Have It Your Way

We were having dinner one night. Throughout the meal she had been complaining about not being able to find a guy to fuck her (her words) the way she wanted.

“All I want is a guy who can get it up and can last more than ten minutes and can fuck me fast and hard or slow and soft, depending on my mood. Is that too much to ask for?”.

She had broken up with her boyfriend a few months ago and her biggest complaint was their unequal sexual appetites. She was one of the few vanilla friends I had that knew about my…. interests.

Me: Why don’t you find a submissive guy?

Her:Um I don’t want to tie up and gag a guy, I just want him to fuck me the way I want.

Me: Most of the sex I have has nothing to do with rope. Usually it’s with either me on top or my head between her legs.

Her: What about doggy style? Do you do doggy style?

Me: What do you think? That I’d tell her I don’t want to have sex in a position just because it’s not with me on the bottom? That sounds more selfish than submissive.

Her: So you’ll fuck her hard and you don’t see that as being dominant?

Me: You mean I do it the way that gets her off and I don’t see it as being dominant? No!

She looked at me in disbelief and started throwing a bunch of what-ifs at me.

Her: What if she wanted you to fuck her in the ass instead of her putting on a strap-on? Would you do it?

Me: Are you drunk? Of course I would.

Her: And you don’t see that as being dominant at all? What if she wanted you and another guy to double-team her?

Me: I’ve done that before.

Her: What? And you two weren’t dominant?

Me: The other guy was vanilla and it was clear that it was all about her so….no.

Her: What if she wanted to get on her knees and go down on you?

Me: Are you insane? What part of “if she’s getting off, then I’m getting off” don’t you understand?

Her: So do you make her spank you after you’ve done something dominant? You know, to even yourself out again?

I could tell she was just giving me shit at this point. Trying to push my buttons. I didn’t answer her.

After a minute or two of silence and deep thinking on her part, she asked me:

“Can you help me write an ad looking for a submissive on Craigslist?”

15 Comments

I’ve seen that attitude SOSOSO many times! Thank you for having the patience to explain it to her- I usually get annoyed and give up about halfway into it.

I wouldn’t call my partner “submissive”, but I definitely “top from the bottom” frequently. I’m typically the one that sets the pace of our fucking. I’m the one that will demand X or Y and he obliges. It’s because he knows how much I love to be woken up and taken that he does so. Is a man who has sex the way his woman wants to have sex a submissive or just attentive?

Hahaha. That was amusing.

It seems that many people equate “submissive” with “masochistic”… which are not really the same thing at all.

I hope she eventually gets what she wants!

Can’t count the times that I have had to explain the concept of “if it’s what I want and he’s doing it to please me then whatever he’s doing is submissive” concept. From now on, I’m just going to refer people to this post 🙂

This seems to be a case where the term “submissive” is causing significant cognitive disconnect. Is it possible that abandoning the term might solve the communication problem? I mean, if language is intended to help us understand each other and the term is creating precisely the wrong set of ideas, why use it at all? What is its function here exactly?

In short, if you want to sleep with this woman and you know you can give her what she wants, why label What She Wants by a term that describes — to her — something she thinks she doesn’t want? Isn’t the label just getting in the way? So rather than say, “Why don’t you find a submissive guy,” why not say, “I would love to fuck you any way you want it”? Everybody wins.

This is a great post. Most vanilla folks just don’t get that it’s the person who’s dominant, not the act. Of course, disassociating sex acts (in particular) from submission or dominance means letting go of one’s heteronormative preconception that penetration, being on top, or being the ‘active’ partner during intercourse are all dominant things, while being penetrated, on the bottom, on one’s knees, or the ‘receiving’ partner are inherently submissive.

This gets a little trickier when you want your slave to beat you with a stick while you masturbate. But in general, I’m totally with you.

She evidentally doesn’t get it. Or know what [WHO!] she’s missing!

Actually, I fear you may have sent her into a scene where what she’ll find isn’t a great guy who does what ever she wants, but a long, long lineup of fetishists who want something specific of her, so they can get their own kick. While I totally agree that a submissive is a guy who satisfies Me the way I want, looking for that guy means sorting through an enourmous list of guys who want Me to do what they want.

I hope you voluntaired to screen her responses.

I won’t purport to understand your friend as well you do, but I sincerely doubt “a submissive guy” is what she is after. She is not looking for a submissive person, she is looking for a compatible person. If that person happens to be submissive, then great, but to seek compatibility in the guise of submission is a really terrible idea.

I agree with maymay. It may be easy to mistake submission and a desire for please for compatibility – the person who wants to do whatever you want looks very compatible. However, once the submissive person turns out to have needs, too, that feeling of compatibility may well go right out the window.
Though I will add that there was something about her intial complaint that sounded like frustrated dominance to me. If that is the case, a submissive man might be the road to new and interesting discoveries.

Looks like I’m the contrarian here but to me she is looking for a dominant guy. Dominating her as a submissive act is hard for me to get my head around – unless she is truly orchestrating the action, and from the conversation it seems that she wants to do anything but that.

It sounds to me like she is just looking for a considerate and skilled lover. Some submissive men are, some dominant men are, some men who prefer egalitarian sex are, and some of all kinds are not.

Axe-

I am delurking myself at last….

I love this post, I have absolutely seen this logic play out, over and over. Even in laws. It reminds me of the old joke about the prostitute telling a client that for $300 she’ll do anything he can tell her do in three words. So he lays down three C notes and says “paint…my…house…”

(But that’s not entirely a joke in D/s relationships, hmmm?)

Still and all, there are some activities that come far more naturally to me as a submissive, and I think it has to do with role-switching, which Meg just posted about. If you-the-sub are being paddled, everything is pretty straightforward. If your dom wants you to paddle her, then there is this sort of back-and-forth decision making (“should I hit harder because she wants me to, or because she doesn’t want me to but she wants me to do what I want to whether or not she wants it and I want to do what she wants me to do….”)

And that’s just one step towards madness. Surely someone out there wants their sub to play the role of a dom playing the role of a sub. And then, of course, your brains will actually start to ooze out your nostrils and onto the bedsheets….

Wow! I am amazed and mystified once again. Either I am completely missing the point of this post, or every one of the commenters is completely missing the point of this post. That point being: She is having dinner with someone who is willing and able to give her exactly what she wants, but she asks that person to help her write an ad. This point escaped her, which is almost as ironic as the way it escaped everyone else here.

Everyone except for Xenaclone, that is. Xenaclone and I get it, or maybe WE are the clueless ones.