A lot of you have heard my particularly strident complaints that there’s a distinct lack of both femgaze femdom and femdom romances. So… I wrote a book! A sweet, sentimental and wonderfully cozy story about two people finding each other and falling in love through femdom. It’s spicy as a gingersnap, but it’s also a story about the magic of finally feeling seen by someone who completely gets you.
Big city lawyer Trevor (personal injury, junior partner) has just been dumped on Christmas Eve. His fiancée’s return to her small home town has gone permanent after deciding to throw all in to save her father’s bakery. She blamed catching the Christmas spirit, but Trevor knows damn well that a reunion with a High School bad boy from her past is probably a much more significant factor than she’s letting on. Now he’s at a bar on Christmas day, trying to forget the worst Christmas of his life by burying himself in work. He’s ready to call Bah humbug! and stack billable hours, but holiday magic has other plans in the form of posh rich girl Elizabeth. She’s also smarting from a breakup of her own and makes him an offer: join her until New Year’s Eve for a get away in her family’s cottage and prove that the best way to get over someone is get under someone else.
Their chemistry is perfect, and Elizabeth’s never found someone so effortlessly able to be what she wanted. But with ghosts of relationships past haunting them both, can her sweet sadism and his desire to please be enough to see them together after the end of A Holiday Under Her Control?
It’s somewhere between 3 and 4 pm. He slips out into the narrow hall that connects his office and the bathroom to the main area of our apartment. When we moved in together, one room became his space, while I sprawl out in an organic extension of hobby clutter across the rest.
Thus, with his office, I feel like I need to ask to go in, even when it is not in use. Not in a forbidden blue beard’s secret room sort of way, but a matter of consent. The irony is not lost on me that at any moment I can stick my fingers in his mouth, maul his testicles or shove him into the wall and pin his arms over his head, but heaven forfend I retrieve something from his desk without checking first. Or go into the office closet and get some item like the tool box or our winter coats.
He didn’t request this rule, it’s a rigid cultural thing raised into me like fruit tree branches growing bound to a wire. Shoes off indoors, don’t start eating until the cook does, respect the room of another. Do not listen to music without headphones. Space. Quiet. Privacy.
But he’s out now, and I swoop in for a kiss even as he does lean to me for the same. I do that a lot, pitter-patter fast feet down the long hall when he is back from the gym in the morning to engulf him in a tackling embrace. Crane in when he’s brought back something from an errand outside (don’t leave people to put a load of groceries away alone, another Rule). Right now he can feel the edge of my desire and we are starting to cocoon ourselves in the erotic. I ask him if he is done work for the day. Unspoken that means: “is this a quickie before a last meeting or room for something else, more?”
A quickie means he will masturbate just to the edge of orgasm in front of me. Maybe once, maybe three times. Otherwise I will draw him into the bedroom a few steps more behind us, into the bed and more will happen
“Yes he is done,” but, getting my meaning, he says he will “visit the washroom first”.
Practicals, of course.
Have to respect them. The pull apart will happen and then he will come back to pick up where we left off. Probably in the bedroom, on top of the covers, or me on the bed and him beside it, stripping off his clothes.
Imp of the perverse, my hand snakes out, to his stomach, low, where his belly becomes his groin. When it is empty it’s hard to find, full and the muscle there feels tense. I press the absence of softness.
I have done it before a little bit. It’s the sort of half gross half playful thing you do to tease in the comfort of a relationship. We’ve never had an interest in piss play in the regular sense. No champagne coupe glasses of golden nectar, no human toilets. Just another kind of discomfort to play with. It’s like another game, my hand over his mouth and nose, taking his breath away. I always let it linger for a few seconds longer than when the involuntary struggling kicks in. Just enough to produce the illusion “you don’t know I won’t smother you”, so hind brain juices him with adrenaline while forebrain knows I absolutely wouldn’t go that far.
The unspoken threat in the press on his bladder, that I might leave him in discomfort until he pisses himself. There’s also the point of the moment: That he doesn’t get the dignified little pretend ritual where we both don’t openly acknowledge our bodies do taboo things. Humans are weird, we half self train not to mess in a coached operation of little plastic chairs and picture books, and then an elaborate ritual develops of accommodation. It’s not a room to piss and shit in, it’s the bathroom. The washroom. Even toilet, shamelessly borrowed from the french for washing oneself, is a minor impoliteness such that the word is navigated around. And used in a juvenile act of daring for a meme that only works because we think it’s dirty.
