O Review

“Come As You Are” by Emily Nagoski [Femdom Book Review]

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Come as You Are The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life Emily Nagoski Phd.

Why am I reviewing a sex manual intended for a broader audience of women as a part of my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project? While the majority of my focus remains on romance in particular, this being (I feel) the genre most concerned with depicting femdom in a way dommes may enjoy, I also approach this as books that may be relevant to dommes who are trying to figure themselves out beyond finding fantasies that work for us. 

Come As You Are is one of those self help phenomena that has successfully lodged itself in popular acclaim, popularizing a broad sweep of helpful information about sexuality so well that people don’t even realize it’s a source. It is also notable that if you dig into kink manuals or forum advice posts, it’s also likely to pop up in a “further reading” section or just have its advice paraphrased on the spot to the benefit of whomever is receiving it. Mostly you have probably interacted with it if you ever heard people talk about “responsive desire” versus a spontaneous kind. 

Specifically the book proposes to be a sort of owners manual for women and their sexuality. I think that Nagoski’s efforts are laudable overall, and where it is held back is probably an artifact of the medium of self help as a larger genre. To its credit it is kink positive and interested in normalizing diversity of how people experience sexuality. It’s also dedicated itself to the important work of undoing the years of shame and lousy messaging people get about sex even long before they are adults. In practice, however, I think the main thing that holds it back is that its suggested outcomes, of modulating desire, are at odds with its actual message of there really being no shoulds. 

It therefore ends up being like a Healthy At Any Size nutritionist here to help you develop a better relationship to food largely stuck giving you diet advice to change up your body because all their patients still want to know about gaining or losing weight. Or in this case Nagoski clearly believes compulsory sexuality is as bad for you as compulsory purity, but has to take a harm reductive approach because the majority of people still are preoccupied with having the “right” amount of sex with a monogamous partner. 

That some of her anecdotes are about bisexual or lesbian women is nice, as is her stolid insistence it is ok to get off to m/m fanfic or kink. But this is a world where the asexual spectrum is not a factor of consideration, which I think isn’t her fault. We are largely the invisible orientation and Nagoski’s concepts can at least apply to the spectrum part of that experience. But, ultimately, for all she wants you to know and love your body she thinks of sexuality as first and foremost a partnered activity. 

When I first decided to read this I thought maybe I would use the hands on aspect of the book to do a sort of read along. I quickly determined that probably this was going to be an issue because the majority of this is about trying to figure out why you don’t want to have sex with your partner, with a smaller amount of focus on making yourself want sex less of this desire is vexious to your circumstances (and partner). Other parts are likewise not something I need personally (I know where my clitoris is, and this book really does start you off from 0) and the rest of the book supposes it’s trouble shooting some sort of problem between you, another person and your feelings about yourself.

Therefore the premise weaves between improving communication and mutual understanding with a partner and repeating various versions of letting you know you are normal in all your infinite variations and that there’s a lot of bad information about sex we internalize. She ties most of this to the three Ms, Moral, Medical and Media. I can hardly think I am immune to misunderstandings and myth, but I think it’s an ironic testament to the strength of her thesis Nagoski’s own work still has a bunch of assumptions from those categories in the advice she is giving.

One of those sticky ideas is that she frames this through a lens of men being fundamentally different than women. I think her gender reductionism, paired with appeals to what science says, are some of the weaker parts of the book. She does a lot to criticize that sex research treats women like men lite, but not at all that our assumptions about men are as incorrect as the ones about women. She repeats various traits in women show more variation in that category than comparison to men, and in her examples treats men as if how she describes women is equally applicable, but there’s still a tendency to frame things in terms of “we know this about men, but for women…”. I think Nagoski must know this, but it’s almost like she’s been swept along with the long standing assumption that sex ed for women has to be delivered in a “secrets of womanhood, just between us girls” format.

Still, some manuals that are popular have their own problems of coming from an iffy starting place, and can still be useful. Love Languages, for example, crawled out of the land of Christian Heterofatalism. Critics correctly note a rather depressing foundation there of both reductionism (one love language!) and over use of demands on women (his love language is touch so put out, you silly girl!). With these books you can extract value, but you are going to need a sturdy shovel. And, just by the presence this book has in discussions on the topic of sexuality it’s clear a lot of people have been finding this helpful.

So if Nagoski’s Come As You Are occasionally veers into a bit of gender-essentialism, I think the book can be forgiven not quite making the leap to point out that while it proposes that women are different than how we believe men to be, men are also different than how we believe them to be. That topic, itself is a whole piece of queer theory most people aren’t ready to digest. Introductions to chemistry uses simplified models of the atom in graduated complexity, from balls joined by sticks to eventually fuzzy energy clouds only comprehensible through advanced math, but in 2012 a child still discovered a hitherto undocumented molecule through playing with a sticks and balls set, so a good simplification is more useful than a bad deep dive. 

The other, honestly more important thing she’s doing here, however, is actually using our relative openness to What Science Says to chip away at our self destructive defence mechanisms. There’s a bit of a hidden aspect here, but it’s less trojan horse than trojan my little pony. It will be very hard to read this without an extra layer of re-enforcement on your self acceptance.

Beyond that, and an introduction to general anatomy, her main theory is the idea that sexuality has variable levels of excitability and inhibition. She believes that the vast majority of women are experiencing problems not because things don’t turn them on, but because most women are easily turned *off*. The whys of this are a bit more vague, but she also believes these are more of a factor of things we internalize than say, hormones. 

Thus for Nagoski, generally the root cause of inhibition is attributed to mental baggage or to current life circumstances that make it actually reasonable to not want to have sex. Therefore the majority of her efforts are towards helping the reader think what that might be. Nevertheless you can see a contradiction that she writes in her examples of essentially trying to get women to acknowledge they don’t have to do this and can be ok with not being horny when they think they are supposed to… by telling them how to want sex with another person when it is convenient. 

If I had another pet peeve it would probably be that while Nagoski is plenty kink positive, she generally defaults to examples of female submission. It’s true there’s a lot of submissive people out there of any gender, so this is hardly all that remarkable. Indeed, for all her women in her illustrative anecdotes, BDSM makes up a part of what the women do as an unremarkable part of their sexuality. Nevertheless, it’s always some variation of the sub role that’s described in the most positive terms. Two of the women find significant results in having their partner deny or otherwise restrict them, while the third, in a sapphic relationship, has it mentioned off hand that the only part of her desire that seem to be working going into therapy is when she imagines herself the bottom in a male/male multipartner scenario where she is being dominated. Everty so often around her storytelling, we then get some light reminders about how healthy the bottom/sub side of kink is. And while a lot of people need to hear that, there also is a certain point when I am absolutely and entirely sick of being reassured it’s ok to have submissive fantasies. Even more so when they are paired with glurgey comments that of course since you have so much pressure on you in the real world it makes sense you want to pretend you have none in the bedroom. Hurkblergh.

And then there was one moment where things went frankly bizarre. Fueled by a desire to accept the whole spectrum of possible sexual experience while pushing back on the idea of a pure physiological arbiter being the ultimate signal of true longing, Nagoski goes from the more sensible reassurance that wetness or similar are not contradictory signs of enthusiasm if the rest of you thinks otherwise, and into defining orgasms as something entirely abstract and personal. An orgasm, according to Nagoski, is whatever the person having it says it is.

After coming in through a tagline about “The Surprising New Science” and the first three quarters of the book woven with quotes from various studies, this was an odd place to find myself dropped. While I agree to Nagoski’s larger point that orgasms have a wide range of sensory difference for those who have them, here we are departing from what any science says on the subject with the velocity of a glitching kerbal space program launch. Sure, for some people orgasms are transcendent full body thrashing and for other kind of like the pop of a fresh jar of pickles opening, but the physiological part is still not entirely subjective. If you are so inclined and armed with an electrical current you can give a freshly deceased cadaver an orgasm.

And the sudden turn to hand wavery here is so abrupt that I had to take a break here and wonder what the hell I was just reading. Was Nagoski just using a bit of hyperbole here to stop women from discrediting their orgasms as not good enough and further psyching themselves out? Was she, despite setting the expectation that anyone should be able to have an orgasm, hedging by leaving the door open for women to decide anything they can mange is still enough? Did I misread something here?

But, be that as it may, for me I think the book’s strengths, outside of the reassurances and the basic anatomy, are the approach of troubleshooting sex as something that requires making space for it and removing distractions. This kind of is a skill that you have to figure out in long term relationships and approaching this with your expectations at a realistic level based on your actual circumstances can be very helpful. And if your problem with sex with your partner is you a psyching yourself out or worse, refusing to acknowledge good reasons why you don’t actually want to do this, this book may be really helpful.

