Entitlement

Posted by Tanos on Sat 13 Jan 07, 11:33 PM

One of the most interesting aspects of my relationship with lili is the way we revisit ideas from previous years in a new light or with new clarity. In the year since popi joined my household, one of the concepts we've been trying to turn into words is what we now call "Entitlement". This started as an idea to guide property, but over the holidays I realised that it also gave a name to an important idea for owners too. Yesterday, the word cropped up on the "Narcissism and D/s" thread on The Slave Register, and so I'm going to try to explain how we use that word now, and distinguish it from narcissistic entitlement.

Back before I met lili, I started off saying that everything in a slave's life is a punishment or a privilege. Then I read about Transactional Analysis and its idea that negative strokes, or negative attention, is better than no strokes at all. So everything in a slave's life became a privilege, starting with being a slave in the first place, and my idea of the Dominance Economy (by analogy with TA's Stroke Economy) underlined that, since competent dominance is a relatively scarce resource. This idea of working to view things as privileges has been the basis of our terminology until recently.

But last year we started talking about entitlement, which is the converse of privilege, and better captures the set of perceived rights that are lurking in a slave's subconscious (or conscious), waiting to be dug up and set aside. The word right is also not ideal in that it sounds like something the individual really should have unless it's carefully qualified, whereas a feeling of entitlement implicitly raises the question of whether the feeling is justified.

These feelings of entitlement connect with the concept of reactance: the drive to reassert freedoms which wells up when freedoms are threatened or removed. Many submissives enter relationships with a strong desire to lose everyday freedoms (such as starting to eat without having to ask permission), and so it is the deeper freedoms associated with entitlement that lead to drawn-out episodes of reactance. It's also the case that entitlements can arise during a relationship, as practices turn into habits, then into customs, then into expectations which give rise to feelings of entitlement. (If a slave is always required to sleep with her master on a particular night of the week, there is a danger that she eventually comes to see this habit of his as an entitlement of hers.)

I also believe there is a subtle connection between reactance and terminology, as feelings of reactance arise from the emotional parts of the brain and are some of the oldest and deepest aspects of the human psyche - along with love, hate, jealousy etc. Overcoming these feelings requires reevaluating the situation with the cognitive parts of the brain, and this is made easier by having the words to express these ideas to yourself. For instance, to see that sleeping in her owner's bed is a "false entitlement", and that false entitlements are not something a good slave wants to be carrying around.

At the end of last year, I realised that entitlement is also a very useful word for an idea that I'd not really discussed before: the sense of the rightfulness of an owner making use of their own property. A master has every right to send slaves off to fetch things; to access their bodies at times of his own choosing; to have doors opened for him; to take the last seat on the train while his slave stands. These are all part of "Being a Master, 101", and are internalised during the setting aside of unhelpful ideas from his vanilla upbringing, at the start of his first M/s relationship. But I'm now referring to this rightfulness as "entitlement", rather than just illustrating it with examples, and that meshes very neatly with the lack of entitlement on the slaves' side.

Just as slaves have to step back and analyse their own false entitlements when they come up, I do sometimes still find myself thinking without that corresponding sense of entitlement - in a way that's very different from seeing my entitlement and choosing not to act on it.

Over the holidays, I caught myself doing this with potatoes of all things! As part of post-Christmas diet plans, lili is now putting each type of food out in serving dishes at dinner time, rather than directly on to our three dinner plates. The reasoning is that we then take what we really need, rather than clearing our plates. Now lili also makes very nice mashed potatoes, and after eating the first lot of food I'd put on my plate (one of everything), I then decided to go for more potato. But, being brought up properly, and never before faced with serving dishes except at formalish dinners and Christmas dinner with my parents, I found myself falling into the trap of not taking as much as I wanted to be "fair" to lili and popi. Not to be nice to lili and popi, but out of a misplaced sense of equality. Only when I'd made a fourth assualt on the pile of mashed potato did I start to realise what I was doing, and we ended up talking about it using the concept of "entitlement" (rather than me having to give some other examples to explain what I was getting at this time.)

The TSR thread that prompted this post was about "Narcissism and D/s", and the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder came up. These include "has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations", and I pointed out that this can sound very like an owner to people in the BDSM play scene (and vanillas). But it's carefully qualified by "unreasonable" so it is an irrational sense of entitlement: eg treating waitresses as slaves in our case.

Whereas treating your own slaves as waitresses is an entirely reasonable entitlement.

Edited Mon 26 Feb 07, 3:05 PM by Tanos