Yin, Yang and Leadership
This is a piece about perceptions and misperceptions of the exercise of power. We typically think people with power are very "yang energy" -- very stereotypically masculine -- and that "girly" (yin) qualities are not conducive to gaining or exercising power.
..I typoed it and wrote Mz ...It was six weeks before it crossed my little pea brain that people might interpret that as a feminist handle.At which point I decided it wasn't important enough to bother changing "because no matter what I do, people accuse me of being a feminist and imagine I walk around dressed in black leather with a cat-o-nine tails hanging out my back pocket just in case I run into some guy I want to dominate."
That's a story about how I ended up being Mz on Hacker News, an overwhelmingly male forum.
I kept that handle until I hit the leaderboard and it stopped being "Funny, ha ha, the actress in a Nazi uniform in the back pew of our Black church is dressed that way because she's in a play." And began being more like "WHY is the honkey at the pulpit in our Black church in a Nazi uniform???"
I changed it to DoreenMichele, my actual first and middle names, and was briefly given crap by people acting like "You aren't FOOLING anyone, bitch!" As if using my actual name is a slick move to hide my identity.
No, I'm not a dominatrix. I don't even self identify as a feminist. I'm a divorced former homemaker just trying to figure out how to make my life work now that I don't have a husband providing for me.
And that's apparently too feminist and strident for some people. A gal wanting to like eat and pay rent even though she's divorced. How outrageous!!!
Because I get this vibe all the time online that just minding my own business and trying to make my life work must mean I'm some weirdo dominatrix. And, to my aggravation, some men apparently wish I were.
I'm NOT. I'm absolutely certain I'm NOT.
Because when I was getting divorced, I made the conscious decision that if I was psychologically screwed up and some kind of subservient weirdo and maybe that's why my life didn't work, I would rather that be harmless head games in the bedroom and not a repeat of my dysfunctional marriage.
To kind of test that hypothesis, I spent one night with a guy who identified as "into BDSM" whom I understood prefered the Dom role though he never outright said that. I never wanted to see him again and ultimately concluded he was a bigger butthead than my husband and a loser who liked ordering people around because of his deep personal insecurities, so feeling like he was in charge in bed over someone eager to be ordered around for titillation was an emotional rush.
I concluded firmly: That's a NO from me.
BDSM: Not my thing.
And if it's yours, I think you probably need therapy. I already did therapy, thanks.
That's a long way of saying, no, you can't actually infer sexual preferences from someone's job title. This post is not suggesting you can.
And I'm also not suggesting "servile" personality traits obviously lead to weirdo sexual predilections.
But I do want to start by saying public media tends to assume powerful people are all Doms in bed and then if they do a fictional character who has power at their day job and is a subservient weirdo in bed, they make up stuff about it being evidence the job is too much stress or it's a counterbalancing emotional experience to the experience of issuing orders all day.
That seems highly unlikely to me. That's not how people typically work or how life typically works.
My recollection of the episode is they portray it like "You would never guess the weirdo sexual predilections of this man with power." And probably imply or suggest those weirdo predilections are a negative reaction to or some kind of emotional compensation for being in charge of other people all day out in the world.
The reality is that powerful people often live to serve and frequently have servile personalities or at least some such traits or -- said another way -- they have a willingness to do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals.
People frequently are keenly aware that people in power are often willing to do whatever it takes but that's not usually viewed as meaning "Even be polite and diplomatic to people I absolutely loathe with the fiery fury of ten thousand suns."
No, they typically think it means something basically synonymous with you know, ordering people around and being a jerk, exactly like I imagine a Dom in bed does!
People with servile personalities or personality traits and power are people who serve a larger cause and they are typically unwilling to be your bitch socially, if only because it would undermine the cause they serve.
Someone who is inclined to be a "bottom" sexually isn't necessarily different emotionally or psychologically from what powerful people do as the big boss making things happen all day. Contrary to what many people seem to imagine, people in power spend much of their time being diplomatic to a long list of people in a fashion many would characterize as butt kissing.
And they are often being diplomatic to their social lessers, such as a politician being friendly with the voters because they want to be President.
If someone has power and also happens to be subservient in bed, you should probably assume their power grows out of their conscious use of their subservient traits to serve a larger cause.