Ultimately, for me, this book wasn’t something I needed. It’s good to have vocabulary to talk about the steps to setting up to have some flavour of successful intercourse with another person. Ditto to describe variations in desire patterns. I am also glad someone’s catching the traumatized religious conservative survivors and getting them to look at their own genitals. Lives are going to be saved by doing that, since your reproductive system is also one of those body parts that has a high chance of trying to kill you. But this really is a 101 primer and ultimately a 10+ veteran sex blogger probably isn’t going to be surprised to learn the clitoris is important or that you don’t need to feel shame about your fantasies.

Where to buy: 

Author Website:

Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!

“What Fury Brings” by Tricia Levenseller [Femdom Book Review]

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What Fury Brings by Tricia Levenseller

In a Greco-Roman fantasy world, various gods award their client populations gifts. For the country of Amarra, that’s to be stronger than any (cis) man, a fact that has led to a warlike society of Amazons with a distinct man shortage in their upper caste, causing them to have a practice of forced marriage harvested from their neighbors. Meanwhile everywhere else is a sea of ultra machismo masculinity.  In reaction, the Amarrans are also hard, harsh and violent, including our protagonist, Olerra, one of the leading candidates for the (elected) throne of her country. She’s hoping that she can leverage her status as general to impress her electorate (a small council of noble women), and in service to that she decides that nothing but the hand of a neighboring prince will do. 

Amarra’s’ most immediate rival a people who worship the god Brutus and therefore are known even internally as Brutes.  It is known that Brutes get higher than average fecundity thanks to their deity, but turn around and use that to create a culture of very fragile patriarchy, where the most powerful treat their wives and daughters as non-entities, but live in terror of their sons. For me I was a lot more curious about the fertility gift. We established that the Amarran strength wasn’t limitless as the King of the Brutes could still fight off multiple warriors, is the fertility a gender based blessing? What are the limits here? The King has multiple children but nothing unusual for someone having a lot of sex sans birth control over several decades. We hear about his five sons, of which the male protagonist is the eldest, and a daughter, while a reasonably determined person can get into the double digits if they keep at it most of their adult reproductive life. My grandfather, for example, is the youngest of 10.

When we learn Olerra’s darkest secret, that she lacks the strength awarded to all cis women of her society, I had suspected the actual truth would be that nobody in the society had real magic and it was social constructs the whole way down. You can still take that reading here as correct, but that’s not where this story goes. 

Instead it’s warrior/warrior, abduction and forced proximity plus fake romance, with a liberal pile of femdom to glue it all together. Olerra conspires to abduct a husband from the heart of her enemy’s kingdom and grabs the wrong brother, Sano, the crown prince. Sanos decides, for strategic reasons, not to correct this misunderstanding up front and then they slowly come to fall in love as Olerra does her level best to “housebreak” her captive into the more demure model of Amarran masculinity and he comes to appreciate her pure hearted sincerity. 

The way to read this is to turn your brain off and enjoy the ride. Up front, any nitpicking of the world building comes at the expense of the dubcon femdom. Likewise, a book which gives you an on page reason to refer to men as Brutes is not trying to be subtle and realistic. And in doing relax and enjoy approach, it also needs to be said that there’s nothing here that, gender flipped, would be remarkable in a romance about a male warrior-noble abducting a bride. Romance heroines have been slowly chipping away at their hot blooded ambitious warrior captors until they mutually surrender to the bonds of true love since forever. And they have done so on looser premises than this. 

It is true that somewhere in the back of What Fury Brings you can see the DNA of Wonder Woman, in the idea that a society under loving female authority would be largely utopia, but unfortunately somehow men get in their own way of accepting that. But this is also a sort of gender flip Gor, for despite being liberated for 500 years, the glue that holds Amarran society is the humiliation and subjection of men. Amarrans are inordinately obsessed with that, particularly the nobles, with lots of stories about how terribly rapey men are amidst a brutal culture of female on male rape. Again, take this as a feature not a bug. 

Probably because of that aforementioned clause that deity gifts are still beatable by exceptional individuals, Amarra really leans into restrictions on their men well past even the strictures of even an actual historical roman slave.  Even fighting back to the point of drawing blood from a woman is a death sentence and the murder of one noble woman, Olerra’s mother, lead to a purge of all adult noble men. 

Timelines get a bit hazy here, as the husband kidnapping is described as a tradition, but the massive gendercide that’s made it more popular happened within Olerra’s lifetime. The absolute trauma of everyone else’s father, adult son, brother or grandfather being murdered is not something that ever comes up, even though every adult noble woman you would interact with in the story would have lost multiple loved ones to a purge that made even some of the more out of hand European witch burnings seem restrained. You really have to just accept this is a convenient man shortage. 

Still, what is difficult to put your finger on is just how much this is a matter of unreliable narrators, how much is plot convenience and how much is a society that really, really hates cis men to the point of undermining its own modern feminist inclinations. What point do you need to be, after all, to overreact so wildly you are murdering everyone from 85 to 18 under suspicion of conspiracy to rebel? And what does this end up saying to the idea that “if women were in charge things would be different” when they are objectively worse? 

The book gives the on-page explanation this is what fury brings, but 500 years is a long time to stay mad, a timeline under which, for example, the real world went from medieval to space exploration (or if you want to stay Greco-Roman, the Athenian heyday to the advent of Christianity in the Roman empire). This has nothing to do with fury and everything to do with an intersection of fantasy clichés of excessively long timelines. The geography is pretty handwavey too, with the capital of Amarra and Brutus a short carriage ride from each other, yet different enough in climates to justify one character needing sun protection. Again, the parts of Northern Italy and Southern Italy where you can get that much genetic and climate drift are still considerably further apart. But will we let errors in cartography get in the way of pornography?

I only flag the nitpicks in the end, not because I think the book is bad for its flaws, but because the audience for femdom romance is excruciatingly selective. Forewarned means that you can go into this without a common response I find in our reader circles of getting your hopes up and then feeling particularly betrayed. I obviously can’t flag everything you the reader might personally find irksome, but I do these reviews to help people get an idea of what might be worth taking a risk on. 

And, ultimately everything is just here as a premise to justify the kidnapping of the male lead and make him more special. This isn’t a story about a woman trying to reform her society because her brother’s life was made forfeit by a deeply violent society, it’s one where the heroine being middling bad (for no reason other than random chance) in a society of terribly bad is a ray of reforming hope. 

Of course, lest you worry this is a TERF paradise, the opening glossary makes sure we are aware the Amarrans have a queer positive culture, with trans, non-binary and same gender couples galore. This is unlike the Brutes, who expect this to keep on the downlow.  Unfortunately though, it’s the sort of trans positive culture where any gender non-conformity to the binary firmly lands you in third gender status. The goddess gift of strength doesn’t work on trans women, yes, but they don’t get it, and it also does not work on trans men. I am going to give the writer the benefit of the doubt and say there’s no reason to assume their deity is perfect rather than that it’s an endorsement modern trans people are less valid.

The other part that’s very much a symptom of the modern era is what’s *not* included in the trigger warnings. We hit the ground running in a battle to take down the King of the Brutes, whereby the solution to his behaviour was to live capture, tie him to a chair, gloat a bit and then release him to his people stark naked to humiliate him. The King then goes home and strips his adult sons stark naked to flog them. Four chapters in and the fetish counter is making constant dinging noises, but none of this is being interpreted as vaguely sexual for purposes of warning the audience. 

This is really a problem about fetish stuff versus social norms about content notes. Because much of what is kinky is not inherently sexual, it means that it exists in a context of plausible deniability. But neither is the dubcob being flagged. The book depends heavily on body betrayal syndrome, and the male lead being aroused by something to make it clear surprises are ok. Things like tying the lead up and fingering his ass, without him realizing that was a possibility, are ok if he expected to have some sort of non-PiV sex. The trigger warnings demurely say the sexual assaults are off page, but every facet of this story is relentlessly horny.

Which is probably the books most winning feature. Every single part of it is twisted itself into the sole purpose of offering you more attempts at femdom for women and theorizing about a masculine friendly version of F/m. Want not men doing naked oil wrestling for your amusement? It’s got that. Sex markets where you can get a skilled man into what really gets you off? It’s got that too. Lovingly lavish descriptions of male fashions to simultaneously emphasize masculinity and make the man into a delectable and beautiful object of desire? It wants you to have that. 

But for me, my biggest personal nitpick (outside the recent voluntary gendercide being handwaved as more inconvenient than traumatic) is probably the part where Sanos comes to internalize Ammaran social superiority. There’s a reasonable conversation about the limits of trying to protect your kin from sexism versus social reform, but the point he is won over is that common men in the street seem happy in their subjugated position. There’s some contrast here in that while Amarran nobles are absurdly decadent in their harems, whereas there’s implication that commoners don’t have time for thirty men to exist in entirely decorative subjugation, but enough context clues to know that men are so constrained in this society they aren’t really out without female escort and they aren’t handling money. 

This is generally held up to being what Sanos and Olerra both see as ok. They don’t want all the grooming and domestic violence in either direction, but they are nobles and their concept of the world is not one where hierarchies are flattened, only softened. 

