![A naked man hangs an American flag against a brick wall already covered with various classic American paraphernalia.
Today, July 4th, is America’s Independence Day holiday. All across the United States, people are celebrating principles such as freedom and justice. Reading the Declaration of Independence, I was struck by a part I never examined closely before:
[A]ll experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
As the authors of the Declaration of Independence acknowledged, people are often willing to suffer rather than to attempt to change for the better. Change is hard and no change is harder than a mental paradigm shift. As you know, today I describe myself as a submissive man, but this was not always the case.
So painful and so abusive was imagery and ideology of submissive masculinity to me as a teenager that, in spite of the awareness I had of my submissive and masculine desires, I refused to take on that label. Easier, I thought, to suffer the pretense of something that wasn’t really me than to make myself visible to others. What’s more, how would I go about making myself visible in the first place? Neither my submission nor masculinity were things I could accurately portray to other people?and it’s still a challenge to do this.
Indeed, I struggle with that almost every day. I often feel like I have to “pass” as a very different kind of man than the one I want to be. So do others. In a comment on Bitchy Jones’s recent post, Tom Allen shares similar feelings:
I’ve been thinking about how I hate to be associated with:
sissified sissy maids who insist on talking about their sissy clitty, and
exceptionally out-of-shape subby men.
I’ve become so squicked by these stereotypes that I’m letting my sub/bottom status card lapse when the registration comes up again. For some reason, these are the first images that seem to come up when people think about male submission, and I don’t blame them for being turned off.
Tom and I have come to different conclusions regarding how we choose to self-identify, but our motivations are clearly the same: the long train of abuses and usurpations that American culture has forced upon men. There are many things to be proud of America for, but let us not forget that the dream of a government instituted to secure the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people has not yet been fully realized.
-maymay
(via pornotumble)](https://web.archive.org/web/20160408013745im_/http://41.media.tumblr.com/PntOpj4qupdfzpf351GxralMo1_500.jpg)
A naked man hangs an American flag against a brick wall already covered with various classic American paraphernalia.
Today, July 4th, is America’s Independence Day holiday. All across the United States, people are celebrating principles such as freedom and justice. Reading the Declaration of Independence, I was struck by a part I never examined closely before:
[A]ll experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
As the authors of the Declaration of Independence acknowledged, people are often willing to suffer rather than to attempt to change for the better. Change is hard and no change is harder than a mental paradigm shift. As you know, today I describe myself as a submissive man, but this was not always the case.
So painful and so abusive was imagery and ideology of submissive masculinity to me as a teenager that, in spite of the awareness I had of my submissive and masculine desires, I refused to take on that label. Easier, I thought, to suffer the pretense of something that wasn’t really me than to make myself visible to others. What’s more, how would I go about making myself visible in the first place? Neither my submission nor masculinity were things I could accurately portray to other people—and it’s still a challenge to do this.
Indeed, I struggle with that almost every day. I often feel like I have to “pass” as a very different kind of man than the one I want to be. So do others. In a comment on Bitchy Jones’s recent post, Tom Allen shares similar feelings:
I’ve been thinking about how I hate to be associated with:
- sissified sissy maids who insist on talking about their sissy clitty, and
- exceptionally out-of-shape subby men.
I’ve become so squicked by these stereotypes that I’m letting my sub/bottom status card lapse when the registration comes up again. For some reason, these are the first images that seem to come up when people think about male submission, and I don’t blame them for being turned off.
Tom and I have come to different conclusions regarding how we choose to self-identify, but our motivations are clearly the same: the long train of abuses and usurpations that American culture has forced upon men. There are many things to be proud of America for, but let us not forget that the dream of a government instituted to secure the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people has not yet been fully realized.
(via pornotumble)