Just a comment

[Pearlgem]

Still with you, Rachel. Some acts, as a submissive, strike you as especially meaningful and significant, helpful to your submission, and others mean less to you but you do them to please. But this is largely what subs do, in my opinion, and it's all okay so far. The very desire to please often invests the act with appeal and so the fluid dance continues.

But, I suspect this dynamic can go too far. You can dislike something but still be very engaged with it - humiliation and punishment spring to mind. But disengagement is something more difficult altogether. It's like the difference between obedience and submission. I don't know it others would agree with my definition, but I've always felt that obedience is to do with the outward manifestation of acquiescence and submission is from the heart. God save me from too much 'mere' obedience.
So,when subs on here claim to be feisty and not doormats (which they all naturally do), actually it needs to be true. Don't be merely obedient - hold out a little and make sure your Dom knows enough about you to lead you to real submission!

[leah06]

Still with you, Rachel. Some acts, as a submissive, strike you as especially meaningful and significant, helpful to your submission, and others mean less to you but you do them to please. . . .

But, I suspect this dynamic can go too far. . . . It's like the difference between obedience and submission. I don't know it others would agree with my definition, but I've always felt that obedience is to do with the outward manifestation of acquiescence and submission is from the heart.

Yes, doing something that does NOT speak to me because it's important to the other person can be tremendously meaningful to me. I think I'm seeing obedience a little bit differently, though. To me, the very act of obeying can be very meaningful. If I only participate insofar as an action resonates with me, then the interaction is less about submission than about mutual gratification. Participating despite the fact that something DOESN'T resonate with me invests the action with a certain kind of surrender.

But, not to get too fine-grained here, then it's not the act itself that has the significance - the act is meaningless. It's the obedience, the fact of wrestling with and twisting and reshaping the content of my submissive intuitions, that has the significance. So there's still a very real and meaningful event occurring.

Obviously it just comes down to the motivation. I can do something because it's clearly a submissive act that resonates with me, or I can behave out of trust or obedience or respect, but I can also perform the same actions just for fun, or as an indulgence to the other person. It's the last category that makes me feel, well, ironic, or inauthentic, or detached, but it certainly also makes me feel much more in control.