If DD Is The Glue Do the Parts Really Fit -- Revisited

Thank you to all of you who have emailed and posted comments during the past few months!

In the (relative) peace following the election cycle, I took the winter off to work on a new art series and a new book on strategic political communication, and with all that going on, didn't realize until recently that I hadn't posted a new article since October!

Part of the delay has been a preoccupation with other projects. Part of it has been that I try only to post when I have something to share that might be of interest, and I haven't felt like I had any insights relevant to The Disciplined Feminist for quite awhile. Now perhaps I do.

After a year spent trying with mixed success to live together in a more traditional arrangement, my partner has moved back to the city to pursue career opportunities available to him there, and I'm still out here in my beautiful mountain hideaway working on my various projects. Our DD relationship is suspended indefinitely while we try to work on the larger issues that need resolving between us. I still have hopes that we will be able to get past our current difficulties, but the future between us remains uncertain.

And while I don't believe that DD is responsible for the problems between us, neither do I believe, as I once did, that DD is the solution to those problems. That's not to say that I don't believe DD is a powerful and effective lifestyle choice. Only that I'm starting to realize that, at least for my partner and myself, it's not the "fix" that makes things better. It's the reward that comes from having made things better in other ways.

In a prior article, written during the time when DD was working so well for us, I wrote that I believed that DD could serve as a way of building trust and communication between two people when all else has failed. (see "If DD Is the Glue, Do the Parts Really Fit?", Jan 07).

Given the experiences of the past year, however, I'm no longer convinced it's true that DD can "save" a troubled relationship -- at least not long-term.

Recent experiences have largely convinced me that for DD to work, it must be built on an existing foundation of love, trust and mutual respect. I now suspect that as wonderful as DD is as a lifestyle, it can't create love, trust and mutual respect if those things aren't already present in the relationship. DD can help, perhaps, to resolve minor day to day glitches in communication, adjust minor power imbalances and bring increased intimacy to a relationship already based on love and trust, but it can't fix the larger problems that lurk beneath the surface.

In short, I now suspect that while DD can be the icing on the relationship cake -- the tool that smooths over the rough spots and takes a good relationship to a whole new and richer level -- it can't be the "glue" that holds the relationship together, as I once thought.

In retrospect, it's easy to see the error in my earlier cause & effect reasoning. Just as scientists often draw false conclusions by failing to adequately screen for external causes in their results, I look back to when things were going so well between my partner and me and see that what made everything click into place for us was not DD, but a series of events that occurred just before we started our DD relationship. I mistakenly believed that it was the DD that made everything work for us. It was actually the series of circumstances beforehand that made the relationship work -- which in turn allowed DD to work.

When I first moved out to my beautiful mountain retreat, it was largely because my relationship with my partner had fallen apart. Indeed, we were in much the same situation we're in now -- hurting, angry, barely able to sustain a conversation without one or the other of us getting angry and upset and hanging up the phone. Wondering how on earth to untangle the complex web of professional, financial, emotional and psychological ties that bound us together, so that we could go our separate ways without ruining each other's futures -- but still loving each other so much that neither of us was willing to end it completely.

So I left to give both of us some much-needed space. And in leaving, I pursued my professional path and he pursued his. As a result of this estrangement and separation, we became financially independent from one another. After being dependent on him to create professional opportunities that paid the bills, I got my confidence back that I could take care of myself and create those opportunities without his help. He, in turn, felt less pressure to create opportunities for me, and thus more able to focus on the emotional, nurturing, erotic parts of our relationship. We fell back in love -- more so than we'd ever been before. We talked about marriage, about sharing a home. I once again brought up the subject of DD. He agreed. Paradise ensued. (I started the blog to share my new-found wisdom about how to have the perfect relationship.) I felt like the luckiest woman in the world.

And then we decided to take the DD part of our relationship one step further. We both longed for an even more traditional, archetypal dynamic between us and wanted to make that happen.

Our arrangement was that I'd quit my political career and work on the more feminine pursuit of art, ceding the alpha power position entirely to him. I'd be the arty feminine domestic goddess who was able to pursue my artistic passions without the pressure of having to make money at it. He'd be out in the world, fighting the dragons, affirming his own archetype of provider and protector. It would be bliss -- the recipe for a perfect relationship.