(No, I'm not suggesting people in the Epstein Files who rigged elections are highly effective servant leadership types. Please just don't go there. I'm not talking about pathological people here.)
A lot of people probably dream up these illogical explanations for what is going on because they haven't had that kind of power themselves. So they don't know from firsthand experience that powerful people spend a lot of their time being polite and respectful and considerate to people with much less status than they have or people they loathe but need to broker deals with.
And I guess they also don't really think too much about it, because that seems obvious to me, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem obvious to most people.
The accumulation of and exercise of power isn't typically experienced by powerful people like the little people often seem to imagine it is. It's frequently experienced as servile and as being a small little speck trying to wrangle a thing much, much larger than themselves, such as:
A project, a company or a nation.
If they are any good at what they do, their primary relationship is probably to THAT much larger entity and it's most likely a constant battle to be adequately "kowtowing" to the individuals you need on board to get them on board and keep them on board without letting an endless stream of jerks derail the whole thing by egomaniacally making it about themselves and their agenda because they think you are sucking up to them as individuals and don't realize you are doing whatever it takes to move a larger goal forward -- even sucking up to a JACKASS like YOU.
People frequently react to diplomacy with thinking "You're my bitch." I know that because I was raised by a woman whose ancestors were European nobility and she was big on manners and people routinely misinterpret my manners as "Doreen is a doormat and likes having people wipe their boots on her."
No, I don't. And if you do that to me, I immediately start moving you out of my life to the best of my ability.
No one in power really wants to tell you that. No one really wants to suggest that power is often wielded by servile personalities or people with some such traits and it's the so-called "butt kissing" that puts them in power, not the barking of orders.
So then when people are aware some politician or whatever is "a weirdo" in bed, people invent explanations about how the burden of power is messing up this person's mind and being servile in bed is the opposite of issuing orders all day and they decide it's a kind of emotional venting rather than actually in some cases exactly like being polite to the head of state of an enemy country while trying to meaningfully broker peace.
I've spent a lot of years thinking about such things because I'm diplomatic and people think I'm supposed to be a doormat and their bitch because I have manners.
I see the pattern in part because having manners and being diplomatic while I caught hell nonstop for being a woman with a relatively high status on the aforementioned overwhelmingly male forum Hacker News is a very large part of how I made the leaderboard of Hacker News.
It's kind of a meaningless accomplishment. It certainly doesn't pay my bills and I no longer participate there and I wasn't really seeking power, though I was aware that -- at least for men, like Patrick McKenzie -- it was potentially a path to open doors and gain access to the old boys' club and the money and power that goes with that.
But: Behaving yourself on Hacker News is a baseline expectation for being there at all. They rate limit people who don't, so making the leaderboard implies you probably aren't rate limited because it takes substantial participation to get there.
I've been given crap my whole life for being too tall, too athletic, too mathy and too opinionated. Those things get interpreted as masculine traits and for the life of me I absolutely cannot fathom how having opinions is somehow manly.
I have opinions like your stereotypical full-time homemaker Auntie who is a chronic source of embarrassment. So, I mean, we have that stereotype of a loudmouthed woman relative you "can't take anywhere," so I absolutely do not understand this CRAP I get about how I'm too masculine because I have opinions.
Servant leadership is a concept and a standard phrase. I didn't come up with it. There are books on it.
Yet, somehow that seems to not alter public perception that "The people with power are clearly all Doms SEXUALLY!!!!"
Real leaders who are big names in charge of big things who are very successful are frequently servant leaders and you aren't likely to hear most of them described as servile because they are almost always male and calling someone servile is considered emasculating.
But real leaders go ask everyone what they want and figure out how to sell the same idea to large numbers of people based on different elements. And they frequently give away credit rather than take credit because their goal is to get something done.
Giving people credit for the piece they did helps keep them on board and willing to work with you again.
People who steal ideas and take credit for the ideas of other people sometimes manage to appear to have power but they don't really serve a larger cause and they don't really lead. It's a false front that people imagine they are leaders. They aren't actually leaders, even if they managed to rig a presidential election and have the right titles and trappings of power.
They may be well-paid figureheads with nominal power because of the job title they hold, but such people don't really have the skills required to accomplish the kinds of things a leadership role demands.