Photo of Lady Justice by Dev Kulshrestha, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
A little while back, a judge in the US was caught and fired for engaging in sexwork. Specifically, he made gay porn – and the booting overlapped with a period where he was critical of anti-trans bigotry by a city councilor. On the other hand, as the case came out on social media, people were quick to fret his advertised sex work engaged in implications he mixed his work with his sexuality. In reaction to that, even people who were generally leftist and might even otherwise be inclined to stand with a sexworker were quick to point out it showed poor judgment, even if he described his framing as kayfabe.
The choices of Mr. Locke were relatively benign in the spectrum of things, basically sexualizing himself in his role.. Nonetheless, he will have his career ruined as firmly as if he had committed some crime of violence. A few moonbats like myself will mourn in vicarious humiliation and he will get some media footnotes alongside his tabloid dragging, but nobody will effectively petition or protect him in any way that will get him his job back. That chapter of his life is effectively over.
My position on this was pretty clear: I want my judges to be sexworkers, past or present.
I love you very much, painfully so, with the yearning of spending too much time apart. We are that couple, together, in public, but just as much with no eyes on us but each other.
I cannot recall the music, writing this now, but I remember, in late February, dancing in the kitchen with you, guarding for the slight slip of my black cotton tights on the faux wood linoleum as we shimmy-twist. Alongside the peril of losing my footing, it’s distracting how beautiful you look in motion, in a blue blazer over a light blue button down. Your body tapers sharply from your shoulders, shimmying. I’m wearing the green vintage dress you bought me for Christmas. When we pull apart and I twirl, the skirt bells out, all picturesque.
We have returned from a Pike Place Market french restaurant, where I stole half of one of your crab cakes, and you took, at my urging, half my salmon filet. I think I got the better trade, though there was nothing wrong with my fish.
There was a window to the restaurant kitchen marked by a pile of citrus fruits, aiming to put themselves into the dining area to make things feel more casual, or maybe make the most of the space. Once upon a time, in the 70s, this was a jazz spot, but its so crowded I wonder where they used to put the musicians. Still, it’s well prepared fresh fish, bread with a $5 up charge and pleasant crab cakes. And noise, lots of it, more crush and clatter than intimacy. The hints of old music, there, are drowned out in the excess of the conversation of others. I am content, holding back my urge to nitpick this nice gift, but nevertheless we do not favour them with the opportunity to sell us dessert. You serve me icecream instead, later, after we have danced. Looking after me is just what you do.
When I arrived for the weekend, I took the train in. It’s always comfortable, but too crowded that particular night to fight the line in the dining car, so you met me with food. It’s been a bad eating week for me again, a fact that I am not proud of, but being home in my space is driving me a bit nuts when I try to cook.
I daydream about kitchens that are not shoved into main areas. I am well sick of exposed, designed for people who don’t cook counters that push atrocious storage and a strict inability to let anything be, lest it become noxious clutter. I keep optimizing, all the endless expenses to try to make the space livable. Hooks for this and that, shelves expanding outwards and upwards. Ultimately no compensation can fix a cramped, poorly laid out space with too many things in it. And there’s no walls in spaces, anymore, a victim of the open plan trend. Sharing these spaces is even more frustrating, because there’s twice as much room to let the dishes or the mess get away from you.
If, perhaps, I lived flung out from my work by another 30 minutes, I might have my own solo shoebox, on my comfortable middle class salary. It pays more, on this coast, but rents jack up to eat one’s earnings. But, even paying more, the kitchen would still be in my bedroom, or at best, still in my living room. On the west coast, new construction is the norm. I think they are so cheap, regardless of the actual cost, they would leave the doors off bathrooms, if they could justify it.
Case in point: Tech job or not, your kitchen, the one I danced in, is “open plan” as well. This pivot and swirl smooth space I slide about in is an island of no texture in the otherwise stucco and wall to wall carpet, an alley of linoleum fenced between appliance and an island counter. For this visit, you draped the island in a rich quilt, handmade in a medley of turquoise and blue, serving as tablecloth to display a bouquet of flowers. Pink and purple and green, stems capped by pale, fat roses that remind me of babygirl birthday cakes. Just for me, to be pretty to look at for the weekend.
We’re in the approximate orbit or Valentine’s day, so we brought each other gifts to unwrap, too. Yours were piled up on the kitchen island when I got there, mine hand wrapped in sticker covered tissue paper and tied with real satin ribbon. You gave me a cape-capped coat dress with a flash red lining; a box of fancy tea; costume brooches; and spangle-sparkly tuxedo bodysuit that tugs at your fetishes to lift the collective sense of power over you, even as the glitter roughness of the fabric repels your touch. I gave you a high end, self thrusting sextoy by lovense.
This was written without being able to consult or personally verify the stories of the three people most affected, but where possible I aimed for a harm reduction approach. I do not link to any source that contributes to the the outing two sex workers, and put my focus primarily on Satanatrix not to diminish the agency of the two others involved, but because she has been most vocal about her personal philosophies. I caution readers that my interpretation and recounting of the situation will, necessarily, be imperfect. However, my motive for writing this is because nobody else I can find has. Indeed, for all the attention given, nowhere else but the sexworker and sexwork aligned femdom community has taken the part of Satanatrix and Empress Ming. I must tip my hat to the podcast, What Women Want for being the only other effort, outside of the immediate community of the victims, to try to combat the barrage of nonsense from mainstream media coverage, and as he has an own voice interview with Satanatrix, you should definitely take the time to listen.
Once upon a time, in 2020, three people, Satanatrix, AKA Lady Vi; Empress Ming; and the priest of the parish decided that St. Peter and Paul’s Catholic church in New Orleans was a good place to do some spiritually themed femdom. Two years later, after the filming of an ill-fated fetish-flick-cum-ritual resulted in the arrest of the three participants, the trial part of the fiasco has finally ended. It did so in the most American way possible, a plea bargain that knocked what might have been a pair of felonies (institutional vandalism & obscenity) to a misdemeanor version of the former. And yet, lest you think that’s a slap on the wrist, it carries a fine of $8K, to be paid in 6 months; two years suspended sentence (with intrusive supervision); and a vigorous NDA that stops not only release of any video or pictures from the event, but the two Dominatrices even talking about it to the media in any capacity. Further, the church had all details of the trial sealed.
