Femdom Problems: Being a Dominatrix VS Getting What You Want

I browse reddit when I’m bored, and this comment thread came up on /r/relationships from a user (reluctantmistress) with a pretty classic problem that happens more often than I’d like in femdom: the guy who can only understand his own needs, so a loving and indulgent woman who actually enjoys it gets overwhelmed with service topping to fit into his ideal dominatrix.

I met my boyfriend, Pat, when we were both in college. We were originally FWB, then realized that we wanted more. We started seeing each other seriously, and have lived together pretty happily for 3 years.

We are best friends. We can talk about anything with each other, and we have helped eachother through a lot of tough times. After we had been dating for a while, Pat confessed to me that he has always had a lot of kinky fetishes, and wanted to explore them. I agreed, because it seemed exciting and he was so happy about it. As we started exploring this stuff, I realized that I loved it too.

The thing is, though, that I really just like regular sex. Pat is very submissive, and even though I enjoy being dominant, it tires me out and doesn’t recharge me or give me as much pleasure as just regular, plain, PIV while gazing into each others’ eyes.

We have been doing 24/7 chastity for a while now (working up, making sure the cage fit, and being safe, obviously!) and it is so hard to be “Miss” during every intimate moment. Even if I unlock Pat, there still has to be a kink element, because if we go from kink to vanilla and vice versa, he gets depressed. We’ve also been getting more and more into RAK (risky types of kink) like scat, watersports, and cuckholding.

Things came to a turning point for me when I visited a bull and had sex with him. It was ok, nothing to write home about, but I just loved the fact that we were just having sex. I didn’t have to worry about picking nipples or saying the wrong dirty thing or whatever. I could just lose myself in the moment and be myself. I liked having this need met, but I want Pat to be the one to meet it. I guess I am just naturally monogamous.

We’ve talked about this for a long time, and have tried a lot of things. We’ve tried having different weeks or days where we’re kinky. It just made us both unsatisfied. I’m confused because I constantly feel like I am service topping – if things don’t follow a certain order or prescription, he gets depressed and shuts the scene down, which makes me feel like a failure and then wonder why I’m even doing this because it makes neither of us happy. Even if he isn’t in chastity, he is looking at porn on his phone. He admitted to me that when we have vanilla sex that he is imagining kinky stuff happening. That really broke me.

I don’t want to give up kink forever. I have my own kinks that I like, but when I try to intiate and I mess up the scene stops. I use kink to get Pat to do things like the dishes, or running with me, and he enjoys it, has even told me he prefers it to me nagging, but I just want him to do things without me putting on a show. I just want to top him my way, which sometimes means I’m in my pajamas. I don’t want to have to put on my sexy boots and use my sexy voice whenever I want him to pay attention to me.

I’m so sorry that this has turned into a rant. Anyway, any advice would be nice. We’re also involved in the local BDSM community, and gone to a lot of classes and workshops, and they have really helped our relationship but they haven’t addressed the big problem. I can’t really talk to any of our kinky friends because I’m ashamed of how I feel. People sometimes sh*t on vanilla people for being boring. I don’t want to be boring, I just want to be happy.

I’ve also talked with my therapist about this but she isn’t very knowledgeable about alternative lifestyles. I’m looking for a kink – friendly therapist or counsellor but I have no idea where to start.

tl;dr: My SO and I love eachother but our different sexual appetites are causing us to be unhappy. We want to fix this. What do we do?

See “Pat” find a loving, willing femdom. See Pat drive his relationship into the ground by treating her like a fetish dispensing machine. Pat, your girl is a super winner. I get that you have your fetishes, but you’re going to need to find a work around because right now you are trying to totally dominate that woman you call “Miss” harder than you’re even asking her to do to you. You need to stop that.

Poor OP. She’s even into it, but you’re wearing her down with this constant demanding. I mean really, now you demand kinky treats to do your house chores and just asking is “nagging”? Are you fucking kidding me? How is it that submission is your favourite thing ever, but anything that actually gives your Miss her way turns you into a sulky baby? Look, Pat, she will probably swear you are a great boyfriend and she’s probably right, but you are overwhelming her with your approach.

Think of it this way: I like sadism. I could torture a pretty man all day long. But there are limits of how to express things- I can’t torture someone 24/7 because that’s not safe or sensible or would probably lead to good emotional outcomes. RelectantMistress isn’t actually very relucuctant – she’s the very model of GGG (good, giving, game). However this is hitting against the thing other writers like Giles observed, the difference between letting someone have power and asking them to play out your dominatrix fantasy.

Okay, first it’s adult conversation time. Do you value your relationship? Good. You need to get your ass in gear and talk about that with her. I don’t know how she got the impression sex that wasn’t your fetish was boring, but mission number one is to take the focus off you and your locked cock and onto her- not because your fetishes are wrong, but because she matters too and her fetishes and interests are just as important as yours.