What I am doing now, pressing on his bladder is not really comfortable, but the nerve endings that control urination do double duty. That’s how you learn to do a kegel, stopping the flow of urine. The whole groin to ass area uses the same nerves and muscles to contain, eject and come. It’s a simple system too, normally the bladder, filled up, pushes internally to tell you to tend to it. When it’s full and you poke it the body demands attention, mistaking the intrusion for more urgency.
He winces, as I press. Just a little, over and over. His reaction nudges me on. I am drawn to that vulnerability, the slight extra hesitation of the extra taboo. Press. Press. I think that perhaps I will need to let him go soon. I think the game can only go so far. But, there’s pleasure there in holding him to the wait.
I want it to last. I reach into my own discomfort, a game of chicken. I nudge him towards our washroom door, almost next to the office he just left. Again, a threat. My presence prevents the polite rite of privacy. He is waiting on that urgency with a now incredibly hard cock. Now, with him in front of the toilet, I am alternating stroking up and down its length and pressing on his bladder again. He is making shy, squirmy twitches of his shoulders, sidelong glances, speaking in incomplete sentences, trapped in embarrassment.
I whisper, “Do you want me to leave?”
He doesn’t say anything, maybe a little noise, more wriggling. That’s an affirmation, for us. He usually will never ask for more, maintaining the head space of cnc. He almost never asks to come, vocalizes most things in service to the idea that nothing that happens to him is with his enthusiasm.
More touching, kisses. There’s a black wire shelf over the back of the toilet, holding miscellaneous overflow. He is bent so his forehead almost touches the top shelf, occasionally bracing with one hand on the far side of it. Squirm. His body is at once turning away from and towards me, like a pinned animal involuntarily moving against what has seized in. I am standing to his left, and half behind him, looming and trapping him in the corner of the room.
“It’s going to be so hard to pee with an erection,” I murmur. Any acknowledgment on his part lacks coherent words.
This whole time I can feel my face is a bit hot, embarrassed by myself, daring, probing. It’s that act of dominant masochism. I am not frank, either. Even as I am charge, the taboos about this are as active in me as they are him. Rationally, I know this isn’t a big deal. I have seen friends sit on the mouth of another to piss. I’ve explored squatting on the floor of the shower with a past partner to see if that gave any sort of interesting charge (it didn’t, probably as much a factor of them as what I was doing).
My foot kicks, with my hands full to try to flip the toilet seat up. I can see the bowl, with its pooled water, the slight discolouration. I cleaned the damn thing literally the day before. The mold in the pacific northwest, unlike back east, grows fast in vibrant orange, like a rust stain. I can’t quite get the seat up that way and he finishes the gesture. He’s immersed in his own torment, participating.
I encourage, depriving him of even the least ability to hide, to have even this secret, or a whiff of the courtesy of a secret. I feel like I am holding him over a precipice, threatening to let go.
His cock is so velvety in my palm, his face a little rough, his touches, of me, in increasing desperation. His eyes are frightened but glassy with desire. I alternate between stroking and roaming his body, viciously pinching his nipples like I could pull them off. In one moment of that tussle I realize his right shoulder had dipped. He is pulling at his own cock, a spiral turning in on itself, pumping.
I press on his bladder again, crooning, “go on.”
He tries now, trying to compose himself to let a stream of urine out. Holding his cock to point it in the right place. It’s not going to happen. The muscles inside have spasmed, shunting one function to another.
“I can’t…” To call it a whine implies a crawling nails on a chalkboard wheedle that’s not in his tone, but it’s a whine of helpless admission.
I press on his bladder again, and pinch at his nipple, up under his shirt. “Go on.”
Again, more trying. He cannot. Squirm. Squirm. A single drop at the head of his cock that might well be pre-cum.
“I can’t.” He says in a whisper. Another long silent moment of my torment upon him. One more try, but I know he’s pushed as far as he can go. Not shyness or disobedience, but a wall he cannot walk through.
“Alright,” I say, beginning to pull back from him. “I’ll let you finish.”
As I walk out of the bathroom and close the door, I can hear the bang of the toilet seat dropping so he can sit down. It’s a last note of amusement. The same thing that makes me keep accidentally picking partners who are a little larger than average in the cock department seems through no effort on mine, to choose men who prefer to sit to pee.
Later business done, he will come to the bedroom and we will continue. But it is this scrap of the game we play together that will linger with me.