The church was very upset by this incident, going as far as ritually burning the altar. The priest was obviously fired, and awaits his own trial, having had a falling out with the two dommes. Thus, the details of the defense now seem split between “I thought we could do it because he said it was ok” versus “that woman, she tempted me”. As it was ever so, where sexuality and social censure intersect.
And it was, in the lingering aftermath, a terrible ordeal for the three involved, particularly the relatively blameless women. Likely the fallout from that first arrest did the most damage. Even without a conviction, including if they had somehow fought it out to a not-guilty verdict, most of the worst consequences fell into place the moment they were placed in custody, head shots taken in loosely striped jail clothes, and thence released to the world. Long before any guilt was legally established, the arrest resulted in the immediate outing of both Satanatrix and her colleague via their real names.
In theory this was a last longer visit before I return to work. The two body problem kicks back into gear, as my office job cannot be imported over the border, WFH or not. I am a Canadian, and though Silver is more portable in his skill set, Vancouver consistently swings below competitive in tech salaries. We make do, but for now we cram the time together before I must return from portable disability to fixed labour law compliant behaviour.
It feels like visiting another life. He emphasizes “Home”, wanting me to feel that way, and makes every pain to make it that comfortable, but my practical roots are still paying $1000 to share a two bedroom with a friend, and my brain still parks myself there at my legal address. Home isn’t where my heart is, but where my childhood teddy bear, resting on my pillow, and my mess and the clutter I am still struggling to grapple.
With him, I think we have started to escape the honeymoon extra effort period. Even as he continues to dote on me, this feels sustainable. We have passed the first year or so where everyone is on their extra best behaviour. But, with the matter of the extreme step of moving to make this permanent, my life is an Elizabeth Barret Browning sonnet:
I think I could be happy in this quiet domesticity. Working on writing projects on my computer. A farmer’s market in the morning, doing our laundry in that continuous cycle of always being more to do daily, and making us meatballs from scratch for dinner. He puts up with my criticisms of his bachelor kitchen patiently. It’s not the franks’n’beans and no paper towels squalour we stereotype men with. It’s the not having to answer to anyone but yourself- so there’s a kitchenaid mixer, but the grater has a crack in the plastic frame, and things I take for granted aren’t there. And yet… Sure he has less cake pans, but he owns more pots than me, in fact in many ways more things on hand than I do. Deviance in our kitchens is more personal preference than otherwise. Though my tools tend to get junked when they break, I am still getting my shit together after what amounts to 5 moves in 10 years.
The steady progress here says that in another while, there will be a move there, too. All the things I established in Vancouver, my nest, will need to be upended, those possessions that transformed money into comfort and convenience winnowed for duplicates and storage. I am a person who wants roots who has lived relatively rootlessly. I wonder now, if my nest making was foolish and I should have expected to be shaken loose from each new home in the speed I did.
There’s a bit of care there, on my part, sensitive to feeling less than in the totality of the measure of our lives. Though I apply therapy to my insecurity like an ointment, the thought is ever there with a deep penetration. Reader, if you came here to see an ice and leather goddess regiment worms under her boot, or see a woman drift guilt free on a tide of consensual exploitation, alas it’s been ten years of disappointing you and counting. here, we have naught but the neurotic and horny, a fiercely distrustful and scruffy mélange that leads me to only half facetiously say I’m certified femdom trash.
Heterosexual femdom is weird.It’s not colouring between the cis straight lines, but it’s going to get you even more side eye if you call yourself queer than a bisexual woman with a boyfriend does. I tend to settle on the lukewarm “queer adjacent” to avoid some traumatized wee LGBTQ+ getting verbally abusive at me because they aren’t comfortable with spectrums, only binaries. Nevertheless, because our understanding of “normal” heterosexuality has certain gendered power expectations built into it, if you lean F/m, you are going to travel to where your behaviour relative to your gender expectations are not in alignment. That’s even if both of you are the most cisgender folks on the planet. This disconnect is a frustrating, orphaned space. These days, how we perceive the progressive and “safe” is a kind of hierarchical tightness that doesn’t know what to do with things that don’t fit into what is mainstream, but also don’t have a perfectly overlapping experience. No wonder we had to carve out our own “femdom” niche! For its many cultural faults, there is a reason why we are our own distinct identity, and I often feel like the aesthetics of gay men are the only other place you are allowed to consider male bodies as more than a vaguely threatening symbol of potency.
Submissive men offer the opportunity to flip the subject/object nature of typical straight relationships
Sexual perfomance expectations for women are like that old metaphor of the swan, gliding serenely on the surface and paddling like mad underneath. An infinite amount of work, primping and positioning goes into performing femme for fucking, but then there’s a demand for aloofness that borders on disassociative. You become the prize he is then expected to pursue, the elegantly prepared feast to be devoured. Though I don’t doubt submissive women have their own canny inversions, if you are anywhere femme of centre, femdom has the best possible route to flipping that on its head without switching to a same gender partner. Not by default, mind you, as transgressively centring him, his looks and his beauty are hardly the default of mainstream BDSM porn. Nonetheless, big titty anime mommies and needy idiot fanboys or not, there’s a reason gentle femdom tends to be a land of painful yearning. And when you talk to dommes, outside of marketing copy; the people who don’t like submissive men; and the naive morons who think an actual personality like cat piss is a symbol of power, there is a visceral, all quenching immersion in him. He is there for us.
