I received this email from mb and with her approval opened an account and pub­lished it as a post. yes I knew LD. He was well known and missed.

The email from mb is as follows:

Dear Sir,

I believe we may know each other. I belonged to L.D. who dies quite a while back. I’m

sub­mis­sion

cur­rently in a rela­tion­ship with another dom­i­nant man (what a sur­prise, really) and since we will soon be get­ting mar­ried and I will be mov­ing in with him, i was look­ing for some point­ers to help both of us. While I’ve come across your web­site before and found it very use­ful, I thought I would finally write to you and make some com­ments. Please keep in mind that I am a queer sub­mis­sive woman who has on occa­sion dom­i­nated oth­ers, that I am African-American and do not use terms like mas­ter and slave in my rela­tion­ship, that I have a back­ground in cul­tural anthro­pol­ogy and that my for­mer Sir had a back­ground in social psy­chol­ogy, and that I do not see the dom­i­nant male/submissive female dyad is being the new plus ultra of BDSM; it’s just one of many flavors.

1. I con­grat­u­late you on writ­ing your excel­lent web­site. The ways in which you use Adler­ian and other psy­cho­log­i­cal tech­niques to explain pos­si­ble ways of train­ing is superb. The only nig­gle I have (and it’s a small one) is in the REBT sec­tion; philo­soph­i­cally I don’t think it’s wrong to dis­cuss with a slave/submissive whether slav­ery is a form of hap­pi­ness. It isn’t for every­one, at least not in an obvi­ous way. I would argue that we are all slaves to some­thing, and that if a woman has prob­lems with think­ing of her­self as a slave it might be that this prac­tice is not a good fit for her.

If that is so, there are alter­na­tives. The rela­tion­ship can change, she can be encour­aged to move on, or dif­fer­ent ter­mi­nol­ogy can be used. In all the years of my 24/7 rela­tion­ship, I was never referred to as a slave, although I referred to L.D. as myowner on occa­sion. For some of us, terms such as slave have dis­con­cert­ing his­tor­i­cal impli­ca­tions, espe­cially where there are par­tic­u­lar eth­nic, reli­gious, polit­i­cal or fem­i­nist dynam­ics. When white men who knew us insisted on call­ing me a slave while giv­ing me the once over, they didn’t real­ize how close they came to get­ting punched in the face. Con­sid­er­ing that I once had a white French­man actu­ally say to me that in the old days they ‘had had women’ like me in the Caribbean, I don’t think I was being overly sen­si­tive. My cur­rent Sir and I, as well as my for­mer Sir, mod­eled our rela­tion­ship on roman ideas of own­er­ship rather than fan­tasy or New World con­cepts that were in large part racist in nature. Other women may have a prob­lem with cer­tain terms as well because of the his­tory of the treat­ment of women, espe­cially women of color, in West­ern culture.

2. What I like best about your web­site is that your sug­ges­tions are real­is­tic. Might I sug­gest a few touch­stones for your read­ers? As a good for­merly Catholic and now non­af­fil­i­ated Zen Bud­dhist girl, rit­ual is very impor­tant to me. So is inter­nal dis­ci­pline. I would sug­gest ‘The Inte­rior Cas­tle’ by St Teresa of Avila as read­ing to under­stand the submissive’s inte­rior psy­cho­log­i­cal expe­ri­ence. I would also sug­gest St. Fran­cis of Assisi, as well as Thomas Mer­ton. I would also sug­gest The Book of Five Rings by Musashi Miyamoto; my cur­rent Sir is a great fan of The Hagakure, and swears by it.

3. I have found for myself that sound is an impor­tant part of train­ing. Con­tem­pla­tion is used in all dis­ci­plines to instruct the mind and inform the body. I per­son­ally find that Gre­go­rian and Ambrosian chants are use­ful while the sub­mis­sive in med­i­tat­ing or being trained. You men­tion tones of voice, which I think is excellent.

4. Smell (indeed, all of the senses) are impor­tant dur­ing train­ing. In the past, it was very com­fort­ing hav­ing some­thing of my sir to sleep with, such as a shirt. Dur­ing my wid­ow­hood, I would some­times put one of L.D.’s old shirts in the bed with me at night to com­fort me, of I would wear one of them. I also kept his hair brush in its dirty state for a long time, so I could still smell him. With my new Sir, since we live apart, I love smell his t shirts and keep­ing one on hand. I’ve also made a point of buy­ing him cer­tain shav­ing prod­uct so that I can asso­ciate the smell of those liq­uids with him.

5. Visu­al­iza­tion has long been a part of my sub­mis­sion. Pic­tur­ing my Sir’s body in total detail, pic­tur­ing his hands on my body, pic­tur­ing myself tak­ing things that he liked to do, was very effec­tive. After L.D. died I remained in sub­mis­sion to him for years by using these tech­niques, and they helped to keep me strong and on track.

