Domination & submission _ the BDSM relationship handbook ( PDFDrive )

the two extremes of Dominant and submissive. I would venture to guess
that only about ten percent of the general population can truly count
themselves as Dominants, and another ten percent as submissives. The
other eighty percent of the human race falls somewhere in the middle; they
exhibit characteristics of either, or both, depending on a variety of
factors. These individuals should never feel pressured to decide whether they
are Dominants or submissives because in truth, they may be neither, and there’s
absolutely nothing wrong with that. Among the vanilla population, these folks
are simply thought of as being normal.
Unfortunately, in the BDSM culture, they are often considered confused, just
experimenting, or still learning when, ironically, it is often the case that an
individual has realized that he or she is a Switch only after a great deal of soul
searching, experimentation and learning.
Decades ago, being a Switch generally meant something else, entirely. The
classical definition of Switch used to refer to a person (usually a female) who
was always submissive to one person, and Dominant towards another.
Historically, this manifested
itself typically in poly relationships consisting of a male Dominant head of
household living under the same roof with two submissive females, one of which
was the more dominant. In such a scenario, the more dominant of the two
females is always submissive to the male Dominant, and yet simultaneously
always Dominant towards the other submissive female. The meaning of the
word has evolved over the past thirty years or
so to better serve the purposes of a post-modern BDSM culture that embraces
experimentation, self-determination and kink-tolerance. Even so, even
today, there are still many people who consider themselves Switches who
categorize themselves as such on the basis of the classical definition of the word.