So, even if you have a complex asexual thing going on where it’s the sadomasochism not the aesthetics that matters to you, it also flips how we can interact with the bodies of eachother. One of the most depressing parts of the male default identity is how they are taught to relate to their bodies: penis, penis and yet more penis. Dudes learn this pretty early: Don’t touch anything else, not your nipples, not your lips and for gods sake, not your ass or the puckered hole between your cheeks. It’s no wonder so much straight porn treats its male actors like a life support system for an erection! For a shocking number of men, they live in an inversion of the previous century. Sex positive feminism taught women to look at their vulvas in mirrors, touch themselves down there, and see their genitals as something other than a dirty shame. But for men, almost a century from when your metaphorical (and my literal) granny squatted over a mirror, guys are worrying if proper hygiene makes them gaaaaay.
So, if straight men are putting their prostates off limits out of shame, forget nibbling the inside of his wrist, fingers, sensitive pulse points, etc! By now, our collective sex lore says these are all things that you have to teach men to explore on women. It’s expected it’s not intuitive to him, but agreed on as required, much how millennial dudes and younger now all osmotically learn cunnilingus is the new chivalry. Him though? No dude needs that! Just be hot and grudgingly consenting, ladies!
Of course that’s nonsense. Human bodies are so much more like each other than not. While the individual always varies, the layouts of most things anatomical are lazy, even putting nipples on every dude, and folding a structure that is shockingly analogous to a penis into the groins of cis women. Nerves are nerves, and we are not so sexually varied that a man lacks the physical capacity to enjoy all those erotic sensory things, from finger sucking to a hand pressed to the throat.
Whether you are hurting him or just exploring him, femdom unshackles you from his dick.
So don’t get me wrong, the end argument is not just to lock up all the penises. I agree that men vastly over state how much cock cages and chastity are a universal benefit to women. Men are not actually ruled by their libidos like it was a life sustaining drive akin to hunger or breathing. But what we don’t talk about in so-called chastity is how much it breaks everyone of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, including giving him permission not to receive it. The whole rest of the boy is on the table.
And whether your kink is inadequacy or display, you also get to really look at him. Just as my body is socially considered to be open to public commentary too much, men blunder around uncomplemented even by their loved ones. Stick that guy in the s type role and you center a female gaze that may or may not be pleased, but at least it’s pretty much universally there. Ditto the tentative exploration of lingerie for men, both to humiliate as emasculation via consensually weaponized dysphoria, and my personal preference, to decorate and emphasize. Though dommes grumble that our more shallow needs stay uncatered to, if you are here to oggle a pretty man, whatever your tastes, the options have only been getting better, gradually and grudgingly, over time.
I mentioned GentleFemdom, and while it’s drifted past interest for me into a fandom sausage fest, you have guys pressing in the other direction for a different idea they might be pursued and desired. And while the stock characters might not be my cup of tea, again, the manga influence heavy illustrated boys are most likely to be treated with dialogue that assumes he’s cute.
And likewise, just as his appearance becomes worthy of opinion, physical sadomasochism also needs a bigger canvas. Sure, you can hurt a cock and balls. I do, and enjoy it, but it’s a touch monomaniacal if that’s all you ever do. While you could glide through vanilla on kissing, hugs and touching his dick with bits of you, sadism means you need to get intimate with the sensory possabilities of everything. To stay in the sweet spot of permanent harm free, extended ouchies means more square inches than whatever is between his legs.
Male masturbation toys enjoy more use in femdom
BDSM in general favours a more hands off approach. Be it a flogger, a dildo on a pole, or a bog standard magic wand to give someone a forced orgams, we like our gear. It’s a sexually permissive society that’s has less emphasis, even in femsub land, that you should insist that a vibrator is competition to a man hoping a woman will have an orgasm.
There’s no weird hang ups about it being a cop out to use your belt, not your hand, on the pert behind of whom you are topping. Toys *on* tops are still a bridge too far in most content, and people can normalize for play, regardless of whatever gender combo is featured. However, male subs are the vanguard gradually dragging everyone to admit you can put a vibe on him as much as her. Through our purchasing needs, the plethora of strokers, milkers, butt plugs in various bulbous shapes from the Aneros to the usual blunt christmas tree style stopper are ever so gradually being dragged out of the “gay men only” silo they are stuck in.
Toxic masculinity ruins everything. While I can buy vibrators at Sephora, and female intended sex toys are now aggressively marketed assuming I am the primary consumer, male recreational appliances have a ways to go. And it’s generally part and parcel of femdom subculture for me to be able to talk about using something on Silver without people acting like it’s weird.
I’m enjoying it. One of the most common things I get asked to review, these days, has been the burgeoning male market, and it’s clear it’s a whole new ball game (snrk), with established manufacturers and new brands popping up every day. Between the new toys, and old toys getting more availability, the increasing presence of lingerie and more space to put his body in one’s metaphorical cross hairs, everyone’s sex lives will be better for it. Now to convince more dominants that they can use butt plugs or be masochists. 😛
To tell the story of Pearl, it’s a bit more than just saying I am a dominant sadomasochist.
At this point it’s probably clear that the whole femdom thing is indelibly stamped into the core function of my sexuality, enough that I have been talking about it a LOT lately, or at least my place on the asexual spectrum. But, part of who I am is influenced by something a bit adjacent todemisexuality, and that has been further effected by the factthat I fall in love easily. I don’t use the word “love” lightly, like I pop off crushes on lots of people. I mean the sort of heart soaring heavy nonsense. Getting there, for me, is incredibly easy.
After many years of having this part of my makeup, I also have determined not everyone falls that hard. Insights into the spectrum of human possible really does involve a lot of guessing, like discovering some people are ear rumblers or cilantro tasters. But, much like the latter case, if people don’t have the capacity themselves, they may suspect you are somehow exaggerating. Which, I suppose is just the part of the human condition that finds it comforting to suggest one is making things up, or that the severity will reduce with the right mindset, like comforting a child with a scraped knee.
