“Put your left arm up. Make a fist. Stretch your fingers, one by one
…
Slower!”
Let’s take a dominant person (Dom) and a submissive person (sub) as an example. The Dom provides the assignments and the sub is obliged to carry them out.
Useful Assignments
Most of the time, these assignments are functional and help the Dom to do the things he/she wants. “Spread your legs!” is very functional for example, when you want to see or do something in between those legs. “Make me some coffee” is also very functional, aiming to get a certain result, so it’s useful.
If you want, you can even separate the useful assignments (get my whip, undress) and the assignments with a more common purpose. When talking about common purpose, you can think about things the sub should have done already, like chores around the house, be on time, shave properly, etc. But by turning this into an assignment, it will suddenly give the Dom extra control.
Useless Assignments
However, there are also Doms who “apparently” hand out useless assignments. I put the word “apparently” in quotation marks because I will explain the use of these kind of assignments in a moment. For now, I just call them “useless assignments”. Assignments that are not necessary for playing and additionally serve no purpose. Things like “put your arm up”, or “look at the floor”. Or “Call me Sir/Madam when you speak to me”.
The usefulness of these instructions might not be evident immediately, but it can be summed up in a single word: humiliation. We are not talking about excessive forms of humiliation like swearing at someone or make a fool out of someone…. no, we are talking about the basics of the word “humiliation”.
When a Dom hands out an assignment that does not serve an immediate “purpose”, then it will be even more clear that this its intent is solely to serve the Dom.
“You’re not doing it because it’s useful, you’re doing it because I want you to do it.”
That’s where you find its strength. Here you will feel that you have the power to instruct your sub do things which are not immediately useful or serve any purpose. The only thing that’s important is surrendering to the Dom by doing what he/she wants you to do, even if you can’t see why it’s useful. You don’t have to agree, as long as you’ll do it.
…an assignment in humility…
now first put that hand in the air
