The Sweet Dominatrix

I was amidst a cyber-discussion in which my cyberfriend wrote of how she went from having a dynamic persona to a rigid and closed one. She wrote: “At some point I just didn't want to attract attention to myself anymore. Part of it was putting my energy into learning and getting older, but another part of it was not wanting to deal with the perceptions of others - positive or negative - and wanting to be in control so as not to be hurt so much. This surfaced more and more during a time when I worked at a fairly conservative bookstore, and I got into the habit of hiding myself. The mode I went into with was very much like, ‘You won't know anything about me unless I like you enough to tell you.’

“And then I got married and did the same thing in subtler and damaging ways; trying hard to be something acceptable to love. It was the most dishonest place in my life, I always maintained a place of honesty within my close friendships, but to not have a persona that aligned with my deepest core in some way was really crippling.

“During this time I had a lot of dreams about a 'bathing suit.' I would go to that old bookstore and couldn't find my bathing suit. People would offer me other things to wear, but I just wanted my bathing suit and I couldn't find it.

“The very adaptability I had always used to deal with radically different environments was now no longer this fluid creative thing through which I could express what I needed to, but a role I took on to avoid the consequences of being myself and now I was stuck in it. When all of that broke apart I went to the other extreme and wore my heart on my face, breaking into tears before customers who were rude and obnoxious, and didn't really deserve that much of me.”

Amy: Perhaps they didn’t, but your over-inexpressiveness, by turns, reflected how rude people can be and so did your over-expressiveness. It was so honest of you, crying. In a way, it was saying, “This is about me as much as you, you shithead.”

Saying they did not that deserve that much sort of dehumanizes them, and by turns it dehumanizes you. In a way, you were being martyred for our essential nakedness, which is beautiful (in a horrible way, as martyrdom is) – and it does not have to detract from how honoring yourself needs to come before honoring others. We don’t have to be superior to honor our needs.

Of course, you were in a bind, playing the role of server, so it would be natural to go to the extreme of, “I serve you nothing, especially not my heart.” But we all must serve the heart, even shitheads.

Cyberfriend: True. true. I find the problem with that customer/employee relationship is that it’s often not service but servitude. I am someone who always treats everything as 'relationship' so if someone is being a jerk in regular life, I have the space to say, 'No, you can't treat me that way. I will not accept it without saying something about it.' But within that service context you often can't do that - if ever... although tears are one way of doing that. But should I really be so affected by it in the first place?

Amy: I would be. To me, it’s very honest, very heart. Should we be so honest? I don’t know. There’s no mask in honesty. Masks get “glued” onto our faces and we don’t realize they are there. I think someday everyone will be unmasked, and this masquerade will be over.

The bitch is a mask; a very useful one. Perhaps the key is to take off the mask as soon as we don’t need it, which is hard to do when it becomes habituated. For me, stepping out of habit – taking off the mask - like you did crying, is admirable. The world is hypnotized by habit. [fin]

This discussion yesterday was reflected in waking-life: an English couple is vacationing for a week in the unit next door to me. The day they arrived was stormy, so I did not open the pool. (I am paid to open and close it, and test chemical levels.) The English couple called the owner of the unit to ask for the combination to the pool. She wouldn’t give it to them, saying it was my job to open and close it.

Next day - yesterday - I have an avocado ripening in the sun. I go out to fetch it, and real quick because I am wearing a tank top and nothing underneath to enhance my pubescent sized breasts. From my neighbor’s patio, the Englishwoman sees my hand snatch up the avocado, and says, “Excuse me,” with some agitation. I look over and she is striding toward me.

Face-to-face, she stands a half foot taller than me, and outweighs me by 4 or 5 stone. Her bosom is large. She’s blond, like me. She lays into me about the state of the pool; the “silt” and other debris on the bottom. She says she expected America to be cleaner; that she wouldn’t let her children swim in the pool; that it can’t have been cleaned in ages.

I am holding the avocado between my breasts to shield them from view. It looks like I am praying, saying, “Don’t beat me, Momma.” If only I had my wits about me to say that. Instead, I explained that it wasn’t my job to clean the bottom of the pool. She bitched some more. I explained that the recent storms had blown a lot of stuff into the pool. She bitched some more. I said I thought some company probably came to clean it. She bitched some more. I said I’ll ask someone about it. She bitched some more.