For me, sex hormones and falling in love share an entwined history. In addition to my kinks, which grew from day 1, ever since puberty hit, so did the BigFeel capacity. The hardest part is there’s not a lot of support for it. Generally, if you talk about intense feelings of yearning for another human, everyone treats it like an obsessive thing you are choosing to do. Instead, as I experience it, it’s an involuntary WHOMP of an attachment. It’s the closest brush I can get to vanilla, in so much that there’s a tiny window my sexuality will be present without a mountain of kink between me and them.
It’s like those various brain integrated glands got the instructions to lay down the pre-framework, long before I dropped my first egg, and decided to say: “Hello, Miss Pearl (aged 12)! In addition to a single orgasm this year, and some now functionally vestigial parts that will ripen up over the next half decade, your already awkward ability to bond onto others will be amped up to 11. The only saving grace is that you will be completely frustrated in realizing these wants most of the time, thus safe from a lot of dumb follow up behaviour.“
This nonsense was probably made worse by the fact that there’s a cultural assumption that pushes eros into any male/female relationship. When I was younger, I preferred the company of boys for reasons of shared nerdy interests. I liked the company of girls before that- I am lucky I never internalized the sexism of assuming girls were inherently no fun. However, I followed my interests, and the kinds of games that could be played, which meant little in the way of female companionship. As a result, at the best of times, when I was way too young for it, adults were already imposing dating expectations onto my male friendships. But, inversely, even in these erotypical scripts, I had no tools to help me navigate having an Olympic level firework display going on in the brain of a child and young adult. Indeed, most people generally denied it could be happening to me, and further romanticized it as an experience we would be lucky to have once in a lifetime.
(There’s an additional hypothesis one might have about my capacities: there is actually a deeper form of Eros I have yet to experience. If everything to this point was a “crush”, I will end up in a psyche ward when it happens, because this is already pretty all consuming.)
For the lack of support I grew up with, I blame abstinence only education, which depends very much on the idea of rare, monogamous and consistent attachments and no alternatives. It’s much easier to enforce a compulsory, marriage focused heterosexuality when you believe in abstract concepts like a single shot of “True Love” to save you purity for. And yet, when I dug further, past pop culture, much as most research on love is almost laughably primitive. Like sex, people have thought about it a bunch and made more art than a million humans could consume in one lifetime. And yet, the psychology is still in the classification stage. Limerance, the term for the intense attachment and search for connection, was a word only coined in 1979. University labs pair college students in research to see if sharing prolonged eye contact and facts about the self correlate to an increased chance of a relationship forming.
So, you have a paradox. Love, in the broad sense, is a big label. It’s been contemplated forever, and generally serious classifications start with mentioning it’s broken down into sub types to distinguish sexual passion (Eros) from friendship (Philia) or a bond with a family member (Storge), and so forth. Unfortunately, this also hints that a lot of the thinking about it hasn’t really advanced, like we were still using the Aristotelian concept of the atom to try to do physics.
Setting off to navigate the conversations around the asexual spectrum, by the way, is a further challenge of everyone having a different perception of love. All humans don’t have the same capacities or experience, but this is never discussed. So, the other half of the expectation around my experience is that it is on the one hand very rare, but on the other, universally possible. Much is said about “True Love” in art, but while you can find out the wavelength of the colour orange, try to measure dopamine and so forth in new parents, or calculate the age of the galaxy relative to its neighbours, love just seems to be. People expect it to happen, to the point that aromantic folk have to make it clear they are a distinct identity, including having to emphasize that it’s not the same as asexuality. (Though the whole Ace thing clearly has a bit of an umbrella label effect, due to the path of collective discovery).
I can’t know if you, the reader, experiences love like I do.
Moving away from the people who don’t love, or love as much, but further from the Greeks, trying to explain what is going on might be further clarified philosophical observation about love from the late 1820s, of something called Crystallization. That’s the process your entire brain gets melted and leaks out your ears, and in the process, elevates the object of your fixation. In my case, barring rare moments, I am about as attracted to the act of non-kinked sex with another human about as much as humans typically find upholstery, garden ponds, or fruit bowls erotic. If Love wanders in, then these parts actually work.
Moving through the timeline of people writing about love, in the second half of the last century you will find neologisms like limerence. The experience of the early stages, for me, is something I only semi facetiously call a “temporary manic episode”. The first burst of falling in love brings euphoria, dropped sleep needs, and a magnetic inspiration that slams whatever poor bastard I have bonded onto into a muse. It also has a regrettable history of encouraging me to be a pest, though at least my gender flipped pigtail pulling could be tempered by maturity.
But just as nature abhors a vacuum, I am not permitted to walk without attachment. A cozy monogamous(ish) relationship that meets my emotional and sexual needs is the only thing that turns it off. Elsewise, I don’t have it in me to be the bed hopping, casual sex loving slut I wished to be. I was born to burn for desire for one person at at time. More frustratingly, though this limerence allows a brief ability to have a more vanilla sex, trapped in a relationship without kink, my romantic attachment fizzles.
What dignity I have today, in love, is hard won.
I am not the hot mess I once was. I mean, I hope so, as I think I’m in the “middle aged” territory of womanhood now, pre-menopausal, but definitely not young. And yet, the insensity has never wavered. All that coudl happen is I got good at controlling my behaviour. That’s no thanks to pop culture, which excuses the theoretical actions of women in love only a little bit less than the carte blanche it gives a guy with the same thing. Fiction isn’t even really sure that dying for your passion is a bad thing, even if Romeo and Juliet has an aspect that’s a cautionary tale. Cathy might crash her immune system yearning in the moors in her nighty, but we are meant to see her passion for Heathcliff at least understandable and inevitable. Of course, luckily for me, love largely just gave me an opportunity to act like an embarrassing git. My teenage years are, lest you think otherwise, a cringe factory that I survive remembering only through accepting my own sincerity at the time.
