Domination & submission _ the BDSM relationship handbook ( PDFDrive )

In some ways, perceptions of Switches in the BDSM
community may be similar to how bisexuals are sometimes viewed by straights
and gays. Many heterosexuals have an
unfortunate tendency to view bisexuals as gay. Conversely, there are members
of the gay community who demonstrate a bias against bisexuals by
characterizing them as straight people playing at being gay.
Perhaps this is all due to the fact that we all have a very human need to interpret
our environments in simple terms. We want to see things as being black or
white. We really don’t like all those pesky
shades of grey in-between. It messes with our sense of balance; we want things
uncomplicated. You try one kind of sushi, discover that you don’t care for it,
and you say, “I don’t like sushi.” Never mind that there are literally thousands
of different kinds of sushi out there that you haven’t tried. That would be far too
difficult to contemplate.
This tendency to oversimplify things can lead people to believe that certain
things are opposites and mutually exclusive when, in fact, they are nothing of the
sort. Domination and submission
are not opposites, nor are they mutually exclusive in any way.
A person can be both simultaneously, as in the poly household with the
“Dominant submissive” who is always sub to the male head of the household,
and always dominant with the other female sub. Many people also
erroneously consider sadism and masochism to be opposites and mutually
exclusive. They are not. A person can easily be simultaneously a sadist and a
masochist and, in fact, it’s extremely common in the fetish lifestyle. If you’re
still having a difficult time wrapping
your head around this concept, consider this analogy: when a thirty-year-old
woman takes her ten-year-old daughter to visit grandma, she is simultaneously a
mother and a daughter. For the most part, no one thinks there’s
anything weird about that.