Month: August 2024

Kinky? You May Be On The Asexual Spectrum.

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Kinky? You may be on the asexual spectrum.

This is not the first time I have written about this, nor do I expect it to be the last. This time the trigger was participating in a podcast about sexuality and realizing that though I had written about the kink/asexual spectrum connection a bunch, I haven’t really explained why the two are complimentary in a rigorous enough sense. I also wanted to do some sort of typed up summary of another phenomena, where after talking about asexuality or how it works I find a lot of folks, kinksters in particular, find the definition surprisingly resonates with them.

Needless to say, this got long.

Explaining asexuality always is posited on needing to explain how sex works in a broader, global sense. As I have written in other blog posts, most folks tend to define asexuality in a very rigid binary, imagining a person with no erotic desire or inclination. This can be part of being asexual, but it really isn’t the only part.

Attraction (that’s inspired erotic desire for another person) is not the same thing as arousal. The core of asexual identity presumes not so much whether or not you are capable of arousal, but how you experience attraction.

The problem with telling people this is that asexuality hides in plain sight. For example, homosexuality tends to stand out because the behavior associated: attempting to get into relationships or have sex with people in a way that breaks normative social barriers, not having sex is the baseline human state. Likewise, being immersed in stuff that could or could not be interpreted sexually (e.g. artistic nudes, music about really, really wanting someone else in a body responsive way) is the background radiation of human cultural existence. And, having sex with people you are in no way attracted to is so common as to not be considered remarkable. It’s generally regarded as unfortunate, but some of the most conservative societies can be very into compulsory sex done out of a sense of duty rather than inherent horniness.

So, if you go around not being into what your society (or subculture) generally identifies as ok to be sexy, as long as you are willing to perform the behaviors associated with your social role your internal thoughts on the matter are going to be treated as trivial or specific to you. The folks who absolutely won’t or can’t cooperate with the expected behaviours are treated like a pitiable minority, either eccentrics, shirkers or people with a medical issue, be it physical or psychological.

You, reader, who is probably a more sensitive soul, almost certainly adopts the position that nobody should be compelled to fuck anyone. You probably feel incredibly sympathetic – someone should help those poor people not do sex! And, you are generally able to accept these people fit the label of Asexual. Otherwise, if you think about this at all, you generally only do so in the context of biology, where some living things clone themselves.

Here’s the current assumptions around how the typical way people are sexually wired work: 

Humans are expected to default to being attracted to a fair number of whatever the gender(s) they are into. They are expected to be this way sans anything other than that person existing and them being aware of that fact, or maybe getting a good look at certain bits of them or the whole body. That’s being allosexual, the opposite of asexual. 

Then there’s anyone who fits the following: they experience attraction like this not at all, sporadically or require some additional factor. These people are all on the asexual spectrum.

AllosexualAttracted to people reliably without other modifiers other than being whatever gender(s) matter to you and some influence of taste.
AsexualAttraction to others is absent, sporadic, rare or requires some other factor, such as an intimate connection.

When you say that, a large number of people cross their eyes and look bewildered. 

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Femdom Review “Pawn of the Cruel Princess” by Rebecca F. Kenney

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“Pawn of the Cruel Princess” by Rebecca F. Kenney is a dark romance aiming for the trope of enemies to lovers. It’s got an ostensible femdom premise (male war captive of female royalty) but a decidedly switchy tone. Like many works trying to focus on sexual slavery while also trying to keep the characters likable, it relies heavily on external pressures pushing the couple together and forcing the female lead, Ruelle, into a more carnal dynamic with Ducayne. 

There is a plot here, as well, with shades of Gideon the Ninth. After our main characters’ introduction and torture room meet cute, we learn the flower of the youthful nobility (and their pleasure thralls) must congregate in one isolated place to party. Once at the resort, bad things must be grappled with and whodoneit mystery is presented. Ruelle brings enemy captain Ducayne to spite her Crown Princess sister, but also because she is attempting to politic her way into her own survival when her wicked sister eventually ascends the throne. Despite having virtually no time to train Ducayne, with the help of a magic tattoo and some negotiation, Ruelle secures his cooperation to at least vaguely attempt to pass as her submissive thrall.

The sister and the family dynamic here is extravagantly abusive. The society, for their part, is hypersexual with a great deal of focus on the owning and training of their thralls. This appears to be a common practice on the island shared by both Ruelle and Ducayne’s respective nations. Our framing device for why any of this needs explaining is that Ruelle is a virgin who has yet to cooperate with debauchery expected of a noble. 

Ducayne, for his part, instantly decides he doesn’t care about the side of a war he is on, but maintains an intense quantity of pride and belief in his own right to autonomy. He is also spends a lot of time thinking about the bad relationship he has with his mother. 

Both characters speculate they are kinky thanks to abuse from their parents. Much hay is made of the heroine’s inherent masochism, something that she is deeply uncomfortable with. The hero is forever pinning her against things and making threats. In this society, being aroused by bottoming is apparently shameful, and both characters grapple with discomfort that they are aroused by it, Ruelle more so than her thrall. There is something here about space for switches and lovers of primal, but if you are turned off by the sub manhandling the dominant and at least one scene of pretty much flat out non-con with another man for Ruelle, you might be annoyed.