Let's be clear here -- working for a living is not something I have ever enjoyed. Even when I enjoy the work itself, I deeply dislike the pressure of having to do that work to pay the bills. As such, I have always fantasized about having a successful man swoop me up, carry me away to his castle and take care of all the money issues for me while I did whatever I wanted to with my life. It's the Cinderella fantasy. (And I don't for one moment believe I'm the only "modern" woman who still entertains it!)

So we moved in together and I bowed out of one of the most interesting and dynamic election cycles in our history to focus full-time on my new art career and on being a nurturing caretaker to an alpha male. He worked around the clock, paid the bills and slew (slayed?) the dragons.

During that year, my art career took off -- I had solo solo shows in major venues, reviews of my work in prestigious arts publications, won national competitions. In short, I had all the success I could have dreamed of in my first year as a serious artist.

But art doesn't pay the bills. For all my success, the more I worked to build my art career, the more financially dependent on him I became. The more dependent I became, the more resentful both of us were at the power imbalance. I resented not having a dollar to call my own. He resented that I wasn't contributing financially. Not to mention that the more financially dependent I was on him, the less able he was to pursue his own career aspirations.

Things deteriorated between us very quickly, until we were back to the way things were before we started DD -- on the brink of falling apart. This time, he's the one who moved away -- back to the city to focus on his career. I stayed up here in the mountains, not sure what to do. Things got so bad and so scary between us that in the last few months, I've woken up to the reality that I need a way to take care of myself financially in case everything falls apart and I'm left with no way to pay the bills.

So I've started working on my political career again, in addition to my art. And as I create new financial opportunities that will once again make me financially independent, things are getting better between my partner and me again, albeit very slowly. He calls me again just to say hi, I send him sexy emails. We're back to the point where I'm once again dreaming of a future with him, and a revival of us DD relationship. Not there yet, but I have hope again.

Way back when, when we started DD, I assumed that it was the DD that made everything so magical between us. But looking back, I wonder now if perhaps my analysis skipped a step.

It seems that what makes our relationship work isn't DD per se, but rather our individual financial independence, which in turn makes each of us feel safe and confident enough with ourselves to be able to engage in a healthy DD relationship. In short, if he's paying the bills, neither of us is happy, and DD along with everything else falls apart. If we're both doing our share to contribute, both of us are happy with each other -- the relationship -- and DD -- works.

I had hoped that the traditional female role of nurturing my mate and creating a home would be sufficient contribution to the relationship to compensate for not bringing in any money. Perhaps for some people, it's enough. It may be that I myself don't really, in my heart of hearts, value traditional feminine labor enough to believe it's enough of a contribution to offset not making money. Or perhaps my partner doesn't value it enough, either. What I do know is that if I don't have my own money, our relationship doesn't work. If I have my own money, it does.

Oddly enough, the conditions required for a traditional dominant-submissive power dynamic between us seem to be that I break archetypal tradition and pay my own way. I'm not sure how to reconcile my experiential reality with my belief that relationships do better when traditional sex roles and archetypes are honored. It seems that in order to have a traditional relationship, I have to take on some un-traditional sex roles. A paradox.

But then again, everything else about DD is a paradox -- why shouldn't this be?

What a Woman Wants

There is an ancient Arthurian myth which seeks to answer the question in the title of this post -- what does a woman want. (To read the full text of the story, click here.)

The summary of the myth is that in order to save his life, a knight must within a year's time give a wisewoman the answer to the question, what does a woman want? The knight searches far and wide and asks everyone he meets for the answer. Ultimately, the answer he comes up with for the wisewoman is that what a woman wants above all is Sovereignty. In the myth, this answer is correct, the knight's life is spared and the wisewoman turns into a beautiful young woman whom he marries.

It's worth noting that this legend dates back to at least the 13th century. Even during an era when women were essentially property with no rights at all, the popular culture of storytelling acknowledged that sovereignty was a primary need in a woman's life.

