“There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.”
— Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker
If you ever want to start a fruitless argument among any group of power exchange enthusiasts, just ask them “What’s the difference between a submissive and a slave?”
I’ve been involved in power exchange communities for over twenty years, and across all those years I’ve seen this same question asked, answered and argued over and over again, with no sign of progress toward a broad consensus. It is one of the Great Intractables of kink, destined to spur endless disagreement until end of the world, or at least the end of the Internet.
A big part of the reason why it is intractable is that different people have different reasons for wanting to draw the distinction in different ways. So instead of trying to give you a single definitive answer, I’m going to give you a question: why do you want to know? Continue reading “Slave or Submissive?”