The world around us is diverse and fluid, but we humans love to think in terms of binaries. Black and white, good and bad, male and female – these have always existed. We have binaries in the queer communities as well – straight / gay, top / bottom, dominants / submissives. We like these binaries, we like thinking in either / or positions.
We don’t really ‘get’ or trust people who say they’re beyond these. We don’t trust the gender fluid or non-binary (because we must be one or the other, no?) or the versatile (can’t make up their minds, can they?). When we stretch our minds beyond single gender preference, many of us still can’t understand bisexuality or grapple with the reality of pansexuality.
Even kinksters who manage to move past the ‘Domino’s Pizza’ and ‘Subway Footlong’ puns in their conversations often comment “So, you’re a switch!” when I tell them I’m not always dominant and I sometimes, if rarely, have the odd (pun intended) submissive feeling. But no, I won’t call myself a ‘switch’ for multiple reasons.
Two of the definitions from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fifth edition, define switch as “a device used to break or open an electric circuit or to divert current from one conductor to another” and “a transference or shift, as of opinion or attention”. Online definitions from Merriam-Webster include “a shift from one to another”, “. . . used to select between one of usually two available states”, and “to make a shift”.
All of these definitions nudge us towards an implicit binarization of the D/s relationship and interactions, implying dominant and submissive are two absolute roles in a dynamic which probably magically flips for some of the people some of the time.
However, for a counter-example, let’s look at the BDSM tests (despite their limitation of having to be finite-question surveys that can be administered to a large populace). So many of us use these tests for both self-realization as well as communicating our preferences. The outputs specify these ‘tendencies’ as percentage values, precluding the absoluteness we have talked about above. My argument is that the term switch is inadequate to capture preferences in more complex dynamics like hierarchical D/s and doesn’t recognize the temporal fluidity most kinksters experience.
My second peeve against the term switch is something that also applies to dominant and submissive as kinkster identifiers as opposed to role-in-a-play type identifiers. I feel that switch tries to place ‘the slash’ uniformly for different types of play. All these three pigeonholing terms – dominant, submissive and switch – can’t appositely describe someone who wants to be a giver in an impact play, is a bunny in a rope scene, looks for a worthy opponent in mutual humiliation plays, and is a partner with a wavelength match in mental plays. So, in essence, these labels are restrictive and box in the expected behaviours of people who use them for self-identification instead of enabling them with an identity that helps the journey of exploration.
Finally, the term switch does not liberate a D/s relationship from the expectation of a power exchange. While a total power exchange is the holy grail of most D/s relationships, in this age, we should also accommodate for the fact that some of the participants indulge in some of the D/s plays and scenes with expectations different from power exchange. It could be to bust stress, derive instant gratification, or just to fulfill a fun dare. Just like world cricket had to grudgingly acknowledge T20 as a popular format and couldn’t obsess with the purity of test matches, D/s interactions and relationships also need to engulf and acknowledge the plays and scenes where the depth of emotional connect is probably shallower, consensually and deliberately.
The binarization of the D/s terminology can probably be inversed by introducing terms like d-flexible and s-flexible so that one’s leanings on the spectrum, relative to ‘the slash’, can be communicated clearly. This kind of spectrum-aware terminologies would also hopefully steer the conversations towards more granular, nuanced and individualized choices and preferences across multiple overlapping planes of kink plays.
Graphic credit: Pawan Dhall
