Going to Extremes: An Alternative Perspective on Women, DD & Work

Several months back, I wrote an article suggesting the not-uncontroversial opinion that women who desire to explore their feminine side may be better off avoiding male-dominated activities and career fields. ("Does DD Work at Work?") If we don't want men in the "blood hut," the argument goes, maybe we should stay away from the dragon hunt. The article suggests that, generally speaking, a woman participating in male-dominated activities may be asking for trouble in a relationship, because doing so violates male-female archetypes and gender roles to the point where a relationship -- particularly a traditional DD (domestic discipline) relationship is impossible to sustain.

What follows is a radically contradictory perspective on the whole "women on the dragon hunt" issue. (As a woman, I categorically reserve the right to change my mind...)

For the last few months, I've been inviting myself along on the dragon hunt by participating in intense martial arts training. I've done this in an effort to explore further my growing theory, touched on in the last article, that to be soft and feminine, a woman may be need to first create a foundation of strength. ("If DD Is the Glue, Do the Parts Really Fit Revisited") Though the article in question was specifically about financial strength, I've often found that to test a theory, it's good to start by taking it literally. So off I went to "get strong" in the most literal sense of the word.

Getting strong literally and physically was new to me. While I have in the past engaged in intense, hyper-masculine mental activity by working as a political consultant, doing anything physically intense with my body has been radically new territory for me.

I've always been the sort of person who felt that gyms and exercise of any kind were the work of the devil and I wanted no part of it. Furthermore, I have always seen those physical activities as unfeminine and therefore not something I wanted to engage in. (I actually still believe this, but read on for why engaging in unfeminine activities might be the easiest way to get feminine.)

"Getting strong" in the literal sense, then, has involved spending the past four months engaging in serious, hard-core daily weight training and aerobic conditioning, along with daily martial arts training emphasizing intense, real-world boxing and streetfighting techniques.

The martial arts training I've been doing is heavy on the hand-to-hand combat. Most of the people I've been training with are men in their 20s who train seriously for martial arts competitions. To hold my own in this environment (and I'm proud to say that I am holding my own and more) requires pushing myself to new levels of physical and emotional toughness far beyond what I've ever done before. This extreme level of "playing with the boys" requires getting (literally) dirty and sweaty and doing lots of very "unfeminine" things in a very unfeminine, unforgiving environment. In short, it's participating in the dragon hunt on a very primal level.

Recently, I've noticed that the more I push myself to express the masculine part of my nature during training -- ie, the physical and emotional strength required to keep up with the men, the need to "play hurt" and not show any weakness, etc. -- the more feminine, submissive and sensual I feel when I'm finished.

When I'm paired with a sparring partner who challenges me to tap deeply into that masculine power, I leave feeling strong and energized, but also with an intense desire/need to express the DD/submissive side of my personality. I feel very similar to the way I feel after a particularly effective spanking.

On the other hand, when I train with a weaker (usually female) partner who does not physically or emotionally challenge me to dig into my inner masculine, I leave the training session feeling weak, frustrated, angry and vulnerable in an unpleasant way -- exactly the way I feel when a spanking doesn't "work."

In short, the more I allow my inner masculine to express itself freely and without judgment or reservation, the more I seem to be able to tap into my inner feminine and my desire to be soft, vulnerable and submissive. This reaction at first seemed paradoxical to me -- but given that virtually everything about DD seems to be in one way or the other paradoxical, I figured I must be onto something.

I'm now wondering if I've been doing it all backwards when it comes to the struggle to balance my desire to be feminine and to experience the benefits of DD with my partner in private vs. my need to be independent and assertive in my career.

A bit of backstory, for those just tuning in: As most of you know by now, I also work in politics as a communications strategist. Politics, like martial arts training, is an intense, testosterone-driven environment, albeit the less literal and more metaphorical kind. My DD partner also works with me as a political consultant, and as a result, I'm constantly feeling the need to hold back my masculine, aggressive tendencies in an effort to balance my desire to be feminine in the relationship with the need to play hard-ball with the political boys.