Image by Lehn­ert et Handrock

6. I think that look­ing at mil­i­tary train­ing tech­niques would also be use­ful. Both the mil­i­tary and reli­gious groups have used tech­niques such as sen­sory depri­va­tion, sep­a­ra­tion from the out­side world for set peri­ods of time, sleep depri­va­tion, mantras and rote mem­o­riza­tion, and sim­ple bod­ily mod­i­fi­ca­tions as a way of rewiring the minds of new recruits and con­verts. Gay men and les­bians use these tech­niques also in BDSM dis­ci­pline. I have never under­stood the inter­est in fic­tional worlds and places such as Gor or Roissy as mod­els for BDSM tech­niques when there are so many meth­ods that time has proven to be effec­tive. My only expla­na­tion is that it takes a great deal more time to learn about real cul­tures, peo­ple and places that might find the dis­ci­pline, per­se­ver­ance, self-control and knowl­edge sets of both the dom­i­nant and sub­mis­sive want­ing than to con­jure up a badly writ­ten cul­ture, peo­ple or place in which one or both can claim to have a ‘nat­ural’ under­stand­ing. It’s like say­ing a very good Lit­tle League player should be accepted to play for the Yan­kees because his desire is strong, rather than insist­ing on train­ing, dis­ci­pline, and the pur­suit of excel­lence while admit­ting that most peo­ple will not be up to the task. It’s one of the rea­sons I stopped going out to SM events a long time ago, and was dis­ap­pointed in them for a long time before that.

7. I saw your men­tion of that silly new series, 50 Shades of What­ever. I agree with you. Books like this make it more impor­tant for us to be able to artic­u­late what we do, why we do it and what we are not.  In pri­vate, I often clashed with my first Sir about the larger com­mu­nity. I felt that peo­ple who had no dis­ci­pline, espe­cially sup­posed dom­i­nants, should be dis­cour­aged from stay­ing around, since it is easy for them to do so much harm. It should be hard to find true prac­ti­tion­ers for train­ing, just as one can’t walk into any gym or dojo and meet the best train­ers or mas­ters. One can meet decent ones in such places, yes – but qual­ity peo­ple must be sought out. It might be good to clearly spell out for the new­bies who will find your site that while the inter­net is a good place to start learn­ing about our Dis­ci­pline, there are excel­lent teach­ers out there who can be sought out, and that often they don’t look like bil­lion­aires or models.

8. I found the arti­cle on DSS to be inter­est­ing. I dis­agreed with it in part, how­ever. Or, rather, not with the arti­cle itself, but with what I see as the fal­la­cious mind­set many polyamor­ists have, and what monogamists expect from them.  Because I’m trained in anthro­pol­ogy, I can tell you that there is not a sin­gle cul­ture on earth that prac­tices polygamy in which all the women share the same phys­i­cal liv­ing space. In all cases, each woman lives sep­a­rately (whether that means in her own trail, sheep farm, hut or house) and the man will take turns vis­it­ing them all. They may live in the same com­pound, but they are not expected to share the same bed or have sex with each other or with the same man at once. This is because females of all pri­mate species tend to be nat­u­rally ter­ri­to­r­ial, and if they are put together, com­pe­ti­tion breaks out almost imme­di­ately. Even in his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments, we see that this is true. The only peo­ple who try to force nature in this way are mod­ern polyamor­ist and their ilk, which is why such rela­tion­ships with this par­tic­u­lar struc­ture are doomed to fail­ure. If the women are sep­a­rated, the rela­tions can work, if not, there is com­pe­ti­tion. There­fore, it’s not that there is ‘dis­grun­tled sub­bie syn­drome’; it’s that the man is often try­ing to force an issue that just won’t work. You my notice that most of the time when these rela­tion­ships fail, the man usu­ally ends up with his pri­mary partner, or the pri­mary rela­tion­ship ends and he ends up with nobody. Ethno­graphic accounts also show that women can­not be ‘sis­ters’ to each other in a polyg­a­mous rela­tion­ship. There is always a hier­ar­chy. While some of the wives might be closer to each other than oth­ers, it is impos­si­ble to make three or more women get along equally just because a man wants it. Even with two women, it’s pretty much impos­si­ble. Mod­ern West­ern cul­ture has solved this issue by invent­ing what we still some­times call ‘the mis­tress’ or ‘the out­side girl­friend’. Both women might know of each other, but they travel in dif­fer­ent social cir­cles and/or have dif­fer­ent func­tions in the man’s life. Oddly enough, women seem to be able to have two male lovers on an equal basis in the same house­hold with fewer prob­lems, espe­cially if the men were orig­i­nally friends or are actual broth­ers, but it is extremely rare. In other words, polyamory is mostly a fan­tasy for many men and a few women, but it’s fairly dis­as­trous if the female part­ners are all per­ma­nent and live under the same roof.

Thank you for your time, and I hope this was not too tedious.

Sin­cerely yours,

mb

P.S. Should you choose to pub­lish this, please redact all names, as well as my e-mail address