You, Pat are now going through the hardest orgasm denial of your life, the one where your cock absolutely belongs to her and not to you. No more porn and fantasy for now. You need to put as much effort into channelling your sexuality to please her as she’s been putting to please you. You love this woman, you know her intimately and you should have an idea what she likes.

I imagine that she’s put a lot of work into letting you know she finds your sexuality sexy, and that’s very comforting. However she’s set a good example about what love means, it’s time to reciprocate. True, how you perceive sex is filtered through your kinks, but you can at least make the effort- if she wants missionary sex without props and calling anything but her name, you can at least stretch to being her adoring fucktoy. Take some time to rediscover who she is. Practice that coo-ing romantic connection of sticky eyes, like when you first fell in love.

But on top of that, I want to talk about the house chores only being tolerable if dictated by Miss issue and the sulking if you don’t get kink. It’s really nice that she’s found a way to make boring adult responsibilities fun for you, but she shouldn’t have to nag you in the first place. Calling being reminded of something that needs doing, that you were failing to do ‘nagging’ is saying that neither her wants nor the task are relevant. Similarly, try to have a bit of quid-pro-quo empathy, imagine if every time you wanted kink she got depressed and moped and needed reassurance? I bet you’d feel pretty stifled. Being Miss is a fun thing for both of you, but the way you are subbing is turning this into a chore for her, not a joy.

Don’t blow it, Pat, give Miss what she actually wants, rather than what you feel like a dominant should want. Or she’ll eventually pull away to protect herself, after a great deal of crying and feeling sad and guilty and unloved, and you won’t have a Miss anymore.

I posted this here because I think this is relevant for all of us, and points to the fundamental problem in femdom as delivered by popular culture- we are rated at how well our kink pleases men, not by how it pleases us. This doesn’t make our partners bad people, but it is a common trap we can fall into. Femdom will never work as a major menu item unless her desires are part of the package and you cannot expect to get a lover who is all into your kinks how you like them only.

30 Days of Kink: The Penultimate Post

30 Days of Kink (in this case several days crammed into a post ‘cuz this isn’t tumblr) is drawing to a close. The last challenge is to pick your own topic, but this time they asked another question about my identity.

Day 28: How do you dress for kink/BDSM play?  What significance does your attire have to you?

99% of my “play” is a slightly kinked up version couple sex where I give him a hand job, and I’m wearing nothing, or whatever lounge wear I’d like. in a better organized world I’d be in scintillating lingerie, but sex tends to have a very broad unscheduled aspect. Particularly to Wildcard, who requires a certain degree of spontaneous, where Punish Tuesdays are as planned as it gets.

I like looking sexually desirable. I buy nice panties and stockings. I have a whole wardrobe of cocktail dresses and cheap heels, the latter the kind that cost less than $25 at chain stores which also sell hair clips to teenage girls and six packs of earrings. I like attention, assuming its polite and makes me feel like I’m in control. I find the constriction of corseting pleasant.

My female protagonists are fussy dressers, and I myself don’t like blindly throwing clothes onto my body. I see clothes as a visual medium for communication and like having the ability to express myself exactly how I want.

As far as the “Mistress” look, I’m more likely to throw together a feigned fetish costume than go all out- pleather booty shorts from another cheap mall chain that does a lot of club wear, bikini top from AA, knee high boots from that selfsame cheap accessory store. That’s about as far as it gets- I don’t own any latex or full leather- the cost being astronomical. Of course, given my druthers and infinite budget I’d probably aim more for dread Empress than dominatrix.

Day 29: Do you have a BDSM title (e.g. mistress, master, slut, pig, whore, princess, goddess, ma’am, sir)?  What is your opinion of the use of titles in general?

MISS! My title is something I like, but you are no obligation to use it unless we have a consenting BDSM dynamic. Pearl is fine otherwise, or Miss Pearl for branding recognition purposes. If I know you in real life I’m happy with my real name.

Asking I call you a title when I’m not in a dynamic with you is a little odd. That being said I get a little thrill from overly formal fussiness and I generally don’t think about someone whose handle is LordButt being called Lord and not just Butt. However I’m weirded out if SlaveButt insists he has to call me and all the other women Mistress or something, even if his dom told him to.

For my last post, I’m opening myself up to questions you are curious about and want answers to. So, folks, what’ll it be?

Real Life Again & Emotional Health

As mentioned, I’ve just come back from an Alaskan cruise, a family thing that was well appreciated but kept me away all last week. Despite the ability to create your own event (LGBT, friends of Bill W.) I resisted the urge to organize a floating munch. Wildcard insisted on using banked time to drive me to the airport and picking me up after. He brought my much beloved but bedraggled teddy bear to meet me by way of greeting. I spent the time working on me, with exercise and yoga and trying to meditate beside the pool and getting to know my largely absent father.

Wildcard had a crap time in my absence. Probably because I left him my summer cold for his already weakened immune system to wrangle, but also because he’s rather attached to his regular supply of snuggles. While I was away, he played with “Princess”. She ended the session in a crying mini panic attack not because he was hurting her, but because of his desire to know about what she wanted. Faced with the possibility of her own happiness, a yawning, overwhelming sense of inadequacy and failure took her out at the back of the knees. He comforted her, but she remained embarrassed Telling him “You and Pearl are so effortlessly cool and together, she feels so stupid losing it!”