Since myth is generally seen as roadmap into our personal consciousness, the general consensus is that the sovereignty in the story refers not to institutional or governmental power, but to personal sovereignty. That what a woman wants most of all is the right to make her own decisions, feel her own feelings and create her own life out of her own heart's desire. This is Virginia Woolf's Room of Her Own, dated 500 years earlier.

But what if part of a woman's heart's desire is to submit to another? What if she wants the sovereignty of the story, but also wants the comfort, security and feminine experience of submission?

As I've struggled over the past few months with the problems my partner and I are having incorporating domestic discipline (DD) into our relationship, I have thought often about this particular myth and what it means in my own life. My primary need for sovereignty is a big stumbling block for me in making DD work, as it clearly is for many, if not most, modern women drawn to the DD lifestyle.

I've written at length in prior posts about how many in our culture are still children functioning as adults, and I wonder if the issue of sovereignty vs. submission goes right to the heart of this cultural problem.

We live in a culture which, too often, encourages us to think in terms of having it all -- of being entitled to it all (whatever "it" is) without pointing out that there's a price to pay for everything we get. Corporations and Madison Avenue tell us we "deserve" a new car, we've "earned" an iPhone, we're "entitled" to premium cable service. They don't tell us that the price for these things is environmental devastation, war, exploitation of third world countries and, closer to home, stress, overwork, estrangement from our families and credit card debt.

The corporate culture, with its profit-at-all-costs imperative, promotes this attitude of have-in-all entitlement, of course, to sell product -- and in the true spirit of corporate America, they do it without regard to the societal chaos it causes.

As a result, we don't seem willing to accept that we can't have it all. We expect that we can have the super-charged career, raise a family and still have time for personal development and recreation. We expect that we can be parents without having to take on the responsibilities and sacrifices required to do so responsibly ("why should I have to stop going to the movies just because I have a screaming four year old"). We want the career opportunity, but resent being asked to work overtime or give above and beyond to impress those above us on the ladder ("Can you believe my boss actually asked me to work late on this project? Geesh."). And on and on it goes.

So as I struggle with my desire to have both sovereignty and submission -- or perhaps better put, my stubborn and steadfast refusal to give up any of my personal sovereignty to get something that I say I want so much -- I wonder if my insistence on having both is an example of me being a member of our entitlement culture. I wonder if I'm being the willful, immature six-year-old who doesn't understand that she can't have everything she sees at the toy store and ice cream on the way home, too.

On the other hand, if the language of myth is to be believed, sovereignty isn't so much a desire as it is a requirement for human fulfillment. And if other myths, equally old and powerful, are to be believed, a woman's desire to submit is a requirement for female fulfillment (see "Feminism: The Power of Giving Way"). Is it possible that to be a fulfilled woman requires two apparently contradictory and incompatible things -- sovereignty and submission. And that our attempts to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable conditions is what's driving women in our culture slowly into depression, dysfunction and despair?

I know it's doing that to me in spades. In my struggle to have everything I feel I need, I am caught between the proverbial irresistible force and immovable object, between two imperatives equally strong, neither of which I feel I can be a complete person without. Is it really possible to genuinely submit to another while still maintaining my right to make decisions about my own life? Do I really have to choose between being feminine and being a complete human being, and is it even possible for a woman to be one without the other?

As is often the case, however, the answer may lie in the question. Perhaps my sovereignty lies in making the choice to submit, rather than having that choice forced upon me. And perhaps losing part of my sovereignty is a necessary consequence of the choice I've made to submit in the first place. A difficult and terrible choice, but a choice nonetheless. And a choice that's been hard-won over the past few decades by those who have fought courageously for women's rights.

After all, unlike during other eras, no one is forcing me into DD. For that matter, no one is forcing me into a relationship. If I really want pure sovereignty over my life, I could choose to live alone and be accountable to no one -- a choice that women in the past didn't have when they were forced to marry, forced to stay at home, and forced to submit to their husbands and fathers.

The reaction to this forced femininity/submission in the '70s was equally un-empowered. Despite popular perceptions to the contrary, '70s and '80s feminism was no better at giving women choices. It denied women sovereignty as much as the old ways did.