But there are moments where that background assumption gets a bit messy, never more so than the self congratulatory attitude around the penis guillotine scene. It’s presence is framed as being used to punish the worst of the worst, a man who raped a child. The idea is that it tells you that Amarra is harsh but fair, at worst a little preoccupied with certain risks over others. 

In actual impression it comes across that there’s such an appetite for seeing bad things happen to men that Amarra, lacking enough villains in their own borders, imports criminals from other countries so people can come and watch an evil man get his comeuppance. And our female protagonist gives our male protagonist a little lecture about how it helps with the inherent make tendency to rape…despite our introduction to her culture involving a paralytic toxin that leaves you with an erection used on consorts who misbehave, the villain openly being known to being likely to force an underage member of her harem to consummate and another character being considered unremarkable that she has a harem of entirely children. The book lets us know she is actually running a clandestine orphanage not a grooming operation, but apparently Amarra is so anti man that keeping a couple of dozen boys as consorts in training is less weird than openly running a school for under privileged boys. 

Meanwhile a lot of dialogue between the characters repeatedly confronts Sanos with his hypocrisy. Olerra is supposed to be the one who thinks bigger than him, but from an audience perspective, we are able to see her blind spots but he can’t. Inversely Sanos is not so far behind her as Olerra acts. She calls out his tendency to use chivalry in place of systemic repair, but he has something that’s much harder to discard in misogynistic cultures, the belief in fundamental inherent gender equality. Sanos somehow manages to avoid all the usual baggage that women are dumber, more cowardly, manipulative, etc.. that goes with real world sexism. 

So the guillotine becomes one of those moments where I can’t tell if this was supposed to be porn or praxis, but mostly it was a moment of the book trying to have their cake and eat it too. I base this on the fact that Amarra also uses voluntary eunuchs as high prestige servants  for unclear reasons. These men, it is made clear, are not being punished, but if you want a job in a noble household as a man it’s a mandatory requirement. Why? No reason given, so I think Levenseller just likes castration as a fetish. But the narrative also wants to have some moral line and it does ask you to give them more but in that I can here. 

Finally, in trying to bridge that problem of making members of a monstrous society sympathetic, the tactic deployed is that we are shown much worse people. The king of the Brutes abuses his sons, and Olerra’s rival to the throne is (most disgusting of disgusting vices)… a sadist!!!    

Sadism here is depicted as impossible to exist in a context of consent. It has to be the violent mishandling of unconsenting men, and is contrasted with the mainline Amarrans way of controlling their men, keeping them physically restrained and sexual tease and denial. It’s a sort of tyranny of gentle femdom, which as a story is supposed to let you relax your moral calibration to sample your edge fetishes as bad things and have your main ones as acceptable. As a premise it is understandable, but it also puts you in an awkward position that your happily ever after creates a line where half the stuff you enjoyed as a reader is going to arbitrarily be put in the shameful category. 

Thus penis guillotines are for good women to get off to bad men being chopped. Abusing your sex slaves is for good women to be titillated by but to ultimately condemn.  Other things are made arbitrarily ok, but ultimately when good triumphs in this story most of the stricter and more cruel fetish parts are to be swept up off the stage like discarded lingerie after a burlesque show. 

And I think the part of the ending that might make at least some potential audience give it a hard pass is in the HEA. After Olerra has fought many times over and won due to a combination of sheer skill, cunning and purity of heart, and after Sanos has learned to trust her and let her lead; they are cozy together as a couple discussing the future. And Olerra mentions they might switch sometimes. As character development it’s her learning to trust men and be vulnerable, as a Domme it was the disappointing inevitability of how tied to the situation a lot of the kink was. Olerra wasn’t constantly restraining Sanos because it was her fetish, she was frightened of him having the upper hand. When she loses that fear, she loses her justification to tie him up. 

For most people that’s going to be enough, but I know some of you would find a hint of switching would make you feel entirely undermined, so I think I need to mention that. 

But, caveats aside, I actually liked it. I liked the sex scenes. I liked the slow mutual understanding. I liked Sanos being an object of display and the almost fourth wall breaking internal observation he made about how shocking it was he got to be beautiful. I even liked the premise that the most popular brothel in Brutus as a make-believe version of Amarra because while the narrative through Dani’s perspective implied it was just to humble powerful women, I think it also pointed to how miserable men in ultra patriarchy are that they can’t help yearning for something else. It also delivered something a lot of femdom books struggle with, two leads I liked and thought suited each other. It even evaded one of my least favourite femdom tropes that submissive men in particular have to be inherently feminized to occupy that role. 

And, ultimately, even if the leads end with the shy possibility of switching on the table, it’s also notable that in a book which is incredibly open about sex, did not see fit to write that.  Sure, it’s there to let us know femdom doesn’t have to be compulsory, but you never get the vibe you as the audience were being told you had to endure some male dom as turn about. 

Which, review-wise, it’s good. It hits everything most people who want more femdom romances are looking for. While some books are a chore to get through, I knocked this one off in two binge read sessions, entirely entertained the whole time.

Where to buy: 

Author website: Tricia Levenseller

Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!

“Preferential Treatment” by Heather Guerre [Femdom Book Review]

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"Preferential Treatment" by Heather Guerre

I think there’s some note of consistency that although I am much more likely to drop a less known work as a review on my blog, inversely precisely because a thing I have read is popular I assume that I have reviewed the things that people are more familiar with in the genre of femdom romance. I liked Preferential Treatment when I read it, enough so that I regularly list it in a top 5 recommendations when people ask for a femdom romance book. I am not the only one who makes this suggestion either. 

In actuality it looks like I hit What Was Meant To Be, but not this one yet. This is a pity, because the book isn’t merely a great read, but also, in my opinion, the last word needed in the genre of Billionaire Romances. And by this I mean that it’s a beautifully constructed reply from a population that’s getting awfully sick of oligarchs and the power differences they represent. 

For doing so the book gets some negative reviews as “preachy”, which I think says more about the reviewers than its protagonist driven rejection of what that kind of wealth represents. Most billionaire romance heroines aren’t comfortable with the sheer gravitational pull of the hero’s wealth, but this one at least can articulate the problems she has clearly. 

And for all the lead is introduced as a more traditional meet cute through a chance encounter, it is remarkably realistic for the rest of it. The book gives you a happy ending, but it doesn’t flinch in how it constructs how people behave when massive amounts of money are on the table. 

Specifically, a major theme running throughout it is the complicated relationship poverty gives you with money, but also the conflict inherent in ones aesthetic preferences towards symbols of opulence, versus your actual coping skills as you try to escape that state of deprivation. Growing up in what passes for poor in Canada, there was also more of this book that personally resonated with me for non-femdom reasons to boot. I don’t just recommend it because it’s entertaining, but because it’s an incredibly genre savvy response to a lot of the problems in both romance and how we imagine femdom works versus how it actually works.

This is despite the how the premise and the male lead’s attitude to the woman he is into are possibly as far from an ideal starting place for a healthy relationship as you can get. Russian Billionaire Mikhail Volkov decides that his low level worker has the makings of a good domme when, not knowing who he is, she responds to his entitled behavior with firm pushback. To get her interested he gives her access to his near limitless resources, an offer that the heroine, Kate Pasternak is desperate enough not to turn down. She’s in a rough place in her life right now with a bunch of lingering medical debt, but there’s really never been a point when she’s been able to enjoy any financial stability. This is a lifeline, a chance to finally clear a hurdle between a net worth in the negatives and maybe have an emergency fund or start saving for retirement. Kate’s ambitions are incredibly modest.

A typical billionaire romance would then have the kink be forced gifting, where the heroine dub-con whines and blushes her way through the hero’s largess, protected from ever having to confront being perceived as greedy by his forceful choice to shower her with his largesse. This fantasy is probably as old as dirt at this point, a tension produced by suppressing your appetite for material things that’s enforced by social norms almost as strict on women as the one around sexual purity. The act of being a dominant unavoidably evokes three vices women are not supposed to have on our own behalf: aggression, overt sexuality, and selfishness. Thus being a domme is not just the archetypical bad girl, she’s the worst girl. All dommes have to deal with this, one way or another. 

Findom, as it is popularly understood, has sins two and three particularly emphasized under its umbrella automatically. I have said before that it exists because there’s few things women can do more transgressive than express ambitious ingratitude. We are supposed to permit men to be our social superiors and then be rewarded for loving their inner selves, not treat their sexual and romantic attraction to us as an overt vulnerability to extract from. Even sex work isn’t free from this, perpetually victim of the fictional construction of the woman who despite her job has a heart of gold, as if being someone’s paid worker was inherently implying blackmail of the client. Findom generally says fuck that, gimme. And people tend to feel at best ambiguous. 

Yet, most women like stuff and money, as a symptom of being human. Everyone needs stuff and money to not die. And the stuff and money, historically and currently, is disproportionately gated in the hands of men. You can try to earn your own stuff and money, but the people who have the majority of it did not earn it through sheer hard work. And then of course there’s a severe social penalty for asking for stuff or money for being female even in wage negotiations. 

