Why I Won't Take "Submissive" Off My Book Cover
Why I Won't Take "Submissive" Off My Book Cover
Almost every man we meet at a bar or a restaurant says the same thing. He looks at my book, nods, and says, "my wife should read this." And then he will not buy it. He is too scared to bring it home.
"Every man goes, my wife should read it. But they say it in such a weird way that it makes me uncomfortable." — Master
One guy in our chat literally said, "I can't afford that to my wife. She's going to divorce me." That reaction, that flinch, is the entire reason I wrote the book. And it is the reason I keep getting told to change the title.
The word everyone is afraid of
We chose a hard title on purpose. Why Submissive Women Are Happier. People read the word submissive and their brain goes straight to one place: a collar, all fours, a man saying go fetch me a beer. So men feel guilty buying it, and a lot of women feel insulted by it.
We even joked about printing a removable paper cover with a softer title, so people could peel it off and drop it in a basket by the cash register, the way you would hide an erotic novel on the subway. Because that is what people actually do. They judge the cover, every time, no matter how much they say they don't.
Submission is not slavery
Here is the line that the whole book turns on:
"If you're not strong, then it becomes slavery." — Marian
We actually pulled up the dictionary on the show. The definition of submission is "the action or fact of accepting or yielding to a superior force, or to the will or authority of another person." That is it. There is nothing degrading in there. The bad reputation came later, from actual slavery, from the boats we don't name.
What I write about is the opposite of that.
"In my book, it's an actual act of conscious submission to gain something in exchange. It's a partnership." — Marian
A slave has no agency. A strong woman who consciously chooses to submit to a worthy partner, for growth, for a shared goal, is doing something completely different. When Master met me, I was lost and looking for purpose, but I was strong. You have to be strong to say yes.
The starfish problem
This is where it gets funny, because the women who announce that they are submissive in bed are usually the most boring ones.
"A submissive woman in bed is super boring." — Marian
It becomes the starfish. You just lie there and let the man do everything, and you call that submission. But that is not submission, that is not knowing yourself. Real submission, in bed or anywhere, still runs on communication. You have to know what you want before you can hand someone the lead. Lying there doing nothing is not surrender, it is just being absent.
"Astrological Love" became a bestseller
Someone in our chat dropped the perfect story. A woman named Nora Eden wrote a book called Astrological Love in 1982. It sold almost nothing. A man bought the rights, changed the title to How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time, and it became a bestseller. Same book. New cover.
That is the whole game, and it is why I do not believe selling out is a real thing.
"If you make art and you make something, you just want more people to access it." — Marian
If a real literary agent, someone with prestige, told us to change the title to reach more women, we would do it. Not because we are weak, but because that is submitting to a higher authority who knows the field. Even Robert Greene called his book Mastery, not the word we would have used. He went mainstream. We chose to stand right on the line.
I became a businesswoman by submitting
The biggest myth is that a submissive woman cannot grow, cannot build, cannot lead anything of her own.
"I became a businesswoman by submitting to you, Master." — Marian
I became Piper Blush. I built a brand, a business, a whole life, all of it downstream of one conscious yes. Submission did not shrink me. It fast-tracked everything. It made me less anxious, gave me purpose, and let me blossom into my real self instead of the self other people wanted.
We ran a live poll on the show, my title against the new one. Mine won, 67 to 33. But honestly, I would still change it for the right reason, because the goal was never to protect a title. The goal is to get more women to that same yes I said, with their eyes open and on purpose.
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