Are Women “Wired” for Submission?

Ah, wonderful life-affirming, marriage-enhancing, heat-producing BDSM.  After a long hiatus updating this blog while I dealt with health problems and a couple of no-fun surgeries – and feeling constrained by the whole #MeToo movement of female empowerment against unwanted sexual dominance by men – my Daddy and I have recommitted ourselves to our BDSM life with marvelous vengeance.  We are now over four years into our journey of Dominance and Submission, and oh the things we have learned.  But for now, I am going to go back and pick up our tale from where I so abruptly left off, back when we were just beginning.  This is my journal entry written a month or so into our D/s journey …

Daddy has gone away on a business trip, and over the two days he’s been gone, I’ve been caught up in work, feeling the return of independent me, not thinking too much about sex.  In fact, I’ve become so detached from the idea of sex that I feel puzzled by the intensity of the past month, maybe even a little embarrassed by my previous zeal for the Daddy Dom dynamic.

Last night, all alone, I poked around online for things to read, and ran across these unbeknownst-to-me genres of erotic literature available only in e-books that have flourished in the post-50 Shades of Grey world.  There is a whole genre of being treated as “little” by dominating men and even a sub-genre of “historical” tales – stories of poor lost orphan girls pushed into Victorian boarding schools where they are trained to be submissives to new rich Daddies.  They are splayed open and inspected by stern doctors, given enemas by stern nurses, bound to their beds, and have ginger plugs shoved up their bums when they are bad.

I ran into these books just by typing “spanking” into the Amazon search engine, and hundreds of these are available for download.  Every possible spanking configuration has a niche, the submitting to the stepfather, the schoolmaster, the moody billionaire, the doctor, the sheikh, the teenager, the child, and even “the baby” who is forced to wear diapers, suck on a bottle.  And there is of course spanking on most every page.  It amazed and astonished me, the sheer volume of output about these fantasies.  True, it is dreadfully written stuff, laughably bad.  But clearly, women respond to them in a big way.  I do.  I got hooked reading Taken by the Duke late into the night, feeling the pull of it, almost put in a spell by it.

Before long, a huge sexual longing for my Daddy hit me like an ocean wave, and engulfed me completely.  My mind was possessed by restless sexual longing the rest of the night.  As my mind turned to imagining the rope, or the spankings I suddenly wanted so badly, I felt very aware of how the sexual reward centers of my brain were lighting up, creating a loop of craving (stimulating chemicals) and a following satisfaction (tranquilizing chemicals) from the mere thought of being spanked.  It felt like I had no choice in the matter, the rush of chemicals from the initial longing and then the imagined receiving – they literally hijacked my brain, and spread throughout my body until I actually ached to submit to Daddy, to be taken.

Again, I had the feeling that as a woman with an essential feminine essence (in Deida speak),  I am somehow “wired” for submission, that there is an actual chemical pleasure reward built into the more primitive parts of my brain that, and it lights up like crazy when triggered by feelings and acts of submission.

And last night, whatever chemical flood was triggered by my fantasies of submitting to Daddy stayed with me through the night, because I had long elaborate submissive dreams as well.    I read a sub wife’s blog yesterday where she talks about the intensity of discovering submission, which came with an overwhelming desire to stay on her knees almost constantly.  She said that desire “powerfully controlled” her body.  She said, “I was besotted with submission.  Saturated.  Infused. Owned.”

I have felt the same, saturated and infused, and I would guess that is what happens to me in actuality, I become saturated and infused with the stimulating/tranquilizing chemicals being churned out by my brain.  And these chemicals are wonderful and oh-my-god so addictive.  If I type “The neurobiology of BDSM” into a Google search, the first thing that comes-up is an article in Psychology Today. A relevant excerpt …

“We all know pleasure and pain can be felt simultaneously: think of the pleasures of a delicious meal laden with spicy chili peppers or the blissful ache following a long-distance run.  In the lexicon of cognitive neuroscience, both pleasure and pain indicate salience, that is, experience that is potentially important and thereby deserving of attention …

How is salience built into neural pathways?  We have an evolutionarily ancient and highly interconnected pleasure circuit in our brains.  When  neurons in a brain region called the ventral tegmental area become electrically active, thereby triggering the release of dopamine in a structure called the nucleus accumbens, this evokes the feeling of pleasure …”

The article also says that only 5 to 10 percent of the population report finding pain in the context of sexual stimulation pleasurable.  But I suspect that is only the number of people who have experimented enough to discover an ability to find pleasure in pain.  A year ago I would have said that I absolutely do not find pain to be sexually gratifying.  But today, I am regularly becoming blissed-out by things like firm spankings and tight rope.  Of course, it might not be so much about the spanking or the rope, but about how efficiently those things trigger the chemical rewards of mild pain.

There is something beyond the pleasure reward that plays into submission.  While lying across Daddy’s lap getting spanked, or when he holds me down forcefully to fuck me, I get an incredibly strong sense that “I am designed for this.”  I experience it as such an overwhelmingly primal reaction, and see so much evidence of it in other women all over the internet, that I cannot help but think there could be a universal sexual submission response built into the female brain – or at least a whole lot of them.  Clearly it can be part of the male brain as well, but more many women in BDSM identify as submissive than do men. (See Fetlife breakdown of member kinks).  I know I have come to yearn for it in an urgent psychological way, a spiritual way.

For me, submission is spiritual surrender made literal through my naked body.  To be used by my Daddy feels very much like being used by life, allowing myself to be caught up in the visceral force of love – a creaturely animal force that needs the sexual union of opposites in order to create new life.  I have always had a concept of God as this life/love force, a spiritual longing to be joined in union that exists within all living things.  I can almost literally feel it within me as a longing for the infusion of the masculine polarity (spiritual being) into the feminine polarity (physical being).

I think David Deida is right, and the power exchange of dominance and submission explicitly charges up each polarity.  The more extreme the polarity, the greater the sexual charge between poles, the greater the magnetic pull and flow of energy, the greater the urge to penetrate and be penetrated, by love, and thus by God.  After all my restless spiritual wandering through different philosophies and disciplines, sexual submission to my Daddy Husband is the closest I have ever been to directly experiencing what feels like God-energy pouring into me.  All brought on by Daddy’s hand on my throat, a length of rope, his sharp smack across my bottom.

I am utterly fascinated by all this, but also outraged that I am so late to this way of being, that I only discovered this part of me, and the man able to liberate it, after a lifetime of lackluster 50/50 sex.  I am especially outraged that I have discovered it after menopause, when my sexual response is nothing like it what it was back when I had plump fertile ovaries and a working uterus.  I have a secret suspicion that the feminists who worked so hard to help women by pushing for the sexual revolution were at the same time unknowingly dragging some of us away from our true sexual nature.  Wait, that isn’t right, one has to be able to be an independent self in order to be able to offer true submission, right?  Submission can’t be forced upon a woman against her will, it must be offered willingly.  Sex that is taken without consent is criminal rape that hurts, not spiritual submission that heals.

Still, I wonder. Did cave-woman sexual surrender feel the same as submission does to me when I offer it freely to my mate?  Did 18^th century submission to one’s husband lead to any version of bliss?  If it is a universal primitive response as I have been considering, or an evolutionary mechanism built within women so they would allow themselves to be fucked and impregnated – and actually want to be fucked and impregnated – then wouldn’t it work no matter when and where?  I don’t know. I just know I get lost in thinking about this, wondering at this new self of mine, this thrilling new relationship of ours.  I can’t wait for Daddy to come home, and put me across his lap, and enlighten me some more.  Whether it is because I am a woman or not, I am wired for it, I am sure.