If that wasn’t enough, of course, humans are preternaturally attached to the Cinderella myth. That’s the idea that it’s viable for women to do some sort of extreme cross class marrying into money if you are just that good, either through your virtues or strategic gold digging. The reality, of course is that marriage statistics do not show that happens at all. Marrying into money is not very common, and particularly not gender linked as a man is as likely to do so as a woman is. 

Findom exists as a result of both the belief money can be easily finessed from men and a male anxiety that in a rigged system they will never truly be loved for themselves, only what they can offer. 

And for its sins, the salt people hurl at it is legendary. In day to day interactions with the internet, more kinky people can be counted on to be critical of findom than pretty much anything else, even the stuff that plays with much more noxious taboos, like rape. Every bad stereotype people can make about women is dusted off: deceptive, seductive, addictive. Men, inversely, are cast as sweet naïfs, wistfully lured in by pure hearted loneliness. 

Green And Gold, another exploration on Findom, dealt with that stigma by drowning the dominant in reassurance. Nothing she desired was capable of being outside of what her two eager male leads wanted to give, and her primary power was rooted in simply gatekeeping her ability to receive. To an extent this is true to real life power exchange. Florid fantasies not withstanding, it’s ultimately bordered by the limits of your submissive partner. In an ideal world that’s bordered by your limits too and you have a balanced dynamic. Nevertheless, that assumes a circumstance without conflict, which is great in practice but not ideal for a story. 

I think Preferential Treatment is also about escaping the other, very real life problem of simply ending up being someone’s fantasy fulfillment version of power. 

This is a problem for all dominants, but I think femdoms even more so. You learn pretty early on that the intersection between human nature and misogyny means a culture where men generally say they want women who are lively and assertive. The most macho cultures, be paradox, seldom actually prize total submission in their women, instead idealizing women who defer to them but also otherwise behave as if the symbols of masculinity they prize were also more valuable to them. 

As a dominant this leads to a vexatious category of men who pursue you because they think you are actually some sort of extra complicated brat, or your inclinations are simply a defence mechanism that makes you extra choosy. But external to the fetish aspect, you still need to navigate an assumption on the part of many sub dudes that firecracker or ice queen, you are ultimately still his to channel or receive on his terms and not the other way around. Mikhail, the book’s Billionaire hero, is very much of that mold. He is certainly happy to have her dominate him in very closed circumstances, but his proposition comes with NDAs, a great deal of ambiguity and the real world power imbalance that even if she did object to anything he did or want other than what he wants she has no real ability to counter him.

Kate is otherwise sketched out as how dommes actually are, in really sharp contrast to how most men who fetishize us imagine us to be. This includes the limits of the common bitch-in-heels over achiever stereotype dominants are awarded. There’s this tendency to assume sheer gumption can overcome systemic issues, and that you are some sort of heroic, magnetic figure where assertiveness or confidence are the limitless scaffold you build around people so they cannot but help going in the direction you choose. 

Kate is not unflappable at all. She’s all flap, barely held down, her appearance of cool-headed boundaries and absolute accident based on Mikhail reading way more into their first interaction than is there. By pure luck, his silly, fetishized stereotype actually leads him to find a lifestyle domme with a knack for improvising with his rather lousy material and enough cynical insight to notice the limits of how much he is actually willing to submit. 

A blind read through left me angrily screeching at the book on her behalf while he continued to suck, while simultaneously deeply invested in her getting some sort of happy ending. It’s almost ironic most readers were prepared to overlook his consistent selfishness while calling out her critical and vocal socialism. 

Which, side note, here is another place Guerre is being clever with her use of tropes. While most Russian male leads are chosen exoticism largely based on emphasizing social biases about people on the borderline of whiteness (about as yikes as you are thinking), Guerre has done two things here. Firstly, her female protagonist’s surname is also Russian, making it clear we aren’t going there. Secondly she’s put her timeline that her male lead grew up in the worst sort of deprivation during the transition of the fall of the Soviet Union. If you are going to have at least a semi serious discussion about socialism, someone familiar with the way authoritarianism poisoned things, and the additional complexity of the immigrant experience gives you much more interesting fodder here. 

Likewise on the subject of poverty, Guerre gets across not just the foundational parts being systemic, familial and long lasting, but also the cultural alienation when you are confronted by wealth. Wealth is a foreign country. 

I occupy an awkward place, a rich man’s unexpected, youthfully created bastard, born to a bohemian mother from the sort of gnarly intergenerational situation that layers queerness, neurodiversity, intellectual brilliance and an interlude with, I am not making this up, MKULTRA. This means that I have this odd experience of growing up in what passes for poverty in Canada but occasionally getting dunked into the world of people who live sublimely comfortably. And you wouldn’t believe the guilt and sense of constant anomie that produces. 

Likewise there’s something in Kate I could vividly feel, the way her curated vintage aesthetic was a bridge, as all alt fashion is, outside of easily code readable class markers. Which works until you hit exposure to something actually expensive that has hidden infrastructure. Or something that was, for you, unthinkable. I cannot review this without talking about how this book ended up being deeply personal in this sense. 

I married a nice, upper middle class software engineer from the Midwest, who is not, as far as humans go, at all extravagant, particularly not for his social class. But there’s always little moments where the sort of diagonalization of our overlapping cultural pieces, the creativity, the kink, the nerdery do not entirely obscure the nice straight lines of his world compared with the turbulent ripples of mine. 

There’s a point in the story where Kate starts coming unglued, revolving around a piece of luxury cookware. The overt language of her meltdown is that she has determined that despite coveting it, she has no idea how one even integrates such a thing into one’s actual cooking. The underlying issue is that this temporary exposure to wealth isn’t helping her actual problem of living with lifelong instability, and the debt that’s put on her, in knowledge but also an ability to trust. Mikhail, for his part, is mystified. He is doing nice things, getting to give as an act of service and all it is doing is making his dominant cry. 

Their way through is a fundamental truth about making BDSM work for the long haul, you both have to be who you actually are with each other in a way that is immensely vulnerable. For this couple, it is about dismantling the wall his money has put between them. It is also about transitioning from serving his idealized Kate, a person he needs to be implicitly impressed by and endorsing of his status to feel safe with, to offering himself to real Kate. The person who he wanted at the start of the book, who when confronted by an entitled peer doesn’t back down. 

Because this is entirely told through Kate’s perspective, Mikhail’s transformation is a bit of a cypher, and he never really gets a scene where he articulates to her why he is able to go along with the change in direction she wants. But, I think Guerre has given us enough ground work we can take this as a matter of show don’t tell. What carving away his real billions is about is acknowledging that these are actually getting in the way. 

If you judged by the cover and blurb Preferential Treatment sounds like it will be yet another silly escapist bit of Cinderella fantasy fluff. Yet, what you get is something so solid it stands distinct in its own genre. It manages to understand and respect the tropes it is working with (romance land Russians, wealthy male leads, femdom), but in combining them, comes through with something wholly unique. And I think it speaks to something else as well, that the femdom part is probably what most made this possible. 

While all billionaire romances see their heroines eventually find some sort of comfortable equilibrium with the menace their lover’s wealth presents, the taboo breaking aspects of femdom becomes, through its inherent potential for iconoclasm, a way to pass through one of Romance’s more tricky barriers. A cardinal rule is that all stories must have a happy ending, but more often than not, books where the male lead has a huge advantage over the female lead require us to leave him that way and count on the strength of his love to abrogate it. She will always be more exposed than him, by class, by sexism, by being the one who married into the money, but trust me bro, he loves her, so that’s fine. 

Sometimes that can be enough, but sometimes it is nice for the heroine to say all the quiet parts out loud, and to strip the hero truly naked in the process. 

Where to buy: Barnes & Noble

Author website: HeatherGuerre.com

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“Hidden Claws” by MT Addams [Femdom Book Review]

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This week, we are back in the bonkers, QAnon adjacent world of contemporary dark romance, for an F/mm about three immensely messed up individuals, one of whom is a yandere flavoured serial killer and one of whom is doing a sort of budget V for Vendetta style effort to  replicate her exact trauma to make the sub into what he needs to be reborn. 

The third character, Malek, is not exactly in a healthy place either, in the middle act of a downward spiral. As a teenager, family pulled him into human trafficking and then died messily in front of him mid-crime, dropping him into juvie and then an adulthood of unstable low paid work, substance abuse and violent outbursts. Those latter two factors have landed him in jail, looking at his first of what will clearly be a series of adult incarcerations, likely ending with his death or a life sentence. 

Fortunately for him, he is offered a diversion program, a stay at a luxury facility to get his life back on track. Unfortunately, it’s a trap.  The cop that arrested him, Mason, is owed a favour by his dominant, Jasmine, and asks her to take on Malek’s rehabilitation. Contrary to first impressions, however, this is no altruistic act. Jasmine, while she does enjoy remaking and rebuilding individuals, keeps things on a strict six month timeline. Mason has finagled his way to a second six months, but he knows that’s likely to be it. Therefore Mason has hatched a plan to give Jasmine a submissive so hard to handle she’s forced to turn to him for help and thence see she should keep him around permanently. 

