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Roots...
It is my personal belief that D/s emerges from the most basic, primal, and instinctual triggers within the human body and human mind. You might say we have been conditioned through thousands of generations to accept and respond to situational intensity.
It is without doubt the submissive female's desire to attract the attention of, and mate with, the strongest or most dominant male in her sphere. This, in the biological sense, is to create the strongest babies and the highest potential for survival. Exposing herself to this larger and more dangerous individual created certain mutations in her responses. She desired to be more 'pleasing', and to be able to not only endure the violence he might inflict upon her but to, in fact, limit that violence by becoming aroused and shifting his attention from 'punishing' her to being interested in taking her physically. This met with her primary needs!
Regardless of the enlightenment of modern society, the men and women who are actively living a D/s lifestyle are reaching through those ancient traditions to summon forth behaviors that feel instinctively correct to them. It is my personal belief that in times when society encourages a lessening of traditional roles between the sexes, certain individuals (those with strong D/s aspects) internally rebel. For example, Women of today are required to let other people raise their children. The result that many women now see is a husband that leaves them (for the women are unhappy and unhappy women are not giving pleasurable attention to their men), children with grievous detachment from family and society problems (for the children are not bonding to the family), personal poverty (for the woman cannot earn at the level sufficient to independently raise their children) and personal loneliness and agony (for the shattering of the dream, the promise the instinctive desire to be with their mate).
As society or civilization changes, the desires of these men and women to interact on a more natural level with them become further challenged by the perceptions of extreme stress-related brutality of non-consensual physical abuse examples. Their interaction becomes the topic of great debate and criticism. To live in a manner they find comfortable, they must seek the shadows and corners. I believe that these components converge into a second secret society, much as any dissociation from the mainstream drives other minority groups to seek each other out for comfort, a sense of belonging, and access to new ideas and information. I think one final thing that should be noted here is that the difference that I see most clearly is in the desire to give in a loving way between both people. That encompasses the safety (of someone you love or adore), sanity (sharing what pleases both), and consensuality (the prevention of injury and the act of play for pleasure, not to hurt someone).
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