Recently, I started getting interested in 24/7 power exchange relationships: how they work, what they’re like, why anyone would want to do that. I quickly read a couple of books on the topic, mostly intro level or 102 level guides for people who want to that themselves.

Here are my takeaways:

• These relationships are usually, or at least often quite loving and affectionate. In a way, it’s really sweet.
• It seems like the relationship is “about” or “for” the submissive, more than I would have guessed. Often the dominant’s pride is in tightly controlling the experience of the submissive in a way that brings her pleasure or satisfaction.
• Being a dominant is, to a surprising extent, acting. It’s about creating the appearance and experience of dominance for the submissive. Substance seems (often) to matter less than I’d have thought.
  • There are lots of places where a dominant might use something like magician’s tricks to craft that illusion (brandishing a stage knife, but then actually cutting off his/her clothes with (more effective) first aid scissors behind the submissive’s back. Or displaying a jar of yellow jackets, and then (while the submissive is blindfolded), pressing a jar filled with flies against their body, so they think the buzzing crawling sensation is the stinging bees.
• Some submissive feel reassured by the the knowledge that they’ll be punished if they break a rule or do something bad. This is true even if they dislike the punishment itself.
• The kink lifestyle is, interestingly, not so different from traditional marriage: the wife respect, and obeys the husband, and the husband defends and cherishes the wife. To my amusement, it seems like there’s a kind of political horseshoe here: where the most conservative relationships parallel the most one of the most far out liberal kinds of relationships.