Chevenga...

I'd never do such a thing.

Good Gods, of course my readers are smart.

But in all seriousness, I had heard the idea that publicly high-powered types have a tendency to be privately sexually submissive, and it made a lot of sense to me, because it's a balancing, a relief from constant responsibility. And of course I think it is cool, just as I think all quirkily-ironic ways of being human are cool, and fun to write about. Just now I wondered if I could Google up some substantiation.

Here is a newspaper article which talks about BDSM intelligently and without derision, and touches on this notion:

And, ironically, those you'd expect to wield the whips and paddles behind closed doors would often sooner be muzzled, flogged and nipple-clamped into submission, says [Calgary sexologist Tina] Read.

"The high-powered exec type or control freak outside the bedroom generally likes to have someone control them inside the bedroom," she says. "It's probably the one place they let themselves be vulnerable and open, and trust enough to lay down their guard."

Yet that is mere anecdotal evidence. Might there be a study about it? Ta da ...specifically about submissive men. The results suggest that, like auto-asphyxiation, it's not quite but almost exclusive to white guys, and there are some intriguing regional differences ("...there is something about New England that tends to create a disproportionate number of submissive men"). And:

Twenty-two percent own their own businesses while sixty-eight percent work for others. (Six percent are retired, one percent is unemployed and one percent keep house while the wife works). A whopping forty percent have employees for which they are the direct supervisor. I do not have benchmark against which to compare that, but I suspect that it is inordinately high compared to the population overall. Furthermore, forty-one percent consider their job “high-powered” and fully fifty-five percent consider their job high stress.

So there you have it. Not incontrovertible proof, and the author points out that we can't know the reason or even which way causality goes from the correlation, but a strong correlation.

With Chevenga, however, it's more complicated (as it always is with him) in that his high-powered job is framed culturally as submissive, and he's been strictly trained to that. You'll see that contradiction come more into play (in non-sexual contexts) as things go. He's actually about to be told pointedly that he has more power than he's really supposed to, maybe in today's post; we'll see how it goes.

Just to warn you guys, I'm not going to just give the answer to this quiz when I close the poll once voting has plateau'ed out. You'll just have to keep reading, until you find it tidily answered in a certain chapter of asa kraiya.