What’s Wrong With All The Submissive Men?

Submissive men, as a group are not ok

Relax, this isn’t a hate piece. I’m being sympathetic and trying to solve the problem that a countless horde of submissive men have brought to me to solve. Just get a cup of tea and get comfy while I focus on you and fixing why you are so lonely and unhappy, ok?

First, who am I to speak about the problems of submissive men?

This problem has been made my problem because submissive men keep asking me to solve it. If you are a dominant woman in the internet, you will be a magnet to the lonely “please help me” queries of sub guys.

I still think we are some of the least qualified people to opine on finding a domme precisely because we are the last on the list of people trying to date us. Nonetheless, beyond the usual how to find a domme/how to find a mistress articles, some challenges are a little out of scope of simple check lists or quick tips. Brace yourself, this will be long.

Often a submissive man asking me also has no idea how to find a vanilla partner, or if he can have one, how to talk with her about getting his needs met. With that as a starting place, unpacking how to help him is a big ask indeed.

So why still try? I like men, so I’m interested in them. I don’t just like them as people to fuck, or boss to obey, but as a nerd, I spent a bunch of time in male heavy spaces from my youth. Being part of the minority of women in a stereotypically male hobby came with having a lot of male friends. Then, these guys would repeatedly seek in me a soft safety and social toolkit their male peers didn’t have. So I am not a therapist, but I’ve been drafted into trying to help guys. A lot. And I am (mostly) ok with it and doing it.

Unlike many she-nerds, I escaped the identity of being Not Like Other Girls and am largely comfortable with the fact that I couldn’t escape the pressures on my own perceived gender by opting out of normal. Nonetheless, I was not blind to the fact that the boys were Not Ok. And I was drilled enough both in my right to rule as benevolent princess, and my toolkit of humanism that I almost immediately wanted to know why it seemed to suck so freaking bad for the individuals of the so called ruling gender.

Submissive Men definitely have a problem

You guys get it coming both ways. You’re under immense pressure not to let your kinks show, as your desires transgress masculinity in ways we put a lot of effort to punishing men who do. On the other hand, you are awash in porn that has evolved to cater to your fantasies without much concern for the practical, including a thriving market in lying to you about how things work to indulge wishful thinking.

The net result is an amorphous blob of men who REALLY want a dominant woman, but have no idea how to find her, or relate to her. These guys don’t just fail to get a domme, but can often destroy their participation in groups, making dominant women gun shy about talking to them, and women who might be dommes reject trying it for fear of being eaten alive. I talk a bit more about that problem from my side when refer to my challenges of being the oft chased femdom unicorn. But I am not so unempathetic to fail to notice that while some of the behaviors I receive or witness from men are downright terrifying to me, a lot of sub men are suffering, and they don’t know where to start being ok.

Caveat time: this isn’t going to tell you the secret is to stop being male, or men just suck. My exploration is seriously concerned about your happiness and fulfillment. I am not here to scold you, but there is a problem and it does need fixing.

It starts in boyhood, because the Patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a system (simplifying here) in which a few men have power over everyone and use a system intertwined of familial alliance and influence on gender roles to maintain that power. The extreme is say, the FLDS cults, where polygyny is sustained by booting out enough boys when they come of age that the gender ratios let the rulers broker power by trading around women and girls.

Patriarchy sucks for everyone in that (to quote mangle) it convinces people that it’s not men versus women in so much as men versus men with women as the ball.

More painfully, because even in literal slavery, people don’t stop having thoughts and some capacity to act, the system rewards women who play along. While they usually can’t grasp supreme power, if you are female and buy in, things get significantly less shitty for you than if you opt out. And by being a wife, mother, daughter, etc… who props up the people in power, you can even get power over some men and other women!

In my opinion, this creates a feedback loop where men are incentivized to lash back at women, as safer targets (they have less power to retaliate), but also to associate women in power with an extreme threat to their social position.

A good example is in online gaming harassment. It’s the guys with the shittiest game scores being the nastiest. That nasty is more likely to spill onto female players, minorities and people who otherwise are already marginalized. And holy god is that not a good place to be starting from when your fetish is literally being “beaten by a girl”.

All the broken boys

If you go down the ridiculous MRA rabbit hole you may find yourself nodding along- hey society is weirdly quiet about the piles of dead men. We often hand wave this data as men killing men, as adults and equals, so they it is just the way of the cruel world. There’s some data there to belay this, but there are other pieces, including parts which the bizarre, self harming manosphere don’t bother touching.

You know the standard facts: shorter male lifespans on average. More successful suicides. Higher murder rate. What you may not know is where the count starts.

The first two big male die offs are in the womb, and in the early years of childhood. We cannot blame society for the fact that there are significantly more male to female conceptions, but the miscarriage rate for males is much higher. We think this is a product of the lack of genetic redundancy on the Y chromosome. Perhaps this causes the same effect in the next early childhood phase, but I think we need to consider when a possible baby is sexed is the minute that we apply external gender onto something/someone that doesn’t really have it. As much as you might see a different rate of certain genetic disorders, in so far as we can measure, sex differentiation in infants, in their cognitive and physical capacity, is minimal.

Despite that, whether shown in how you tie a baby’s scant hair, or the elaborately themed layette of princesses versus dinosaurs at a baby shower, gendered parenting is going on long before the kid would remotely demonstrate any differentiation in behaviors. To give you an idea of how blurry physical sex is: some infants are even born with ambiguous genitals that finish growing in one approximate pattern or another months later. Boy brain versus girl brain is completely irrelevant when you have a cute blob that sucks on things and can’t roll itself over yet. But… the external gendering of a baby starts long before the body really changes.

Nature versus Nurture: Tough Boys and Talking to Girls

Outside of modern western pink/blue framing, there are two fundamental differences in how we treat infant boys and girls. Female infants receive more gaze time and social interaction and male infants receive more exposure to risk and physical challenges.

(Summary from parenting article here, dig into scholarly search if you want to know more. If you can’t afford the article, email the writer- they will usually be happy to share it for free. You may also be able to access it at a university library)

And if people don’t know the sex of a baby, they will default to the behaviour they think matches the presumed gender. This is the important bit. Girls are getting more social time and boys more exposure to physical challenges long before we can measurably tell any difference in base capacity. There is also a minor but significant boost in skill acquisition in what you train your kid to do.

Particularly in the culture which, if you are reading this in English, you are at least partially immersed in, we hammer into boys that being feminine, soft and vulnerable is bad. We emotionally and psychologically cripple boys, while building up certain skills in girls. Sure we also try to stop girls from developing certain skills too, but boys are particularly restrained from associating with the feminine. No babydolls, housekeeping toys, dressing up, or associating yourself with female fictional characters. Later, in school, the presumption that you can’t empathize with a female protagonist and even the reading materials you get silo you.

The problem with submissive men is encapsulated in the unsolicited dick pic.

You, the reader, know that women do not like getting nudes from strange men. Unless this somehow goes viral and reaches into the far pockets of places where women seldom go (doubtful), if you are this many paragraphs into a theory essay on gender, you are unlikely to think it’s an effective strategy.

The brain breaking part is that when there was an effort to survey guys who do send unsolicited nudes, the general finding was that the guys assumed that it was wanted behaviour that would be reciprocated.

What? How???

Yes, I know, that sounds bizarre. But bear with me here… You have an audience that has fundamentally discouraged from developing skills that improve empathy from day 1. Then, you rigorously punished them for even considering to associate with girl things. Are we particularly surprised that they popped out on the other side of that with no knowledge of the inner lives of half the population?

Ok, that’s nice, but now what?