This second male lead is a complete piece of work, putting the B into ACAB. Inversely he is a pretty good example of an under explored trope for male subs, if you want a more classic bad news romance hero. He is an inveterate schemer and boundary pusher, but offers that fun-only-in-fiction trait that he will do literally anything to be with you. Even murder. I think that from a story perspective it’s good to see this sort of character be explicitly coded as submissive as it works very well with the real life tension between someone’s submissive desires versus their real world agency.

The second male lead, Malek is a more traditional sort of character and a depiction as a sub, a more straight forward invitation to ride along with his reactions to his captivity. He is cocky and takes a long time to break, but ultimately slides into a much less complex state of attached submission to Jasmine once her mental conditioning starts to work on him. While we get a lot of his perspective, it’s mostly suffering and confusion, either something to linger on as a sadist or to vicariously project yourself into for a more masochistic read. 

Of course rounding this out, the domme in this story, Jasmine, has secrets of her own. The fact that she has near infinite wealth and a mansion equip to hold people prisoner and brainwash them is a matter of inheritance. Specifically, she is a survivor of a much less positively motivated sex slave trafficking ring, who eventually navigated her way from teenage victim, to non-consensual trophy wife and with a little judicious murder, wealthy widow. The remainder of the trafficking ring is now being kept at arms length by mutually assured destruction through the various blackmail evidence they have on each other, and consensual BDSM is her hobby to get some social contact while still keeping strict boundaries on the rest of the world. 

Mason, of course, is here to destroy all that. While the trafficking ring she escaped are the true villains of the story, it would be accurate to call him the major antagonist. His role is to stir up Jasmine’s stalker, be a sort of puckish bad influence on Malek, but above all provide a pretty rare scenario of male sub to male sub jealousy. This is another thing that makes this book unusual as while there’s a million different versions of cuckolding fantasies that lean MF/m or M/fm, it’s pretty rare for there to be as much emphasis on sub feeling insecure relative to each other. Honestly, I think this is a lot more common to how dommes would prefer things if they want drama in their harems. As much as it creates room for Mason to feel off putting (if your ideal submissive is safe, this won’t work for you), it does succeed in selling the fantasy of being treated like you are the most important person in the would by multiple men 

On the other hand, as is many “why choose?” books, there’s also an inevitable amount of convenient bisexuality. The glue that holds the triad together is the two men’s attachment to Jasmine, but part of the resolution of this is that her two pets develop a sort of strong erotic friendship. This is particularly important when you get to the final conflict of the story that presents Malek with an opportunity to choose Jasmine for himself rather than be forced to submit to her.

And related to that, as a review I should probably flag that while I would not describe this as switchy, Jasmine’s bad experiences do not focus on making her disproportionately powerful. She barely has a handle on Mason, who tries to top from the bottom constantly, is playing cat and mouse with her former tormentors, and while her treatment of Malek is framed as effective, there’s a bunch of arms length distance she has with her subs that we are supposed to see as the thing to be broken down and discarded. Her two lovers are going to help her get there, but it’s going to mean we accept that they might know better than her.

Finally, as I mentioned, this is a bonkers story. It’s a world where human traffickers put multiple women in separate duffle bags to move them around, as if this was a sensible of viable way to transport people, and where you can get a private security team to be loyal to you but indifferent to the unethical sex slavery that’s happening under their noses. It’s one where you can apparently divert a prisoner from a jail and make his charges evaporate without anyone caring all too much. Honestly, in the former situation I somewhat suspect that the author started this off as a more straightforward idea that the diversion program was entirely just how this society worked and then changed their mind two or so chapters in. It doesn’t hurt the story’s readability, but it does cause a bunch of rapid tone shifts that are a bit incongruent from how the characters are first introduced.

In all, I liked it the way one likes an action/thriller you use to fill an evening. It scratched an itch I have for darker materials and while I think would have liked Jasmine to have a bit of a stronger role, the parts of the story that made it different from most of its genre were fun enough I’d be interested to see what else MT Addams did or does with femdom.

  • Where to Buy: Amazon
  • Author Website: https://mtaddams.com/books/

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“My Best Friend’s Honeymoon” by Meryl Wilsner [Femdom Book Review]

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My Best Friend's Honeymoon By Meryl Wilsner

Last month’s Beguiled Books outing got me not just the second in the Secret Illuminations duology, but two others that the gentleman running the counter assured me were femdom. The Sea Witch was one, this is the other, so I will be due for a trip back shortly to restock.  Unsurprisingly, all three purchases were in some way in the non-traditional space, more reliable hunting grounds. You would think it would be otherwise, just based on probability by the sheer volume of books published, but most non indie het romance tends not to want to gamble outside of the current trend of the moment. I do predict some more attempts at “Villainess” stories out of the Romantasy space, but most of these will probably just lean on making their female lead misunderstood rather than capable of harm. And so I will stay hopeful, but expect most reviews will still be pulled from the indie or queer part of the pool. 

My Best Friend’s Honeymoon is a contemporary sapphic NB/f romance about a woman with a near pathological inability to make choices on her own behalf and the service top Daddy who has loved her since middle school. There’s definitely femdom here, though the overt part is eased into like someone slipping into a warm bath. You will be about three quarters into the book before they start discussing titles and half way in before it’s entirely clear who the dominant is. 

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. A lot of femdom bonks you over the head with how special and different and bossy the dominant is, something about them instantly flagging that people should yield to a Strong and Powerful Woman. This is contrary to the experience of being a dominant in real life, where you are generally just a person. 

The premise, otherwise, is that the sub character, Elsie (she/her), desperately needs to grow up. She’s so bad at asserting herself that she sleep walks her way nearly all the way to the altar in a marriage with a man that’s safe and sweet, but so oblivious to her own struggles that he’s tried to book out everything for their wedding as a surprise. When that blows up, in the extremely gentle breakup that follows he gifts her the planned and entirely non-refundable honeymoon. She decides to take her best friend Ginny (she/they, but represented as they/them), whose pining for her is something she likewise has elided around since they were 15.  

The thing I found most interesting is the novel nature of the dynamic. Ginny has a lodestone like desire to please their friend, but the book’s premise amounts to pushing Elsie way out of her comfort zone. This means Ginny refusing to ever anticipate or guess what Elsie wants and demanding she ask, explicitly and clearly. Via this system they eventually work their way to cunnilingus, fingering and fisting, with a stop off in some entirely consensual dirty talk. But for Elsie, all of these are high tension, pulling teeth level confessions, even starting by choosing what holiday activities to do at the resort first. 

This is really well done, and the tension of awarding someone the possibility of offering someone anything they want to make them squirm with the struggle of admitting they want it. Where it suffers is probably that while Ginny is more or less a saint, a part time carpenter who takes in rescue dogs and charts a path for themselves in a world that has been less than accepting… Elsie’s kind of an asshole without much else going on. 

Her choices, to put her head in the sand to try to get her fiancé to dump her, and to elide around Ginny’s teenage admission of interest, are set up as having plausible motivation, but there’s no examination in this sort of behavior being kind of hurtful. Elsie has spent her life enjoying casting other people as the problem. Her dad won’t listen to her plans to change the family hardware store, and she’s sidelined in her familial dynamic, but she’s never forced to consider her ideas might be bad. Derrick, her fiancé, won’t intuitively realize exactly what she wants but will still guess as best he can to treat her like what she acts like she wants with the limited information she’s given him and then she gets to look down on him. And Ginny’s pining, well, Elsie’s not entirely unaware of that either but it would require effort on her part to address it. Much easier to pretend they are just chosen lifelong sisters. 

The book is not entirely unaware about it. Like a lot of queer romances it does the thing of communicating everyone’s problems and the reasons for them in excruciating detail. (Very Tell versus Show) This includes having both leads feel ambivalent about how much it’s ok to mock Elsie’s gormless himbo ex-fiancé. But the trait of Elsie to essentially use refusing to assert herself overtly to get her way is pretty consistent. Sure she’s not thrilled about all the outcomes she gets, but time and time again a part of that is that she’s scared of not getting her way even more. 

Ginny repeatedly thinks about how Elsie could have dropped them as a friend in their teenage years, being described as pretty and popular to Ginny’s weirdness, or it lavishes praise that Elsie guards their pronouns the way nobody else will. It’s kind of sad, and sets up a bare minimum versus unconditional love situation. And unfortunately Elsie never quite comes down off that pedestal even during the books inevitable third act break up. 

At least it is framed that maybe Ginny is a smidge too attached, and the minute Elsie acts overtly cruel they are dropped like a hot rock. Then the leads separate and Ginny goes off and does what they are doing already but more so (carpentry, queer socializing, rescue dogs) and Elsie goes off and accidentally reminds the audience what a loser she is. 

