A very special thanks to Mistress Charlotte, for both suggesting this topic and giving me not only a lot of good material to work with, but a few perfect quotes I just had to include.
So! Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a slave. Or, if you prefer, a bitch, toy, puppy, cuck, slut… I could go on – and I will! A whore, plaything, object, worshipper… you get the idea. A submissive to a Domme, anyway. (If you get to this step and you’re already a slave, great job! That, or your imagination is REALLY good.) Now, let’s say you do something good – send a tribute, complete a task, etc. – and she messages you, calling you a “good boy”. You’re happy! Of course you are! But then, you see her tweet out a sub’s even bigger tribute, or she talks about a slave who completed ALL these tasks so well – how would that make you feel?
If you said jealous, angry, sulky, dramatic, petty – then you might be eligible for Compersion™.
Compersion! This is a term I had never heard of until just a couple weeks ago. For those like me, here’s the deal – it’s a word used in a lot of polyamorous relationships to define a feeling which is basically the opposite of jealousy – a sort of empathetic happiness you get when someone else (in poly relationships, one of your partners) feels joy, but from a source that isn’t necessarily you.
In D/s relationships, we’re talking about something a little different, although the basic concept is still the same. There’s a bit of a prevalent idea around subs of being a Domme’s “one and only” – or as Mistress Charlotte put it, an ingrained patriarchal belief that men have to fight against each other to “win” the woman. Competition, instead of compersion. And that’s the topic of today’s blog!
And, look, I just want to say first of all – it’s not that I can’t understand having feelings of jealousy sometimes. You hear yourself get called a good boy and wonder “but who’s the GOODEST boy?” – I get it. When I see something disappear from Mistress’s wishlist, for instance, I do feel the occasional brief pang of “Aw, but *I* could have been the one to buy that for her…”. However, it’s quickly overwritten by “Oh, good, somebody bought that for her!”. At the end of the day, I know it simply wouldn’t be feasible for me to buy her every gift, send her every tribute. Even if you COULD (and this is the important part) – how many subs a Domme has is entirely her personal preference. It’s up to her! If she wants one sub’s worth of attention, that’s great. But some Dommes want many subjects in their service, and when you’re serving one of those Dommes you should be ready to accept that.
Mistress mentioned when we were talking about this, and I entirely agree – from the Domme’s perspective, it’s a frustrating idea that she should have to limit her pleasure in order to save a man’s feelings. It just seems almost antithetical to the idea of femdom – surely you want your Domme to get as much pleasure as possible? If you really want to serve her and make her happy, that should be your goal. So if there are other subs pitching in besides you – isn’t that just a good thing? Your Domme gets more, you all get to serve her – everybody wins!
The main point I’m trying to make here, is that it really isn’t a contest. Your Domme isn’t ranking her subs or anything like that! If you’re serving her, it’s because she wants you to be. You don’t need to stress that you’re not living up to a standard you invented in your head.
Or, as Mistress Charlotte said in this recent tweet:
If your service is pleasing her, then clearly she would like to keep you around. Don’t worry about comparing yourself to others – just focus on yourself, and doing the best that you can. Focus on HER, and how much you want to serve her pleasure. Your submission is yours, and nobody is going to take that away from you. I can assure you that if you ARE fucking up in some way, she will NOT be shy about telling you. Why would she? There’s no reason for her to keep company she’s not enjoying. If there’s actual failings that you need to work on, then that’s one thing – but please, stop making yourself miserable over a failure that doesn’t exist!
So, I’ve mentioned how there’s no need to have these anxieties. But what’s worse than that, is making them a problem for your Domme. Mistress Charlotte told me about a few things she’s experienced from competitive subs – clinginess, endless drama, petty nitpicking at her other subs… Some other things that I won’t go into here, because they’re just not fun to talk about. And I don’t believe that these subs go into this trying to be competitive, or jealous, or anything like that. But it’s important to know that turning this into an issue for your Domme really just doesn’t help anything. What’s worse, is taking those perceived feelings of rejection, or being ignored, and just shutting down completely, vanishing. This just leaves your Domme with a bunch of unresolved stress – and nobody wants that.
Mistress also mentioned that it’s a matter of understanding that your own individual submission is not ever threatened by someone else’s. That subs aren’t being judged against one another. And that can be hard – we all have ideas of monogamy baked into us by default, and it can take conscious effort to unravel those societal conceptions. But non-monogamous service has plenty of upsides, that make it more than worth putting in the work. Like I mentioned earlier, the more of us working together to please a Mistress, the better – but it can work out in other ways, too. Often, Mistress Charlotte has sent me off to serve her friends – buying their content, trancing to their sessions. She’s made it very clear that by pleasing her friends, I am by extension pleasing her, which I really like. It’s a new angle to do something good for my Mistress. Do I feel a bit whored out? Yes. Do I love it? Oh yes, very much so. But that might be a topic for another day.
Finally, one more little thing. When we were talking about this topic earlier, Mistress said something that I think was really powerful. I’d mentioned that if this blog got one slave to think about what they were doing and dial back the competition angle, I’d be very happy indeed. And she responded with:
And I really love that. You don’t have to be your Domme’s Number One Absolute Best Slave because… there is no “best slave”. It just isn’t a competition like that. You are the best at doing what you can do. And nobody can take that, take your submission, away from you.
Service and Sluttery 