We were 3/4 of the way through an episode of Mice & Murder when I realized we were starting to procrastinate on our pre- planned play time. He is going in and out of a doze because he has already seen this episode, but he’d also put this on in the first place after we’d already watched the back half of the prior one and Saturday is definitely drawing to a lazy close with things, or rather him, left undone. That won’t do. I tell him to pause the show and strip, while I start rummaging to find my latex catsuit in the three boxes the latex is stored in. I have wanted to do this since yesterday, almost did it last afternoon of my own volition, but his work day ended early and instead we cuddled with his head against my chest and the stress of things seeping from him in an almost audible hiss.
It wasn’t the right moment then, not just for his obvious state of stress, but because I have been a bit fragile too. While he would have been able to transition from the vagaries of tech industry imperial court nonesense into helpless little bitch mode, I knew then I would need more emotional uplift from him than he was prepared to give if I was going to hurdle into into the head state to treat him like a besotted fuck toy and not obsess over my own troubles. You can do the surprise firm pounce on a stressed person, but not when you can feel the raw edge that if something goes wrong in your bullying, on your side, you might end up in tears.
Instead, the other day I had vocalized, around previously scheduled D&D sessions and farmer’s market trips, I wanted to take time to do more than the casual default we had gotten into the pattern of doing. This weekend Something More should happen. And it was important I put it on our mental calendars, because we aren’t doing it as much these days, and that’s not what I want for us.
It’s a hazard, in couples that live together, that kink stops being An Event. Even as you still have the sexual energy of a couple of rabbits, you can just coast on your prior exploits. It’s not a dead bedroom, or a default to vanilla, either. It’s almost that the emotion/narrative of all the elaborate nonsense that has passed between you so far wears a reliable groove where trying hard is no longer necessary. You get the couple version of how you can get so comfortable with your particular kink you don’t need to read the whole story/watch the film/finish the fantasy to come, just the idea of it. In a couple, much as you can look at eachother and toss out just the punchline to a running joke to make the other person laugh, with mutual kink dynamics of any tenure you can just hit one or two of the right spots and bam, you go from slightly in the mood to done, cozy together and discussing what veggies in the fridge need to be cooked up first before they wilt into the trash heap.
It’s not that that’s not nice, in itself. In fact that’s sort of the ideal foundation, but if that’s all you do, over time it starts feeling like just how easy it is comes is at the expense of the potential highs of putting in a smigen more effort. I’d even told him maybe after an episode of Dimension20 we should play, but now I can feel the inertia of the cozy bed and when I start hearing the little whistle of his semi unconscious breath I know, very starkly that if I don’t say something now, all that is going to happen is some makeouts, and edging session and then I will make myself come and there’s nothing left of the day but dinner.
And honestly I am not tracking this episode either, just surfing erotica on my phone intermittently. I can almost perfectly visualize the episode ending in another 10 minutes, be kissing, and the way that just immediately goes to me coming and then him making roast chicken and the peach cobbler I also planned. So I take control. The TV goes off. I tell him he is going to help me suit up. We are going to do this.
Of course there’s another delay. He makes a trip to the bathroom and I need to pee before this suit is going on, so I sort of wait around in anticipation unable to do much else. I am both psyching myself out and being cross enough with my own brain that I am in a simmer of horny and cranky. I remind myself that I trust him and if things don’t actually click this late afternoon it isn’t the end of our kink life. Now he is chilled out enough I can be insecure without is just being a buzz kill.
So, dressing, we talk about how I am worried the suit won’t fit (I am learning to deal with a healthier, but fatter body) and navigate around how I messed up my shoulder last month in a way that compresses my ulnar nerve. That’s been the other major damper on our play. It’s hard to feel attractive when extending your right arm causes immediate 7/10 pain. But the injury is better and the suit fits fine. Kink Engineering does good work and while there is a lingering stiffness on my injured side I can feel from the latex full body squeeze, it’s trivial.
I remind myself of the same thing I did after our first play time and he drove me 4 hours home. I trust he wants to be here and knows how not to offer what he doesn’t actually want to give. I trust him to be an adult, not a martyr, and a veteran kinkster who long since discarded unreasonable kink expectations. There’s like 5 minutes of polishing and sort of trying to get into the groove. I am still so jangly it feels like he isn’t there, in that mindless lust state, but I am also aware even if he was, my brain is enough of a scumbag to lie he isn’t. So I tell him to choose the position I am going to fuck him in, and snatch the harness from where it hangs in the closet.
