On Doms and Dommes and Everything Else

saratoga wrote here on the topic of dominant Males. The post and the comments are worth reading in their entirety. At one point, saratoga writes:

My personal belief is that it's the least secure males who outwardly express themselves as 'dominant' to Females.

Among the commenters was a Gorean Master and well, you can imagine the fur flying, so to speak.

In My experience, there is just no one way about things. I have met many women presenting as Domme who were in fact looking solely to submit. They used a Domme name/persona for protection (from, among others, some of the more aggressive "Doms" out there). I've met many a man presenting as Dom who, likewise, wanted mainly to submit. Rarely would those presenting as submissive be truly Dominant, although obviously many were switches, and others had an idea of "submitting" that, to be kind, needed a lot of work.

But the one constant is that confusion, "deception," etc., are not sex-defined. Are men more prone to a more aggressive approach? More likely to adopt the "best defense is a good offense" style of D/s? Very much so, as saratoga points out. But neither sex has any monopoly on unintentional or intentional deception caused by fear, inexperience, misplaced emotions, narcissism, sociopathy, or confusion. We shouldn't get led astray by the differences in surface manifestations, which are essentially chemical in nature.

We're all in this together . . . a thought at once inspiring and frightening. But fewer arbitrary lines can only help us all.