Submission

What is submission?

Submission is the handing over of control itself. The act, not the person who performs it. It is the small s in D/s: someone hands decisions to another, within an agreed range and for an agreed time. The person who does that is called a submissive, but submission is what she does.

How submission works in practice

It is a transfer with an outline. What falls outside it does not go along.

Here is how it looks up close. The two of you agree that tonight he decides what happens and in what order. From that point on you make no more proposals; you only report how it is going. What is not transferred: that you want to be home by eleven, that your knees give out after ten minutes, that nothing goes on your face. Those things stay yours because you named them beforehand.

In Archives of Sexual Behavior, Kevin G. Casey and Brad J. Sagarin describe a relationship form in which, after negotiation, someone voluntarily hands control over part of their life to another, who carries the responsibility for it. One of the nine things they say this produces: power and control come apart. Whoever makes the decisions is not automatically the one holding the reins.

Where the word submission comes from

From the law, and there it meant something surprisingly precise.

The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal carries exactly one entry, SUBMISSIE, and it is not a scene word: it is legal language, defined as an “agreement to have disputes settled by arbitration”. A submissie was thus the agreement by which two parties gave a third the right to decide. Voluntarily, on paper, and over a delimited dispute.

That agreement still exists, it just goes by another name now. Article 1020 of the Dutch Code of Civil Procedure (Wetboek van Burgerlijke Rechtsvordering) says parties can “submit to arbitration” (“aan arbitrage onderwerpen”) disputes arising from one particular legal relationship. Not everything that runs between them. The third paragraph draws the other line: such an agreement “may not lead to the determination of legal consequences that are not within the parties’ free disposition”. So you can only sign away what is yours.

Line for line, that is the scene agreement. It is a parallel and not a borrowing: there is no evidence that the scene took the word from arbitration law.

Ordinary usage went the other way. In the newspaper archive, submissie returns 552 articles, and the oldest sits in the Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. of May 12, 1640: subjects must be brought to “soodanige conformiteyt ende submissie, als sy volgens Goddelijcke ende naturelijcke Rechten schuldigh zijn aen hem” (such conformity and submission as they owe him by divine and natural law). Nine years later it is about “de submissie ende ghehoorsaemheydt van ‘t Hof des Parlements” (the submission and obedience of the Court of Parliament). There submission is not a contract but a duty.

So Dutch has known the word in two flavors: the imposed and the agreed. In BDSM the second one survived.

Why people seek submission

Because not having to decide is different from wanting nothing.

Someone who carries the final responsibility on weekdays experiences a few hours without their own choices as air rather than loss. And it saves two people a lot of shuffling: there is no more doubt about who is in charge of what.

One stubborn image fell apart in a large sample. In Psychological Reports, Juan Carlos Sierra and colleagues asked 1,400 adults how often they had thoughts about dominance and about submission and how those related to their arousal. Thoughts about submission were linked more strongly to arousal in the men than in the women; for positive thoughts about dominance it was exactly the other way around. That is the opposite of the cliché in which submission is the feminine side.

Two caveats belong with it: it is about thoughts and not behavior, and the participants were all cisgender and heterosexual.

Alongside the gains, Casey and Sagarin also name five costs, and the first they write down is the room for abuse. An agreement that covers everything also covers the cases where the other person breaks the agreement.

Misconceptions about submission

“Submission is a character trait.” No, it is something you do and therefore something you can stop. The role is called submissive; that page is about the person, this one about the act.

“Submission means obeying.” Obeying is one form. There are more: serving, waiting, asking for permission, or simply not deciding yourself. A D/s dynamic without a single order can still hold submission.

“Whoever hands over control hands over everything.” Precisely not. Both the arbitration rule in law and the practice in the scene say the same thing: the transfer applies within one defined range, and about what falls outside it no one decides on your behalf.

“Submission belongs with pain.” They often occur together and they are not the same. Submission is about control; pain belongs with masochism, and those two can each occur on their own.

What I see myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, in the BDSM world since 1990 and trained as a psychotherapist. What I most often hear women describe is not a role but a moment: the second they notice they no longer have to think anything up.

