About the Dominant Savant

This past weekend, I had the immense pleasure of meeting Mollena, among many other awesome type people.
She and I were on the same Bolt Bus from DC, which gave me the unique opportunity to pick through her big, sexy brain outside of con space. (I’ve now added her to my list of intellectual crushes) Anyway, she wrote a fascinating post and related conversation thread about the phenomenon of dominant savants.

She writes:

Someone who is a stellar whipmaster, bondage aficionado, piercer, what have you, may be able to act as your guide throughout an incredibly earth-shattering experience, but you would be absolutely making a dangerous assumption if you automatically piggyback a deep spirituality to their expertise. It MAY be there. It MAY not. It may be there for one partner and not for another. This doesn’t intrinsically make them a shitty player, it means you have to know what is happening for them.

I don’t have much to say in objection to what she wrote, but it did dislodge some of the flotsam that has been banging about my brain. I’m posting a more polished version of what I left on her thread.

In sexualized and charged spaces, we tend to bring filtered versions of ourselves. This is not a bad thing, mind you, nor is it something that always happens consciously. So someone can present a facade of togetherness and control in one environment better than he or (insert pronoun here) can in the mundane world. Similarly, there are others who, like you said, thrive in a BSDM environment, but are utter crap at relationships, nurturing spiritual connections, etc.

If the only interaction you have with people is in kink contexts, then it’s hard to see the other facets of their personalities. And if that’s the only venue in which you interact with people, that’s fine, so long as you know what you’re getting and what you’re not.

I use myself as an example because it’s my blog, dammit. There are a few people I can think of off the top of my head with whom I’ve had really intense, beautiful, and cathartic scenes… For a while, I’d trumpet these scenes to others “Oh So-and-so! Yeah. He’s awesome. We’ve played. Maybe I can introduce you!”

And then the realization two-by-four clocked me on the head. I don’t really know these people. I don’t know what they’re like at home, or what their mental map looks like outside the fleeting context of our scene. I still enjoy playing with these people, but I no longer assume that a hot scene will immediately grant me a certain level of personal access.

This idea of dealing with someone in one capacity without letting it bleed into another can be tricky. But again, it’s about knowing thyself as much as it is about knowing thy partner.

I can bottom to most people, no problem. I can do silly, I can do pain slut, I can do happy rope space without requiring deep spiritual connections with my partner. If they happen, great! If not, meh.

A lot of the play I like to do as a submissive, however, requires me to strip myself physically and emotionally bare. To trust my partner to take me to those dark places and bring me back in one piece. Deep mind fucks, hard core humiliation play, anything where I let someone stomp around in my brain require intimacy and deep, meaningful connection.

For me, the purpose of such scenes is to strengthen or establish intimacy. I give so much of myself. How can I go to those places without letting myself get close to the person I’m playing with? It’s like putting an ice cube in my mouth and telling me not to let it melt. However, since I know this about myself, I’m very careful about whom I explore that kind of play with.

I have had the misfortune of going that deep with someone who could not maintain that intimacy. The realization that we were speaking different languages and that his idea of intimacy did not coincide with mine was devastating. I felt like a teddy bear whose stuffing had been pulled out. I needed to curl back up and put those pieces of me back together. In retrospect, there was no way I could have known without going those places, and I don’t regret a single second of the relationship. But it goes to show that emotional anguish is kind of a recreational hazard.

I still seek out those connections knowing full well that I may get hurt again, but to paraphrase Osho, you cannot love or enter into reality if you are not courageous.

~ by Sascha on May 13, 2009.