I have mentioned before that I was dominant from the moment I was conceived. That fact does not have anything to do with my kink life, although it does a bit with my WLR (women-led relationship) life.
My whole life, I have been self-directed. I have always trusted my gut, never sought a mentor, and never taken advice without a second opinion from myself. I have made decisions to move across the country without a job, knowing that I was going to be just fine. I have very rarely experienced any doubt or anxiety about anything.
People who meet me and spend time with me frequently say I’m “brave,” or that they want to be like me when they grow up, or that I helped them make decisions by encouraging them to trust their own guts.
That’s what I mean when I say I was dominant from the moment I was conceived. I lead myself 100%, and through doing that, I end up leading other people. I do it at work, I do it with friends, and I do it in intimate relationships, because that’s just who I am. The majority of partnerships I’ve had have been vanilla, but they have still been WLRs.
For kink, I could just as easily have been a submissive bottom. There are many women (and men) who are dominant in their personality but want to submit in the bedroom. It’s just what they like.
I am not one of them.
When I was 19, I had a boyfriend who was not a masochist but was very sex-positive. He was the first lover I’d had in my young life who wanted me to be satisfied as well and who knew what he was doing. One time during sex, he looked up at me and told me to do what I was thinking in my head. I bit him, hard, and had a great orgasm.
So I learned I was a sadist, even though I didn’t have the vocabulary for that until later.
So I have a dominant personality and also happen to be a sadist. I also happen to be happier and more fulfilled in relationships where I lead. And I’m even happier when I have things taken off my plate by someone who wants to make my life easier. That man could be vanilla or a self-identified submissive—kink is in the intention.
What this all means at the end of the day is that I cannot teach anyone how to be dominant like me. It also means that I do not need a submissive to be dominant. I don’t put this on and take it off. It’s not a role. It’s the fundamental core of my personality—of me.
I can teach you how to top—how to act like a sadist even if you’re not one. I can teach you how to decenter men, if you’re willing to do the work and buck millennia of patriarchal conditioning. I can share my practical experience of being in a WLR, D/s dynamic. I can probably even help you be more assertive, but if you’re not naturally dominant in the way that I am I can’t teach that to you.