By Amethyst Wonder
Last month, I wrote about having my sexual orientation questioned. Continuing in that theme, this month I’m writing about identifying as a switch and being told that that means I can’t be dominant. I’m lumping these winners in with the aforementioned Sexual Orientation Police under the heading of “Stop telling me what I am!”
I received a message complimenting one of the photos on my profile – a photo of my feet in heels. The sender commented that it made him dream of being trampled beneath me. As it was a well written, polite, non-cut-and-paste message, I responded. What I got back was this:
“Upon closer inspection of your profile, I see that you are a switch. I am looking for someone who can truly dominate me. A switch can not do this. A switch is not a true dominant.”
As a side-note, I’m not sure how he found the fifth picture on my profile before seeing that I identified as a switch.
More to the point, I was irritated at his assertion that a switch could not dominate him. Granted, in a better mood, I could have just read it as a personal preference. But his abrupt tone definitely indicated that he saw this as a matter of fact, not opinion.
I could go off on a tangent here on how I feel about anyone who believes there is only one way to be dominant (or submissive, or queer, or femme, etc.), but that’s not where I’m going with this. After giving it some thought, I realized that there was a great deal of truth in his message, though probably not in the way he intended.
Submission must be given, and by refusing to give that submission to anyone who identifies as a switch, he is thereby ensuring that a switch will, in fact, never dominate him.
Anyone who’s done the online search knows you have to set parameters. But people don’t fit neatly into boxes. Standards are a good thing, but holding hard and fast to what are sometimes arbitrary and superficial criteria can be self-defeating. We have to ask ourselves if we’re cutting ourselves off from quality potential partners in an effort to oversimplify our search.