Onderdanige

What is an onderdanige?

Onderdanige is the Dutch word for a submissive (in the scene shortened to sub): the person who, in a BDSM relationship, hands over control to another. That transfer is agreed, bounded and reversible: the submissive sets the limits beforehand and keeps the safeword. Being submissive says something about the power balance, not about what happens physically.

How a submissive works in practice

Being submissive starts with choosing what exactly you give away, and only after that does the deciding stop. Only that second part looks like submission from the outside.

Take a first evening. In the talk beforehand she says which acts are allowed, which are not, and which word stops everything. Then something in the setup changes: she no longer sets the order, the pace, or the moment something ends. What she does keep doing is reporting how it’s going, because without that information the other person is playing blind. Afterward comes aftercare and, usually a day later, a conversation about what stayed with her.

The second form is easier to measure than to see. Ambler and colleagues randomly assigned fourteen experienced BDSM practitioners to the giving or the receiving role and had them do a Stroop test just before and just after their scene. In the receiving role the score climbed from an average of 92 points at the start of the day to 504 right after the scene; in the giving role nothing meaningful changed. The higher that score, the more effort it takes to process a conflicting cue. What the scene calls subspace is therefore not a figure of speech: there is a state in which the analytical part of the head works noticeably less hard, and in that experiment it appeared only on the submissive side.

Something practical follows straight from that. Someone who has just come out of that state can make poor decisions for an hour, and that is exactly the moment when people say goodbye and get into a car.

Where the word onderdanig comes from

The Dutch onderdanig descends from onderdaan, and onderdaan is originally not a noun but a past participle. Etymologiebank brings together three dictionaries that all describe it that way: the Middle Dutch onderdaen meant “subjected, subordinate” and was the participle of ónder-doen, “to place under, to subject”. P.H. Schröder adds the nicest detail. The adjective onderdaan was replaced over time by onderdanig; only as a noun did onderdaan survive, and then almost exclusively in the relation between a people and its ruler.

So linguistically the word carries a constitutional history with it: a subject is someone who falls under an authority they didn’t choose. That is the exact opposite of what the word points to in BDSM, and it explains why people trip over it so often.

Because in a BDSM relationship the movement runs the other way. Power exchange works, according to the encyclopedia, because the submissive’s surrender puts the other in their position, and it says there in so many words that the underlying control in reality lies with the submissive. What gets transferred are decisions: which act, how long, in what order. What does not get transferred are the limits those decisions have to fall within, and the right to draw a line through it halfway.

How far that transfer reaches is the only thing the variants differ in. In the shortest form it lasts an hour. In 24/7 it runs on with no end time, and in an M/s relationship it’s fixed in an explicit agreement.

Why people want to be submissive

The pull is in the letting go itself, not in what follows it. Hébert and Weaver interviewed nine dominants and twelve submissives and found exactly one benefit that belonged only to the submissive role: giving up control. Not the touch and not the pain. The handing over.

The payoff falls differently depending on who you ask.

• For the submissive the participants in that same study named psychological release, freedom from the roles of daily life, and being able to be yourself. For anyone who decides all week, an evening without a single decision is not a loss but rest.
• For the one who takes the lead the payoff is that something real is entrusted to them. Those same researchers describe dominants as empathetic and caring; those qualities only get a foothold once someone lets them in.
• For two people together the division of roles changes what gets said out loud. Crane and Ireland had 261 participants write stories and analyzed them with text software. The language mirrored the role: dominants wrote more about ownership, responsibility and the other person, submissives more about the power balance itself and about themselves.

There is one large comparison in which the submissive role was measured separately. Wismeijer and Van Assen gave 902 BDSM practitioners and 434 control participants the same questionnaires, and the submissive role scored less favorably there than the dominant one, but still more favorably than the group with no involvement in BDSM. Their conclusion was that BDSM reads more like a leisure pursuit than like psychopathology. Notice what is not said there. An outcome like that says something about who takes a questionnaire, not about what an evening of being submissive does to someone.

The same interview study also asked what disappoints people about their role, and the submissives named three things: vulnerability, bad dominants, and following orders and accepting decisions. That last one is no joke. The act the whole role rests on is also the act that weighs heaviest.