What winds up happening, though, is that I get trapped in what's essentially a watered-down version of both. Perhaps a bit like Hillary during her campaign, I feel caught in the worst of both -- unable to be soft and feminine for fear of being eaten alive by political colleagues, and unable to be as aggressive as I feel I need to be for fear of damaging my private relationship with my partner. So instead, I'm perpetually trapped in the androgynous blank pantsuit that is neither male nor female, and thus disappointing and frustrating to both.

But given my recent experiences playing hard with the boys at martial arts, I wonder now if the answer to balancing these two conflicting needs/desires is to push to the extreme in one area in order to create a corresponding need to express the other -- to push more towards the dominant/masculine in the appropriate areas of my life in order to create the opposite, submissive/feminine impulse in my private life.

Those of you who have experienced DD firsthand know, of course, that the DD lifestyle is inherently an extreme expression of archetypes and gender roles. By its very nature, DD calls for an exaggerated expression of dominance and submission far beyond what's considered culturally acceptable or "normal" in current Western culture. But to use the analogy of a scale, an extreme weight on one side requires an extreme weight on the other to balance it. Without equal "extremeness" on either side, the scales aren't balanced, the center cannot hold -- the relationship falters. Perhaps.

Of course, there are some couples for whom DD seems to work as a long-term dynamic without an extreme expression of masculine energy on her part to balance the scales. But for those of us women who continue to struggle to find a way to be comfortable in a DD relationship without feeling correspondingly unbalanced and powerless -- and I know from your comments that there are many of us out there -- finding a safe outlet for our inner masculine away from the relationship may be part of the solution.

Perhaps the answer for those of us who struggle to submit in private is to find ways to go to the other extreme outside of the relationship. For some of us, that might be through our careers, if we work in hyper-aggressive, male-dominated fields. For others, it might mean exploring the limits of physical strength, as in martial arts training or other physically demanding sports like soccer or basketball in which it's appropriate to give our masculine energy free rein. For others, it might mean aggressive "Code Pink"-style involvement in activist politics -- confronting opponents at rallies, in debates, etc. It could mean building a house with Habitat for Humanity or learning how to repair a car engine. And there are no doubt still other examples.

This balancing of extremes theory would not be inconsistent with the best thinking on archetypes and gender roles. Many of you are probably already thinking about how Carl Jung, the father of archetypes as a model for personality, suggested that becoming a healthy individual requires the balancing of these conflicting internal masculine and feminine archetypes. And many of you have commented on prior posts about the need for this balance.

It would make sense, then, from a Jungian perspective, that an extreme expression of the inner masculine would motivate the need for an extreme expression of the inner feminine. Perhaps that's why my initial attempts at DD quickly went awry (as apparently do so many other women's similar attempts) -- they created in me an extreme desire to express my inner masculine, which I quickly squelched for fear of being unfeminine, which created an imbalance that toppled the whole dynamic.

Perhaps the surge of rebellion that many women who participate in the DD experience isn't a rejection of DD as a lifestyle, but merely our inner masculine demanding balance.

And perhaps the situation is then made even worse when we assume that we need to find that balance within the relationship, instead of outside of it.

Men, of course, are often way ahead of women in this regard. The dominant,
successful alpha male who sees a dominatrix in private (separately from his work life) is so common as to be a cliche. But the aggressive, achievement-oriented career woman who allows herself to submit in her personal life -- well, the struggle to get there is what this blog's all about.

On a personal note, this new information brings up provocative questions about my own situation with regard to my partner and my political career:

If I hadn't held back and second-guessed with regard to the political work, if I had allowed myself to play as hard as I do during the martial arts training, would I have experienced the same corresponding desire to be soft and feminine that I experience now? Or would the addition of my partner into the mix change the dynamic so much that I wouldn't have been able to let my inner masculine out to play as aggressively as I can when he's not involved?

Would it even be possible to play that hard with my partner without turning him off by the masculinity I'd be demonstrating? Could a man engage with a woman in combat, masculine to masculine -- and still be able to respond to her as a feminine woman when the battle is over? Or does the expression of a woman's inner masculine have to, by definition, be separate from any interaction with her partner?

These questions I don't yet have good answers for, but of course, this whole Disciplined Feminist experiment is a work-in-progress...

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