That’s to say that Elsie, for all she is full of magnificent promise in Ginny’s eyes, has been working the cash register at the family hardware store since day 1, despite an associate’s degree in business, and sets her sights on finally killing her white whale: getting the sign in the store updated. Her big achievement is working up a new logo design (with an in text reminder Ginny is the graphic designer, not her) and convincing her father that they can add yellow to the design. Again perhaps the scene would not be so cringe if they hadn’t proudly thought-narrated that this was motivated by “color theory” that yellow was a happy color.

Dear reader, that is not how color theory works. But, if that wasn’t enough, reunited with Ginny at the book’s conclusion, Elsie is also excited to announce her plan to have Ginny and Ginny’s other friend Sue teach handy classes and make her dad record promotional Tiktoks. While I don’t think hosting lessons is the worst idea, the rest of this triumph is somewhat undercut by hints that this isn’t actually good plan.

The vibe that was being gone for here was Elsie coming into her own. The actual output is something more like this: https://youtu.be/sI1SLHEC98I?si=K0jrEJsJ7zhwb7y6

While I grant Ginny’s business plans also depend on making custom bondage furniture as much as home renovations, I find it less of a stretch that in a setting (Minneapolis) where the resistance is successfully being backed by a local sex shop. There’s probably not enough well heeled queer people to work referrals on this here, since this isn’t the universe of the Duke of Burgandy, but if the hardpoint market is finite, the need for tiling and drywall or new cabinets is not so limited.

Maybe this is also a bias here, not just because I have worked marketing jobs before and am used to bullshit, but also more personally. There’s a scene where Elsie scolds a staffer at the resort for calling them both Ladies and as someone who generally doesn’t like being addressed that way and is also a she/they, I got the ick. It is supposed to signify the true sincerity in Elsie’s heart, but instead it had more vibes of her tendency to prefer that aforementioned other-people-are-the-problem. And I think this is where it moves into weird my own reader hot buttons because I am also personally a little jaded about social justice defenders.

Nevermind the vibes of scolding the people with way less power than you (the waitress at a luxury tropical resort), there’s another thing that I kind of have as a personal red flag. If you are something considered unusual or marginalized there’s a particular kind of person who will gravitate to your orbit because they like that vibe of you being the squishy they can fight for. The trade off is that they expect constant infinite ally points, but also they can be an exhausting conflict farmer constantly dwelling on the manifold slights that you experience as a sort of vicarious humiliation. And then they make it their business to never let the subject lie and constantly try to drag these moments back to you.

That’s on me and my baggage. We can assume by author fiat that Ginny likes that sort of support as they react really positively to it, but I can’t help also bringing that scene together with another moment earlier in the story. One of the many things Elsie finds eye rolling about Derrick is that he is baffled that if Ginny says their pronouns are she/they, why the they is important to them. They is important to me too, but the distinction based on Ginny never using “she” for themselves is that the “she” here is being used as a compromise to elide around that awkwardness of being a non-binary person who still identifies with some aspects of femaleness. They are happy to associate with the term Dyke, but not a Lady.

It’s supposed to be a big breakthrough that Derrick later gets a therapist that he is using lots of they pronouns for. Tahdah, he got it! All I am actually left with is a vague sense Elsie is actually kind of shit at non-adversarial support for Ginny. This is probably just me being a hater due to my own baggage. And, credit where it is due, it seems to be a very consistent and not actually badly written. It’s actually extremely realistic, even as it makes me, the reader, side-eye the character.


And in support of my interpretation I think one must look at Elsie’s other major relationship. Derrick was supposed to represent the height of awkward allyship, well meaning, but more often than not cringe. But this is largely a perspective we get through Elsie, who shows other signs of being an unreliable narrator and who will distance herself from any problem she tries to fix. And, ultimately, someone who suffers from anxiety around being openly flagged as queer. Elsie says she is pansexual often enough that even very dim brained Derrick got it, but it’s kind of clear in her head narrative she sees Derrick as a straight relationship. Derrick doesn’t. Derrick is actually one step ahead in understanding that a queer relationship is any relationship with a queer person in it. He gets it more than she does, and happily ever after or not with Ginny, Elsie’s still going to have some work to do in how she places herself in a larger hierarchy. 

Still, one of the leads being disappointing as a person did not subtract from my overall appreciation of the book. The kink parts were solid, the sex scenes plausible and the deconstruction outside of a more stereotypical way of depicting D/s was refreshing. In aggregate I am really happy that I both bothered the poor clerk at Beguilded Books overtly for recommendations and that I have branched out of exclusively F/m. 

Where To Buy: 

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“Deliver” by Pam Goodwin [Femdom Book Review]

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Deliver by Pam Goodwin book cover, showing a man with bound wrists and intense green eyes

Completely breaking with tradition, this extremely dark romance starts an otherwise entirely M/f series off with a femdom couple. Liv is part of a criminal organization, the fantasy kind, that makes millions abducting and training people for sexual servitude. This was just supposed to be one more job for her, just another mind to break and body to twist to the needs of the future client. She’s learned to be hard, after going through the same process herself, and is ever aware of the lethal consequences for failure. It’s not just her life on the line, the organization takes hostages, promising death… or worse.

However, there’s something about her latest victim, the virginal football star and seminary student Joshua, that gets under her skin. His real submission, his goodness and their intense chemistry are throwing off her careful system. He’s supposed to be for the client.  She has plans to follow and people to protect, but it’s all too tempting to take him for herself.

As well as more traditional trigger warnings that are likely implied in the premise or mentioned on the author’s site, if any hint of bad things or the dominant character being put in a submissive position is a limit for you, you will want to skip this one. Liv spends much of the book at the mercy of the man who captured her originally, who still holds a twisted degree of power over her. She’ll break free eventually, but there will be lots of bleak scenes that reinforce Liv is not acting on her own initiative. The relationship between her and Joshua is a real matter of mutual attraction that eventually gets its happily ever after with her still his dominant, but this is not a straight forward power fantasy, it’s a lampshade, permitting us to ride along with evil acts while absolving the heroine for her part in them.

I think it also suffers from not always trusting the heroine to be impressed by the hero unless he can rhinohide and force some vulnerability out of her. Joshua resists to a degree that can sometimes be frustrating (Silver listening to my read along describes it as “rude!!!”). I also think the need to keep her redeemable pulled some punches that didn’t need pulling. It gives you some final act twists to further push that point of her actually being ok, but it probably could have just gotten by on those last bits alone.

Which, I suppose, also needs flagging that this is a deeply silly book. Real sex trafficking is not the plot of Taken, nor are such elaborate investments needed to put vulnerable individuals at the mercy of the wealthy and powerful. How things get resolved also requires a significant perspective shift on just how far the reach of the criminal organization was… but if you are reading a dark romance about kidnapping and then corrupting a virgin college linebacker you probably aren’t demanding detailed and plausible world building. There are moments where I giggled at what wasn’t supposed to be funny and “so bad its entertaining” parts, but the tin is clearly labled.

Besides, its nice to have a heroine who gets to dominate in a way that violates the hero’s consent, stay dominant and stay alive. Many stories will let things go dark, but they often do so at the cost of killing off the heroine, disempowering her, or at least having her end up alone. True, it does so by undermining her own capacity to be evil, but as an experiment on how to pull off the subject matter you could do worse. It’s almost a pity this seems to be the writer’s only foray into femdom because I wouldn’t have mind giving this another shot.

I will also say there’s a very conservative-side-of-true-crime vibe here, in so much that it’s been set in a sort of fantasy otherwise more familiar to the sort of person who warns you traffickers will leave a coin on your car to mark you for being later kidnapped. Nevertheless the hero, for all his gruff resistance, gets to be the hot objectified one and there’s a sort of Eurydice can take care of herself vibe from the heroine. There might be shades of QAnon here, but neither must we assume the writer thinks the world actually works that way. It’s just as plausible to take away that the silly parts make this less grim and exploitational than a more realistic account of how abuse goes down.

Where to Buy: The author actually offers this one for free on her site

“Green and Gold” by Gwendolyn Harper [Femdom Book Review]

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Green and Gold: An Erotic Irish Fairytale by Gwendolyn Harper

When Sloane comes to stay in a small Irish village to care for her ailing grandfather, she attracts the attention of not one but two men. Liam, a local cab driver, and Darragh, a fairy king. These men may differ strongly in background, but they are united in one thing, the desperate desire to submit and serve her. The possibilities seem endless, but Sloane has to worry… can a girl maybe be a bit too lucky? (Spoilers: No, no she can’t)

I freely admit pulled this one out of the archive of my to be read pile based entirely on its thematic relevance to the month more so than anything else. And, I went into this with very low expectations as a result. St. Patrick’s Day, history of sectarian violence not withstanding, isn’t really much of a holiday. There’s green beer, green cake, and maybe some muddled imagery confusing four leaf clovers and shamrocks, alongside pots of gold and rainbows. The book has all hints of being at about the same depths. 