There’s three schools of advice in how to “fix” sub men: mumsy belated parenting, scolding them to suppress their needs, and fap. Fap is the masturbatory passing off of “training” via BDSM play as helpful, and we can discard this as fun but ultimately nonsense. Scolding is born of exasperation, as there’s only a certain amount of sexual harassment and clumsy entitlement you can take before blowing out a cutting screed on why sub men suck. And the maternal effort to get men to learn how to people can be both incredibly patronizing, and as we came in here, not necessarily giving men the toolkit to self teach.

Why not sub training?

I toss out any program of “slave training” or the demands of the small line of sub men asking dommes to use kink to teach them to be a sub, because it isn’t practical. Wrapping lessons in sexy pants tends to favour the norms of people equip to do mass teaching, which creates a few issues. It puts the onus on the domme to figure all this shit out the non-sexy way, first. It overemphasizes sexual openness, not itself bad, but not how most people hook up. You shouldn’t need to also be poly or into teaching sex to figure this out. And, more cynically, it creates a dedicated market for selling the fantasy at the expense of the practical.

The Limits of Scolding

Some men report learning from the angry domme screeds, or the advice to learn to sublimate the self. However, although a safe space to be fucking pissed at how we are treated is a crucial fire that provides the light to attract femdoms to a community, it feeds two problems: self hating subs, and radical over correction. Radical over correction is the more subby than thou guy announcing that he is basically a passive recipient of literally anything a domme might do. It’s not sustainable for most men, so it can be dishonest, and it still puts the onus all on the female half of the couple to make things function. Human interactions are complex, and most dommes want their partner’s needs as part of wanting them. The other problem with the trend of endless sub shaming is that you have a population that is already incredibly insecure, now being reminded they are all bad and nobody will want them.

Getting Beyond Being his Mother

Even me, the author, on the autism spectrum, has a whole toolkit I noticed most of my male peers do not. While maternal flavoured leadership is part of a typical woman’s gender training, unfortunately this is also one of those learn by rote versus teach critical thinking problems.

If you are a sub man you may find the greatest emotional fulfillment from the perception that you pleased your partner, but unfortunately getting there often means developing resilient and effective social tools that can adapt to the inherently ambiguous nature of all human social interactions. It’s not enough to give men a couple of etiquette rules local to your pocket of BDSM (like “always call her Mistress”, “no dick pics” or “tribute first”) and hope for the best.

Broadly the meat of my advice are as follows:

Seek out the (somewhat scant) men’s lib resources.

It sucks that the men’s movement is largely occupied by grifters and misogynistic dingdongs, because men need space to examine the problems that go with living as their gender without having to get just handme down resources. I know you feel like a needy tool hanging out as a feminist trying to unpack your own problems, but spaces like r/menslib are slowly getting you a bit of traction.

Maybe you are cool with gendered shit, but if you are feeling hecking alienated in this guy thing but still aware it’s your gender and you are stuck with its challenges, there are at least other humans being thoughtful about your real problems.

Reach out to other sub men and talk to them.

This one fucking sucks, but it’s been the observation that we dommes have made is that straight sub men don’t really like each other very much. Men have a hard enough time with community building, but the kink scene is particularly a mess. Every category of female + fetish seems to automatically build cliques, work groups and sisterhoods. Male tops tend to gravitate to showing off top skills, which I think is silly, but at least they can trad bro out about their erotic macramé or their awesome flogger swishing, or whatever trendy performance kink grants power and attention.

I can’t tell men how to order their business to have fun. However, if you *must* have a prestige skill anchor like the cis male doms to excuse your clustering, pick a couple of core archetypes you know sell well with women and obsess over that in a social way with other guys. What to pick? I dunno, strength training to give people piggybacks, being “the butler”, chastity marathons, endurance fucking, flogging bottom meditation- pick something, anything to use as a beard to open the conversation if the vulnerability of just directly admitting you need a community is too much.

Or talk about the guy dominated vanilla shit you already do outside of kink with them. If you MUST make this, ultimately, about a finding a partner rather than your own psychological well being, remember women will be lured to existing interesting conversations. There are more women who will feel safe talking about even football than casually sliding themselves into a conversation about how fuckable they are as a category. It works a heck of a lot better than standing in a corner holding a metaphorical rose and making overwhelmed worship noises.

Queer is your neighbour.

I cannot, strictly speaking, call straight sub men “queer”. That label is indelibly attached to homosexuality. However, it’s the closest frame of reference most submissive men will have for what, regardless of their firm attachment to being straight and cis. Queer guys are also heavily policed for displaying “weakness” (like you) and have valuable insights on being the object rather than the subject of gaze (eg how to be hot to get taken and fucked).

This isn’t the end state, as some things don’t directly translate. Your average m4m courtship is way more comfortable with in your face sexuality. For example, femdoms pretty much pan on the grindr special rosebud close up. But, queer is also a back door into understanding how women think, because queer culture has a lot more support for escaping “only for boys” aesthetic and social straight jacketing. It’s also a rare space where you can see other modes of being masculine (eg chubby “bears” being celebrated).

Embrace flirting as ambiguity

All humans are bad at knowing when other humans are flirting with them. We dedicate much of our massive brain power to trying to parse this out, coming up with elaborate schemas that still never successfully model every nuance of how we go from “Hello” to “Fuck”. Sorry, it is what it is.

But what you do have is that if you can’t tell if she is interested, neither can she in you. Until one of you pops, it’s a big playful game of “maybe”. I bring this up because sub guys are often trying to reconcile not trying to terrify the pants off of her, with the belief they have to lead aggressively, in antithesis to what they are trying to select for.

You may (still) need to be the first “hello”. I am super sorry about that. What you also have to wrangle is the grey area of finding and locating eachother’s boundaries. This is a topic that deserves its own essay, but broadly, flirting is an intriguing push-pull that lets you both deescalate in a way that saves face. Scared of being too bold? Socially, be mindful of keeping you both having an avenue of easy escape. (Trust me, once you flirt a lot, you too will appreciate learning to let her down gently).

Consume her world through art

Remedial consumption of media targeted at women can be one of the best ways of learning both what sells to her, and what she is likely to talk about. Even in the kink space, femdoms usually consume different porn than you probably do. Taking the time to know what pervy scenes get repeated a lot in her fanfic, terribad urban fantasy TV, and so on, can be key to getting into the larger conversation that is your mutual sexuality.

There’s a theory that reading fiction significantly improves all human’s “theory of mind”. That’s the ability to imagine the thought processes of others accurately. If you had a typical male childhood, keep in mind that one of the reasons women seem to have more “empathy” (a predictive capacity as well as a sensation of shared feeling) is that they have been encouraged since day 1 to enjoy and identify with male characters. You, on the other hand were robbed of a world of female protagonists. Some nervous pedagogue thought you might check out of learning to read if the story was mostly about a girl.

The damage is not permanent. From fanfic by women who share the same taste in media as you, to picking out shows aimed at women on netflix, you might even find stuff you genuinely like. Also you may end up feeling a lot less broken when you see the number of women who are not bastians of awareness and write men very poorly. But even that lets you know what they think you are like.

Now what?

It sucks. I’m sorry, I can’t undo a couple of decades of gendered damage towards keeping you lonely in the name of making you more competitive. But I can say that you are not without allies or people who care about you. You can’t necessarily fill the empty place with a singular domme and be whole, but your pain, bewilderment and confusion in the landscape of seeking fulfillment isn’t invalid just because you don’t have problems as bad as some other group.

If you take anything away from this, I hope you understand I am writing with a deep feeling of love for you. You matter and the world is better with you in it. I am sorry you got handed a lot of hard work, but I think that we can build communities where you can feel better.

