I was looking for something to watch on Netflix the other night and came across "
The Duke of Burgundy" a rather quirky tale of lesbian dominance and submission. Well, elliot was downstairs working and Mady had gone to bed so...why not.
While the film was more than a little slow and not in the least explicit, it raised a basic and I think important element of the whole dominance and submission world. The slightly older woman who was, in theory, dominant spent most of the movie catering to her "submissive's" desires. To the point where she was reading an index card with a script on it. Even her submissive lover's safe word was used to "direct the action" as it were.
My own sense is that there are many more submissives - male and female - in the world than there are natural dominants. Those submissives, and elliot is a good example, tend to like some things and dislike others. elliot, for example, prefers the cane to the bathbrush, long term
chastity to forced orgasm, being sent to bed in a nightie rather than being made to sleep on the floor; so the question is what a dominant wife is to do with her supposedly submissive husband's desires.
When a girl is just starting a female led marriage she will, naturally, be inclined to pay attention to her husband's preferences. Especially if she herself is not particularly experienced. Her new husband may have a fairly elaborate submissive fantasy and it is tempting to go with that at least at the outset. It is much the same in pure vanilla marriages where a wife will have meat and potatoes sex with her new husband regularly but save blow jobs for date night and refuse anal sex either altogether or reserve it for extra special occasions. (And notice that even in a vanilla marriage it is the wife who decides about sex. This tends to emerge over a few months after the ceremony when even the mousiest wife will begin to take control of when what and where marital sex occurs. There is a lesson there.)
Part of the problem with
The Duke of Burgundy is that it assumes a static relationship between the characters. The script does not change. The "maid" forgets a pair of panties to be washed and must be punished. She is taken to the bathroom, the older woman who has been drinking prodigious quantities of water, closes the door and tells the "maid" to lie down and open her mouth. Sexy once; but as a daily routine? Hardly. And, of course, the "maid" eventually gets a bit bored getting exactly what she wants and suggests some form of confinement as an additional punishment.
The actual problem here is that the older woman has never really been brave enough to risk understanding what her lover/maid really wants. Possibly because, at root, the older woman is not willing to take on the responsibility of actually loving a submissive girl as she needs and craves to be loved. The distance created by the scripts lets the older woman play a part sufficient to gain her access to the love the younger women might give her.
At a guess, and despite the film's ending, neither of the couple will be satisfied and the already crippled relationship will collapse. And the reason, which a young wife should heed, is that the submissive maid is entirely sincere in her need but the dominant old woman is simply playing along as a means to her own ends and she is not even doing that very well.
To be a successful, dominant, wife a woman has to elegantly accept how the male psyche (and submissive female psyche) is constructed. While there are some men who don't have a submissive bone in their bodies, most do. Whether you begin your marriage as a female led relationship or come to the dominant position over time, you need to go much deeper than a script if your dominance is to be anything more than a Saturday night bit of fun (and nothing wrong with that.)
The "maid" in
The Duke of Burgundy wants to obey and be punished when she does not. Rather than stick to the script, the older woman could easily have taken the essence of the script - be given orders, obey, be punished for disobedience - and elaborated.
The dance of dominance in a marriage begins when the wife begins to regulate her husband's sexuality. A process which women almost universally understand from girlhood. As I said above, sex, particularly mildly variant sex, is used as a reward from the earliest days of many marriages. So, in a sense, many ostensibly vanilla marriages have a significant element of female control built right in. For a woman to extend her control over the sexual life of a couple into other elements of a marriage makes sense as a husband learns that things go rather better for him if he does what he is told.
Now, while most women have sexual control in their marriages, women who lead their marriages are a small minority simply because most men are very closed about their more submissive tendencies. Part of being a dominant wife is giving your husband lots of room to be submissive without having his sense of self compromised. Talking to him about his fantasies, taking it as given that he will do as he is told, imposing punishments when he misbehaves: all of this creates a sustainable dynamic.
Female led marriages (and relationships but an elegant woman usually requires marriage) come in many forms; but in every form both the dominant wife and her husband get what they really want from the marriage rather than play-acting their way through it. Start as you mean to finish is good advice at any time, it is particularly good when a young wife is taking charge of her marriage.
