This article was co-written by Coyote Marie
Señor: Hi Amy. You are quite an intense woman. Most of my interests, fantasies, and dreams involve me as a submissive with a Beautiful, Strong, Demanding, Strict, Dominant female. Pleasing her and giving myself totally to her are paramount. Thoughts? Comments?
Amy: Submission is to balance as dominance is to power.
Mother Mary is the female figure who brings balance to the power of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In submitting to the divine feminine, you are submitting to Mary.
The psychology behind the goddess worship of ancient peoples is the self same that compels modern people to submit to the make-believe divinity of the dominatrix. At play she is perfect and archetypal, preprogrammed and without authentic personality, like a goddess.
While the focus of ancient goddess worship was often fertility, the focus of submission to a dominant female is eros. The difference is a measure of how humanity’s needs have evolved from the material to the spiritual. It also reflects how mechanical and unerotic contemporary, vanilla sexuality can be. Yet, BDSM, too, can be just as mechanical.
Coyote Marie and I recently attended Bizarre Bazaar, a sort of festival with speakers, booths of DIY BDSM products, and lots of people in black — including me, though my wooden cane (which I use because of MS) is resplendent with colored glass.
My feeling is that BDSM’s emphasis on blackness, dungeons and slavery reflects existential darkness, the darkness of the unconscious, created by the enslavement of the feminine to false masters. BDSM is a false master when it is an end in itself, when its darkness rolls its closed eyes at the rainbow. While we were at the festival, my MS symptoms worsened rapidly, the numbness in the pinky and ring finger of my left hand expanding through the whole hand.
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Señor, you are an undisciplined fool, the Tarot’s Fool. Who but a “fool” would have desires such as yours? Yet, wisdom must be implicit in them, since there is no folly without wisdom.
Underneath your projections, the dominant female figure in your fantasies is actually demanding from you strict obedience to your balance. The reason is that there are parts of your identity that are chronically imbalanced.
The dominant female personifies your inner woman. Man’s inner woman personifies his balance, emotions, and life force. Man experiences a compulsion to submit to a dominant woman to the extent that his identity represses his balance, emotions, and life force. Repression as such can be caused by hypersexuality toward the feminine and the aggression and numbness engendered in becoming “masculine.” A dominatrix acquaintance of mine remarked that her clientele are frequently in the military — and the higher the rank, the more intense they like play.
Hypersexuality and the “tough guy” persona relegate a man’s balance, emotions, and life-force to the unconscious. Reintegrating them is a long-term process requiring intense self-discipline, but it can be achieved by sublimating libido into the non-sexual, and through submission to one’s own balance, emotions and life-force. Once such submission dissolves the need to be dominated, the energy of the dominatrix is reassumed into one’s own self. Thence, it is reborn as receptivity, creativity, wisdom and eros. The man who possesses these is a man among boys. He is the eventuality of spiritual evolution, the New Adam; born in 2020 according to dreams.
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At eight my male self, “George,” forsook his true self as the world molded him into its version of the masculine. He traded his innate sensitivity for baseball cards and a male gender identity. As a result, George had this dream: My father dresses me in girl’s clothes and I feel humiliated. He woke from the dream feeling confused, his gender identity violated.
In George’s past life, he had been a French monk married to Mother Church and Mother Nature. When the monk was reborn as “George,” he retained the sensitivity and receptivity of his past life, carrying them into a time and place where they could not re-flourish properly in a developing boy. Consequently, the transsexuality that is present in all males, latent in most, was awakened in George. I consider this his destiny since, after having married the Church and Nature in his previous life as the monk, his next evolutional step was naturally to marry me, his inner-woman, his soul.
Unlike most transsexual females, I was not born into the wrong body. Rather, I was born into the right circumstance for awakening my inborn transsexuality. It is as if George lost the Y chromosome, and has become the single X of his momma’s egg: me.
By age eight, George was roundly emasculated, but unable to acknowledge it because he identified as a boy. For George, being a boy was being tough and into sports, and not being feminine in any way. His identity exiled me to the unconscious, to dreams and fantasies.
At eight George had this nightmare: Chuck Taylor’s Converse All-Star sneakers are swinging in front of my face and a terrible beast is growling behind me. The Beast in mankind was intimidating George into a male gender role, symbolized by the sneakers — a type of shoe he would wear for many years, even as he was secretly fantasizing about being made to wear my shoes.