I know this is a hot button issue for a lot of femdoms that even in fiction we don’t get to avoid being disempowered,, not to mention the external pressure that we are just feisty subs who will eventually be taught better. If anything that could even hint of that is triggering, you might want to skip this one.

On the other hand, for all of Ducayne’s bluster, his growing feelings for Ruelle quickly come to form an ongoing basis for his willing cooperation with his own subjugation, and he’s clearly aroused by being sliced up, verbally abused and manhandled by Ruelle. There’s more turbo brat here than full dominant from him, and his own violence towards Ruelle rapidly starts to resemble a sort of service topping. Ruelle is incredibly erotophobic and Ducayne’s role is to largely safely confront her with her own desire in a way that she can eventually accept. Inversely Ducayne shifts from being horny-for-his-enemy to deciding that she’s almost as much a prisoner as him and assuming a role of rescuer.

Also expect interludes with all the background characters, who are of every possible orientation. There will even be a sort of light love triangle with potential for a thruple explored, but this book isn’t aiming to be menage, just keeping most of the focus on kinky sex, more kinky sex and rather intense violence.

To its credit, when we get to the ending, while all romances must have a happily ever after (HEA), we also don’t get the sense this pair will transform to vanilla. They will probably remain stabby and primal, but ultimately the hero decides to accept something that keeps him subjugated to the heroine.

TL;DR

Domme-to-switch non-con with a brat and a very violent, gory plot. A lot of stabbing and slicing from the heroine. I found it perfectly readable, but the emphasis on the heroine’s masochism still needs flagging.

On Having Porn For Dommes

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It has been true for the entire lifetime of this blog that fictional depictions of dominant women are really limited, and most typically tailored to what subs are attracted to. Or being more precise, what a certain paying audience of sub men will purchase. This standard tends to depict dominance in women as a vocation performed for the benefit of subs (or their vulnerability and persecution fantasies) and is often gender regressive as heck.

For example, there’s a whole dialectic around the ubiquity of strapons- is this like the little fake beard Queen Hatchepsut wore in her official portraiture, to project authority, or is this a rare overlap of the ostensibly hetero into queerness? Either way, it’s practically compulsory to penetrate and very rare to see depictions of your penetration if you are a dominant.  Likewise much frustration is noted that dominants are seldom depicted as attracted to or even liking our subs. Not so in hetero male dominant/femsub land, where the slave princess fantasy is perfectly common in the stuff targeting women. And, at the very least in the porn for men, there’s definitely no shortage of degradation, but the femsub is at least the main event.

This has a carry-on effect that if your version of femdom doesn’t look like most typically available versions of it, you are more likely not to realize your desire. In the inverse, a lot of lifestyle dommes share their lightbulb moment was finding an image or story they just vibed with (often outside of conventional porn altogether) and chasing that feeling down the rabbit hole. Further, when all depictions of you are so very limited, if you are a dominant you get endlessly frustrated by a conga line of idiots who think fiction catering to them is an educational documentary about you.

In any case, lifestyle dommes generally agree that porn is collectively failing us.

Dealing with  this is still a work in progress. Unfortunately a lot of folks get stuck in a frankly SWERF style approach – they decide that since most porn (and pop culture depictions of dommes) are garbage, that it’s actively malicious on the part of the people who make it to keep doing so. While I do think that the almost exclusively “Mistress Manual” dominatrix-in-a-box source of approach on the education side is actively bad, you have to be more nuanced in your tackling of the problem. Getting into a war with the existing content creators about how they are pandering internalized misogynists or fixating on the bad fake subs who just want to be catered to isn’t working. I say that as someone with a lot of yelling about not getting anything approaching the rep I want. 

At best, if you fixate on trying to stop the existing content, all you do is make everyone miserable and some Republican/Conservative politicians cream their suit at what good potential ally you might be to their latest (bad faith) protect the kids crusade. But, we should be able to discuss the problem without doing things like trying to redefine the larger category of Femdom to mean “stuff only me and my friends who agree with me are into”. Sure you can argue yourself blue in the face that femdom should centre women’s pleasure more than it does, but the current content situation will point out that we are assuming the people involved don’t enjoy it. You can see how that’s a subjective dead end?

And, inversely, I am not saying to turn your brain off completely. There is value in consciousness raising discussion. All media is subject to criticism and pointing out trends and implicit biases is one of the ways we bring change and establish community with people who feel similarly. But is our goal here less content overall? Or is it more of the good stuff for dommes?

I think it should be the latter, and for that there’s a very big, slow next step. We are going to need to spend a lot of money or make our own erotic content, if we feel otherwise. You are also going to need to grapple with systemic barriers that exist outside of the business (and amateur hobby) of erotic or otherwise deviant to the norm content. 

I’m also going to take a controversial stance and put porn, erotica and romance into the same general category.

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