Domination and Mastery

Care

1. Love

   1. Highest Importance

      Love is of the highest importance in most of the M/s relationships I’m familiar with, and is the fullest form of Care for a human being. In loving the slave, the Master puts him/herself on the line and envelops and protects the slave in the context of His/Her World. In returning the love the slave accepts his/her place and the protection and security afforded. All the small concerns, the small things that we allow to matter to us, are subsumed in the overall meaning that the love involved manifests.

2. Concern

   In smaller ways than love Care manifests in all the “taking care of” that we do, all the small concerns that we have dealings with. In entering enslavement the slave accepts that his/her concerns and dealings are henceforth at the Master’s discretion. In accepting enownment from the slave the Master accepts that the slave will depend on him/her for direction in what needs to be taken care of and how.

   1. Matters

      1. “Let Matter To”

         We have concerns and Care fundamentally because things “matter” to us, or to put it better, we allow beings in the World to affect us, to be important or unimportant, to have meaning.

         In an M/s relationship the web of meaning is determined by the Master’s World. The slave learns what “ matters” and what doesn’t in a constant, and hopefully consistent, training through all the substructures of Care documented earlier.

Meaning of Dasein (Human Being)

Care is named in “Being and Time” as the fundamental meaning of Dasein, or human Being. Within the structure of Care lie a number of substructures. This examines how these structures and substructures function within an M/s dynamic.

Last night we attended a munch and a party in the local scene. As it happens the munch was for one local group and the party hosted by another, although there is a large crossover in membership of the two groups and many of the people at the munch also appeared at the party. It’s very pleasant having a local scene, with people one can discuss M/s and related aspects IRL rather than just online, and even have a bit of fun scening in public. There was even some discussion among myself and a few other doms about the “daddy dom” aspects of my relationship with emmie and theirs with their respective little girls, something that is not often easy to discuss IRL as people who don’t relate can get pretty quickly squicked. (we talked about getting together once a month or so and one of the doms had the fastest and best quip – that we should get together at Chuck-E-Cheese’s ).

Both mitda and emmie had a pretty good time, I believe Luc did as well, (especially when a number of submissive women were leaning over him checking out his cologne), With the different groups in town a weekend without a munch, party, or both is becoming a rarity.

It could be argued that we are too involved in M/s and not involved enough in more vanilla activities but the reality is that most of the M/s oriented gatherings are not strip-n-beat parties but vanilla social gatherings that just happen to be with like minded individuals from whom one doesn’t have to dissemble and hide one’s peculiarities.

Today emmie and I took a short road trip down to San Antonio to purchase a new (to us) vehicle. We are nothing if not consistent in our albeit obscure vehicular tastes, as the new car is our 2 ^nd Saab 9-5, both black, although this one is the wagon version rather than the sedan that Luc drives. It is also a veg-o-matic as emmie is still not confident with the stick shifts on our other two cars. This car is mostly for me although I will be sharing it with emmie, as she doesn’t drive a lot in general. It will feel a bit weird driving a family wagon, but being a Saab wagon ameliorates the “soccer mom” imagery somewhat .

What the Saab does have is an ass-kicking turbocharger that powers the wagon from 0-60 in a healthy 6 seconds. We’ve been making jokes about lead footed mitda ever since she found herself driving 115mph without intending to on one of the new local highways – I’m going to have to avoid falling into that trap myself in the Saab if I’m going to keep my record of having driven for 23 years without a speeding ticket, something that no one who has ever seen me drive can quite believe.

On one of the M/s boards I frequent I find an inordinate amount of self justification of one’s choice to be in the lifestyle. It made me realize today that in my own WIKI on absolute enslavement the use of phenomenology in terms of defining and understanding M/s could be seen as an attempt to somehow justify the lifestyle. In terms of clarification let me state that I do not see the lifestyle’s elements as justifiable on any terms to anyone not involved in it.

Often eastern thought is brought in as part of this justification, with ideas such as “the middle path” etc. somehow being bastardized to justify M/s. (this one particularly befuddles me because how could one be absolute in following the middle road? By definition Masters and slaves are at the two extremes of the power spectrum in human relationships and therefore by definition do NOT follow the middle path. As well, M/s in an erotic sense is a particularly Western development, and a recent one at that, being virtually unknown prior to the Enlightenment in the 17 ^th Century. How eastern thought could be somehow involved in a specifically Western development is extremely unclear to me.

Western thought, though, suffers from a specific difficulty in transmitting its own understandings even to the educated elements of its own peoples. The originary thought of Parmenides on the one hand and Heraclitus on the other is echoed by many thinkers around the world, and is not what uniquely gave rise to Philosophic thought in the West (specifically in Ancient Greece). The codification of ontological thought into formal and mathematical reason is the uniquely Western contribution to thinking, and is what separates philosophic thought from spiritualist types of thinking in other cultures.

All this makes me want to go back and reread Aristotle for the umpteenth time. Not because he was always right, by any means, or that he and I are even in agreement along general lines, but because no matter what Aristotle looked at he was intelligent and thoughtful, and therefore thought-provoking. Beware believing that later thinkers and scientists disproved most of Aristotle, in many cases they simply use a different predictive model, and in others were and are flat out wrong, due to not seeing the subtleties in what seem at first glance to be simple arguments. Eastern spiritualist thinking will always remain more accessible at first glance than Western phenomenological, formal, mathematical thinking, but the rise of true philosophy in the West is something that should not be abandoned simply because the price of entry is a little steeper.

I see my slaves predominantly, as with other people, in terms of their possibilities. The difference is that their possibilities are in a sense mine. In understanding them, then, they are understood as being projected from out of my possibilities. Of course these possibilities are modified from what they would be if they were projected upon myself.

In this sense mitda and I have a very ontological relationship, our being is shared in a very transparent way, where we share the projection and the possibilities openly. With emmie it is a little different because her possibilities are less transparent, mostly because we have not spent the same length of time together, nor have we spent as much verbal time, where mitda and I were online with each other for years before finally meeting. It’s not to say that our relationship is less close, but it is not yet as transparent to either of us. I’m still very much learning where emmie’s possibilities lie, and where her abilities are best used.