He laughed, this is hardly unfamiliar territory for him… Or me. We often accidentally give the impression that we have a sort of infinite reserve of poise- its not unusual for people to confess how dominant and unassailable I seem, but the reality is a lot more mundane, from giggles and skip-hopping about to wallowing in insecurity. This is not unusual; my kinky friends are no more or less nuts than my vanilla ones, which is to say a good measure of both camps have doctors fine tuning our brain chemicals via a daily dose, while a bunch more really should be being looked after properly. We make do.

Last summer shit got nasty for me: food became inedible- I was unemployed, in the best shape of my life from trying to run my feelings off, and absolutely miserable. I took it as responsibly as I could, to a doctor to deal with to triage the immense and inexplicable pain I was feeling. Citalopram and therapy helped, definitely more so than the exercise had.

I’m upright again, a little plumper and better centred, and also employed, the latter most important in the unrelenting world of adult bills. Feeding you guy’s desire to read my stuff ain’t cheap.Trying to sum that up got me thinking- I feel like one of the big challenges is that the mundane of (kinky) life tends to get lost in making a narrative. You hear about me playing with Wildcard- not so much the sex dead week where one of us feels like the idea of anything other than vegging with a screen is a step too far to consider. You see little glimpses of ecstasy, you miss the weekend when I come back when he’s in a little self castigating spiral of doom because he’s too busy feeling like a bad boyfriend because he’s not in the mood for sex to notice I’m feeling sore, bloated and fragile, hardly horny at all.

I trailed comicon with the company of someone I see as effortless cool. Let’s call her “Tattoos”. Gosh, I thought. I hope she wants to be friends with me. She’s so funny and pretty! Tats, meanwhile was struck by my dominance and having a hard time internally not calling me “Miss” and kneeling.

I, of course, don’t see it. I see my often cheerful, consistently awkward self. Which of course gets complimented as confidence, as what is my own obliviousness or mechanical social performance doesn’t have a disclaimer to outside observers. Such is life.

 

The Pet Gentleman 2: Cover & Title

Just got back from a relaxing Alaskan cruise and into Montreal’s sticky summer weather. While I was gone Yumine delivered and provided four sketch ideas for book 2 of Catamite (AKA “The Pet Gentleman”). Before I make a selection I thought I’d share this for feedback from you guys. Drop me a comment, email or however you want to share what you think!

catamite2sketch

YuMine is an incrediably talented artist, and if I had my way I’d choose them all. Of course the demand of economy mean I have to pick just one. Maybe when I finally get a print edition it will have “illustrated plates”. 😀

The title of the next book with be “Understanding a Cruel Lady” as it looks more into how Annette fits into her society and what her life is like beyond breaking and taming her pet.

I’m currently looking at a tentative fall release, possibly in early October 2015, for the edited, polished and updated second book of the Catamite series. This not quite femdom romance (and definitely BDSM erotica!) has been many years in preparation and I’m extremely proud of how it is all coming together.

 

I’ve been asked if the art is mine- no, Yumine Guo is responsible for cover art. If you liked these, she has more stuff on her tumblr. If you are looking to hire an artist, she’s a joy to work with and provides knockout quality professional grade work with extremely reasonable pricing.

So, which one is your favourite? I’m leaning towards #1 or #4, although #2 is pretty spectacular, though possibly not in theme with the simplicity of the first cover.

(No idea what’s going on? Check out book 1 of The Pet Gentleman on Amazon to get caught up. Its been selling like hot cakes.)

And as always, a big thank you to the many readers and fans who have funded and encouraged me this far. I never could have done this without your enthusiasm, and your purchases help keep this site going and allow me to afford top quality cover art like this.

 

Answering: “Am I A Femdom?”

vintage_whipOne of the hardest things about being a dominant woman is still got to be that initial hurdle when you have to reach that question in the first place “Am I a femdom?

The usual answer is “only if you choose to identify that way”, but for many people, that’s not enough. What, after all, is femdom? What benefit is choosing the label of dominant?

I’ve said it before: the state of education for new or curious femdoms sucks and the parameters for how it is expressed in popular culture is depressing. Even undergoing a sort of renaissance on the subject courtesy of the internet’s impact on the widespread acceptance of BDSM, the fact remains that this is part of kink where getting shown the proverbial ropes is a random and unstreamlined process. New doms fall into this the same way they always did- because an idea or a relationship dynamic they encountered resonated with them, or because they met someone with that kind of chemistry.

Only, for female dominants, its hard to find stuff aimed at us to try to get comfortable with the idea or be intrigued. And some women genuinely like the black clad villian dominatrix archetype. But one of the hardest things about being a female dom is making the expectations gell with your identity, and most of us grow up with other personal archetypes than Wicked Wanda.

So, what then?

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