Middle school (Junior High for Americans) passed in an unfortunate series of stupidities, to be met with an excess of eagerness in High School. While the adults assumed I was on drugs based on my general behaviour (lol, nope), and shook their heads at my sexual precocity, over 50% of the time such passions were unrequited. That is for the best, and it was only through this experience that a modicum of a clue and a shred of pattern recognition started to assert itself. I lived in an area where all the small town nonsense of the early 2000s was in full swing. It was the era of Purity Rings and second virginity, and I was a baby pervert who wanted to do BDSM. I had the internet, and bonded awkwardly on similarly aged folks there too.
I learned the triggers tended to be creating the fiction I craved together. Not every person, but outside of my first times, where mere positive attention seemed enough to turn me into a giddy idiot, it was a common denominator. I’m super lucky, by the way, that Silver’s sexuality is more primarily mapped on making “story” too. Unfortunately, I also learned a pattern that for most people I fell for, they would play out such creativity with me during a crush on me, and than put that away like some sort of courtship only thing.
Nonetheless, I eventually learned to handle it. It doesn’t force me to pursue a single goal, rather while I can’t temper the intensity, I can find appropriate outlets. It also doesn’t completely suspend my judgement. As an older teenager, I was already able to tell if something wasn’t going to work if we tried a relationship. Gradually I managed to shunt all that enthusiasm and energy away from the people and into writing projects and so forth.
Kink mismatches, and other hazards of love
This does give me a little perspective on the situation of the tale as old as time: the kinky person married (or as good as married for their socio-economic status) to someone mismatched in libido or what they want to do in their sex life.
I am generally on the side of telling people in monogamous, but kink free or dead bedroom relationships not to cheat. Divorce and seperations are economically and emotionally hard, but at least they are legally possible. However, I am a little more sympathetic in how a kinked person stumbles into a union with a vanilla person. Not only is their precious little information about kink, to help one make that self discovery, but circumstances like mine show how one might have a brief window where things could work without kink. Nonetheless, my self knowledge means I have to front load any courtship with what I am into.
Nonetheless, I have had variable luck. In the first place, one of the harder lessons in being kinky is that just because they technically have your fetish doesn’t mean you share it compatibility. Nowhere is this illustrated than among balloon fetishists, where popping/not popping is a deep schism. but even in BDSM and further sub divided into femdom, you can come from two wildly different places. It’s been the end of more than one relationship for me, and painful, at that.
I cannot, however, have much spite for the incompatibility. I did have one party claim to be more kinky than they were, but the delusion there seemed to be wishful thinking. Nonetheless, when things are kink-functioning, I am a very sexual person. That’s an irony for me, lacking all the typical attractions, but unable to sustain the head-load of romantic attachments if we aren’t regularly doing some sort of intercourse. I worry , these days, as menopause is about a decade or two at most away, if my libido will sputter out, changing the picture entirely. But, past evidence shows that even when brain meds tanked things, there was some sort of connection still there.
Silver linings
I think, however, there is one blessing. I have, more often than not, found adult me’s passions reciprocated. Even in my youth, I turned down one budding relationship because I knew were wouldn’t be kink compatible, but the poor person, at least, matched me for the gooey-glue of our wants. And I suspect I owe that to the fact that I love openly and well.
Silver, for example, says he likes the surety and openness of my feelings. I was many months ahead of him for the “I love you”. For him, it was a much more cautious conclusion. But I cannot help feeling that my quick heart probably helped me signal to solidify the relationship that makes me very happy. And, I also noticed, though my looks are often remarked on, I have never been courted because of them. My personality, my creativity and so forth have always been someone’s motive- even as I find my aesthetics are a bonus. That too, I think is related to my loving openess.
I think it is easier to fall for the “personality” of a person when they unspool themselves like I do. I might love immensely, deeply, but it does seem I have been loved deeply, a lot, as well.
As you know, health issues have been a core part of the sporadic hiatus, and emotional well being is part of them. It’s something I am a bit sad and sheepish about. In my happiest D/s relationship, most uncomplicated or “yes, but” tainted, I am also at a point where I am not giving the content here that probably would have helped me equivalent back when I founded things 10 years ago. But, maybe I should talk about the pain of how trying to bring change hurt me, within the community, too?
Content Note: transphobia, social criticism, bullying, burn out, mental health, and sexual assault.
Recently, after seven years in the role, I quit moderating r/femdom. I’d been basically checked out for more than a few years. This was, not in the least part, because ultimately the act of trying to curate porn that gives 0 space for my actual sexuality (while purporting to be about me) is about as inherently rewarding as watching the bailiffs auction your heirlooms to help settle the unpaid mortgage on the family farm they are also seizing. I had started, amusingly, because I got banned and publicly spoke out about how the environment was hostile to dommes, particularly lifestyle dommes and tried to seed a little foothold- not removing the fap but suggesting it could be otherwise. The trigger for quitting is betwixt the therapy I am faithfully doing and yet another DM attempting, in good faith on their part, to point out I was not doing enough.
This isn’t, by the way, an attack on this person. She pointed out, being trans, she was banned for content with her bio-dick, which the group gives a pass to with a strapon. Systemic unfairness is rampant- users flag trans people just for being trans, at the best of times. Since everyone is very, very off the rules, even if you could argue her post broke the letter of the law or spirit, she wasn’t without a solid point. But I was looking at her relatively polite appeal to me, pointing out the gatekeeping of the group, and something just came untied. It was that while someone COULD take on her crusade, I was so burned out and, tbh, socially burned by trying to help that I was the wrong person to do it. If I did, I would probably piss everyone else off, putting her hopes on me and then dashing them. This would also be no win for me, as excessive past experience shows that friendly fire is a pretty standard experience in progressive spaces, as well as fragging.
I wouldn’t be able to get the other moderators to be able to make a useful change, all they would be is more burned out and pissed off. I was the most approachable for her issue, but holy hell was I holding on by a thread. I knew that the team I worked with, however well meaning, were similarly ground down. Bot campaigns, hate mail, trashing and bad faith social justice flavoured appeals had all done a lot of damage, leaving a team that was doing the bare minimum to keep the lights on. Fragility, in its various forms has been called out as a barrier to change, but being what people call a “Geriatric Millennial”, I am old enough to see that while conflict might not be abuse, it is labour. It’s labour to sit with the discomfort of your own faults. The work doesn’t go away, even if it is important, no spoons magically materialize extra to make people more resilient because the work is important.