Of *course* the dildo I want is missing, and he has to get up to help me find the box of cocks. We go through and “um, pick one of these three” moment with some other reluables, but I find the general, a more implausible toy. There’s my hair and fluff stuck to it and I am distracted by cleaning it. If I was more organized, I would have had my chosen cock in hand before I suited up, but that’s not who I am. I tend to play by inspiration, not a script, even my own. I walk tiptoe to the kitchen sink so as not to lubricate our floor worse from any silicone that drips off me. Silver, out of the three, picks the bumpy white one he usually prefers.
That one is kind of meh for strapon play because it has a hollow core at the base you are supposed to lodge a bullet vibe. I think this is an unfortunate choice, and it makes it worse for thrusting, but I am not going to nitpick after asking, because that’s a bedroom confidence killing move and I did offer. And, in fairness it’s a visually pretty toy with ridges just where they need to be. If the designer hadn’t given it a vibe pocket it would be my number 1 too.
However, at the lubing him stage I determine that his ass, usually drum tight, is pretty loose today. This is incredibly variable, with some days it being a bit tender, too. Not today, perhaps due to the on his back spread V he chose. My fingers just shloop in, as my gloved hand works him over. I can get four to the knuckle easy, his absolute limit on his best days.
Butt stuff is always a delicate process, emotionally, because even cleaned out you may find something. I can’t even call them “surprises”. That’s like opening your fridge and being surprised it has food in it. Pretty universally, the one getting filled is in a much more emotionally vulnerable place because they are worried about being an object of disgust. But, today he is clean, not even notable santorum. An idea, already planted from my rummage of the cock-box forms.
He is already edging away while I work, as it’s the other trick to open someone up- and every stab of crooked fingers into his prostate is getting significant reactions. Reader, lest you doubt there is anything going on other than this sort of physical mechanics there is significant dialogue being exchanged by way of psychological stimulation, but up until this point things aren’t quite feeling they click for me. When I am jamming him into proper groans I start feeling the connection I want, but it’s still taking a while to warm up.
Chronic pain, body changes, all that bullshit really get in the way. Yet it’s the most pain free day I have had in a month and I am still pushing through the sort of bad feeling hangover. I do end up giving him a few thrusts with the strap-on loaded with his ridgey pick, but this isn’t quite it. I make a judgment call.
The ruddy, plump headed general had already been thrust into his mouth after it’s impromptu rinse. I’d left it lying on the bed next to his hip, and I scoop it up, announcing that he is going to take this for me, too. I am pretty sure he’s limber enough for some moderately advanced anal invasion.
Fucking men in the ass in your terns is not the universal apex of dominance, but the knowledge of his body combined with my fetish for larger insertions is making things lubricate on my side as much as he is opening up on his. I don’t force it, nudging, with many groans and whimpers on his side.
It’s actually hard not to stop here because the noise he makes in pain and the noise of not really pain at all but just hitting the spot just so are pretty similar. That’s where my experience with him matters. After pulling the literal plug well before his limit numerous times, I know that if I stop now I will be over cautious. I can, as it’s after all as much my prerogative to stop at my limit as much as everything must stop at his. But precisely because of the number of times I have stopped sooner than he’d have liked, in this moment I know just how much further I can go.
We have never discussed this as an official safeword, but I know now the moment it turns into a harsh, “Fuck!” is actually the stop point. We aren’t there yet, but it’s a nudge forward/nudge back kind of thing where one step away to ease up only means two steps deeper, after.
I drop into soothing encouragement. He is so focused on the challenge at hand that he won’t have more than mono syllables or little head twitches to work with. That’s more than enough and the general is several inches lodged, exactly where I want it.
At this point it’s not about depth but travel. In, out, never entirely popping free. His hand is still pumping his cock up and down in a way that’s basically instinct to him. The toy is gliding nice and easy. There’s a definite sensation of finite space and resistance on my end, gripping the flared base and leaning into it, but it’s neither a hard block nor rough scrape. I couldn’t tell you in minutes how long this goes on. Honestly the whole thing feels pretty brief, in hindsight. In the moment it’s enough, the way pleasurable sensation lingers, like a mouthful of something delicious making things seem to extend past the gulp, chew, linger, mmm, and swallow.
But, Silver is particularly quickly undone to size… if I can get it in. A whole sideline exploration into inflatable plugs has taught me that he’s a combo of a tight ring, but weak to a firm jam up against the underside of his cock. The general, and probably my encouraging but persistent running patter about how he is taking it, he is going to take it, this is for me, etc… have got him to the point where he yanks that hand away from his cock, now, with a great deal of urgency. He utters something about being close.