Nevertheless, Green And Gold  takes itself more seriously than a book about a three way femdom relationship with a Leprechaun might, and this makes it readable. It doesn’t rush the sex, and avoids describing people in terms of breasting boobily, or confining all activity to the bedroom. It’s cheesy, but the conceits like using the stoplight safeword system “green” regularly during play were more dad joke head shake worthy than tiresome. 

That being said, while it gives us some time to warm up to the protagonist, it never forgets this is a work of fetish porn. Most of the text is just a vicarious ride along of two consenting, but ultimately mundane BDSM relationships separately getting off the ground and eventually coming to mingle. Negotiations are made. Ideas are proposed. Kinky acts are done and go well. People orgasm. People are very grateful to each other. There’s a lot of mutual gratitude amidst the gratification, and a lot of declarations of affection, attraction and attachment. 

Otherwise, the protagonist, Sloane gets what she wants with minimal trouble. When challenges occur, they are always within her capacity to overcome them. The pattern follows that the heroine will identify a problem, worry a little and then the entire universe conspires with her to fix it. This might be more off-putting if it wasn’t part of the book’s larger premises, enjoying things being unfair in your favour. 

Findom, ironically, is one of the most taboo fetishes for all it enjoys a current state of popularity. There’s something about women openly and avariciously wanting things that attracts a particular social ire. This is the second romance novel I have read on the subject (review still pending), and while Preferential Treatment was about the complicated relationship poverty gives you to money, this is pages and pages of hungry receiving intermixed with more traditional femdom activities. This one doesn’t want to tug your heart strings or play on your guilt over wanting things. Green and Gold just wants your mouth to water as you imagine getting anything you could possibly buy with a credit card, while the most handsome man in the world is so happy for you he has an erection. 

Likewise, the all too convenient manifestation of unicorn poly can similarly be understood through that lens. Wanting partners who are open to sharing, but conveniently only into you is also a taboo desire. Worried boyfriend #2 will be hurt that you didn’t tell him about your financial arrangement with your boss? Nope, he is just happy for you and thinks your boss is hot too.  Worried the faerie king with infinite resources will want another lover alongside you if you have an open relationship? Nope, he cheerfully admits he doesn’t really have any other options anyway, so everything comes up you shaped. 

Of course there’s a trade off that by having few problems there’s not a lot of substance where the men are involved. One has a stressful job, the other one has… his sister’s cat to look after? But, once more the reader is being freed from a hint of tension. Two perfect boyfriends with almost no baggage! If you don’t have cat allergies and don’t mind the occasional mystical jet lagged lover needing to be put to bed, the fantasy remains that the world shall revolve around you. Even your mildest problems are merely opportunities to win and be praised, or anxiety you can release after receiving unconditional reassurance.

And in a reality where women can’t even masturbate without some bright bulb writing earnest essays that our sexual fantasies aren’t morally affirming enough, there’s something particularly transgressive about that naked display of unpunished greed. I personally tend to prefer a sharper edge to my fiction, but sometimes you want something that’s the literary equivalent of eating a jar of cake frosting. 

Where to buy: Author site

The Sea Witch by Katee Roberts [Femdom Book Review]

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The Sea Witch by Katee Roberts A Wicked Villains Novel

Despite being published, hardcover and bought by me at Beguilded Books, The Sea Witch is a shameless #AUMafia #Fairytale #OlympicGods F/mf fanfic, with no pretense its leads, Zurielle, Ursa and Alaric, aren’t cribbed directly from the Disney version of themselves. It’s here to deliver up a bunch of group sex scenes and intermittent impact play, with a bonus side of virginity auction and secret kinky crime families. Nevertheless, I maintain the belief that there’s no premise too silly or formulaic that it cannot be saved by good writing. I like F/fm. My own personal tastes and expression of my asexuality end up coming out in practice as a sort of bisexuality, and sapphic, menage or not, is one of the places it is much easier to find femdom.

Unfortunately this one was a slog, leaving me skimming the sex scenes and taking not even smug schadenfreude flavoured so-bad-its-good pleasure as it shoehorns in the worst parts of Mafia romance, fairytale retellings and secret BDSM society stories. Worse than being particularly offensive, it was boring.

Of course I have no pity for Disney being borrowed from. That corporation has injected itself in virtually anything public domain shaped, and premises like Once Upon a Time and the Kingdom Hearts game series establish world building where all the bits and pieces of their version of things interact is open to reimagining. The fact that in a better world our folklore wouldn’t all be filtered through the Mouse can be balanced that stealing is important for reimagining them back into collective ownership. But, here the parts that were clearly Disney shaped were invasive as hell, a sort of smug mugging moment where almost every background character was reminding you who they were by their barely changed names. Except when they weren’t changed at all, the logic of who did or didn’t get altered itself a bit hard to follow.

Greek myth was universally under their original names. Hades, Megara and Hercules are in another triad (though Hades having any opinion at all on Hercules being an another artifact of Disney). Aurora, we are informed, has hair shifting between pink and blue (Disney again), but she has a thing with the crime boss Malone. For some reason Jamine and Jafar get to keep their original names (even though they don’t get names in the original Aladdin), and are of course an item and also doing crime boss things, but we also needed to know about Gaeton, Beast and Isabelle off doing a sex show in a way that was really more like blatant ads for another book. That’s what most of the fac fic parts read like, characters doing cameos in the most ham handed sort of way. You know when an actor gets too successful in a particular role and you can’t help that intruding into their later parts? That’s what’s happening here. 

But sure, whatever, Robert needs to get paid and endless overlapping series are the order of the day. As I said, maybe this book might have been rescued on the strength of its kink or the strength of its plot. Ideally both.

Kept in perfect isolated innocence by her crime boss father, honeypot Alaric has lured her from shining Olympus to the dangerous Carver City, under the pretext that he’s trapped in debt bondage to Hades. To raise the money to free him she immediately goes to her father’s enemy, Ursa, for a solution to raise the money. That solution is to auction her virginity. The result is that she somehow ends up in Ursa’s penthouse alternately sulking and orgasming. As it turns out this is a set up. Alaric and Ursa are an item, and this is really just part of Ursa’s revenge scheme against Zurielle’s father.

As far as the femdom elements, most of this is focused on Zurielle having a four day sexual awakening as a sub. The b-plot is the titular Sea Witch using this foray into unicorn poly to bridge a trust gap between herself and her more longer term sub partner, Alaric, but ultimately this is also about her coming to decide that Zurielle is indispensable as well. Ursa dominates everyone, Alaric alternates between light dominance of Zurielle and being treated as a sex toy Ursa uses on Zurielle. I should be able to enjoy this, and there are moments of Alaric’s submission to Ursa, both directly to her or when he is being wielded on Zurielle where I thought this had promise.

I think where things went wrong is an inconsistent handling of the darker parts of the story. It’s one of the most obnoxious habits of BDSM romances, when it comes to consent versus conflict, to try to have their cake and eat it too. Plots must set up a scenario where the characters are in peril, use the symbolism of BDSM to further add a sense of danger, and then every three pages have the characters confirm they are consenting even when nothing about the setup wants that to be implied. The result is much like the habit of barely legal porn to have the lead shriek, every so often “I am only 18!” This is largely for the benefit of the censors. 

Meme: The myth of consensual sex. A couple agree they consent, but jesus doesn't
Basically, all creative fiction has to be published like you are considering this scenario.

I like non-con. I think these are fictional characters, and eternally link back to that tumblr essay about diagetic versus non-diagetic BDSM. But I do not live in a world that’s friendly to this sort of approach. 

Historically, you cannot openly sell non-con BDSM as non-con BDSM. At best it needs to be erotic horror or erotic thrillers, providing a Hays Code style figleaf like True Crime does that lets you wallow in darkness as long as the text provides not one whiff of a happy ending. Or, in romance it needs to be passed off with a sort of surreptitious don’t ask don’t tell where you absolutely refuse to acknowledge anyone is getting raped or this is being done for audience titillation. Flagging it as BDSM is a no-no, because you can rip a bodice, tie up a character, or kidnap them, but heaven forfend anyone admit they get off about that part. You can’t even just tag it with the nonos and assume the reader will understand fiction, because even that level of admission can be enough to get you in trouble. You at best have to host trigger warnings on an author site.

As a result, everything that gets sold is done so under the Eye of Sauron level terror of either the credit card processors or some country’s only vaguely dormant obscenity laws will lash out and not only drag that work into the bowels of hell, but the author, publisher, retailer and the other authors too. Along with their bank accounts. 

The result is that Zurielle needs to remind us she’s participating with the ability to say no. Scenes open with the ritual repeat of safewords. Worldbuilding is used to show how safety mechanisms have been put in place. Everything should be fine, since after all everyone’s an adult and had been interviewed and their ability to change their mind discussed.

