This fascinating post generated a long discussion between sprite and myself. We also are sometime observers of the ‘internet D/s’ dynamic and have long suspected that much of what gets posted, particularly on Tumblr, is about fantasy and image management as opposed to reality.
Tumblr, being a short-attention-span place for the most part (with notable exceptions, including V&MAgirl and Wordgirl to name but two) things tend to fall into categories, from what I can see. The ‘Internet Dom’ is one such, a personality that can be donned and doffed like a favourite hat. Except that it’s not that simple. as Wordgirl here has pointed out. The category can be broken down, on examination, into subcategories or caricatures, with ‘dominant’ endearing characteristics such as immaturity, boorishness, lack of accountability or marital infidelity. It is almost as though the more someone opts into the Dom category and projects the accepted tropes, the more one becomes, or appears as, one of these caricatures. Buying into ‘the scene’, espousing ‘the lifestyle’ online as a Dom seems to involve employing (to a lesser or greater extent) a variety of signifiers, such as:
ordering women about or speaking to them or about them in a degrading, belittling or patronising way,
placing selfish (usually sexual) demands on others,
posting images of who one would like to be or, usually less appealling, who one actually is. (See ratemydickpic for hilarious examples of this)
superimposing crisp one-liners with limited emotional depth onto porn,
offering ‘help and advice’ as an ‘experienced’ dominant, particularly to ‘new’ subs in an effort to ‘assist their explorations’, (this one rings alarm bells for me)
a liking for baroque interiors or bare brickwork,
demanding the constant attention of the sub, to the exclusion of any requirements of real life.
just reblogging lots of porn, with or without additional comments.
To me, dominance as a category, where one either is or is not, makes no sense, particularly if it involves conforming to a behavioural or aesthetic stereotype. Surely, surely it is at least a continuum or, more likely, a texture that evolves within the context of a relationship or a series of relationships. Surely it is negotiated, including consideration of both people’s limits, needs, preferences, desires. It also appears to me that the subtleties of such relationships do not translate well to ‘low attention span’ media such as Tumblr. I have caught glimpses of people living out degrees of dominance within relationships that do not appear to be as shallow as the run-of-the-mill dominant facade, and it is interesting to me that they are usually found in the writings of their partners. This subtlety may be one of the reasons why many males within power exchange relationships of any emotional depth or maturity are not so visible or vocal. Other reasons may be:
the awareness of the vulnerabilities that such a relationship exposes in a ‘sub’, and the desire to protect those vulnerabilities,
actually having the long-term submission of another, in any area of a relationship, fulfills a deep need much more than bragging about it (and here I am not talking about committed relationships with a degree of exhibitionism),
this sort of negotiated power exchange involves feelings, emotion, commitment, all the sorts of things that men typically do not communicate about,
association with any of the caricatures is unappealing.
So, after sprite and I discussed this, I wondered whether the caricature of the ‘Internet Dom’, while simple and (in the age of the internet) seemingly inevitable, might not actually be filtering out of Tumblr the men out there who exercise a thoughtful and considered degree of mutual power exchange or at least any intelligent discussion of it from a male point of view. Like many areas of life, of course, there are the exceptions which are worth keeping an eye out for.
As to the last question, I am not sure how comfortable I would be describing and categorising Tumblr subs. I think they have a hard enough time as it is from all the ‘Doms’ out there, and besides, they appear to be much more varied and interesting than their two-dimensional counterparts.
romaincrisis
2087
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
discoholicmusic
kianamaiart
