the art of power

[eastern sun]

I'm curious about how you experience power and powerlessness. We talk a lot about the trappings and the sex and the rightness of a relationship match, but what about the core of this sexual experience. . .

the feelings and exercise of power.

or the feelings and experience of powerlessness.

My own experience leads me to believe that a tremendous amount of creativity and thought goes into the exercise of sexual power. I'm curious in how you play with power.

What does it feel like? Where does it come from? How do you harness it? Develop it? Learn it? Practice it? How does your experience of sexual power or powerlessness relate to your experience of power in the rest of your life?

What are you seeking?

I'm less interested in why it appeals to you (since that seems to fall primarily in the realm of fantasy), and more in how the experience of power and/or powerlessness has influenced your thinking and your actions. And how your creative imagination has influenced your exercise of power.

How have you practiced the art of power?

 

[unregistered]

 

[intothewoods]

Well, I can think of a lot of answers to your questions but then I wonder what true power or powerlesssness is. It's all "fantasy" in a way in that it's consensual. So in some ways I think we look for ways to push the extremes and feel it.

For us, it is exhibited a lot in just his brute strength. I sometimes pass that boundary of the feeling that it's "play" just becaue it's rough and it hurts and it can often feel like he's going to do some damage or something.

His style out of the bedroom seems to be that I'm made constantly aware that I choose the path to defer. This is the way it is. You can go off and think about it for a while but this is the way it is. So, I don't know if powerlessness comes to mind so much as security. I can absolutely see there will be a day when something will be tougher than it is and I will feel powerless. We're just not there yet.

As to how it relates to power in the rest of my life? Well, all power is an illusion, I suppose.

 

[Keroin]

I want to contribute because this is an interesting topic and I want to play.

Just have to get over my uncomfortableness with discussing intimate details.

Maybe tomorrow.

Still formulating.

 

[latexluvr]

Power or the lack of it

My premise for a story would be something along those lines.

We are at a large Madison street advertising agency. Harold Smith is 44, a bit of a playboy and one of the key partners in the firm.

He hires an ambitious secretary that slowly but surely seduces him. Her purpose initially is to make herself useful and a bit indispensable.She uses her feminine charm and spikes his coffee with Viagra.

She dresses in the most outrageous corsets, mini-skirts, boots which are discretely covered under her business suit. She officially puts on a prudish and polite personality and she turns her manipulation into humiliation for the boss who becomes sexually obsessed with her.It s an adolescent crush that will inevitably lead to his downfall.

There are a lot of suggestions of sex, some bondage, possibly a chastity device...but little real sex. Despite an unquestionable cruelty to Harold , she slowly makes Harold into a worm that is so distracted by his cravings for her, that he has a permanent hard-on for her despite her cruelty and the humiliations that she dishes out..

Slowly but surely, she sets out to discredit and feminize Harold who is vulnerable because of his recent divorce.

Secretely, Sarah is a good friend/lesbian lover of Harold s ex-wife who reveals to Harold s assistant all his fetishes, all his torments...all his pitfalls. They set all kinds of traps for him and his judgement becomes intensively clouded bu jis desires and urges. She has a series of procedures that are very effective. They involve promises by Harold and ever greater submission to her.

This story is all about office politics, shear power, greed and ersatz-sex (brain sex, mind-fucks) and Harold' s slow but inevitable downfall occurs day by day. She fills in for her boss increasingly at meetings, ..etc while handcuffing him to the radiator naked in his office. He becomes more or less cut off from the loop as she isolates her boss more and more but picks his brains to take over all the accounts.

She eventually becomes the office manager and Harold becomes a type of wimp , sexually obsessed and marginalized prior to his firing from the firm.

Than his ex-wife along with Sarah take over and send him to their farm where Harold, through vigorous taining, brainwashing and hypnotism as well as some sodomizing becomes some type of domestic slave who lives for his fantasms of servitude and to hear the tick -tock of Sarah's and his ex-wife's heals and who embraces their feet and spends his days on his knees scrubbing the kitchen, the bathroom floors or the stable tiles.