That moment rarely comes from something big. It comes from someone choosing for you which way you walk. And the handing over almost always goes faster than the giving back; the way back gets too little time, even from people who do this often.

The second thing: whoever describes submission as “I do what I’m told” has usually not done a single one yet. Whoever has done it more often talks about an outline. This yes, that no, up to here.

What you can do yourself

• Say what you are transferring, not that you are transferring. “You decide the order and the pace” is workable; “I submit to you” leaves the other person guessing.
• Put an end time on it. A transfer with no end is not a transfer but a habit, and habits never get discussed again.
• Keep out what does not belong in it. Money, your work, and your contacts with others are not part of an evening.
• Arrange the way back before you begin. Agree who says out loud that it is over and how you get home.
• Walk away from anyone who puts the outline up for debate instead of respecting it. The room for abuse sits exactly there.

More on submission

On this site, D/s describes the relationship that submission is the lowercase letter of, submissive carries the research into the person, and dominant covers the same exchange from the other side.

Off this site, the article by Casey and Sagarin is the most worthwhile: it lays out nine gains and five costs of a transfer of authority, without making it pretty.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to know how such a transfer feels on a small scale without turning it into a relationship right away, that is on the BDSM date page. There the first thing worked out is what you would want to transfer, and that is the hardest part.

Sources

• Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, entry SUBMISSIE. Via the Geïntegreerde Taalbank of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, accessed August 5, 2026. Provides the only lexicographically recorded Dutch meaning of the word: noun (fem.), legal term, “agreement to have disputes settled by arbitration”. By comparison, the same search service gives two entries for onderwerping and zero for submissief. Only the existence, the part of speech, and the sense definition were established; the full article text stays unreachable behind Cloudflare.
• Article 1020 of the Dutch Code of Civil Procedure. Text in force as of January 1, 2026, accessed August 5, 2026 (the fragment was checked in the retrieved page). Provides paragraph 1: parties can by agreement “submit to arbitration” (“aan arbitrage onderwerpen”) disputes that have arisen or could arise from a particular legal relationship; and paragraph 3: that agreement “may not lead to the determination of legal consequences that are not within the parties’ free disposition” (“mag niet leiden tot de vaststelling van rechtsgevolgen welke niet ter vrije bepaling van de partijen staan”). Used on this page expressly as a parallel and not as an origin.
• Authority Transfer Relationships: Illuminating a Consensual Inegalitarian Relationship Form. Kevin G. Casey & Brad J. Sagarin, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2025 (DOI 10.1007/s10508-025-03240-0, PMID 41162821). A theoretical article that defines the authority transfer relationship as one in which one person, after negotiation, voluntarily hands control over part of their life to another, who takes on the responsibility for it. Provides two things here: the decoupling of power and control as one of the nine gains named, and the room for abuse as the first of the five costs named.
• The Association Between Sexual Cognitions of Dominance/Submission and Sexual Arousal Challenges Traditional Gender Roles. Juan Carlos Sierra, A. Jiménez-Olmedo, C. Pérez-Amorós & G. M. Sánchez-Pérez, Psychological Reports, 2026 (DOI 10.1177/00332941261430290, PMID 41773673). Self-report from 1,400 cisgender heterosexual adults aged 18 to 79. Provides that thoughts about submission, experienced both positively and negatively, were linked more strongly to arousal in men than in women, while positively experienced thoughts about dominance showed the reverse pattern. Only the abstract was read; the full text is behind a paywall.

Related terms

• D/s. The notation in which this act got its lowercase letter.
• Submissive. The person who performs the act, with the research into who does it.
• Sub. The label with which people place themselves on that side.
• Submissive. The same word in full, as it is used internationally.
• Dominant. The side that takes on the transferred decisions.
• Service-oriented submission. Submission that expresses itself in tasks rather than in obeying.
• 24/7. The form without an end time, and why that has to be agreed separately.
• Boundary. The outline within which the transfer applies.
• Safeword. The one thing that never goes along with it.
• Masochism. The other letter, the one submission is most often confused with.