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Noah -> RE: I don't get it (no pun intended) (7/13/2006 10:13:21 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: WyrdRich
This pretty well sums up my current attitude about it. People do it though, and if it works for them, it must be a valid form of expression. So I'm seeking to expand my knowledge and maybe, possibly be able to appreciate it for what it is.
It seems clear that you aren't some two-dimensional character, that you aren't a shallow person. It is refreshing to run into a question like this posed in such a way that doesn't seem to be a veiled insult.
You seem to have in-person experience with power exchange. It seems to me that this plus just a certain small input of imagination would be sufficient to get onto the operation of remote training, conceptually, if the right vantage point is adopted.
Unless your in-person interactions have been nothing at all but what's called sensation play, they have involved your acting upon a partner in a way that was subtler than grabbing her body and re-positioning it. D&S as commonly conceived (admitting that a seemingly infinite range of interpretations exist I want to point to a sort of bell curve cluster of agreement on what it is we're talking about when we talk about D&S) is more fundamentally a matter of acting upon a person's will than upon her body.
These actions upon her will are very commonly made manifest physically, but the action, so to speak, is mental and emotional. If you have engaged in any D&S as defined this way it surely has involved interacting with a partner without physically touching her, without being in touch range, without being in the same room, etc. at least some of the time.
Think of one of those (in person) "first conversations" in which with either a new acquaintance or an old one the specter of power exchange rises between you for the first time. In some wonderful cases by the time the conversation ends two people have found new power exchange partners. Each has felt the thrill of the exchange actually transpiring. She has, in some non-trivial way--a way which can be profound even if limited--yielded to you. This as I'm sure you know can happen without the slightest physical touch.
Can body language and the exchange of pheremones there in the restaurant help? I believe they can. I happen to know from more than a little experience that they aren't required.
In fact even while in physical contact, all sorts of things transpire between my partners and I in regard to which the physical contact is incidental. It is typically a wonderful incidence, by the way. I am an extremely tactile person. Still, touching is not required for me to exert my will. I can do it face to face, inches apart. I can do it from across the room. I can do it via a note left on the dashboard of her car. I can do it over the phone just before I head home from work. Similarly I can do it via postal mail, e-mail, chat technology, or here in these message boards.
And so, my friend, can you.
Don't parents exert their will over children without physical proximity all the time? Don't employers in some distant tower exert their will over field employees whom they have never even met? I could mention military examples and various others. None is perfectly analogous to kink. Nevertheless all are relevantly analogous to important degrees in my view.
The remote application of dominance/submission is an utterly mundane phenomenon.
Those who complain "Well you can't really know if she is doing it" seem focused on nothing but physical actions. While the actions can be fun, aesthetically pleasing, meaningful, etc., it is for me the meaning behind the actions which are paramount.
Is submission occurring?
From a certain artificial and radically skeptical point of view can one ever "know" whether she is "doing it" (submitting) even if one has utter physical control?
Where is her head? Where is her heart in a given moment?
You can't ever "know" in that uptight epistemological sense. The fact that she is lying still for your gifts is itselfno proof of submission after all, is it? Instead of submitting in a way that I would find rewarding she might be said in one case to be topping from the bottom; or else being cleverly manipulative in some other way, preparing to extort money, say, or to inspire jealousy in someone else. She might be using me as some sort of S&M exercise device with no emotional yeilding at all, just a convincing act undertaken to get the training she wants in order to bring to her genuine submission to someone else.
But in a more pragmetic, more holistic, less epistemological sense we surely do know, don't we, when a person with whom we have bonded in power exchange is submitting to us?
Infallibly? No. But the fallibility is present up close or far away. While touching and while not touching; in vanilla relationships as well as kinky ones.
Distance, in my view, is no object at all standing in the way of training, any more than it is a perfect impediment to love. Countless people throughout history have fallen truly and genuinely in love in strictly epistolary romances. And you and I know they couldn't have all been vanilla. This gorgeous tradition continues today with certain evolutionary changes over telephone lines. Sometimes via voice. Sometimes textually and/or with still or moving, near-real-time, or other images.
Some training techniques vary in terms of distance. Others operate in exactly--exactly--the same way whether applied in-person or across hemispheres.
Picture one girl whose heart changes and whose body displays this change, this while her dom stands over her bound form with bullwhip in hand. Now please picture a girl whose heart changes in just the same way, and whose body registers the change in all the same ways (galvanic skin response, pulse and respiration, activation of glands, the closing or opening of eyes, let's say.)
A question to you is this: can anyone credibly hold that the act of submission and the attendant act of dominance are more impressive--more "real"-- in the first case than the second, if the second case involves a dominant who evokes this same response from a thousand miles away... and of course a submissive who yields her will in just the same fashion as her counterpart but without the constraint of physical bonds, without either a physical threat or actual physical violence?
I hope I am offering you a vantage point from which there is less to be confused about or confounded by in contemplating the phenomenon of remote training.
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