This is a reflection on the nature of power, and on human desire.

It is also, in part, a ramble about Brent Dill. 

I feel very weird inserting myself into that conversation.  I don’t know any of the participants, at all, it’s just distant discourse-fodder for me, and I’m aware that some of the people reading this may be personally affected by the situation in a very serious way.  So this is your up-front warning: if you don’t want to deal with a poorly-informed rando nattering on, just steer clear this time around.  You probably won’t be missing much.

In all likelihood, everything I’m saying here is very well-understood by a lot of people, but…at the least I find it useful to think through it for myself.

So: probably the weirdest aspect of this whole Brent thing, from an outsider perspective, is the disjoint between his goals and his means.  Which is to say, the thing he explicitly wanted was to feel dominant and powerful and in-control with regard to his paramours, and the way he tried to get himself there was…inescapably wormy and pathetic. 

He was literally begging people to submit to him, and when they failed to do so, he tried to guilt-trip them with claims that they were hurting his feelings.  It doesn’t take Wildean levels of social-critic-fu to look at this behavior and say “that is the opposite of dominant or powerful or in-control.”  It seems naively like someone with Brent’s stated desires and self-image should have been flinching away from that kind of strategy, if only to avoid the concomitant self-loathing. 

And, OK, you can imagine someone with literally zero self-awareness going ahead and doing it anyway.  Maybe that’s all there was to it. 

But somehow I suspect it’s something deeper, and sadder, than that. 

Go back to the very lowest levels of analysis for a bit.  A dude wants to have power over a girl, or over girls-in-general, or something.  What does that actually mean?  If he got what he wanted, how would that “cash out” into actual observable phenomena?

There are, I think, three basic answers to this question, all of which have their adherents.

1.  “Power” is basically an aesthetic.  This is the thinking that underlies most normal-ish safe/sane/consensual BDSM, as far as I can tell.  The dom and the sub are playing a game together, a game of roles if you like, in which they help each other get what they both wanted going in.  The word “scene” is super appropriate.  Everyone gets to have a good time with melodramatic behavior, nifty evocative titles like “master” and “slave,” etc.  Maybe there are fun toys made of black leather or whatever.  Orders are being “given” and “followed”…but in some important sense there’s no actual power here at all, except in a fakey pretend kind of way.  The dom gives only orders that he believes the sub actually wants to follow (and is giving them largely for that purpose), and indeed the sub is following orders largely because it is personally fulfilling to do so.  If the dom demands something that the sub really doesn’t want to do, well, that’s very awkward and probably it breaks down the thin shell of narrative holding the scene together. 

I gather this can be rewarding in various ways, if you’re of the right temperament, but it doesn’t have a lot in common with the concept of “power” as it manifests in most other contexts.  In particular, “having power” in an aesthetic sense does not really give you an advantage in term of getting what you want out of your interactions with other people.  Mostly it’s a job – in fact, a kind of service-y job when you look at it the right way – and I gather that trying to do that job makes engagement more stressful rather than less.

2. “Power” is about being able to make other people give you what you want in a concrete sense.  This is a much more conventional conception, obviously.  You can have power over someone else in all sorts of ways – financial control, superior rank in a hierarchy, blackmail material, etc. etc. – and it means that the other person basically has to do whatever you say, or at least finds himself with strong incentives to do so. 

People use this kind of power to have sex, too.  In many cases they get off on it, and prefer it to non-power-dynamic-laden sex.  It doesn’t look much like the BDSM stuff described above.  Here we’re talking about, y’know, casting couches and the like.  Coercive employers of domestic servants.  Handsy bosses.  Inappropriate academic relationships.  You get the idea.  The sexual acts themselves are, in all probability, very “normal.”  There are unlikely to be whips or chains or evocative titles.  It’s just that one (or more) of the participants is there under duress. 

The important truth about this kind of power is that you can use it to get certain things but not others.  In particular, you can elicit compliance – you can even elicit a social display to go along with the compliance, a show of joy or gratitude or whatever – but you can’t elicit actual thoughts or emotions.  It’s very likely that the person you’re coercing is going to be filled with hatred and resentment and fear.  Even if he’s not, even if he sees it as going-along-to-get-along, even if he’s positively star-struck by your rank or charisma or whatever, all it means is that you got lucky and you definitely can’t count on it continuing to be true. 

If you’re really into this kind of thing, it’s probably because you don’t really care much about the thoughts and emotions of your sex partners, or else because you actively enjoy lording it over people who are filled with hatred and resentment and fear.  There are many such people in the world, sadly.  They are, inter alia, people who are really keyed into concrete social reality as opposed to anything else.  They don’t actually seem to have much in common with Brent, apart from the general interest in feeling powerful.

3. Power is about being able to make other people think and feel what you want them to think and feel.  This is, of course, the thing around which we’ve been spiraling.

It’s an illusion, of course.  You can’t make anyone think or feel anything, not ever.  That’s not how human interaction works.  And the closest you can come involves, well, understanding someone very well and doing everything in your power to meet his particular needs and push his particular psychological buttons.  Or, in normal-person language, “being close and attentive.”  Doesn’t look much like “having power” in any conventional sense, or in any sense that will make you feel less dependent upon contingent reality rather than more.

Because that’s really what this is all about, isn’t it?  The dependence on the contingencies of reality in order to get your psychological needs and desires met.  The fear that attention and admiration and love can all just disappear because someone else made a decision, or just underwent a random fluctuation of mind, and there’s nothing you can do about it. 

That part, I do understand.  I imagine we all do, but…I do, at the very least.  Which is the scary thing.  That little flicker of recognition and sympathy.  I don’t have to travel far outside my own head to recognize what causes someone to want to have a companion who is infinitely understanding and infinitely available, with no caveats or exceptions or inconveniently conflicting needs. 

It just takes a pretty big theory-of-mind failure to imagine that you can bully someone into being that thing.  Or, indeed, that you can actually get another person to be that at all, for real, through any means whatsoever.  There’s no metaphor, no theoretical amount of love or care, that will prevent someone from being an externally-existing brain whose processes are not actually synced up to yours. 

Once you’ve deluded yourself into forgetting that this is impossible, though – I suspect that there can sometimes be a strong temptation to use the BDSM-type stuff as a signaling mechanism.  It kind of removes the ceiling on how much validation someone can give you, in the short term.  For boring vanilla people, there’s a pretty tight cap on how demonstratively someone can show that he loves you and wants you to be happy.  He can go to bed with you, stay up late talking to you when you’re unhappy, etc.  These sorts of things indicate a theoretical maximum of perceptible devotion, and if you get them, either you let yourself be satisfied or you admit that you can’t be satisfied.  But if you can ask someone to do arbitrarily unpleasant things for your enjoyment, you can punch through that cap and get arbitrarily strong signals of devotion.  This seems like a very abusable drug.