Other sources:

The Harsh Truth About The Femdom Ratio

femdom ratio | ratio subs who bitch about the domme shortage are just another type of incel

If you aren’t in the mood for tough, skip this post. I am well aware that a lot of submissive guys are extremely depressed about their inability to meet a femdom. This link is for nice advice on how to find a domme. Don’t read this post if it’s going to send you into a self castrating death spiral, ok?

Boys, you and I need to have a little talk about the so called “femdom ratio”, m’kay?

Just about every day, a submissive man skips into a forum or bdsm group somewhere and complains loudly that there just doesn’t seem to be any non-pro femdoms out there.

Not only does this cause every non-professional femdom in the group to intensify her urge to only lurk, or leave outright, I find a pretty common pattern in these guys. To be exact, three consistent features:

1) They haven’t actually looked.

Ok, sure, they made a fetlife account, stumbled into a reddit group about femdom or popped into a discord. Maybe they got as far as femdom twitter or the comments and inbox of some domme’s website!

But they are invariably acting like a man walking through the local restaurant district decrying they lack of private family kitchens welcoming them inside for home cooking. The minute they discover they aren’t instantly rewarded for thinking about kink with a hot loving femdom girlfriend, or the first few lazy messages get silence or a price sheet.. complaints! Additionally, sometimes they immediately demand someone else help them find where all the hot, single, promiscuous (and usually somehow monogamous to them) dommes hang out.

Do they google the problem? Of course not. Do they ask other sub men in relationships how they got there? Nope. They want something like the weird pneumatic sex tube tinder out of Logan’s Run.

2) They are boring as hell.

Ok, maybe they actually have positive qualities, but they sure as skippy have literally no idea how to share them. I can hear the tea kettle whistle of shrieking indignity already. But Pearl! Dating is HARD. The femdom ratio is so bad you ask us to be the exceptional top 1% of all submissive men.

No, you numpkin. First of all, you can’t be the top 1% of submissive men, that’s Silver and he belongs to me. Truth is most humans are vaguely earnest little potatoes, and that’s ok. People like potatoes!

But the average femdom ratio whining sub is going to send you a message that says “hello, I am potat, age X, I want to be told how to jerk off”. Some of the more creative ones might put something they hope you are like “I hope you are blonde” or “I want a nice mommy”.

Don Juan of the femdom ratio idiots might muster “you look attractive”, picture provided to him or not. Yawn. They essentially want a woman to find them fascinating, while giving her nothing to fasten herself to.

Sometimes I feel bad when these guys decide to replace servility for a personality. They forget that Service is a fetish itself, so anyone receiving it will already think that the sum total of the needed interaction is done. Then again, so many of these blokes have basically turned into Nice Guys who think being the door troll at the dungeon party is the secret to sexy femdom love that I have also learned it’s a quicksand of covert contracts.

Learn to hold a fucking conversation. Learn to build on more than just being horny or trying to just claim you are a good sub. Learn to make your appearance visually interesting. Be a potato, sure, just try not to be an unpeeled raw potato on an otherwise empty plate.

3) They have never considered what the inner life of a woman might be like.

At my most sympathetic I blame being raised a boy, and thus actively discouraged from considering anything girly. A sheltered young 20 something can be forgiven his innocence on women. It’s the same learning curve a baby domme might go through when she discovers that the zipless free labour promised by service subs isn’t actually reliable enough to make her feel powerful. We can all be a little dumb sometimes.

But these guys consume the porn specifically targeted to tease them, and never think beyond that. It’s a radical revelation to them that straight dommes don’t also (usually) want to look at porn that focuses on dommes to get off. It’s a bridge too far for them to consider that women can have a spectrum of approaches to their kink, or their own porn and media separate from what the subs like.

In short, they have a level of empathy that’s stunted to the point of projecting the self onto others. What they want, they feel, is all they need to know to please her. Sometimes it comes out as unsolicited nudes or offers of service tailored only to the guy’s pleasure. Sometimes it’s as easy as being bewildered that women have different safety concerns and relationship priorities. Either way, when these guys complain about the lack of dommes, they are pretty explicitly defining dommes in terms of their desires, not hers.

This kind of femdom ratio guy may also pop up in a very conservative country where overt sexuality can be punished, or even fatal to the woman. What makes these guys unsympathetic is it hasn’t occurred to them that dommes exist in these environments too. They are so busy complaining that none of the women around them are inherently into their kinks it doesn’t occur to them that these women might very well be as kinky as them and forced into the closet even harder.

More Variations of the Big Three

Got it? Ok, let’s look at common permutations of those three fuck ups. Slap yourself if you are doing any of these “no domme due to femdom ratio” pitfalls.

  • Waiting for a femdom to fix everything and do all the work once they throw herself at her feet. (AKA the starfish sub)
  • Femdoms don’t exist unless you want to sub to them. (AKA women invisible when I don’t look at them)
  • No skill in vanilla, assumes that femdoms will all be inherently attracted to them, because all the porn ones aren’t picky about everyman protagonists. (AKA dommes are PEOPLE?!)
  • Searching for the magic domme dating formula that unlocks her private messages and from thence, her dungeon. (AKA dommes are a special hive mind)

But I can’t find any femdoms, and I’m not an incel!!

Great. What separates you from ratio subs (ratiocels, if you will, as coined by dommeextra) is that you can understand finding a compatible partner takes time. Being single and looking is not the same thing as maintaining behaviors that are the kink scene version of a fedora.

As long as you acknowledge that everyone has challenges, it’s ok to feel a little blue. Just like, quit the woe is me no dommes exist shtick and you won’t be an insufferable mess, as well as being lonely.

Here’s the most common replies people give when I tell them the femdom ratio is bullshit and toxic:

It’s not fair, the femdom ratio is because subs would serve ANY woman and women are picky.

No, everyone who has a viable relationship is picky. If you really weren’t picky, things like sex work wouldn’t cause you to screech it isn’t reeeeal femdom.

You just like shitting on men for being weak, you misandrist!

No, honey. I have hammered out post after post of helpful, patient advice on how to find a mistress. I am going to take a good faith interpretation that you just have a hard time seeing humans suffer, and I will be clear with you: letting men do those three things I listed keeps them lonely and isolated.

I’ll leave you with this point:

To go out and express your desires, as a submissive man, is fucking brave. You are running against gender role training where being openly weak, vulnerable or wanting to have either of those might even get you attacked.

But as long as you keep telling dominant women they don’t exist, you are shooting yourself in the dick. You are loudly signaling to them that unless they can be available to you, you won’t give them the basic respect of considering their presence as humans.

Try asking not how to find a domme for yourself, try asking “what spaces do dominant women enjoy being in?” and I bet you will start to find us everywhere. Ask yourself why spaces might exclude dominant women, and fix that, and we fall out of the fucking woodwork.

Find a Mistress with 10 Helpful Links!

find a mistress domme or femdom

Ever actually tried to Google how to find a Mistress?

While search profiles vary, SEO spam and porn makes finding useable information on the subject surprisingly hard. As with past projects of approaching things as if I were a clueless newbie, and found a surprisingly sparse number of useful resources immediately popped up. No wonder every newbie asks how to find a mistress in my inbox or in kink groups!

So a curated list!

Although I’ve taken a stab at the question several times, I thought, rather than linking to my article on how to find a domme, I might as well so some community service and collate every good how to find a mistress, domme or femdom article I could scrape. This post may evolve as links come and go, but here’s the top 8 or so to get you started.