I went next to speak with a neighbor about it. She said the pool company came weekly to vacuum the bottom, and was due to arrive that day around noon. I went back to the English people, who were now indoors. I knocked on the door. The man came out and I explained the situation. He wouldn’t believe me. He said, “It can’t have been cleaned in ages,” and glanced down at my tiny, unenhanced breasts.

Sure enough, the pool was crystal clear in a couple hours.

The interaction left a bad taste in my mouth the rest of the day, and I had to get up in the middle of the night to write about it. I am wondering if it would have better to cry in response to the woman rather than deferring to her aggressiveness. Now, I can see that crying could have made a comedy of my feelings; and I see why my cyberfriend questioned crying in front of shithead customers.

After encounters like that with the Englishwoman, I ponder ways I might have undermined them. Often, I consider actions out of left field - crying as a perfect example of such. I love the idea of poignantly reflecting how people are acting to reveal them to themselves; but perhaps such things are better served in writing and theater than in the heat of the moment.

Catching me off-guard, the Englishwoman was able to prey on my ignorance about the pool, and also my innate sense of guilt; guilt that I must be doing something wrong because I have done so few things right ever in the eyes of the world. This issue was dramatized in this dream:

8/30: My first day of class teaching. Students keep coming in and so I have to go make extra copies a couple of times. The second time I bump into Nora and we get sidetracked; she showing me these new, amazing trams, which are amphibious and cable free. I accidentally get off a stop too early, and have forgotten my cane and a special notebook on the tram. I run to the tram at the end of the line. I find my cane beside an old man’s cane, but my special notebook is missing.

I am getting back to class as fast as I can – aware that much time has passed. In the lobby of the school I am accosted by two female administrators; one a very short Indian woman. They say they have found I have made 2000 violations. “What?!” The Indian woman pulls my face down to and against hers and talks intimidatingly. I pull away and say, “You don’t talk to me like that.” I ask Nora to vouch for me, but she won’t.

My job in the dream is the English language teaching position I held from 1993 – 1997 at a polytechnic in Budapest. In waking-life, as in the dream, I was not the most organized teacher (but I was the most popular English teacher at the school) because I just couldn’t be; and I tried to be really really hard because of my fear of people like the dream’s Indian woman and waking-life’s Englishwoman. Feeling unprepared is horrible for me because I feel it gives people the right to dump on me. Even when I am prepared am I paranoid that I have overlooked something.

There has always been too much going on inside me for me to participate as the powers-that-be expect. Now, I have a tremendous complex about it. It is as if I believe I have done something wrong that people have the right to chastise me for, even when I have not. So, my ignorance about the workings of the pool left me especially vulnerable to attack.

Let these leaves fall in the premature autumn wind.

I dreamed:

8/31: As we go down the highway, a little brother holds the hot end of a cigarette very close to the driver’s face, trailing it to his ear, and then down his neck. When we make a rest stop, I get in the child’s face and give him a vicious lecture about not killing us. I keep going till I am sure he has been frightened into behaving. Afterward I can’t feel sweetness.

Inside me I can sense the potential to act as I do in the dream; terrifying someone out of foolishly endangering other people. (I learned how to goring up.) So, I imagined myself addressing the child differently: respectfully, calmly, clearly; not abusing the child’s sweetness, but letting him understand the reality of his behavior and letting it settle into his heart. I might say, “It was very possible that the driver could have crashed and killed both of you. But what if you had lived and he died? How would that feel?”

Say the child receives such conscientious treatment, but it does not change his behavior and he causes a fatal accident, which kills him and the driver. I would rather live in a world without such a child than without sweetness.

What about the driver? Being martyred to sweetness is great end if he was a Nazi in his last life. There is more order than meets the eye.

What if the child lives and the driver dies? If that awakens the child’s heart, so be it. If it does not, let Law keep the world safe from him.

The sort of browbeating I give him in the dream could be an aspect of how I would, as my dominatrix-self, treat a submissive – but with a crucial difference:

At my first play-date, I noticed that my anger about outside issues was coloring my behavior. I was letting my frustrations out on the sub, just like the Englishwoman was on me. It only happened a little with the sub, but enough to know it is not right for me in a BDSM context; or any other. I intuit that as a dominatrix I can learn to be pretend-angry without any real emotion accompanying it. I also intuit that if I am able to do this, I will be able to use my authority - if not my anger - to defend myself from people like the Englishwoman; people who make BDSM such a vital and human expression.

Being a dominatrix for me is about learning to be self-possessed in the presence of other people; learning how to possess my sweetness so that ignorant bitches don’t walk all over it.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.