George needed me to comfort and balance him, but his rage, numbness and indignation — not to mention his romantic cravings and pornographic interests — eclipsed me. In response, I imposed myself on him in forced feminization fantasies, as early as age eight. Then, the more experience masculinized George, the more abusive the fantasies became.
Though the fantasies were a dead end, they temporarily pacified George by getting him in touch with his feminine nature, causing his depression and anxieties to abate, and feeling to return. But this lasted only for as long as it took to reach climax. Then George plummeted back into his pit, tethered to cycles of depression/anxiety and pacification/orgasm. BDSM fantasy was like an escape into Heaven, but was never an escape from hell.
Feminizing BDSM fanatasy attended George every day. Eventually, he chose to give it up in order to feel mostly pain at first — my pain. Had he not, he would have remained too numb for me to grow through him. As I discovered myself in waking-life, George’s compulsion to submit to the dominatrix evanesced. Instead, he was submitting to his truest self: me.
Much of the feeling George concentrated into BDSM fantasy is now reintegrated into the whole of my life, and I am a thousand times more fulfilled than I was as a male. We may think we know who we are, but we cannot know because who we are is discovered through a process, a becoming: individuation.
Being a submissive may be an authentic piece of who a person is today, but it won’t be forever because our identities face inevitable doom. Despite this, we can be assured of the perpetual reincarnation of our souls, hearts, minds and bodies. We exist to spiritually evolve, from one life to the next, and eventually into everlasting union with our souls in the flesh. Perhaps a given man’s destiny in this life is to be a feminized submissive, butit is sure his eternal soul is not a feminized submissive.
The soul’s prerogatives are to feel, express and experience as vastly and subtly as possible. While being in a sub/dom relationship may fulfill some of the soul’s needs, it may cut off other ranges of feeling, expression and experience; though it does not have to, as illustrated in the following dream:
Coyote Marie: My dream stars this woman Netta. It's a sex dream without actual sex. She and I develop some kind of Dom/Sub thing — that's as close as I can describe it. Netta makes me wear things — for one, a kind of black brace under my shirt that makes me stand straight, something that makes me feel I am hers, all the time, when she's not around, and flushed with anticipation when she is around. She knows she wants me to sing, and asks me to.
In the dream I'm submitting, but I'm powerful, beautiful, full and sexy and knowing. I am always totally present in myself. The relationship changes my life, infuses me with my own power.
For how good it felt, how trusting, it might present a model of submission. It’s not about pain, or punishment, or humiliation — aspects of BDSM that are always sour to me. It is about expression, about being a possession that is self-possessed… How do I say it? Feeling "hers," which made me feel more "mine."
Amy: The dream recalls a book I read in college called A Jungian Viewof Masochism. Googling it, I came up with nothing except a link to a sassy essay with the same title. The gist of the book was that the compulsion to masochistically submit mirrors the compulsion to submit to the Self. Submission to the Self is precisely what your dream dramatizes.
The author of the sassy essay paraphrases Jung, saying that the ego can be regarded as the masculine principle, the soul (psyche) as the feminine principle, and the Self as the conjunction of the two. By letting Netta play the Self to your ego, you realize your soul. The soul harmonizes with mind and body.
You write it is “a sex dream without actual sex.” Yes, there’s no sex; there’s only eros, the eros of communing with your soul, offeeling the soul in the flesh.
The self-affirming results of the dream’s roleplaying are at one end of the BDSM spectrum. At the other end, there is self-annihilation. In the middle of the spectrum, between self-affirmation and self-annihilation, are calm, tranquility, and balance.
Whether BDSM is self-affirming or self-annihilating may dependon the presence of love. Your dream-role play is one of perfect self-love, devoid of the sexual, full of the erotic, of libido.
Through dominance and submission, partners can help each other to feel and express, and to submit to what is most beautiful in themselves. Submission is a means of becoming aware of one’s humanity, which brings one closer to the being within oneself. We were created to evolve from creatures into human beings and into beings; beings destined to evolve into an everlasting communion of soul with flesh — a communion that will not come to pass until the Self is integrated, perhaps with some assistance by Mother Mary in high-heeled boots.
Part 2 of this article is available here.
Amy George may be reached at dreams@amygeorge.net.
Image by a whisper_of_unremitting_demand, courtesy of Creative Commons license.