A lot of people seem to think that being a Dom is similar to being a manager, and whilst they may look like similar roles on the surface, I don’t think it’s a good comparison.
The reasons for thinking they’re similar usually come down to:
– A manger tells an employee what to do, like a Dom.
– An employee does what they’re told to do, like a sub.
– An employee gets rewarded (paid), like a sub.
– An employee chooses to be employed, like a sub chooses to submit.
I don’t think this is accurate.
First and foremost: There isn’t any power exchange or authority transfer.
In D/s, both people are equals, but one of them (the submissive) willingly chooses to submit by handing over control/power/authority to the other (the Dom) for them to use as they see fit. The sub could take back that control/power/authority at any moment, with zero consequences, but they make a continual choice to not do so, because the whole point is that they want the Dom to have that control. Likewise, the Dom, who wants a sub to give them control/power/authority, gets to choose how they use it.
In a boss/employee situation, they’re not equal; the boss (and bosses above them) are superior to the employee in terms of the company structure. The boss is then subordinate to their boss, and so on and so on until you get to the shareholders or the owner or the voter or whatever. Yes, an employee could refuse to obey their boss, but there would be consequences such as loss of earnings, loss of job, court-martial, or other legal and potentially permanent ramifications, the threat of which can effectively coerce someone into remaining employed when they’d prefer not to.
Secondly, the Dom, having been given the sub’s submission, is free to do whatever they want with it (within the negotiated bounds of the dynamic). As mentioned above, however, a manager is usually subordinate to their manager, and so on up to whoever is ultimately at the top of the organisational structure. This means that the manager (usually) isn’t able to use their authority over the employee as freely as a Dom can, because the company’s goals will supersede theirs. Likewise, an employee generally doesn’t have the freedom to negotiate their own limits/boundaries as freely as a submissive does, because of the whole losing-their-job-or-worse thing I mentioned above.
Lastly, there’s also the issue that a boss/employee dynamic is entirely transactional – employee does X for the company and gets paid Y by the company (it’s rarely the manager paying them). In D/s, both parties are there out of their own free will and each will have negotiated what they want out of the dynamic; but the same can’t be said for a boss/employee dynamic since the employee and boss are both contractually subject to the company. Everything the employee does is for the employer’s benefit, not the manager’s benefit, and everything the boss does is for the employer’s benefit too. In D/s everything the sub does is for the Dom’s benefit, and everything the Dom does is for the sub’s benefit (even if it appears to actually benefit the Dom on the surface); D/s is a mutually beneficial dynamic, whereas employee/manager benefits the company more than either of them.