You can definitely power that gap on anger, or fear, but that is a quick way to cPTSD.
Oh, poor Pearl, making excuses! Nah, this is honesty, not an emotional appeal to you. The direct truth, here, is that me in the moderator role wasn’t going to help her with her problem. BUT. Me in the moderator role was probably standing in the way of someone who could. Not because I was actively blocking someone- like most load bearing, endless in scope volunteer roles, being present was leaving people comfortable enough not to do the work to fix things or let them fail.
I wanted to tell her that I already thought r/femdom being essentially r/grumpypegging and low effort spam killed my joy. I wanted to say that the standards we tried to determine who was/wasn’t a dom were nonesense, that they reflected a mindset that was fundamentally anti-sexworker, while still consuming almost exclusively commercial content. Femdom is subculture that, due to collective marginalization of lifestyle only and pro dommes alike, needed us to be allies. But the conceptual way reddit’s larger user base handles porn still has the pre-revenge porn laws mindeset. It’s a harassing, greedy and piracy first attitude that bred The Fappening. And, ultimately, it wasn’t my subreddit to decide to blow things up to turn into a feminist sex utopia. Nobody died and made me in change, and, nobody gave me a private army to accomplish some sort of coup-by-doing-the-work. But I didn’t, cuz she didn’t message me out of the blue to support me.
How about saying “I just work here, ma’am”?
I knew that wasn’t a good enough reply, either. Ultimately while the rewards of helping were minimal, a reputational boost translating to such a miniscule amount of privilege compared to say, working the same hours at McDonalds and using the money to self promote via ads- I was still there. Why was I doing this? Because I thought, in some small way I could push things to be a bit better for everyone.
I volunteer to feel safe, and foster a sense of belonging. I’m autistic, which doesn’t mean all autistics experience things this way, but like all humans I have people needs. My people needs were nurtured in socially abusive environments, while my head is full of boundless creative energy and vision. I unavoidably stand in the foreground, becoming a lead weight on a rubber sheet, warping the gravity of an environment I am in. Maybe this tendency to check out when I am not actively engaged is an ADHD thing too, but nevertheless, it is a thing. And this trying to be in motion, positively, has a history of harming me.
Then Perish.
My therapist asked me something a few weeks back. Why do I mention taking on an “11 victim serial rapist”, a fair bit, as an anchor in my life narrative? He’s a good therapist, so we have the rapport where the pillars of my self can be poked without hurting me. It was a good question. Taking on a series of missing stairs, culminating with that last one, and trying to emphasize the shit I dealt with, with Dunter, to get people to listen, did me irreparable harm, and alienated me from the Montreal kink community. Oh, and my relationship with my partner at the time fell apart- it needed to evolve because of core incompatibilities, but holy fuck, the timing.
Losing your social group to ostracism sucks. It’s actually potentially spectacularly fatal. I wish it hadn’t taken Lindsey Ellis having a second breakdown due to extended social abuse by mob to trip over: “Hot Allostatic Load“, but it helped understand what was going on.
Trying to understand my mental health can be put through a few lenses. One perspective is that things have never been ok- I was an anxious child, to begin with, who experienced ongoing abuse trauma. Another is that my early twenties to thirties were cyclical disasters: boom and bust, functional to non. Or, a person with existing vulnerabilities moved from an abusive family; to an abusive relationship; to an abusive situation in her community… to another even more abusive community, outside of kink.
Being accurate, when I took on Kommandant and Dunter, both sought to destroy my reputation, the latter by implying that I was abusive as well to change the subject. Then, because I had a reputation as the only person with a spine, when I didn’t deliver the results that people wanted on yet one more of many issues, fairly unpleasant humans decided to dox me. They did so because in social justice, any damage for progress is and ends justifies the means. Nothing like deleting a post using your real name on fetlife, and then being told you were silencing them. Guess that’s tone policing now, isn’t it? >_>
I am not just bitter, I’m traumatized. Also bitter. But, mostly trauma.
At the same time, by the way, my online life was picking up stalkers. Pretty gnarly ones, the kind where yeah, there’s clearly some mental health issues going on, but also someone you have never met or interacted with is hell bent on personally punishing you for a relationship they imagined you had with them. Most crazy people don’t do that, this was more the celebrity dehumanization effect.
So I quit, running away into a LARP club, and into Vancouver. And on the way, the LARP club ripped my spine out through my ass. Because it turns out vampire LARP’s poisoned history makes the sexual abuses of the Montreal BDSM scene look like a walk in the park.
Bleeding out various metaphorical injuries got round 2 of disordered eating, followed by covid’s impact just kicking what little stamina I had left. I have been cooling my heels on about 1.5 years now of long term disability. What can I say about that?
I am getting better. I am anxious I will never be fully “ok” to function, of tackling permanent disability to work full time. I am filled with so much guilt and anxiety around the Patreon thing falling by the wayside, I can’t even bring myself to open the site, even though I probably would go back to it much sooner if I did. But a lot of where I got so far in my recovery is heralded by abrogation of responsibilities. Quitting things.
I first noticed that in the larp side. Like most creative hobbies, it’s notorious for volunteer labour making even “for profit” endeavors possible. The pocket I enjoyed is even more shoe string, nourishing a community where even minimal membership fees are a hardship. Leaving aside stumbling from sexual abuse in kink to sexual and other abuse in LARP, there’s very much an over reliance on “hero” volunteers, running unopposed for elected positions of implied sort of leadership, but largely admin. And the people in those roles are a smaller pool than the member base, doing it at the expense of personal life, reputation and health. It continues, because if they stopped the event would stop.