…Except everyone involved in the facilitation of Zurielle’s adventures is a murderous crime boss, or related to one. Ursa’s called The Sea Witch because she drowns people. Hades, who sets up an elaborate escrow system that is supposed to preserve Zurielle’s ability to opt out, is also holding Alaric in plausible enough debt bondage he can’t simply leave his job as a pro-sub. When someone actually spirits a clearly consenting Zurielle away from the people who bought her, that person is understood to face a dire (if horny) punishment. The stakes of everyone’s hijinks are a risk of at least nameless side characters dying in gang war.

Efforts to make a distinction about the Real Bad Guys falls flat too. By book end, everyone agrees that Carver City is not as bad as Olympus because *they* don’t do human trafficking. In the middle of their human trafficking operation. Thus Zurielle’s father’s business is enough to be considered a bridge too far for Zurielle, but at the same time Ursa’s vengeance is being sought because she was edged out of that business. A bit of fussing is done by Zurielle about still being okay with all these crimes, but her conclusion is that her actual moral qualms can be satisfied by knowing that Ursa says she’s not that bad.

This is somewhat of a tragedy because rather than talking about consent in any sort of nuanced way you get this sort of outcome. It’s consent theatre, rather than good consent practice, but it is being passed off as the real thing enough to pass the censorship of bodies who neither understand nor care about actual consent. Of course combating that’s a lot to expect from an unassuming Disney menage BDSM romance. If you are looking just for that aforementioned femdom threeway where she bosses a male and female sub to fuck at her direction or you really, really needed an Ursula/Eric tentacle dildo pegging scenario you will get what you are looking for. For anything more than that, the best I can say is that this book getting not 1 but 2 updated, increasingly professional covers and a fancy hardcover at least means people are buying enough femdom for the author to think it’s worth it.

Where to Buy: Author’s Website

My 2026 Femdom Book Review Project

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2026 Femdom Book Review Project

Ok, if you haven’t noticed, this blog has popped out of a semi-hiatus and there’s been a much more regular appearance of one kind of post: Book Reviews. That’s intentional. While I have always wanted to review more works of this type, at least so far I’ve been able to keep up a once a week (every Sunday) schedule. The goal is 50 books for this year, both new and old.

I am looking for books that are intending to appeal to lifestyle dominants. The main focus will be on fiction, particularly romance, but also occasionally guides or other works as applicable. The main point of this is covered by my somewhat tongue in cheek stated goal of More Porn for Dommes, but it would be more accurate to describe the project as trying to get more attention to things that work for us and discuss what isn’t working.

This will also include negative reviews. I’ve wrestled with this a lot, but I think the only thing that does a book more harm than speaking poorly about it is not speaking about it at all. After all there’s a whole subfield of book hunting where people find what they like by the trigger warnings or people scathingly disparaging something a particular reader is actually looking for.

As a single individual I am not the ultimate authority what is and isn’t good, of course. No review I write should be taken as the last word. Nevertheless, I think my opinions can matter and what I trust is that if you think I am wrong you will feel compelled to go contradict me and sing the praises of the book you loved more so than if I said nothing at all.

I will not accept author review copies, I always feel like crap if I hate it. As an author you are welcome to try to let me know you have a work available I haven’t covered yet, but I will try to either buy what I review, get it from a library or look for general free book promotions. There will not be affiliate codes attached to these reviews in any sense. Where possible I will try to link to the author page or preferred retailer, avoiding Amazon as much as possible. If you are the author you may ask me to update me sales/where to find it link to one that best helps you.

Works that use AI (covers, text, even promo) will be excluded. Please don’t.

What You Can Do To Help

Buy the books I cover! Review the books you read as well, not just where you got them, but sites like Romance.io, the romance subreddits (as applicable), Storygraph and even Goodreads. If you wrote a review of something I also covered, please feel free to share a link to that review in the comments of that post. I am open to reciprocal link sharing between review bloggers.

Also! Review books I did not cover. Tag them with “femdom” so other people can find them (and me). Make your own lists of books you liked. Share those lists! As always curation, curation, curation. It’s the only way we can get things out there.

I may reactivate my Patreon at a later date (maybe if I keep this up for another few months and can tell it’s become a habit), but for now please put your money towards supporting authors and buying their works. And if you can’t afford that, ask your local library to buy a copy. You will be surprised what they will keep in stock!

2026 Reviews So Far

(In Reverse Chronological Order)

July

  • “The Admiral’s Acquisition” by Luna Gold

June

May

April

March

February

January

“The Only One” by Daisy Jane [Femdom Book Review]

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The Only On by Daisy Jane. A shirltless man in a backwards had kneels and embraces the waist of a brunette woman in a mechanics coverall. A key dangles from her hand.

As is somewhat the habit of femdom romances, this one pops up in the tail of a “Wrench Kings” series, a collection of erotic romances about banging small town mechanics. Unlike most of the stories you find in this part of the genre, the subtitle and branding make it very clear it’s going to focus on gentle femdom.  Thus two silly innocents decide that because Delane, the female protagonist, has listened to a lot of femdom erotica on audiobook she’s going to teach the virginal male lead, Miller, some more confidence with women. Gentle femdom shall follow, but what Delane thinks is a casual short term deal obviously becomes something much more. 

Much of the rest of the book being readable depends on delivering on that premise in a way that accepts this is a stupid plan. As you might imagine, Delane is also a virgin and she’s flying by the seat of her pants. Whether or not you enjoy it will have to depend on how ok you are with the main characters both lacking not just a clue, but probably the entire current in print line of Hasbro board games. At least this defect essentially drives the major conflict of the story, since Delane not knowing any better is a plausible justification for having the courage to try randomly dominating a cute coworker. The persistent real world belief that femdom in the apex expression of feminine wiles and savoir faire makes the mess the characters get themselves in feel perfectly plausible.

Flawed protagonists notwithstanding, the rest of the plot is pretty standard: sex lessons with building chemistry; a horrible ex boyfriend stalking and harassing in the background; and a background cast of heart-of-gold blue collar people not particularly concerned about minor physical violence, but also heavily invested in each other’s love lives. Big dreams that stay in the immediate orbit of their community; and maybe a bit too much Not Like Other Girlsing around imagined competition that the female lead is at least able to recognize might be a bit unfair to the strangers she projects it on. These tropes aren’t remarkable to find in their niche (small town contemporary), but it’s a good reminder that it’s perfectly possible to stick to an ultra traditional format and showcase a non-traditional dynamic. 

Where it’s weak is that the sex framing is sometimes awkward. Within the first forty pages the text from Delane’s perspective has had her mention her nipples feeling hard in two separate incidents. Likewise, it’s not enough that she enjoys her porn, but we get text samples of what she is listening to , while she lingers credulously on her imagining things must work exactly on page. It is, to be frank, the sort of porn I wouldn’t review for this project, though it makes for an interesting contrast because Jane is clearly trying to make these vignettes of audiobook samples feel over the top. However, once it gets rolling the flow of libidinous references gets less shoehorned feeling.

While I think I personally lean a lot rougher in tastes, there’s a sort of dorkish realism to the spice between the actual characters that never loses sight of how this looks when real people do it. It does make things go perhaps a bit too easily for both parties, but since the underlying theme of the book is about the characters getting over the idea they are unworthy due to their psychological hang ups and lack of confidence, it makes thematic sense. 

And people really do act like this. Places like r/femdomcommunity gets a regular amount of people whose only Sex Ed is porn. We tell people to get their butts to a munch, but this is easier said then done if you live in a town with less than 100k people, and even then most femdom is couples awkwardly working it own on their own. The text doesn’t actually show when Delane switches from purely porn driven advice to what is clearly other online research, but you could imagine the phases of their relationship as a series of her frantically searching for advice or ideas to do with her new partner.

Everything else is unapologetically (and unselfconsciously) sappy. The male lead is every part a perfect gentleman, an escapee from the very Christian commune of his birth who cooks well, volunteers with the needy and steps into ideal son in law mode long before the couple makes it official. And, while Delane does fuck up by leaning into Miller’s own assumptions about her experience level, ultimately they are written as being able to salvage their dynamic on the other side of the necessary confessions and realignment of their perceptions of each other. It can drag a bit at the end where the story extends well past the HEA being established, but only via giving you about three more chapters worth of the main characters getting what they want and loving eachother.

Otherwise what I liked was that you will find both chastity cages and pegging here long before these people try out PiV. BDSM is never treated as the hard mode you can’t start with. The female lead has a bit of a chip on her shoulder about people she perceives as being traditionally femme, at least in the pink Pilates princess sense, but the narrative is otherwise both relentlessly sex and also porn positive. While the characters do lack for any real formal discussion about consent, likewise the pacing and framing is set up so you at least don’t worry anyone is being coerced. Overall I think femdom could use a lot more optimism about how much writers lean into it in romance. Thus, even if this is overall outside my favourite tropes and kinks to read for fun, I also feel it skillfully accomplished taking things that usually go very regressive and delivering a very progressive approach to kink and who can do what to whom, regardless of gender.

Where to Buy: The Only One: A Soft Femdom Romance (Wrench Kings Book 3) by Daisy Jane