Find a Mistress Links

  1. A general guide by Kate Kinsey isn’t a bad start for your search to find a Mistress.
  2. Ferns gives you 10 tips. She even wrote a book.
  3. Here’s an article in metro uk by Miranda Kane. Your question is more mainstream than you think. 😉
  4. The reddit communities r/femdomcommunity and r/bdsmcommunity are dedicated to text based discussions on kink and searching their archives will show you more answers to this question than I could count. There’s even a community called r/BDSMadvice dedicated to answering your questions.
  5. Sidney and Logan Hart have a book on finding your domme here. If you are brave enough, but broke, ask for it via interlibrary loan.
  6. The Smut Project has a massive resource trove including a guide to finding a FemDom Partner.
  7. If you are looking for a rather witty and bossy bit of advice that includes how to not have a professional ignore you, Alexandra Snow has a video on contacting a domme or mistress. This one is more pro-oriented, but trust me, even the pros are picky.
  8. The Chicago Tribune, of all places, wrote an advice article. Again, not bad for starting out, no?
  9. A very easy to read blog list on how to approach dominant women via email.
  10. Femdom Resources took the time to collate a pile of links for directories to find professionals, if that’s your angle, as well as communities.

Please do feel free to drop your own links in the comments. I’m seriously encouraging you here- we need these things to be easier to find.

5 Ways to Celebrate Locktober

It’s Locktober! That’s a full month arbitrarily devoted to celebrating chastity play, and by extension, given the popularity of caging cock in femdom, a whole 31 days to be romantic about F/m dynamics.

With one week left in the month, maybe this comes on the tail of the season, but I thought I’d bang out some quick tips to celebrate locktober – because I’m trying to get back into the swing of writing regular content.

What is Locktober?

Whose idea was this perverse silliness anyway? Well, the origin point is not completely agreed upon, but while the earliest known online post about it was on a chastity forum in 2015, celebrations spread across tumblr during 2016 and 2017, finding fertile ground in the very sharable nature of the then fairly robust adult community. (Credit to Cut to the Chase for making a good try to collate the Locktober lore) The glory days of tumblr are behind it, but the holiday lives on.

I think the origin might even be a cheerful riff on the older No Nut November, with its origin in the r/nofap community on reddit, after the rather more philosophically motivated silliness of boys who don’t wanna cum to preserve their potency gave fodder to fetishists. Not surprisingly there’s also a much more tongue in cheek effort to tie December with Denial.

Regardless of the roots, while No Nut November still has one foot in weird folk beliefs about the physically detrimental effects of the male orgasm, Locktober is for chastity lovers, and ever increasingly, a playful celebration of male submission in general.

1) The traditional method

Grab your chastity cage, cram it inside, click the lock and ask a special someone to be your key holder. 31 days of denial is a marathon, so do your research and look into how to get a good fit on your chastity cage.

You really will want to do your research as you can get a cage in a plethora of materials from decorative and playful metal animal shapes, to silicone, to plastic.

2) The solo method

Not everyone can, or wants to find a partner. Although you could argue that simply not participating at all the the ultimate denial, from the more locked up side, this is actually as good an excuse as you will get to dip your toes into the fetish as more than just a fantasy.

Merits of self locking including dealing with the pesky fit issue now, and also determining if you even like the physical sensations. Have no partner? Apps like Chastikey are here to help with variable time options to practice denial.

And, if you doubt your willpower, there’s alway the old fashioned key in a block of ice, or mailing yourself the key, though with the US postal service under siege you definitely want to make sure you have a safe key for the latter.

3) Making it about your Domme

One of the biggest criticisms of Locktober comes from communities of female dominants, who have observed that there’s an ongoing issue with Male Chastity in general that it tends to be very prescriptivist for how the Top is supposed to react and treat their locked partner. If you want to avoid that, you will need to walk the very fine line between submitting to her, not the fetish- but using your fetish to celebrate her.

Dominants are going to very by how they feel about the subject, but pretty universally clear that the top killer of moods is nagging- both to get locked, and then to get out.

If you want the sexy forfeit experience for your keyholder, the best way to phrase things is a tool she can use to feel as she wishes. Avoid promising more dishes and house chores and think about contexts that make your domme feel both sexy and powerful.

Is it wearing lingerie? Being listened to as a subject matter expert? More one domme even put out the free floating locktober challenge to share your acts of service this month in compliment to the caging.

And, just like how Valentine’s day can be a couple minefield, when it comes to mismatched expectations, talk to the person with the key. And! Make it very clear that you don’t need a special month to obey for her, but it’s great to have another excuse.

4) Being new to denial (and not overdoing it)

One of the biggest pitfalls to Locktober is that prolonged chastity is an endurance sport. A lot of people buy into the fantasy of being perma-chaste, only to feel disgusted or frustrated with themselves when the cage that was supposed to be on for a month is off in an hour.

Take your time, starting with short stints of denial. It’s ok to slowly build up a tolerance to deprivation, and long term chastity fans tell me it’s quite possible to develop a whole new side to your sexuality in the process.

And do take the time to find a community of like minded folks. Denying Thumper is a particular favourite of mine, but not only are their whole online communities dedicated to this, but the best how tos and advice are going to come from your fellow locked folks.

5) Don’t feel locked (snrk) to what other people are doing

Ok, so I’ve talked about this like it’s a thing everyone is clearly doing and on board with. But, shocking reveal, you can hack locktober to work for you. I did! This month I didn’t cage up Silver for the whole thing, I banned him from touching himself with his hands.

Seriously, you can change anything up you want and still be authentic. Maybe you are feeling super pressured because you aren’t good at long term denial. Maybe you are broke in college and can’t afford a cage. Maybe you are a person without the genitals that a cage works for! As amusing as it would be on my resume, I am not the cock cage police.

Regardless of what and how you do it, with a lock and key or the honour system, the most important thing remains the enjoyment and relative safety of those involved- so, happy locking, and feel free to share your month’s adventures in the comments!

7 Ways To Fuck Up Adding Chastity To Your Relationship

adding chastity to your relationship
Don’t destroy your own dreams

I’m writing this as a quick hot take assuming a hetero audience, and likely a lot of nodding along from the femdom side. I know that there’s no shortage of complain lists in kink, so with each point, when it comes to adding chastity to your relationship, I tried to add some alternative DOs as well. Negativity might drive clicks, but ultimately BDSM is supposed to be fun.

Nag

Nobody likes a nag, and coercion through persistence is going to deliver the least fun experience for all of you. Unless she’s specifically into grudging acquisition, nagging to be locked, or after you get locked, nagging for release, are both going to give her a headache.

Instead, take the time to understand her turn ons. She’s more likely to want you out again if she’s horny, than if you pester. Additionally, approach the topic of adding chastity to your relationship with honesty about how much of a deal breaker or not chastity is for you. This will be super hard, but wearing her down to a yes won’t be any better than getting a no up front. Do try to make a difference between understanding her reservations about the activity and pushing past her consent.

Promise her it will make you a better partner

This one is the keyholder bribe-to-play standard. Forums, porn and how to sites are full of people talking about how you will be a better partner in bed or emotionally when you are caged. I cannot stress how much this is a bad idea. Everyone wants to be a better partner, so I can understand how it can make you feel warm and fuzzy to think about being extra motivated. Nonetheless, all she is going to hear is that she needs to bribe you to get her needs met.

Instead, think about your pitch in terms of how it makes you feel. Communicate your arousal or sense of being loved. This has the additional dividend that your partner is more likely to develop the feelings along with it, than if they think this is how you will do the dishes reliably or whatever.

Dive in too fast/heavy

So she said yes! Awesome, as much as we write about this as a fantasy men provide to women, maybe she’s super into it. Maybe it’s even her idea! The mistake you can make here is huge commitments, like long term locking when you have never done it before. Chastity is an acclimation that favours you both building endurance and familiarity.