And at some point I sad down and did the math- if it wasn’t important enough to people to support it, then they didn’t deserve to have it. Would this event, this idea or project die but for one person or team? Then perish.
When I left Montreal, the munch I hosted vanished.
Inheritance, alone in an era of missing stairs and #MeToo, became a mess. Events that didn’t act to make themselves safer, ironically, faced less damage. Not because they were better off doing so, but because the 18-35 community didn’t have its shit together not to turn into a ridiculous mud sling if said can of worms were opened. They grew too dependent on Pearl spending $40 a month on a drink she wouldn’t otherwise consume, and a taxi home so she could host a gathering that was slightly safer and curated than others. The fight over the amorphous cluster of folks that became attached to this group overshadowed the labour of keeping things safe.
Cliff, of Pervocracy, talked about this as well. They have one of the most influential theories on moral and social behaviour of groups, but their Missing Stair essay came at a cost I became familiar with. I became, much as they described their own experience, the holding place for the trauma of others.
You don’t get to one and done, to pick up that sword becomes a lifelong commitment, in the eyes of others. Which sounds noble and ideal for everyone, because, like, shouldn’t we all be unstintingly fighting against abuse? Most of the space we call social media is that sort of participatory effort, a push in all directions, so you would think there would be more people doing the work that needs doing.
Only we clearly aren’t. Because the larger world is a hostile place, the burdens disproportionately fall on these load bearing actors. and then the price of failure or imperfection is “we trusted you, the status of being trusted should have been enough”.
Just purely hosting that Munch was, shocking to me, revolutionary to most folks. One evening a month, emailing a bar and making a fetlife event. It spawned two direct (welcomed) copycats that filled needs my event didn’t. And yet at the time it was a remarkable act of will and inclusion even before I started taking whisper network warnings and shouting them. Acting on them, banning people.
I sort of wondered about those legendary wise people and oracles, with people seeking out some poor bronze age bastard to judge their legal dispute or tell them how to plan their personal lives and granary systems. I think also about the shock people forever have when they discover someone popular isn’t rich, works a regular job.
To help others or to speak is to barter your participation in a group
A pithy bit of writing I stumbled over recently observed that in spiritualist societies, when you started having personal occult revelations, your existing group or church would typically exile you. They might have even be founded by another exile with a vision, but yours would become a bridge too far.
I feel a lot of kinship with Contrapoints, just a girl talking, who lucked into being better at talking and entertaining at the right time. Hers was a monkey paw, trying to protect her community and understand the human condition, which arguably made her inevitable transition a bit smoother, but I can’t help thinking that she was smart/positioned enough to make the same income in a short sleeve polo as a software engineer. Then she could still have spent, as she put it “luxury car money” on the medical side of alleviating some of her dysphoria. There sure are a lot of Tesla orbiting every FANG hub I have been around, and a lot of folks participating in the resulting countercultural communities that spring up in such cities.
Instead, the poor woman became a living goddess style avatar in the way we modern people do it. If you were fanciful and biblically raised you could say the Eden breaking nakedness Adam and Eve traded for was an awareness others could see them and care. Sort of like people suggest the god of foresight, Prometheus, isn’t being punished for stealing fire, but giving humans the anxiety of being able to live outside the now. The maker of the monkey with anxiety, if you will.
Other people have written on the toxicity of the traumatized trapped in a marginalized space, retraumatizing each other endlessly. But, with my double helping of the usual monkey anxiety and being a freak among the freaks, now what?
I guess I do what I always do: process my feelings messily and publicly in a long form essay. But I think I will also suggest that we need to do a way better job on foundational shit. Missing stairs exploit being more effort and social complexity to address than to leave as a shared hazard. Believe the victim was a nice start, but it’s not making a tangible structure of next steps or what to do when you “believe the victim” but all the doctors in the hospital are gunshot victims too.
I need there to be a community that supports me without eating me alive in the process. And I need there to be a community with diffused labour-of-justice that is not done from a place of constant high amp. I don’t know what that is, but right now I won’t be trying to found it, as I am a bit occupied with trying to smelt a few more spoons out of the pile of scraps, swords and old razor blades I have been given to work with.
Oh dear. Lots of promises and then intermittent hiatuses. Bang out something- an article or some such, and then vanish again, after making hopeful plans for more. A therapist, a neurologist, an OT, a GP and the hapless bastard over in insurance land who had to navigate this further works on trying to get me functional. Now is the winter of my body’s health, made glorious by spring. Trying something new, the old way I used to write, churning out posts via stream of consciousness, not structure or schedules.
The femdom blog goes on
In December of last year, a friend helped me rescue the site from its state being hammered by all manner of bot based attacks. WordPress is old bones, as we have well crawled from this sort of site model. The cool kids are all off doing video in walled gardens. I maintain this outpost here that isn’t perpetually fearing being banned, blocked or deplatformed at the cost of relative obscurity. Blogging is a dead art, like speaking Latin it’s a cool trick that no longer sits at the center of the internet. These days if I tell people I am a blogger, the younger ones may ask what that is.
The day web bots learn to parse the audio of all the video content enough to make that viable for search, and I suspect the nail’s in the coffin for this artform too, sure as magazines. Nevermind, it was only being economically sustained on an advertising model that depended on a trick of how search bots worked in the first place.
I have three different SEO marketers asking me if I can do a “guest post”, fresh in my inbox. They want a link or two so a robot can be tricked to think a human would care to connect with their commercial endeavor: brothels in Australia, sex toys around the world. Periodically, a company in China still valiantly tries to offer me a load for “review” to coax the same links to appear. I should say yes to the former and toss prices at them. You, reader, would get some erotica out of it. That’s my strict policy, no glowing random announcements that you absolutely need whatever, just to segue the link into post.
