The Perfect Submissive Guy Blog Title

Recently a very good friend of mine shared with me some very painful details about a submissive mentorship experience that went horribly wrong. Those details were shared in confidence between friends and of course I am not at liberty to discuss them. Let us just say that my friends experiences did not meet the expectations for the mentorship and resulted in a lot of confusion and pain that should not have happened.

My point is this, similarly to the case with submissive training, there are a lot of misconceptions about what submissive mentoring is and what it should accomplish. My hope here is that sharing some facts about submissive mentoring will serve as a useful guide to the new submissive either wondering whether a mentorship would have value for them or who may be contemplating a search for someone to serve as his or her mentor. As with submissive training, along the way I will offer some illustrative examples from my own personal experiences.

What is a Mentor?

A mentor is simply someone who is more knowledgeable and/or more experienced in a particular field or discipline than someone brand new to that field or discipline. As an example, in the business world, new hires are often placed with a mentor who will help them learn the ropes of that particular business and understand the requirements of their new position. The mentor will also be there to serve as a counselor and adviser along the way, as the person being mentored begins to learn more about their new work environment.

Mentoring is a Relationship

Mentoring is definitely a relationship arrangement in the sense that the mentor will basically accompany the person being mentored along their path of learning. It is a personal development relationship. Thus, it is critical that the mentor have the best interests of the person they are mentoring at heart. The mentors objective should be to help the new person acquire the knowledge, experience, vision and behavior that will help them succeed in whatever the endeavor may be. In a real sense, mentoring is about shaping behavior and thought processes.

Mentoring is not Training

In the business world, there is great difference between a mentoring relationship and training. With training, a trainer, instructor or teacher simply disseminates information which a trainee or student then uses to increase his or her knowledge base of a particular subject matter and then will attempt to integrate that into improved performance or higher productivity. The same is true of BDSM mentoring relationships. Mentoring and training are two very different things.

Mentoring in the World of BDSM and D/s

In the context of BDSM and D/s, mentoring works very much the same way as in the business world. Since our focus here is on submissive mentoring, a mentor is simply someone with more knowledge and more experience in the lifestyle than the person they are mentoring. The mentor is someone who helps the novice submissive learn the basics about themselves, about what they are looking for and to help them discover in general what the BDSM or D/s is to them.

Mentors accomplish those goals in a number of different ways. They may serve in the role of a counselor by being a sounding board for the new submissive as the submissive attempts to look inside themselves and come to grips with what submission really means for them. Mentors may serve as a resource to answer the myriad of questions that every new submissive usually has. While not a trainer, a mentor may assist a new submissive in learning more about the lifestyle by recommending authoritative books or other reading material. The mentor then typically will ask the new submissive pointed questions about what they read, what they thought about it and what they feel they learned in an effort to help them gain perspective and to assimilate the information.

Where a New Submissive Should Look for a Mentor

Some will disagree with me on this, but please hear me out before jumping to any conclusions. Mentors should not be a person of the opposite role. In other words, as a submissive, you should not have a dominant as a mentor. New dominants are often mentored too and so the same is true from the opposite perspective. Dominants should not have a submissive as a mentor. There are several reasons why I believe this is true. If any mixed communications arise between the two people in the mentoring relationship, those kinds of issues will be more difficult to resolve if they are in the opposite roles. Also, when two people of opposite roles form a mentoring relationship, especially in the case of submissive females and male dominants, the character of the relationship can and often does change from a mentorship to a partner play relationship. This is a real problem because play should never happen within a mentoring relationship, period. That should be reserved for partner relationships or for a trainer if a the use of a trainer becomes necessary.

So if a submissive should not have a dominant as a mentor then where does one find a mentor? A mentor for a submissive should be another more experienced submissive. It might be a really close submissive friend, a more experienced submissive from a munch or another gathering for those involved in real life or in the online world, maybe a person you have noticed on a site like this who seems to have experience and a good handle on the practice of BDSM and D/s. You can generally pick those people out if you spend a little time in the forums reading the posts.

Really if you look at it, it just makes logical sense that if you are trying to wrestle with your submissive nature and figure out what it all means, how you fit into the lifestyle, wouldn’t it just seem natural that the person in the best position to field your questions about what it means to be a submissive would be another submissive, who in all likelihood at one time went through the very same thing you are struggling with? Dominants are great at many things but, since they aren’t submissive no dominant is ever really going to be able to identify with what it means to be submissive and so are not really in the position of performing the mentoring role for a new submissive.

The Value of a Mentorship

Here at the end I’ll throw in the illustrative personal experiences I promised at the beginning. During my first two years in the lifestyle, I had two mentors, one was a submissive female and the other a female switch who was at the time submitting to a male dominant and so was mostly operating in the submissive realm. My first mentorship was real life and when the submissive female believed that she had taken me as far as she could based on her own experience and knowledge, she introduced to me the switch who at the time had about 18 years of experience in the lifestyle.

I suppose some might point out that I was violating the very point I made in the previous section about not having a person of the opposite role as a mentor by having a switch as one of mine, yet that wasn’t really the case. Technically, yes from the dominant side of her nature she could have dommed me and played with me, but that was never an issue because she was far too ethical for that. In fact, it was from her that I learned that play should never happen within a mentoring relationship.

At any rate back to subject at hand, those two years spent with those women, both of whom had a great heart for submission and gift for mentoring taught me the things that provided me with a firm foundation and solid footing as I launched into the lifestyle. They helped me to understand my submissive nature, to identify submissive as my natural role within the lifestyle community and helped me decide what I wanted to do it with it which eventually led me to embrace it.

Along the way I also learned things like protocol, etiquette and how to understand where a dominant’s rights ended and mine as a submissive began. I did experience some casual play during this time, but never with my mentors. During the time I was being mentored by the switch, I was under her “protection” and when I met the very first Domme I would later submit too, she had to first speak with and satisfy my mentor that she had my best interests at heart. This is the expected protocol and you should be wary of any prospective dominant who seeks to circumvent it when you are under the protection of a mentor.

Mentorship I feel is very important for the novice submissive. There is light in our lifestyle but there is also darkness. Especially in the online realm there are too many wolves in dominant clothing and a new submissive, despite how intelligent and sophisticated they may be in the vanilla world, are unfortunately in many cases sheep easily taken advantage of by unscrupulous predators who are seeking nothing more than their own gratification and could not care less about the carnage they leave in their wakes. Having a knowledgeable, experienced and trustworthy mentor can make a real difference between a smooth transition from vanilla to the kinky side or ending up disillusioned and confused.