Modern feminism forced women by virtue of popular pressure to act like men, to work in jobs as to do, to look like men and wear their clothes, to reject traditional roles of mother, wife and lover of men, to eshew the trappings of submission and domesticity.

This forced "liberation" is no more sovereign than the original enslavement of women. We're still enslaved, we've just switched masters. I have no more sovereignity following the angry, dogmatic prescripts of contemporary "feminism" than I would have back in the '60s vaccuming in my heels and pearls in a TV sitcom. To put it another way, being a house slave or being a field slave makes little difference -- you're still a slave.

It's true, I think, that what women really want is sovereignty, and we still don't have it, we're still by and large miserable and confused about what it means to be a woman, and still struggling to make our relationships with men -- DD or not -- be what we feel intuitively they should and could be.

Is it possible that all of our struggle is because we don't realize that our power is in having gained the right to choose to surrender and the right to choose to pay the price that such surrender requires?

It's a reality that any relationship -- DD or no -- requires a certain amount of surrender and loss of sovereignty. We can't be in a relationship with someone and not give up the right to make every decision and do everything our way. That DD is a bit farther along on the spectrum than most modern relationships means that the issue of sovereignty -- the amount of surrender required -- is more extreme, and thus issue becomes more prevalent, the cost more apparent. The choice more clear.

As usual, I don't have the answers. And don't claim to. But it's something to consider -- that the right to choose to give away one's sovereignty may in and of itself be a sovereign act.

NOTE: I recently received an email asking for help with regard to the subject of rules. I've tried to answer, but the email bounced back. Please email me back with a valid email address and I'll do my best to help! -Viv

Does DD Work at Work?

I hope those of you who have been following the torrid, melodramatic story of my partner's and my experiences with DD (Domestic Discipline) will forgive if I diverge from the main storyline of how we're doing overall and follow a tangent in this article. I realize I'm leaving off the main narrative at a particularly messy point, but quite frankly I have no idea how we're doing overall and thus I don't have anything new or useful to add on the larger issue just now anyway. Rest assured the moment I acquire any wisdom on the larger issues from the last post, I will share it post hence! Meanwhile...

This article addresses instead a topic that's tangentially related to my partner's and my issues: the question of whether or not DD is effective and appropriate in a professional, as opposed to a personal, relationship.

To give some background on my own experiences, my partner and I met as professional colleagues in the political arena -- we both are both high-level political consultants and have worked together in various capacities for almost 10 years in what is arguably one of the most stressful, challenging and ego-bruising environments imaginable. We became romantically involved about halfway through that 10 years.

Extending the DD element of our relationship into our professional lives seemed a natural fit -- something that would make work spicier and more fun for both of us. After all, he's got more political experience than I do and has been a mentor and teacher to me over the years in our mutual work. And he's a natural alpha male at work -- always the leader regardless of the situation. (And of course, discipline at work fueled a lot of old fantasies about stern headmasters and desks...)

But looking back on the troubles we've had over the past year and especially the past few months, I wonder if mixing work and DD wasn't one of the biggest mistakes we've made. Taking the submissive role at home in a sexually-charged male-female dynamic is very different from taking the submissive role in a professional environment -- particularly one as dominated by male energy (meaning aggressive, masculine) and power-driven as politics.

Here's why.

I'm willing to go out on a not very shaky limb here and say that I am good at what I do. (So is he, by the way.) There are skills that we have that virtually no one else on the Democratic side has, and we're well compensated as a result. But to be good at what we do requires a certain dynamic that seems inherently opposed to the dynamic required for DD to work.

The problem with incorporating DD into our professional relationship is that being good at my part of what we do requires a certain amount of, shall we say, Hillary Clinton energy. That is to say, the emphasizing of my more masculine self. To do the work I need to do the way it needs done often requires me to be ruthless, bossy, stubborn and sometimes downright nasty. (I am a big Hillary supporter, by the way, lest anyone take offense. But that doesn't mean she doesn't have those qualities in spades. Believe me, she does. Particularly when on one is looking...)