(So yes, maybe don’t so the full, hard denial Locktober if you have never done this before.)

Ignore custom fit

Not just fitting the device to you, avoid off the shelf fantasies. Don’t assume everything in chastity porn is a fait accompli. Adding chastity to your relationship isn’t a rigid, one true way activity, so assuming you are absolutely obligated to do everything in the porn is doing yourselves both a disservice.

You already know you are supposed to ease into it. While you are doing so, focus particularly on the parts that work for both of you. Porn tends to both cram every fetish it can together to maximize audience size, while depicting the fetishes as rigidly as possible

Unlike a chastity story or porn clip, your relationship only needs to appeal to the people in it. Discard or add anything that works for you.

Assume she hates your penis (or sex)

One of the biggest fuckups would be locked subs make is uncritically buying into the idea that no normal woman wants a guy’s dick. Yes, we probably grew up with the stereotype of the horny man and the frigid woman who needed wooing. This also is a perfectly valid fetish, in its own right. But, and here’s the big caveat, you don’t have to do it if you don’t need that part. By leaning only on humiliation/rejection framing, you reject a whole avenue of being possessed.

I call this stereotype out more than anything else. Along with the chastity for better relationship treatment bribe, chastity because the person finds sex with you appalling is probably the biggest sales pitch barrier.

Sometimes getting her on board is more about getting across that it’s a game of cock on demand and on her terms, not deprivation for her.

You don’t let her develop her own relationship with chastity

I mentioned the problems of assuming she doesn’t like sex, or bribing her by being a good partner. I also talked about avoiding approaching it with the assumption she finds your penis repugnant. With the practical dominance of male voices in communities dedicated to the subject, even though adding chastity to your relationship might be something you are trying to make all about her, beware of accidentally giving her an equally cramped emotional and psychological cage.

Try to be patient if she goes off script from your fantasies, but still seems into it. Be extremely mindful of resources that assume her feelings and make space for her to experiment and tell you what she feels about it. Your keyholder may very well surprise you with plans and fantasies of her own.

Fucking up your framing/introduction

Explain cock cages to the average woman and she might laugh uncomfortably and say no. This isn’t because the idea is inherently worthy of contempt, but because the information is seldom presented in pop culture or porn in a way that makes it approachable.

Your partner is a unique person with her own hopes, dreams, and so forth. You almost certainly know her better than any how to article could. But, what you can bring in common is that first opener.

Telling her that you like a physical reminder of her, and your desire for her via a cage won’t work for everyone, but it’s a definite step up over going straight to talking about your own degradation, if that wasn’t part of your dynamic already. Pitching being submissive to her is similarly more positively done by talking not about what she lacks “could you be more dominant?” but via those traditional I statements “I feel I can trust you and share my fantasy. I like that I can be vulnerable with you.”

In conclusion…

This is not the last word on the subject, and I definitely encourage you to look at other resources. If you get one take away from all this, the paradox of selling chastity is simultaneously to give her room to have her own feelings and desires about it, but also to examine your own desires intimately enough to translate them into the terms that work for her.

How To Find A Domme

Ok! So you are into this, and you want to find a partner to experience your kinks with. You may have been inspired by the porn you’ve watched or seen, or maybe you had a few past experiences with someone that set you on the quest to replicate your discovery, and find a domme. Now what?

This post intends to be a comprehensive introduction to trying to find a woman to dominate you, and the bare bones of getting a femdom relationship to be more likely to happen. Long time readers might think this is all very basic but, it comes up over and over again in discussion forums dedicated to kink, and in my inbox. Should this information help, please share it- it’s a great way to help other kinky folks better get the help they need.

(I do warn that if it seems like I’m using the phrase “find a domme” over and over again, this is intentional. Search engines are dumb and will toss repetition higher in ranking, meaning it’s easier for people like you, the reader, to find this information even if you are stuck googling.)

And, of course, this isn’t the last word I have said or will say on the subject. For a short form version, here’s 8 things to help you find a femdom. I also did a link post on how to find a mistress, for other resources.

So, where to start, to find a domme?

Let’s assume you are the most basic of novices. You are currently a single adult…

You have two options that are fairly different: a professional domme (prodom and dominatrix are other common terms she might use) or the so called “lifestyle femdoms”. The latter are a lot closer to a wife, girlfriend or friend with benefits, as far as finding them, while the former means hiring a sex worker.

Finding A Domme By The Professional Route

[DISCLAIMER] I am a lifestyle only femdom so the information here is not based on being a primary source. There are many professionals who have written more nuanced, insider perspectives on their business.

The chief advantage of the professional route is that you can get the closest from-porn-to-demand experience, and the only strings tend to be basic human respect and a significant outlay of money on your part. Unfortunately most places stigmatize and/or criminalize sex work, so you and your provider both assume some risk. Note that of the various sex workers you could see, the prodom is less likely to offer explicitly sexual contact (touching your genitals, sometimes even pegging) than many other categories (such as escorts, massage parlours, etc…). Also, depending on the laws of you area, the conversation on how to try things like pegging can still be complicated.

Professional femdoms are usually extremely up front about their advertising, although they range on skill, experience and selectiveness.

You can expect her to ask for references or some sort of identity verification on your part, and a deposit is normal. It is ok to politely ask for references from her, and most professionals are extremely patient with the new and confused. She almost certainly has a website or clear guidelines on what she wants, and your ability to follow those are going to be part of how she screens to make sure you are not terrible.

Not ready for in person? There is also a whole host of remote services, from camgirls and phone sex (now voip enabled!), to women who work as a sort of adults only influencer, producing porn content through sites like OnlyFans or Clips4Sale, but allowing you to pay for more personalized fan access.

Do keep in mind that a prodom is probably is not looking for a full time relationship, and she vastly prefers if you read whatever pricelist, client requirement or menu she has published as a FAQ. Expect her to be extremely strict with her boundaries and time- she has to be.

I’ve already spoke exhaustively about the trade offs in other posts here and why I make a big deal about not being a pro femdom. However, speaking from a less me focused perspective: In your paid experience, expect her to be in the business of creating an immersive fantasy. She may be personally into what she is doing and a lot of pros value their vocation, but her connection with you is a lot closer to other forms of body work and emotional labour, like a barber, personal trainer, massage therapist, or a life coach. Don’t expect this to be the gateway into magic kink land where she lives as she does in a session, at all times.

Nonetheless, the connection you share might be intimate and meaningful. What she is offering is not fake, just that she’s deeply simplifying everything for you and taking a lot of the up front risks.

The Lifestyle Femdom Search

Here’s the illusion buster: a non-pro relationship means dealing with the whole woman. Much of the same challenges of heterosexual dating and hooking up exist here, except there’s the extra bonus that many dommes sincerely don’t realize what they are into could overlap with what you are into.

There are a vanishingly small number of women looking for pick-up-play with people, much like it’s hard to find women actively seeking a vanilla one night stand. I don’t personally feel women are less horny than men, but unless you are living under a rock, you know the social and physical risk, and the high chance of an unsatisfying experience generally favour being much more restrained, and hiding your interests, than it does for a man.

Find a Domme By Meeting A Lot of Women

Sorry, part of this is a numbers game. I wish I could tell you that you could easily follow a quick flow chart of steps 1 through 37, but you, the human have to do all the stuff that makes humans generally attractive (good health, a passing awareness of fashion and what looks good on you, learning how to carry on a conversation) and talk to people.

I can give you some tips to make your search more efficient, but this is still not going to be fair or necessarily easy. You could be a nervous virgin or the local Lothario, but the path to finding a partner doesn’t especially change just because you have particular needs.