His intellectual regression, nose-ring, genital peircings and tattoed lips and make-up makes it difficult for him to go back to whence he came. His IQ and vocabulary drop daily as his levels of ever greater submission increases. Everybody around him speak a foreign language (arabic, spanish) and he is really isolated.

He gets paid 10 $ a day and he is also financially enslaved to both of them. He is at last happy and also a free man. No more decisions, just follow the orders of his tormentors and answer <<Yes Mistress<<.

He looks forward to their teletexts telling him to go here, crawl there , while strip naked and he gets himself into the most embarassing situations (naked in a parking lot, 20 miles from home, just with a Playboy magazine which he treasures) and must read on the bus.

Of course, his tormentors are always immacutaly dressed with the most fashionable of business outfits, full of good judgement and he must no longer speak unless he is asked (manipulative) questions. He is really kept in the dark about money, travel, their lovers and his schedule.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last edited by latexluvr : Today at 02:04 AM. Reason: stories about offices, secretaries and sex

 

[BiBunny]

Like Keroin, I'm still formulating a response to this thread. There's something I want to say, but it's only a niggling thought at the moment, like that word on the tip of your tongue that you can't quite drag out of the dusty reaches of your brain to say aloud.

I'm workin' on it.

 

[00Syd]

I can't respond to this thread, but I wish that I could.

 

[Netzach]

I'm really stuck for an answer to this.

The pursuit, forms, and types of sexual power I've been after and need and enjoy are so varied and so visceral I can't really answer "how have you done this." I don't know if it's a "how" kind of adverb. I have no idea how to articulate this, actually.

I did realize something - powerlessness doesn't work for me. Period. It's something T's never made me feel, which is why I'm able to function in a framework of service with him. I don't necessarily feel *in control* but I don't necessarily feel *not in control* either, and that's not a feeling I move toward instinctively at all.

 

[Homburg]

I'm stumped too. I just am, they just are. Our existence together defines our roles as much as language or act. They cede, I accrue. Everything else is porn.

 

[intothewoods]

I have a question about power, which is maybe really stupid, but I'm posting it anyway. I hope it's not too much of a hijack.

I remember rape awareness type speakers in college saying the following: Rape is not about sex. Rape is about power.

I must have heard that 100 times between age 15 and 22.

Frankly, I never bothered to question that. So is rape about power? And if dominance is about power, is that urge the same as the urge to rape, but expressed in a healthier and/or socially acceptable (somewhat) way?

 

[00Syd]

I always assumed that rape was about sex. I guess I should have been paying more attention to Law and Order: SVU

 

[rosco rathbone]

I have a question about power, which is maybe really stupid, but I'm posting it anyway. I hope it's not too much of a hijack.

I remember rape awareness type speakers in college saying the following: Rape is not about sex. Rape is about power.

I must have heard that 100 times between age 15 and 22.

Frankly, I never bothered to question that. So is rape about power? And if dominance is about power, is that urge the same as the urge to rape, but expressed in a healthier and/or socially acceptable (somewhat) way?

Since I have a total inability to separate sex and power in my mind (sex IS power, to me), this conundrum never really bothered me.

Rapists get off overpowering people sexually.

 

[ZRT]

I've always felt that it's an oversimplification. Some rapists rape because they want some friction and take what's available. Some do indeed do it for the power.

 

[VelvetDarkness]

edited. nevermind.

 

[intothewoods]

I always assumed that rape was about sex. I guess I should have been paying more attention to Law and Order: SVU

Wait - you're in college. You never got one of those rape-prevention-awareness lectures?? I don't remember going to those voluntarily! Was that, like, a 90s thing? All I remember is, rape isn't about sex. Rape is about power.

Then I remember this big talk about getting consent every step of the way. I think it was a rule at Oberlin or some school in Ohio. I thought it was bullshit. Because date rape is about miscommunication??

Anyway, I also remember a T.A. telling the class, sex is about power. He was hot, on an unrelated note.

Maybe I just have a really selective memory. All sentences that end in "___ is about power."

 

[intothewoods]

Since I have a total inability to separate sex and power in my mind (sex IS power, to me), this conundrum never really bothered me.

Rapists get off overpowering people sexually.