The reality is that politics at any level is high stakes. You only get one shot at winning and there are very few do-overs. Not to mention that if we want to keep getting work, we have to win. All of which means that if we're at work and I think I'm right and he's wrong, I have a professional obligation to stick to my guns and not back down just because I might get "punished" for it. Careers are at stake -- both ours and the candidate's -- and our clients pay us to be right, regardless of what it does to our personal relationship.

This past campaign was particularly contentious (we lost when we should have won, by the way, which is no coincidence, I think -- our candidate and the country paid the price for our mistake). My partner and I have always had disagreements over strategy, but this is the first time we had them in a context where we also had a DD relationship.

Suddenly, my digging in and not submitting when he insisted he was right became a betrayal of our DD pact. I wasn't being professionally aggressive; I was being disobedient. I wasn't being a hard-core strategist in the trenches fighting for our candidate and doing whatever it takes to win; I was being disrespectful to my mate. He got angry; I got confused and resentful and felt like I was being asked to play with my hands tied behind my back. I felt I wasn't able to do my job without compromising my relationship and couldn't have a good relationship without compromising my job performance.

The "obvious" answer here would be to say, yes, good point. Keep DD out of the workplace. Women should be allowed to interact with men as equals in their professions, however submissive they choose to be at home. But I'm not convinced that's the true answer.

I must say here that (and please don't send me hate mail for the following. I'm just going to delete it anyway...) this is one of the many reasons that I'm not entirely convinced that women belong in the professional world at all, particularly in such masculine-energy professions as politics.

I've written a bit in the past about the need to reclaim our natural archetypal roles in our culture and about how out-of-balance our culture is because we've bought into the "feminist" idea that to have power, women need to act like men (and to be "good guys," men need to act like women). (see "Feminism: The Power of Giving Way")

I (and others -- I'm not making this stuff up out of whole cloth, you know...) have also written about how the male archetypal role includes, first and foremost, taking care of his family by going out everyday and slaying the dragon and bringing it home. In our world, winning a political campaign is about as close to slaying a dragon as a man can get. Other examples are, of course, making a big business deal, launching a new company, winning a sporting event, etc.

As good as it sounds to say that women should be allowed to pursue any professional they choose, I'm not convinced that we women are doing ourselves and the men in our lives a favor by demanding the right to go along on the dragon hunt. It doesn't leave much territory for men to claim for themselves and that doesn't seem any more fair than a man inviting himself into the Blood Hut.

More importantly, going along on the dragon hunt requires sublimating our more natural feminine tendencies. There's not a lot of room for emotions and feelings on a dragon hunt. It's about logic, it's about brutality, it's about conquest. It's where men's archetypal energies are given full rein -- and have every right to be given full rein without them having to stop and soothe our worried brows.

Alternatively, if we go along on the dragon hunt, we could choose to suppress our feminine natures and become as hard and ruthless and brutal as the men are. This is the 70s model of feminism -- suit up and play hard, just like a man would. And a lot of us have done just that. Certainly, that's what I do when I put on the Man Suit to become hard and ruthless in my political work. And the world rewards me for it, just as it rewarded (to some extent) Hillary for doing it. But I believe it's ultimately too high a price for a woman to pay.

I'm not saying I have definitive answers here and I realize I'm treading on dangerous ground when it comes to advocating that women maybe shouldn't have equal access to every profession.

I'm tempted to say that the answer is that we should respect men enough to let them go on the dragon hunt alone, and respect ourselves as women enough to recognize that our power lies elsewhere, far from the dragon cave.

But... what does that mean for a woman who does want to pursue say, politics? How does a woman keep her femininity intact and still excel at her chosen profession? Is it possible? Should it be possible? Or is my even asking the question just more of our culture's collective refusal to grow up and acknowledge that we can't have everything we want just because we want it?

I'm trying to officially "retire" from politics, but even after only a few months, I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it dreadfully -- the rush, the pressure, the thrill of the hunt. I just don't know how to reconcile my desire to hunt the dragon with my deeper need to reclaim my feminine energy and respect a man's right to go on the hunt solo - or even if those things are reconcilable. Is the desire to play hard-ball politics just a product of cultural conditioning (a la Hillary and others) that says that's the role I should aspire to and I'm not being empowered if I don't? Or is it my inner masculine genuinely demanding to be acknowledged?

I don't know.