Looking in the Kink Community to Find a Domme

Your nearest BDSM community has a few openly dominant women, either switches or not, and some of these women are more casual about who they play with. This is not a bad port of call to start with, but absolutely go into this not with the desire to bag a girl right away and skip off into the sunset, but put yourself in the proximity of kinky women and to learn stuff.

And… don’t just try to learn from the dominant women. Talk to the other male subs. Talk to the male doms. Talk to the female subs. Talk to the switches. Talk to the plethora of nonbinary humans who may fall anywhere on the spectrum of kink interest. Think of it as your chance to sponge up information about anything from safe play, where to buy or how to make gear, and new kinks to try, through to watching other people’s drama as educational bad examples.

Vanilla Places to Find a Domme

Your next best place to find a femdom is in alternative or nerdy communities. Goths, pagans, LARPers, tabletop RPGs, polyamory support groups, the burlesque scene and so on tend to favour women who are more open minded and imaginative, and this tends to extend further to their approach to the bedroom. Again, this isn’t a slam dunk scenario where you can order a dominant out of a catalog, but if you find someone you have mutual attraction to, the conversation is likely to go a lot more smoothly.

More on flirting and asking for what you need later, because the third best place to look is your immediate pool of who you would normally date. The trick, when you want to find a domme in your own pool of typical matches (co-workers, friends of your friends people who share your hobby, religion or ethnicity, even people on dating sites) is knowing how to get that conversation open without embarrassing or scaring either of you.

Asking For What You Want

Tell the average woman you want to be dominated, and she will not know specifically what you mean by that. She probably has some pop culture ideas of the gothy, harsh mistress in a corset who doesn’t particularly like men. She probably also has some equally terrible stereotypes about what sub guys look and act like. Unfortunately, parallel to your quest to find a Domme, femdoms have their own barriers to self discovery. Therefore, how you frame the subject will go a long way to how it comes across and one of your main goals is avoiding getting you both stuck in unappetizing stereotypes.

This is not because all women want a hyper dominant alpha bull god who is 6’11” and counter balances his enormous penis by stuffing his back pockets with thick wads of cash. This is because the commonly understood idea of what a dominatrix is, outside of those with much real experience with kink, is a service job meets every negative stereotype about women. Even if you absolutely positively mean that when you want to find a domme you want just the fetish mistress in the leather uniform who hates acts like they don’t like you, you will still need to break down what you want, and what boundaries that will happen in.

You need to answer what it means to you, personally, to find a Domme, before you can communicate that to a partner.

Do you just like her being the ultimate arbiter of things in your relationship at large? Do you like nurturing and pampering? Do you get aroused from feeling jealous? Do you like the sense of humiliation? Or is it being helpless? Or both? Or is it being extremely looked after and cherished?

Do you have specific fetishes like feet, or being spanked? Do you want things in your butt? Do you want a plastic or metal thing on your genitals she carries the key to? Wear lingerie?

If you can’t answer those questions, she won’t be able to figure out what makes your cock throb. If she likes sex and she likes you, she probably wants to know more. But, if your plan is to just go supine at her feet and say you want to be dominated, expect your quest to find a domme to be a disaster. You need self knowledge.

Of course, if you have no practical experience, your likes and dislikes are theoretical. Nonetheless, you can still probably break down your porn to particular aesthetics, acts, etc…

Flirting Like a Sub and Being Attractive to Women

If you haven’t noped out by this point, and are still reading… Let’s talk about advertising yourself. I already told you to play the numbers game, now you optimize.

Being attractive. Every human has the potential to improve on what they were born with. Maybe you look like an emaciated toe after the scurvy set in, but someone fucked your ancestors. Knock out the low hanging fruit (hygiene, fit of your clothing, any health problem you can afford to treat, cardiovascular fitness and enough muscle to hold your body upright).

What do the women you find attractive generally go for? Ok, take “Creep” off your stereo. There’s all sorts of personal, subculture specific sorting people do. Beyond that, what media do these women consume? What do advertisers try to sell them as far as men? This is how to human 101, but I am writing this assuming you got the masculine upbringing that specifically punished you, explicitly or implicitly from showing an interest in girly things, so if you are a normal fellow I am giving you valuable recon information.

Playful surrender and alluring teasing. Ok, fine, now the good stuff. Your teeth are brushed. Your shirt fits. You realized the kind of $blonde you like generally prefer hangs out with guys who affect a surfer look. Whatever. The nice part about kink is it is actually surprisingly polite to take public. Flirting as a sub is all about sending out test balloons.

No, obviously you can’t ask your coworker flat out to be your keyholder as the first word go. Flirting is about building up a slowly escalating rapport which, because humans are so notoriously bad at judging, lets either of you safely exit the process at any time

I have a pet theory that the ability to navigate social nuance is the true peacock display, swollen rump or stag horn grapple of the human species, but leaving off the pet evolutionary biology theories of the author, and back to helping you…

The three things you need in your would be domme are the enjoyment of being in a one up position, a degree of open mindedness and/or a creative but romantic streak, and an attraction to male vulnerability.

Your best flirting tactics to open the conversation and test the ground is to see how she reacts to you casting her as in charge (eg “you’re the boss, yes ma’am, I know who’s the queen of the office, I know my place around you”). To see about how likely kink is going to go poorly, check how she responds to what if scenarios (eg if she has a great deal of scorn for non-conformity in her peer and an assumption people only work a particular way in gender roles, she probably won’t respond well to the idea of pegging you). Lastly, check how she sees men in distress, pain, etc. Empathy is the twin of sadism, so being very caretaker-y or liking comedy where the victim suffers could both be examples of tells. Your job is to not escalate too fast, and both give you room to step off, if you need to show her no harm done, or segue back into just friends.

Lastly I want you remember that every relationship is unique to the people involved. It’s probably going to be a fusion of your aesthetics, tastes, kinks, things that you mutually create and discover, and the exact same for hers. Your functional femdom will probably not look off the rack, straight from the porn or otherwise be by the numbers. Embrace the custom fit.

Thus, I am not promising you a magic bullet, but you will end up a fair lot closer to your goal than if you just set out to find a domme cold. And hey, I pay for my own hosting, toss a Kofi to your blogger?

Reader Letter: “Femdom Housewife?”

I recently got this rather sweet letter from a long term reader, so I’m glad to get a chance to answer for everyone. It’s a topic I’ve talked about before- the awkward relationship between gender roles and power, but if people are still asking about if you can be a femdom housewife, it deserves another mention.

Inquisitive writes…

O Miss Pearl,

I am a bit-more-than-occasional reader of your blog. Recently, a thought has been egging my curiosity.
I was wondering that whether its possible for a male and female in a Femdom relationship (with said relationship being applicable in the bedroom and to a certain, not-discernible-to-others extent, outside the bedroom too … just to provide context) to still have traditional roles with regards to division of labor in the household. That is, man is breadwinner who is career oriented (or has certain ambitions in life) and engages majority of the week’s time in bread winning, career making and training etc. while the woman is in-charge of the household (and maybe has a small side business too in her spare time). A Goddess-of-the-Hearth, so to speak.
Just to be clear, I’m not at all trying to imply that that is “how things should be”. People should do what they choose to do, whether its career-making or home-making, and people whose choices are mutually compatible should come together. Also, I’m the last person in the world to “look down” on the role of a homemaker. I’ve seen first hand how invaluable the contribution of a homemaker can be that s/he provides in exchange for their upkeep.
My query is that, in your opinion, is such a domestic understanding/arrangement even practically possible in the context of this kind of relationship. And if it is possible, just how likely is it to find a woman genuinely into femdom who’d be willing for such an arrangement in life?
Looking forward to your response.
Thanking you,
Yours faithfully,
Inquisitive
Dear Inquisitive,

Of course homemaking is a fine calling for a femdom! I’m glad you asked and gave me a chance to talk about it. Although gainfully employed, I have already talked about being a domestic dominant. I personally find it fulfilling. It’s a part of my assigned gender I like.