How people fill in the submissive role

By far the most people keep it small. Handing over control for the length of one agreed evening, and the next day deciding for themselves again what’s for dinner.

Alongside that, a few forms exist that mostly differ in what gets handed over.

1. Serving. The surrender lives in tasks: setting things up, caring, the schedule. That’s called service-oriented submission, and pain or bondage need not come into it.
2. Resisting. A brat does give the control away but doesn’t let herself be led there easily; the teasing is the form in which the surrender is offered.
3. Cared for. In DDlg and what surrounds it, the submissive role coincides with a caregiving counterpart, and it’s more about steadiness than about obeying.
4. Ongoing. In 24/7 and an M/s relationship the role doesn’t stop when the evening stops, and it’s usually written down somewhere.

For those who know both sides there’s the word switch, and that group is larger than outsiders suspect. That’s exactly why submissive is not a personality type: it’s a place you occupy for a while.

Whether such a version turns out careful or careless doesn’t depend on how far someone goes. It depends on whether there’s still feedback during the scene. A submissive who says nothing more isn’t deeper in her role; she’s simply no longer supplying information.

Misconceptions about submissives

“Being submissive is being passive.” No. The submissive supplies the whole frame the play happens within: the limits, the preferences and the safeword. Hébert and Weaver heard their participants describe themselves as people who want to give up control and want to please the other, and those are both active verbs.

“The submissive has no say.” The exact opposite. The encyclopedia states that the underlying control lies with the submissive, because the power the dominant exercises is borrowed and can be taken back at any moment.

“Submissive and bottom are the same.” Two different things that often coincide. The encyclopedia says outright that there is no requirement for the dominant to also be the top, or the submissive to also be the bottom. Someone who likes to feel pain and wants nothing to do with obeying is a bottom and not a submissive.

“Whoever is submissive in bed is submissive everywhere.” Also untrue. Hébert and Weaver noted precisely where the play role and the weekday person didn’t line up. The manager who lets herself be led in the evening is not a curiosity, but one of the ordinary patterns.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, in the BDSM world since 1990 and trained as a psychotherapist. The women who book me because they want to surrender almost all come in with the same question: am I doing it right?

That’s the question that has stayed with me the most, because it shows how hard people work at something that looks like letting go. What I say next is always the same: there’s nothing to do right here, there’s only something to report.

Beyond that I see two things every time. The first is that people find their own wish list the hardest part to make, much harder than the scene itself; anyone who has never written down what she wants can’t hand it over either. The second is that the dip rarely comes on the evening itself. It comes on Tuesday, and by then nobody is around who knows where it came from.

What you can do yourself

• Write down what you want to transfer before you agree to anything. “You set the pace and the order” is an agreement; “I’m submissive” is a label the other person can’t do anything with.
• Start your limits with what does not happen. A short list of excluded acts is more useful than a long list of wishes, and it’s quicker to write down.
• Agree on a safeword and use it once in the first ten minutes, so you know it works and the other person knows how they react.
• Keep reporting how it’s going, even when it’s going well. Silence gets read as consent, and that’s where a first time goes wrong most often.
• Arrange your way home before you start. After an intense scene your judgment is temporarily less sharp, so agree on who drives and when you need to leave.
• Walk away from a dominant who puts your limits up for debate. Submissives name bad dominants themselves as the biggest risk of their role, and that conversation never improves.
• Plan the next day in. A dip you expect is a dip you can catch; see drop.

More about being submissive

On this site, D/s explains how the relationship between the two roles is built, dominant describes the same exchange from the other side, and the article about the power of crawling is about one concrete posture in which surrender becomes visible.

Off this site, the interview study by Hébert and Weaver is the most worthwhile, because twelve submissives say in their own words what their role gives them and what disappoints them about it. Anyone who prefers to read the measurements will find the study by Ambler and colleagues free to download on the research group’s publication list; there both roles in the same scene are measured side by side.

Where this fits on my site

If you want to try the submissive role once without having to find a dominant yourself, you can do that with me. The page about the BDSM date sets out how such a session goes, what we go over beforehand, and how the aftercare is arranged. Still not sure whether this suits you? A short message is enough to find out.

