Dominance and submission

Usually shortened to D/s, with the capital for the one holding the authority and the lower case for the one handing it over. The part people struggle to believe at first is that this has very little to do with hitting anybody.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything on this page concerns consenting adults over 18.

What it means

One person takes the decisions and the other agrees to follow them, inside boundaries both of them set beforehand. The dominant partner is often written with a capital D, the submissive with a lower case s, hence D/s, which is a convention rather than a rule and one I mostly cannot be bothered with.

What gets exchanged is authority over specific things. Not everything, and almost never everything. It might be what happens for the next two hours in a room, or it might be a standing arrangement about the gym and phone use that runs for months. The scope is the negotiation. A person who says they have handed over their whole life has usually handed over about four things and given them a grand name.

Spanking sits inside this as one available tool, not as the point. You can have a functioning D/s arrangement in which nobody is ever struck, and there is a longer treatment of the underlying appetite on power exchange.

In practice

I switch, so I have been on both ends of this, and the thing that surprised me most was how much work the dominant side is. The fantasy version involves lounging about issuing orders. The real version involves remembering what you said last week, noticing that she has had a terrible day and adjusting without being asked, and holding a structure steadily enough that it is worth submitting to. Inconsistency kills it faster than harshness does.

From the other side, the relief is the whole appeal. For a stretch of time you are not the one making decisions, not managing anybody, not responsible for the outcome. People who spend their working lives in charge of things are heavily over-represented among submissives, and the reason is not mysterious.

Practically, it works best when it is small and specific. Two or three standing rules that can actually be checked. A clear signal for when the arrangement is on and when it is off. A regular conversation, outside the dynamic, where either person can say this is not working. The rules and agreements page goes into how to write that down without producing four pages of poetry.

What gets misunderstood

That the dominant has the power. In any arrangement I would recognise, the submissive holds the ultimate control, because she sets the limits and she can end it in a sentence. The authority is lent, and lent authority is revocable by definition. If it cannot be revoked, then whatever it is, D/s is the wrong name for it.

That submissive means doormat. Some of the most difficult, opinionated, exacting people I have met are submissives, and they are exacting precisely about this. Being submissive in one context says nothing about how somebody behaves at work or who does the arguing at home.

And that it has to be total to count. There is a strange competitive streak online where part-time arrangements are treated as beginner versions of a twenty-four hour one. An evening a fortnight is a legitimate way to want this, and it is what most people actually do.

Where it comes from

The initials come from the standard expansion of BDSM, which stacks three overlapping pairs into one acronym: bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. The compression is why so many people arrive assuming the three are one thing. They are not, and separating them is the single most useful piece of vocabulary work you can do early on.