Contemporary feminism reminds us that household domestic work is still work, and although not compensated financially, is no less useful. Indeed, there is a push to have measures like the GDP recognize this unpaid labour as well, to truly reflect the productivity of a nation.  Housework is work, and it is largely misogyny that it is devalued in the first place.
Criticism of “traditional” roles relate not to the labour itself, but to a lack of options that often accompany the pressure to do it, or stereotypes that demand other behaviours along with the universal mundanity of making meals and removing the dirt from the living space. No matter the railings of reactionary ninnies like “Above Rubies” or the emotional self stunting of the “Surrendered Wife”, if everyone in the relationship is freely choosing things to be so, then all is as it should be- and there is nothing about domesticity that implies submission.
Indeed, domestic discipline, with it’s spoon and hairbrush wielding matrons, is, in itself a fetish.  The imagery of a fashionable mid-century woman is just as likely to be put on like a costume by a dominatrix as an evangelical, and both do so because it armors them in a kind of power we are inherently aware of.  You see it even in would be secular reactionaries like Red Pill Women, or the assertions of the #tradwife brigade, that once they take it outside the context of a consensual kink, they can bray all they want about submission, but these women are, functionally, in charge.
Once you aren’t bound into a role, everything else is set dressing and personal choice.
Even excluding the wealth of pornography that blends so called traditional domestic imagery with femdom, to be a dominant is an act of desire that doesn’t stick itself to any gender or social class.  Women and men have always, sometimes, wanted female led relationships, regardless of the particular background noise of their culture, and simple, pat separation of feminine = submissive, domestic = drudge is ahistorical, revisionism, trying to make a narrative that was never as fixed as we seem to try to teach, where woman in her natural state is a slave.
(Ok, ironically for most of human history, human labour for all genders was primarily everyone subsitance farming, but even then, femdom is not new. Even when your biggest concern was spinning enough wool to not have your fingers freeze off while stockpiling turnips, there had to have at least been a few women who took the laundry paddle in from the wash house and filled their smokey wattle and daub hut with squeals and giggles. It ain’t like modern doms of any gender are all high powered CEO rocket scientists)  
And the truth is, even unpacking traditional roles, femininity often includes expectations of power and management, from deciding family spending to directing the entirety of the life choices of the family as a unit. When women protest exhaustion or frustration with their gender, is is not the work itself (although it can be hard), but the sensation of being taken for granted, or when their leadership is undermined. When women control their own finances, bodies and destinies, well, if you have the shared wealth that one of you can concentrate their labour indoors, while the other works outside the home, go nuts.
So in parting, have your femdom housewife life. As long as you are listening to her and affirming her power, you should be fine.
Love,
Miss Pearl
More posts on the subject include a post on the limits of caretaking and another more detailed riff on The Darker Side of Caretaking

Reader Letter: Communicating Your Needs To Your Sub

This reader has another common femdom problem- dealing with getting the head space right when your frame of reference is decidedly focused on partner pleasing. Add that age old bugbear of personal anxiety about your attractiveess, and you have a thorny problem worth examining.

readerletterHi Miss Pearl,
I just wanted to say I love your site. You have really given me perspective and help to evaluate how I want my relationship to be, not how others think it should be. I do need some advice though!
I have been with my boyfriend for almost 3 years.  He has been in one previous D/s relationship that ended badly, and has not been in one since. I have recently discovered, especially since being with him, I enjoy being more dominant. The problem is, I have never been in a D/s relationship, and I feel like he is more experienced than me. He also seems reluctant to try things with me, and is convinced I want to be dominant just for him. He also has a hard time telling me anything that he likes, he only says it is about a “headspace” for him. From the things he says, I think he needs a nurturing/loving domme. I also think he has some shame about the things he likes it bed, and usually leaves it up to me to try new things. I find he does open up more the kinkier the things we try.
The problem is I feel like I have hit a wall. I know what I want, and I have all these fantasies, but when it comes to trying them I get anxiety. I end up stopping what I want to try and we just have vanilla sex.

I feel like I am lacking the confidence (I am a bit chubby, and have some body issues) to take the reigns, and combined with my anxiety it’s holding me back. What do I do? How do I get over this anxiety? Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
M

Dear M:

Some of your problems are things that you can work on with your partner, some is his stuff to deal with, and some of it are things you need to work on to help yourself heal. I’m going to start with you, because it’s easier to work on yourself than change others.

First, you:

You deserve to take care of yourself emotionally and feel good.

It sucks not to love your body. That part has to come from inside. As much as I can try to point you in the right direction, you will probably find a good therapist can better give you the tools to help build a self image that helps you recognize how beautiful you actually are. I’m going to come out and say that you can be morbidly obese and be captivating.

Look, you’re probably like most of the people living in the top and middle bits of North America. That means, by clinical terms, a little “overweight”. No biggie. Your ancestors for the last thousand years busted themselves to make that possible for you. Only a minority of heterosexual men are specifically wired to their preferences enough to find this anything close to a draw back. If it makes you unhappy or causes you health problems, by all means discuss it with a doctor, but don’t let your body ever stop you from being a femdom.

Some of the most beautiful women in history have had your general configurations- we immortalize them in art. Still other women are erroneously remembered for a beauty they never official had- Cleopatra, for example, was written in her era as not being particularly physically compelling. Her charm was in being an educated, confident polymath and her power was in her self assurance. The aftermath is that we remember her as pretty because guess what- power is beauty more so than the other way around. Getting back off the tangent, take the time to surround yourself with role models who look like you, to remind yourself that a soft body is not a bad body.

The other thing I noticed is that your question is laced with things you think he needs. I feel like his needs are overshadowing yours in your decision making process and this may be causing part of his impression that you are just doing this for him. Maybe he’s a black hole who takes without giving any input, but I don’t see you talking about your specific fetishes and desires, just his lack out output.
One of the hardest, most vulnerable things about femdom is it asks women to be selfish after a lifetime of being told our strength and power in in how we understand and control the needs of others. Being dominant often means putting ourselves out there- we have to deal with the expectation we should be assertive, mean, but even more frighteningly, suddenly we don’t just have needs but also wants and whims.
He’s not getting that your main want right now is reassurance you are desired. But, you are also leaving yourself out of your own sex life when you only look for what he wants.

Now, him:

With your partner, there are some things he needs to stop. One of them is the “you are just doing this for meeeee”. He probably thinks he’s helping, but it’s is seriously undermining since he’s essentially telling you that your sexuality doesn’t exist. Since you already have problems with self abrogation, this is creating a negative feedback loop, you are looking to get your dominance appreciated and he is trying to spare you doing him a favour. He needs to start pushing himself out there and surrendering his needs, just as much as you do.

As a part of that, he needs to understand that sexuality is a back and forth. It is not one person’s job to bring the entertainment for the night and react and he can’t use his submission as permission to be a lump on a bump. That being said, a lot of people being communicative really challenging, and his base state may be what he’s presenting. Only going by your description, he may just count himself lucky he gets sex on whatever terms you decide it happens.

I hope that helps you have something to talk about together. Wildcard and I use a weekly brunch at a cafe (my treat) as a nice space out of the house where we can discuss these things and that check in time outside the bedroom is very important to us.

Now, BOTH:

Right, so now you’re prepared to talk about it together, I recognize it’s still a little daunting to get your sub to open up. Now before you get out the hammer and chisel, there are a few tools you can use as conversational aides.

