I’m submissive because of my mother’s what….?
That pinnacle of psychological asshattery intelligensia blames my mother’s uterus for me being submissive. Don’t believe me?
But here’s the intriguing part. In humans, the hormonal vagaries of prenatal development appear to cause a substantial portion of men to be born with active submissive circuitry. These men find sexual submission as arousing—or, quite often, far more arousing—than sexual dominance.
So…I’m submissive because my mother had some bad pussy chemistry going on?
I understand the article is nearly a year old, but I think it’s worth a comment, because, quite frankly, I find it offensive. It is basically claiming there is something biologically wrong with me because of some undisclosed chemical event in my mother’s uterus. And it isn’t just submissive men who are aberrations, but Dominant Women, as well (also, Dommes are now officially rare – psuedo-science proves it):
So if your boyfriend is wired to prefer sexual submission, then role-playing “The Rape of the Sabine Women” probably won’t solve your arousal problems… not unless you’re one of the even smaller portion of women born with active dominance circuitry—and your boyfriend plays the Sabine.
I will be the first to say that I do not think I have a choice in being submissive. It’s the way I am. I can pretend to be otherwise, but it is just a show. But can something as complex as my submissiveness be traced back to a simple series of chemical events? It doesn’t seem likely to me. Human behavior is much to complex to be reduced to that level.
It is more likely that the best that such chemical reaction – if it exists – would do is create some sort of predisposition. But just like arguments about genetic causes of behavior, something still has to happen to cause that predisposition to be expressed.
And how would this explain switches – people who dominate sometimes and submit others? How does it begin to account for the wide variety of submissive behaviors? Is a masculine type submissive like myself the victim of just a little bit of bad pussy juice while a sissy sub had a whole heaping helping of it? And why is it that most male submissives have no problem being non-submissive outside of their primary relationship?
Even the short list in the article is idiocy:
Such submission-wired men are fans of the equally popular, inventive, and varied genres of male submissive erotica, such as femdom porn, transformation fiction, golden showers, CBT (penis and testicle torture), and CFNM (clothed female naked men).
You know, there are submissive guys who are into none of that. Some of them are into just a little of it. Some take the whole raft of choices. Or maybe there are a multitude of chemical interactions en utero that cause each of these…that seems…unlikely.
What other sexual preferences are caused by uterine chemicals? Redheads vs. blondes? Big breasts vs. small? Dark skin vs. light? Blowjobs vs anal?
How would this chemical accident account for something like eating creampies? As far as I know, that’s not a typical feminine and therefore submissive behavior. Yet a lot of male submissives enjoy it.
Here’s a clue to how badly this whole article is biased – way down in the footnote:
In mammals, sexual dominance and submission refer to very specific physical actions (such as lordosis and intromission) controlled by circuits in the subcortex.
Okay – as the article explains “lordosis” is when a female rat arches her back to display her vagina and “intromission” is basically the male rat mounting her to copulate. But…do rats know of other sexual positions? Do rats 69? Do they do it missionary or rearing up on their back legs? As far as I know, they do not.
So what we have here is a researcher reading a female getting ready for sex as inherently submissive and a male readying for sex as inherently dominant. You know, if we consider an erection to be dominating and vaginal wetness to be submissive; then we get an even higher correlation to the whole “male is inherently dominant” thing, don’t we? But that doesn’t mean it’s so.
In fact, Norwegian rats (the kind we are talking about here) mating behavior is dependent on density. No word on whether or not that is due to some uterine chemical imbalance (seems unlikely). Yeah, female rats always exhibit lordosis and male rats exhibit intromission…but given that it is a fact of reproductive biology, can we expect anything different? If not; then can we accurately label one behavior dominant and the other submissive? I think not.
This is a big reason why I have this blog in the first place – the existence of male sexual submissiveness is treated like some sort of freak-show. We are caricatured and despised on all sides. Even the medical and psychological communities are loath to embrace us as models of a happy and healthy lifestyle. Even within the BDSM “community” we often feel like second-class citizens.
Until that stops, I’ll always have something to write about.