But don't you get off overpowering sexually?

 

[Keroin]

Ooookey dokey, so, um…I’m going to deliver this response while I hide behind a pillow, if that’s OK. Let me know if I mumble. Oh, and don’t quote if unnecessary, PLEASE, I’ll likely delete all of this about two minutes after I post.

Yeah, like I said.

 

[rosco rathbone]

But don't you get off overpowering sexually?

shhhh looks around

 

[intothewoods]

shhhh looks around

*snickers* well just checking.

 

[Adakgirl]

Before I foray into the questions posed, I'd like to try and explain this:

The sexual power a Dominant exerts over his submissive is not the same kind of power a rapist exerts over his victim. Though they both may use fear, one kind of fear is consensual, the other is not.

With most (say a serial) rapists, taking a woman by force, unexpectedly and without consent, is the only way in which he is able to feel sexually powerful. It is impossible for him to have any kind of power over women because he hates them and is to inept, to emotionally inadequate to have normal relationships with them. When and if he has tried, he has failed miserably. Those failures feed his hate for women. Some develop such inadequacy by being raised by a domineering mother. By female sexual rejection or experiences of that nature.
He needs to rape to get back at women, to take his hate out on them. He soon learns that he must sexually control a woman by force in order to do that.
of course that is the simplistic version.
That's what they mean when they say rape is not about the sex it's about power.

I hope I wrote that comprehensibly...


Dominants do possess sexual power, a rapist does not.

 

[Adakgirl]

Where does sexual power come from? I can answer that in a general way because we don't really know yet. It comes from the Limbic system of the brain. What exact part of the Limbic system has not yet been determined, even after many years of study, and only study using rat brains, not human brains.

 

[eastern sun]

I'm stumped too. I just am, they just are. Our existence together defines our roles as much as language or act. They cede, I accrue. Everything else is porn.

Porn is good. And good porn is even better.

 

[Homburg]

Porn is good. And good porn is even better.

No doubt. Just trying to draw a distinction between the porn and the power.

 

[00Syd]

Wait - you're in college. You never got one of those rape-prevention-awareness lectures?? I don't remember going to those voluntarily! Was that, like, a 90s thing? All I remember is, rape isn't about sex. Rape is about power.

Then I remember this big talk about getting consent every step of the way. I think it was a rule at Oberlin or some school in Ohio. I thought it was bullshit. Because date rape is about miscommunication??

Anyway, I also remember a T.A. telling the class, sex is about power. He was hot, on an unrelated note.

Maybe I just have a really selective memory. All sentences that end in "___ is about power."

We've never had any mandatory rape awareness anything. I think its assumed that since the majority of students are studying to either get into the Film or TV industry that we've seen enough Law and Order: SVU to be properly informed on rape.

Either that or they realize we're paying them for classes and not to be our mommies.

The first school I went to (for one whole semester) had a mandatory online alcohol education class/quiz thing which included a section on date rape which basically said: Don't do it and if it happens to you DESPITE our telling guys not to do it, then this is what you should do: Tell your room mate.

Stupid. stupid. stupid.

 

[ZRT]

Before I foray into the questions posed, I'd like to try and explain this:

The sexual power a Dominant exerts over his submissive is not the same kind of power a rapist exerts over his victim. Though they both may use fear, one kind of fear is consensual, the other is not.

With most (say a serial) rapists, taking a woman by force, unexpectedly and without consent, is the only way in which he is able to feel sexually powerful. It is impossible for him to have any kind of power over women because he hates them and is to inept, to emotionally inadequate to have normal relationships with them. When and if he has tried, he has failed miserably. Those failures feed his hate for women. Some develop such inadequacy by being raised by a domineering mother. By female sexual rejection or experiences of that nature.
He needs to rape to get back at women, to take his hate out on them. He soon learns that he must sexually control a woman by force in order to do that.
of course that is the simplistic version.
That's what they mean when they say rape is not about the sex it's about power.

I hope I wrote that comprehensibly...


Dominants do possess sexual power, a rapist does not.

That sums up the 'power rapist' quite well.

I've always hated that term because power is something they don't possess, and the term belies their pathetic status.