Pull the pin — encouraging a brat

Too often I’ll meet a submissive who seems compelled to be a brat, but restrains themselves in scene for fear of disrupting the dynamic, or fear of breaking my “no topping from the bottom rule”. I desire a brat who feels safe to express themself in scene because contrary to challenging the dynamic, a brat’s resistance strengthens it.

Brats want to understand their dommes in a way that more passive submissives don’t feel compelled to. They’re curious button pushers, not to break the spell, but to feel how it works. A brat won’t try to flip a domme, and they still need to hear their praises once they finally behave. They’re safe while they’re creating tension, just as punishment for their push back secures them snugly into a scene.

If we are to treat dominance/submission quite literally, the idea of a brat being a desired submissive can still sound taboo. Are brat tamers trying to be stealth about their sadistic tendencies, or do they not feel capable of facilitating the scene without their submissive carrying it in some way? Is a brat not a genuine submissive, or will they in some way try to violate the consented dynamic mid-scene?

I think assumptions like the above arise from a fallacy of viewing our kink archetypes in the vacuum of kink alone. We all found kink by following our instincts about ourselves, as we already are, and slip into our roles as they feel natural to our own experiences— even if our archetypes are in heavy contrast to our daytime self, we can follow the thread in our histories to how we arrived at that place. A brat knows how they earned the ability to make a failed resistance attempt feel good and a brat tamer empathizes with that experience. It remains a structurally sound dynamic, given the brat tamer is truly able to empathize with the brat’s motivations for resistance.

It’s also of my personal opinion that the above fallacy is limiting many would-be submissive brats from exploring kink because they don’t feel they meet submissive standards, but don’t feel swayed to switching either.

The tricky part is that first moment the brat wants to engage in scene— are they giving up being a “good” submissive by giving in? To those who are new to exploring play it can feel disorienting when you’re trying to find your space in a scene, because it feels contraindicatory to the structure you desire. To someone established in their kink journey, this can feel like a challenge to an identity you worked hard to protect.

Either in kink or in your daytime world, if you’ve ever metaphorically pulled the pin on giving up on the idea of who you think you should be, I think you know where I’m going with this.

Essential to being honest with one’s self is detaching from the idea of who you want to be. Not to create a misunderstanding— there is a difference between having outlined goals for yourself and your path, versus the attachment to an idea of what you could/should/would be. This idea of our should-be self so often is rooted in our shame: the things others say that we internalize, our resentments from our upbringings, the invisible rules we follow and judge others for not following, as if they must also carry our burdens and behave as such. The idealized should-be self is not grounded in reality: the concrete in front of us, the things we are capable of now, and what we can reliably build on.

My self of this nature, who I theoretically should be, is counterethical to who I actually am, so I have to release my attachment to believing I can become an idea. In a kink space, this would be preforming myself in a dominant archetype that falls outside my scope of empathy and intentions for facilitating shadow work— a glossy latex sadist is deeply aspirational, but that is not my personal aspiration, or realistic alongside the work that is honest to my goals for my clients. When the brat releases their attachment to the idea of who they should be as a submissive, they pull the pin on their identity in the kink space. They give up on the idea of who they should be in a space that is supposed to be fun and exploratory— it’s called play, of course— and are able to reflect more honestly now on their motivations inside and outside of kink.