It's a sort of silly looking thing, and I imagine at some point if we ever find somewhere to buy one I might be able to get another one. Unfortunately, neither Glasgow nor here has any real sex stores that we could find, so this one stays until we go someplace else.

It feels absolutely fantastic. I love it. I've not ever experienced anything near as intense as I have with him doing these things. I really feel that I am naturally submissive. I really consider it an orientation, a part of me, just like straight or gay. I don't know if I could be happy and satisfied in a relationship where it wasn't present at all.

As for masochism, that's just something that feels really good. It's not as... spiritual (?) for me as being a submissive is. Also we don't play with it quite as much because Al *is* a really nice guy and all. <grin>

Generally, I know what I'm doing with this as much as I know what I'm doing about most stuff in my life, as much as any chick my age knows. I've done quite a lot of reading and such.


General BDSM info if you don't know (cause i didn't before I started):

BDSM stands for: BD - Bondage & Discipline
DS - Dominance & Submission
SM - Sado-masochism

You can be into one part but not into another. Personally I want to try everything and I guess I've tasted it all. I've been top and bottom. I have a fun time being a domme but it's not fulfilling the way being a sub is.

Something else you should know about is safe words. They're very important. A safe word is a word that means "no". It's so that if you're doing something like a rape fantasy and something goes wrong, you have a way out. Saying, "no, stop" won't work if it's in your character. Ours is "kiwi". I say kiwi and everything stops. Immediately. If everything failed to stop I would have serious trust issues for a very long time. But since I believe in Al to be a fantastic person, I can can give him control of my body and my mind. It's a wonderful feeling. It's so much trust.

Speaking of trust et al, since I've done so much reading (thank you Internet), I am really aware of safety and such. I know how to do things safely that I probably won't do anytime in the near future. I won't get hurt doing this. Al knows, too, so we're pretty cool about that.


On a more scientific and introspective note, I have a possible explanation for why I crave a relationship like this. My parents are very.... liberal. It's kind of like when you say, "when I grow up I'm going to be a cool parent." Except they really did it. I do pretty much what I like around here. I suppose I don't really test it much, but still. I haven't been punished in AGES. Shit. The last time I got anything more then yelled at, or at most threatened with a punishment was... fuck.. grade 4 or something. I'm never grounded. I never have the computer taken away from me. I can stay up pretty much as late as I want. My parents have very little control over me. I dunno if they even realise it, since I just do nothing all day and don't bug them and stay mostly out of trouble. Oh well.

At any rate, I've read that kids need a certain amount of control. I wonder if this is just my way of getting that? I think I might post to a BDSM group and see what others think. I fin it kind of noncongruogous(sp) though, because why would I make this a sex game if what I want is control from my parents? Would this be some sort of Freud-like thing with transference? Was Freud the one who talked about transference? Or was that Jung? They kind of blend together in my mind for some points. If I found out that was likely, it'd be kind of creepy, you know? Incest is something I don't even fantasise about, let alone like the idea of.

Well, I guess that's enough babbling. This really is the sort of thing that doesn't look very... good (?) in text like this, particularly to strange people who might not know a lot of things about me.

But I am glad I got it out. Consider this a coming out of the closet. Well I wasn't all the way in, but that doesn't matter. I'm out now. Tada! If anyone decides to hold what I've said here against me, well... I guess I can't stop you. I'd ask you not to, though. It would be awfully intolerant. I really don't believe I'm hurting myself or Al. I love being like this. It's so intense.

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So that's it. A lot of introspection, eh? Hope I didn't bore everyone too much or kill some app with a huge database entry or something... <grin>