I have a nice relationship with my submissive, and it’s serious
It’s 5:30 in the morning, and he’s still asleep. I crashed out early last night, going from flaunting in a latex cat suit to a migraine with enough intensity that I had to fall onto my talent for radical acceptance for the three or so hours until I could go unconscious. Such is the current situation of my life, with my poor flesh, intermittently functional and then dashed down by one thing or another. The seasonal allergies(?) are still there, though also a lingering fear that it’s a garden variety summer cold I am spreading. My breasts have decided to be huge and plump, the latest experience in pandemic weight gain shooting me to something in the flavour of a 32D. When I put my laptop against my solar plexus to type, their swell rest against my arms. It reminds me of trying to do things while holding a baby or a cat.
I am drinking tea out of a mug with a linocut style octopus, a gift from Silver, who saw me crooning over the display of different animals. He likes to do the little gifts like that, or surprise me with something pretty to wear. This week we poked about neighbourhoods and apartments, trying to square the circle around the problem of geography.
I am a Canadian citizen, and he, American. We can each spend half the year in each other’s realm, true, but the legal technicality that is a problem is that neither of us is supposed to work. Contrary to the people telling you to become “Digital Nomads”, even remote work, abroad, is illegal. Those people enjoying Thai beaches while doing some sort of web marketing or contract programming scheme enjoy the privilege of their citizenships that being an ex pat means local laws telling them to not be doing that are unlikely to be enforced. Immigration is a mess that way, everywhere. Specifically, the time to process a spouse visa means a good year in limbo, deliberately overstaying the visitor level. Were I to marry Silver, and all paperwork filed like good upper middle class people, I would be out of the work force entirely for a year, cooling my heels, legally allowed to own businesses but not work in them.
Needless to say, it’s a law everyone expects to be broken, and then uses to cudgel those who have other reasons to make good scapegoats. Were I wealthy, I would hop into some sort of education, while other visas processed. Easier to take some intensive classes on that kind of visa, or find one of those money-for-graduate-degree schemes to anchor one. (I mean, when you hit fuck you money levels, you don’t even need to do that, you can just anchor yourself based on being able to invest stupid levels of money into a country, because there is one law for man, and another for the gods…) All that digression into unsexy politics to say we are stymied by one thing that would be sensible- the ritual of living together BEFORE making it “permanent”.
I now laugh at my somewhat naïve suppose, when Wildcard and I parted ways in the romantic sense. Divorce decimates the finances of women more so than men, statistically. Both take a hit, one does not recover the same. Rebuying what you need for a second house over and over and over again adds up. I told myself mayhap that I wouldn’t cohabit again until I was sure enough to marry. The romantic notion of not living together until after a marriage appealed to my whimsy.
Reader, be careful what you daydream. Your 2017 fantasy of independence and sluttery to cool the sting of domestic failure may manifest four years later. Nonetheless, it’s not the worst problem to have. At least the somebody, Silver, is worth making squinty faces at immigration law and fussing about demo apartments in Washington satellite towns.
Femdom Writing?
Periodically people still ask me if I will pick up what is apparently my best literary achievement and finish the planned trilogy. The Pet Gentleman still sells a few copies- though my sales stats tell me that I never breached 500 editions in ebook or print. I always have that following me around like the alleged slaves who whispered in Emperor’s ears’ they were merely mortal. Truth is, I am not sure can write that well anymore.
Something scratched out desperately in a dying (abusive) relationship while I worked in a call center might be my best work, at least as far as artistic talent and uniqueness intersecting with something people crave. These days when I fiction, things go very rambly and plot heavy. My writing’s been infected with run on sentences and passive voice. I still write, but I notice that the erotic is a lot more padded these days, and the odds of a happy ending a lot more probable.
Maybe I am being self conscious. A decent editing can make my prose a lot less recursive and rambly. In my bleakest I worry various health issues fried my brain and reduced it to pudding. Maybe I will write something that “good” again, but I try not to feed my perfectionism. And… So it goes.
Allergies boil my head, but his body is an aesthetic dream. My twitter feed’s a minutiae of trying to clear my head of goo, unerotic except to that one person with a histamine fetish (I mean there must be?).
Silver has the gift of most smaller men, proportion easy, then honed with dedication at a gym. He refused to admit he is muscular, calling it into question because his shoulders and arms don’t stay swollen like frozen hams when they are not flexed. He was also incredulous when I pointed out we should probably size up in condoms, because I had to fight to get the standard size down his dick at the last inch.
Even now, the Magnums, with their bold branding, actually the middle not the extreme, from the drug store’s offerings, create a sort of self conscious cringe. Neither he, nor I find much pleasure in harping on imaginary inadequacy. We never developed a taste for the male sub standard of claiming your partner doesn’t do it for you and attaches a certain self defeating aura to the dominant. No knock to your own kinks, but if I am going to own someone I want to think they aren’t a sexual imposition.
I began the weekend by offering him the chance to come, right then, or be denied on my terms as per usual. He picked the latter, of course, for fun in teasing. My god, he’s pretty and I’m horny. My botched IUD install and its correction is wearing off and I get wet easy. But, it’s not his tight little body I adore, by itself. Aesthetically, yes, it’s nice, but subtract my love and the possibility of control and certain tensions and I would have an immunity.
I skim the sex scenes in novels, not repulsed, but bored, often preferring “fade to black”. The intensity *to* bed can do it for me. And yet, now, with him, even writing this, the texture of his flesh when I squeeze it is an alluring sense memory.
As is my habit, I disappeared into a pile of health issues, failing to update my Patreon or my blog. Vague shitposting occurred on twitter, as I shuttled through the multitude of appointments that go with disability recovery. I am ok though, don’t panic. It’s one of those things that saps my ability to function but isn’t known for being particularly fatal. HOWEVER!!!
Guess who is teaching a class tonight for Dating Kinky’s Women In Charge event?
Yes, yes, I didn’t effectively promote it, and I am finetuning my slides and throwing together a “Resources Post” to share in the chat while I give the talk right now. But the main thing is I am here and uh… if you clicked that link you were there too. And it is a REALLY important topic, that I did a pile of research for! so to share those resources, look below!
