Let's talk about William Moulton Marston

If you haven't heard the name, William Moulton Marston was a psychologist, inventor, lawyer and comic book writer, famous for having invented Wonder Woman, who was based on his wife and their mutual polyamorous lover.

Interested?

Aside from inventing the polygraph, Mr. Martson is also famous for having invented the DISC assessment tool, which identifies the personality traits of Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance.

If you've ever worked in a corporate environment or done any kind of career development screening, you've probably taken a DISC profile under some form. It's been relabeled as the personality wheel, the holy circle and all kinds of other shit, but it's all basically a way of understanding people's basic personality traits.

I myself have taken the test millions of time and I typically line up as a strong D with I qualities as well.

Here's where it gets interesting. Something I never knew was that Marston originally defined the personality traits based on how people saw their own relative strength within and the nature of their environment, as below:

Dominance

Perceives oneself as more powerful than the environment, and perceives the environment as unfavorable.

Inducement

Perceives oneself as more powerful than the environment, and perceives the environment as favorable.

Submission

Perceives oneself as less powerful than the environment, and perceives the environment as favorable.

Compliance

Perceives oneself as less powerful than the environment, and perceives the environment as unfavorable.

Seeing this made me do a double take, but I can see it myself so completely. I've always been a fighter. I see life as a hellacious struggle of which I will ultimately be victorious.

Could this have relevance to our respective roles within BDSM? While I'd be willing to bet that our DISC profiles don't match up to our BDSM orientations 1 to 1, could there be more than a passing correlation?

Does believing you are more powerful than a favorable environment define the Dominant personality trait? Does feeling less powerful than a favorable environment define the submissive personality trait?

I'm seeing supportive or steady and conscientious or cautious rather than compliant or submissive for the latter two when I check this out. I got a very strong C, personally and a light S. Risk aversion and confrontation aversion and actual *compliance* are not at all the same thing.

And I see my power as limited, prevailing as a crapshoot, the environment as a motherfucking jungle. I'm an observer of nature lately, what other conclusion can you come to?

Whatever it takes to be unscathed by the social hierarchy, namely carving out a niche that I control, I'll do.

So I'm not too sure. I don't like the feeling of people hating me, but I'm not going to compromise the things that I actually feel matter on account of it. Thing is so much inclination to worry is actually bullshit, so it leaves me a lot of flex once I assess the situation.

But romantically? Well, that's another story. You can't conflate public and private lives. OK, a really strong follower and pleaser personality can only fake it so far interpersonally, but I'm not sure that wanting to be the person doing the fucking and tying and getting their way when desires come into conflict at home has to run along the same axis as a belief in one's own success in a larger scale narrative.

My relationship to my own power is not one of influence, but one of perception. I can tell you how it is and see how it is. That's my X men ability. Just because you know doesn't mean you can expect anyone to listen to you, your due diligence is simply putting it out there. I had the Cassandra role more often than not in any corporate environment, so it got old fast. The fact that my superpower wows the fuck out of a number of men, more often than not a simple mirror trick - well I get a kick out of that, I do.

And I freaking love those badly drawn really massively pervy old Wonder Woman comics, so much woman on woman spanking, tying, you name it.

Yes, from what I understood it's steadiness and not submission. That's closer to how it has been used when I did this kind of test in my own language.

I tend to get high scores on D, I and relatively high score on S but low on C.

I did find this:

Dominance produces activity in an antagonistic environment
Inducement produces activity in a favorable environment
Submission produces passivity in a favorable environment
Compliance produces passivity in an antagonistic environment.

Click to expand...

With both that and what you wrote, I think my own profile makes more sense to me.
I'm not sure what om make of it in a BDSM context though?
The fact that both D and I are about assertiveness but with a different motivation based in the outlook on how favourable the environment is and that C and I are about receptiveness but with different motivations depending on how safe they feel in their environment?

Marquis said:

If you've ever worked in a corporate environment or done any kind of career development screening, you've probably taken a DISC profile under some form. It's been relabeled as the personality wheel, the holy circle and all kinds of other shit, but it's all basically a way of understanding people's basic personality traits.

Click to expand...

Yep, my work used to start every "how to work as a team" training session with psychological typing. Sometimes it was Myers-Briggs, sometimes other stuff, but once they used DISC and I had a lot of fun telling the trainer where DISC comes from. By my understanding, the original version was a lot more sexually charged than the one they use in corp training... I'm deeply cynical about personality typing, there's a lot of pseudoscience involved, but at least DISC has a good backstory.

BTW, Marston's wife Elizabeth was a remarkable woman in her own right. Put herself through law school by selling soap or encyclopedias or some such, supported the family for years at a time when married women weren't supposed to work, etc etc.

I'm a C/D, I guess? This site says C stands for Cautious, not Compliance.

idk, I've never heard of this test before. Personality tests are pretty useless for the most part, though I do enjoy the Myers-Briggs.

To continue the thread Netz started, I feel like I'm a powerful person, just someone that doesn't particularly exercising it. So for me, it's about being able to turn that survival instinct off, get slapped around, and be able to enjoy it. Who am I when I'm around people in public vs private? Who really cares, neither can be said to truly be me. I'm most at ease with myself when I'm alone. Not sure what that says about my ability to sub or bottom, but it doesn't really matter.

I don't really function well within an hierarchy, no matter where that hierarchy is. The only person I've ever knowingly, and happily, permitted to be "above" me is S. No one else, no entity, has that permission from me. I guess that hierarchy is what I probably see myself "above" here.

Some bits from the Wikipedia article on the test tho:

Although William Moulton Marston contributed to the creation of the DISC Assessment, he did not create it or even intend to use DISC as an assessment. In 1956, Walter Clarke, an industrial psychologist, was able to accidentally construct the DISC assessment using William Moulton Marston’s theory of the DISC model.

Click to expand...

Lol, makes sense.

[quotes]...The second dimension is whether a person perceives himself as having control or lack of control over his environment.[/quote]
Idk, feeling powerful vs powerless in a given environment doesn't really seem to be at all related to whether or not one identifies as dominant or not? Kinda plays into the "Christian Gray" dom archetype, no?