First of all, avoid accusations. It always goes one of two ways. Either the conversation gets derailed by mea culpas and you reassuring him, or if he’s a defensive soul, it gets fighty. Acknowledge the problem is a mutual challenge that you need his help with. Neither of you are going to get anywhere until you both put your kink cards on the table.

To do that, there’s a wealth of resources like mojo upgrade or fetish checklists that you can share with each other. You may even find this makes things easier as sometimes face to face conversations can be overwhelming for even the best of us. Communicating your needs shouldn’t be a bridge too far- between the pair of you, there’s bound to be some material to work with. However, it has to come from both of you.

Sincerely,
Miss Pearl

Reader Letter: Do Femdoms Have Sex?

A reader wrote in with this question, a very common one, usually asked by new femdoms wondering if they will ever get to have sex again, and new subs wondering what to expect when they meet the dom of their dreams. Does femdom mean nothing by cock cages and cunnilingus in queening chairs? Do femdoms have sex without $8000 worth of leather and bondage furniture? Of course long term readers know we do, but it’s still worth putting more information on the subject out there.

Reader letter do femdoms have sex?

Dear Miss Pearl:

How often do femdoms have sex with their subs? When I ask this, I am of course not considering the pro dommes. And my question is that, apart from “play”, how often do dommes engage in actual sex as most vanilla people think about it ie. the actual-cock-thrusting-into-the-vagina type? Including what may or may not be vanilla, (as the domme could very well be using him as a sex toy) AND just having missionary sex, how often,  from your experience, do you think dommes do that? How well do you like it, compared to “play” without any of it?

Thanks,

JustCurious

 

 

Dear JustCurious:

Basically you just asked: do we want to fuck our subs; does sex and play mix; and do we just do vanilla sometimes?

Yes, yes and yes!

To be precise,  femdoms have sex about as often as vanilla women do. And by that I mean penis-in-vagina, penis-in-mouth, penis-in-butt; fingers in all of those; and all the lesbian interpretations of that apply for the non-straight femdoms. Unlike in porn, which generally caters to the very specific fantasies of submissive men, femdoms are just normal folks with a fetish and a particular perspective on what we see as romantic. True we might like all sorts of BDSM related activities and get off on it, but femdoms are still women. Excepting an asexual minority, we have sexuality and all the needs that go with it.

For example, in my case, I could tell you that for me how often I have sex ranges from “every day” to “every few months” depending on if I have a regular partner and how high his libido is. I enjoy sex with Wildcard. It might be with all the kinky trappings or it might be a happy quickie at the end of the day.  Talking to other femdoms leads to a similar picture. Most of us have at least one special person that we like to make whoopee with, and we usually don’t find skipping some of the fetish trappings makes us feel less powerful.

I like penis-in-vagina sex. I still need clitoral stimulation to come, but my sexuality includes both the penis-in-vagina thing inside and outside of play. I would not be happy with a vanilla partner, but neither would I want to forgo anything but the explicitly kinky.

However, I can see why you wanted to ask. As you pointed out, both porn, and the standards of professionals have given us a very messed idea of what a normal femdom relationship looks like. For professionals, the extra risk involved in sex and the laws against sex work encourage the average dominatrix to make it abundantly clear that your penis goes nowhere near her vagina. In porn, producers generally try to pack as many activities into one video as possible. You will see sex, but it is always done in an over the top fashion so that even the slowest viewer can tell that this is very, very dominant.

Femdom porn also plays up how little the lady wants to do with her sub. Unlike femsub, where the first the the dom seems to do after hitting and tying her up is cram a dick in a hole (in the case of kink.com, tiresomely, almost always in an ass because anal is Le Edge). Nobody asks male doms if they are somehow losing power by having an orgasm. And prodom advertising will loudly bray about the clients never daring to let their willies out because ejaculation Must Never Occur, as least according to a reasonable amount of their client base. Hey, if your way of dodging deeply puritanical and invasive anti-sex work legislation is to erotically tell men not to have sex, who am I to throw stones?

But this means that when a newbie dom is setting out to have fun, she often hits the expectation that certain things are verbotten. She’ll encounter lots of sources telling her penetration is submission (that’s a pop culture thing, we can’t even blame porn for that one) or if she does want a dick, it better be by treating the guy like a human dildo. About once every three months some poor woman on a femdom forum will ask if she’s still allowed to give blow jobs.

Part of the whole reason (other than the art part and the attention) I write this blog is a reality check. So I’ll state this again:

So yes, femdoms have sex with their partners, whether those are switches, subs or some other identification. And I’m sure some of you will even weigh in, in the comments to confirm that.

 

How To Give A Bare Handed Spanking

One of the biggest barriers for new femdoms (and women who are giving this a try) is that the topping side of dominating people can seem hellaciously intimidating. What if you get it wrong, will the bottom be seriously hurt? Will he laugh at you and take away his submission? I blame existing dominants, who often base their authority on how well they hit and tie. In some cases, of course, kink skill takes time and practice. Bullwhips and needle play require more prep and know how, as well as specialized equipment. But spanking is something anyone can do and carry very little risk, particularly a bare handed spanking with an open palm.


Delecious bare handed spanking pic from juliensubWhy spanking and how does it work?

A human butt is one of the more resilient, padded parts of the body. Cushioned and bouncy, it offers a wide surface area for striking while keeping all the important biological bits tucked deep out of the way. As well as a safe target, many people associate spanking with being in a demeaned, vulnerable of juvenile position. Although people in the 18 to 35 generation may never have personally experienced a beating in the hands of a parent, the idea of being bent over and smacked is deeply embedded in popular culture, as a minor form of violence expressing the authority of the spanker. Besides, we sexualize butts, and spanking is touching butts.

For kink purposes, there’s two kinds of spankings, a fun spanking that works with the “victim’s” natural tolerances and a mean spanking that seeks to exceed them (in a safe fashion of course!). In this case, don’t confuse tolerances for limits. Limits are how the bottom protects you from being arrested, while tolerance is how the spanking effects them in relation to how they experience pain. So how do you make sure everything’s hunky dory?

Establishing informed consent and tolerances.

If you’re a newbie dom, maybe your bottom has also never had spanking before. Or, maybe if he’s new to you, you’re not sure he understands what you are capable of dishing out. I’ve already established that I’m a big fan of consent. Don’t hit people unless they say it’s okay, and understand the ramifications of what they agreed to. That established, what if the person doesn’t know what their finite limits are yet? Nobody wants to initiate a grandiose walloping and have the bottom start screaming “Pumpkin! Pumpkin! I don’t consent!”. Have a conversation about limits and kick any new partner who tells you they have none out of bed.

But what if they’re gung-ho about it, but this is virgin territory? This is the main stumbling block for many kinksters. Most people come into this with a bunch of sexy ideas, some of which are going to turn out to be perverted brilliance, but many of which will be improbable, impractical or nowhere as hot as they seemed in real life. On that line, launching a full scale assault on their ass may sour a spanking victim- if this is primarily your idea you want to be able to ease the bottom into it.

I’m a big fan of using the pain scale numbers system, because you can’t get simpler than that. During your first spanking session, task the receiver to rate your hits on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “did you touch me?” and 10 being “sweet mother fucking christ auugh I’m dying.” For a bare handed spanking, many people can’t even get past 7. Regardless, start with your lightest possible hit and work to establish your mid-range. You will probably discover one other fun fact: people’s pain tolerances shoot way up when they are aroused. Thus his tolerance is going to be a bit wibbly. With warm up, you may exhaust yourself long before he’s ready to call it quits.

Following so far? Let’s keep going…

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