Control Tower

The Pleasure of Topping

by Mistress Matisse

Someone asked me recently, “So, I get what the submissive gets out of a BDSM scene. But what do you get out of it? Where’s the percentage in being the Mistress?”

My first answer was, “I like being a dominant for the same reasons I like French fries, Tinto Brass movies, or music by Prince. It feels good. It turns me on. It’s fun.”

That wasn’t good enough for her. “Yeah, but why does it feel good? What makes it fun?”

There isn’t a simple answer to this question, and I certainly can’t answer it for everyone. I’m thinking that other kinky people may see something of themselves in my reply, but I’m not giving you a homogenized BDSM sound bite here. This is my personal experience.

One reason I like it is that when I’m in my dungeon with a submissive, I get to create a world in which everyday rules don’t apply. In a good scene, my subject feels as if he/she has stepped into a parallel universe—a universe governed by my rules. In the everyday world, having someone smack you hard on the ass would cause you alarm or anger. In my world, you’ll like it, and you’ll want me to do it again. The power of being able to pull off such a reversal of the normal rules of society is intoxicating to me. But it takes two people to enter this parallel universe. If my subject won’t go, I can’t either. So I must seduce your consent and your trust, and give you mine, in order for it to work. The inherent challenge of this only increases my pleasure when I succeed.

This seduction can work in reverse, too. Sometimes someone will come to me with a fantasy that doesn’t, initially, seem like my style. I’ll begin the scene feeling ambivalent, only to be totally drawn in by how deeply and passionately the submissive gives herself to our parallel universe.

I do enjoy dishing out intense sensation, but contrary to what some may think, the pleasure I take from a particular scene is not necessarily hitched to how long or how hard I get to flog someone. If I just want an arm and shoulder workout, I’ll go to the gym. What I want is to effect a change in someone’s mind and emotions, even if it’s only for a short time. For some people, going to that different place may not require any physical stimulation at all. One doesn’t get an endorphin high just from non-physical dominant/submissive role-play, but a submissive can definitely drop into a different headspace emotionally, and that’s just as satisfying to me.

And then there’s the intimacy of it, because doing such forbidden things to someone creates a unique intimacy. I’m particularly fond of certain kinds of physical play—like using my TENS unit, or doing genital torment—because I can be very close to someone, and look into his eyes, while I do it. I will close my fingers and thumb like a noose around the narrowest part of his balls and begin—slowly, so slowly—to squeeze, and to pull, watching his pupils dilate and listening to his breath come in sharp little pants. If I lay my other hand on his throat I can feel his pulse beating faster. I can make his heart and his breath speed up or slow down again, just by flexing or relaxing my fingers a centimeter.

I like placing my submissive prone on my bondage table, with hands and feet secured and electrodes attached to his most sensitive places. And when I hold him close to me while he’s writhing and hissing in pain, pain that I’m creating, even if he’s a relative stranger to me, in that moment I feel so tender and loving toward him. I will stroke his cheek and kiss his face as he moans. In that moment, we are like lovers, straining together for an orgasm. “Feed me,” I say to him. “I’m hungry. Feed me.” That I dare to make this demand is an admission of my trust in him. And his desire to validate my trust is so strong that because I ask it, he will struggle to inhabit the pain for another minute, and then another, and another. Animal cries will flow from his mouth, and I will drink them like wine. In that eternal moment, we are each other’s whole world, and we find that world utterly beautiful.