Submissive

Someone who wants to hand authority over to another person, inside limits they set. The word attracts more nonsense than any other in this vocabulary, most of it about what kind of person a submissive is supposed to be outside the room.

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

A submissive wants to be directed. To have decisions taken off them, to be held to something, to follow rather than lead, for a defined period and inside limits they chose. That is the entire content of the word.

It is not a synonym for bottom. Bottom is about who is receiving in a scene. Submissive is about authority, and the two come apart constantly. I know people who take a heavy caning and take no instruction whatsoever, and people who want to be told what to do all week and are not much interested in pain at all. Sorting out which of those you are saves a lot of mismatched evenings.

In practice

The submissive is doing more work than the arrangement suggests. She sets the limits, provides nearly all the information the top is working from, and can end the whole thing with one word at any second. A well run dynamic looks lopsided from outside and is nothing of the kind.

What it actually requires is unglamorous. Saying what you want in plain language before anything starts, which people find far harder than the play itself. Using amber early rather than enduring in silence. Telling a top afterwards that something did not land well, which is the single most useful thing anyone has ever done for me.

The failure mode to watch for is the pleaser. Somebody inclined to be good at this, told all evening that she is doing well, will take a great deal more than she wanted rather than be the one who spoiled it. Then she goes home and feels peculiar about it for a fortnight and cannot say why, because on paper she agreed to everything. Nothing prevents that except a top who keeps checking and a person willing to interrupt her own good behaviour.

The common misreading

That submissives are meek. The stereotype survives on nothing. The correlation I actually notice runs the other way, towards people who make decisions all day and want an hour where somebody else does. Baumeister argued something similar in 1988, treating masochism as escape from the burden of self. It fits well and it is a theory rather than a proven cause.

That submission is owed to anyone who asks. It is given to a specific person, for specific things, and it can be withdrawn. Anybody who tells you that a real submissive obeys any dominant is recruiting.

That it means giving up judgement. It does not. A submissive who has stopped noticing when something is wrong is not deeper in, she is in trouble, and the difference between the two is the thing worth learning to feel.