Sources

• Perks, problems, and the people who play: A qualitative exploration of dominant and submissive BDSM roles. Ali Hébert & Angela Weaver, The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 24(1), 49-62, 2015 (DOI 10.3138/cjhs.2467). Semi-structured interviews with 9 dominants and 12 submissives. Supplies the description of submissives as people who want to give up control and please the other, the giving up of control as the only benefit belonging solely to the submissive role, the shared payoffs of psychological release, freedom from the roles of daily life and being able to be yourself, the contrasts between the play role and the weekday person, and vulnerability, bad dominants and following orders and accepting decisions as the drawbacks of the submissive role.
• Consensual BDSM Facilitates Role-Specific Altered States of Consciousness: A Preliminary Study. Ambler, Lee, Klement, Loewald, Comber, Hanson, Cutler, Cutler & Sagarin, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 4(1), 75-91, 2017 (DOI 10.1037/cns0000097). Fourteen experienced BDSM practitioners were randomly assigned to the giving or receiving role. Supplies the Stroop scores of the receiving role (an average of 92.3 at the start against 504.3 right after the scene) against those of the giving role, and the conclusion that bottoming is linked to transient hypofrontality.
• Dominants, Submissives, and Bottom-up Text Analysis: Exploring BDSM Roles Through Romantic and Erotic Narratives. Phoenix R. Crane & Molly E. Ireland, The Journal of Sex Research 60(4), 452-462, 2023 (DOI 10.1080/00224499.2022.2111400). Text analysis with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count of stories from 261 participants. Supplies that the language mirrors the role traits: dominants with more words around ownership, responsibility and focus on the other, submissives with more references to the power balance and to themselves.
• Psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners. Andreas A. J. Wismeijer & Marcel A. L. M. van Assen, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 10(8), 1943-1952, 2013. Comparison of 902 BDSM practitioners with 434 control participants. Supplies that the outcomes were more favorable for the dominant than for the submissive role and for both roles more favorable than for the control group, and the conclusion that BDSM is better understood as a leisure pursuit than as psychopathology.
• Onderdaan. Etymologiebank, with the entries from Van Veen & Van der Sijs (Etymologisch woordenboek, 1997), P.H. Schröder (Van Aalmoes tot Zwijntjesjager, 1980) and J. de Vries (Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek, 1971). Supplies that onderdaan is originally the past participle of onderdoen (“to place under, to subject”), that the Middle Dutch onderdaen meant “subjected, subordinate”, and that the adjective onderdaan was later replaced by onderdanig while the noun survived only in the relation of a people to its ruler.

Related terms

• Dominant. The counterpart of the submissive, and the same exchange described from the other side.
• D/s. The relationship the submissive is the little s of.
• Bottom. The role that undergoes the act, and the word submissive gets confused with most often.
• Service-oriented submission. The version in which a submissive’s surrender consists of tasks.
• Brat. The submissive who lets herself be pulled toward it rather than led to it.
• M/s. The most heavily filled-in variant, with ownership at its core.
• 24/7. What happens to the role when no end time is ever agreed.
• Drop. The slump that can catch a submissive hours or days after a scene.
• Boundary. The frame a submissive supplies and keeps herself.
• Position training. Practicing postures a submissive takes on a single word, and what her body notices of it.
• Paypig. A pronounced variant of the role, in which money is the means of surrender.
• Service. The scene word for the direction of serving, which also holds outside the submissive role.
• Service sub. The submissive for whom tasks are the core and pain need not come with it.
• Slave. The same direction, but with a wider reach and a longer duration.
• Female slave. The feminine form of the heaviest variant, and why Dutch has that form and English doesn’t.
• Submissive. The same word in English, with the dating that shows how young the self-label is. Submissief is the same term in Dutch spelling.
• Sub. The abbreviation people use as a label, and what those three letters do and don’t say about someone.
• Submission. The act this role performs, with the Dutch word history out of arbitration law.
• Duty of silence. The standing rule laid on this role most often, and why the word means two very different things.