I wasn’t going to make him come, I planned, prior when I first started thinking about slithering into the catsuit, to leave him wanting. This always happens, every time things get prolonged. I tell him he may.
Well, precisely I tell him if my cock and only my cock forces him to come that was meant to happen. And it does. It’s like pushing him off a precipice all that manual edging placed him on, but it’s also a sensation like the invader in his ass is forcibly displacing the semen out of him. After he is done he stays in position looking utterly drained, even as I ease the dildo out of him and post it into the sink as well.
Check ins do not end where I expect, however. He stays put and spread, but as sandbagged as he is acting there’s and insistent second wind. I chase that to see where it goes, with his hand back on his cock and another, fresh dildo wedged into his mouth.
Crooning more nonesense mantra about holes and their utility quickly shows he has a rare second go in him. I am on my period, and what I want, to engulf him, feels a bit too much. I slick my thighs with more lube and get him to fuck those instead. That isn’t quite right, though it feels good.
The catsuit has an access zip, but it’s in the way and I am too slippery to come now with this on. I make another decision in the moment and send him to get a fresh towel. The tampon gets posted into the bathroom trash.
When he is back, there’s a bit of a decline in turgidity and I can see things sliding into performance frustration because at first it’s not wanting to couple up they way he hopes. I take charge again and essentially grab him by the brain, commanding with firm confidence it doesn’t matter. I wrap my legs tight around him. His job is to rut. He will obey. Doing that and even losing a small lake of cum earlier isn’t enough to stop him going the rest of the way hard. Then he is mine, completely engaged. I croon that he will fuck to exhaustion or until he breaks and falls.
Still unusual for us, it’s the latter, intense, even more so than the first time. He is limp on top of me and I am holding him, reminding him he did a good job. Only when he recovers do I turn firm again. This catsuit is coming off because I want an orgasm and it is now in the way.
He helps me slither out, careful of the fragile material. I am on my back and he is helping, at my direction, with how I want my breasts touched. My orgasm is not long after that, finally, long awaited.
I don’t recall much of the rest of the evening other than the chicken and potatoes, and that we both cleaned off somehow. I do remember two sets of cozy pajamas, and holding him with many uttered affectionate statements of love, but the rest blurs into the many nights that have been and will be just like this one, in bed until we are asleep.
To outsiders we are a typical sort of couple in the Pacific Northwest: a gymnast bodied Midwestern blond built on compact, slim lines and a penchant for short sleeved polos as casual wear, and a long limbed heavy hipped pile of curves in black and jewel toned low effort alt fashion. We live in still mildly mortifying comfort (to me): nice gym with Cross Fit (for him) and Pilates (for me). I am learning to crochet at a Stitch and Bitch. We go to the Farmers Market biweekly and there’s fresh berries with most breakfasts. Once a month or so, we take his practical little car into Seattle proper from our exurb situation and do something cultural with an art show or music.
You would assume correctly our politics are progressive and our hobbies involve things like tabletop RPGs or board games. There’s thousands of versions of us walking about, drawn here by climate, employment and the privilege of not having your values and aesthetics be the lunatic fringe.
Unlike many people, we are latex fetishists. Other than being hard on the pocket book, this presents its own risks.
Rubber, in its natural state, is neither shiny nor inclined to slide easily over the contours of the body. Latex clothing is hard to get into. It sticks to you and it’s not particularly resilient, tearing under too much rough handling. If you want in to your wardrobe you are going to need to make yourself slippery, and ideally you will want something that buffs what you are wearing to a gloss.
Those who are familiar know this means copious amounts of silicone lube, a clear, oily feeling substance that’s insoluble in water and largely inert.
Oil (as any person with good sex ed knows) will cause the material to start to break down. That’s why you don’t use oil based lubes with traditional condoms. Talcum was the old timey solution and is now known to regularly contain asbestos – so much as baby powder has switched to corn starch, so is this used as an alternative, though as you might imagine it does nothing if your goal is shine. I also find powder based lubricants gum everything up while adding more of an abrasive than a shiner. A fancy process (chlorination) gives pieces a permanent slightly duller gloss, but takes away some of the stretch and gives it a papery feel.
The solution is the aforementioned silicone lubricant. Made (elementally) of the same stuff as the sand on a beach and the glass in your windows, it’s a modern miracle of science that gives us much more rugged baby bottle nipples, a caulking agent, easy demolding bakeware, hair defrizzer, bendy yet body safe dildos you can sterilize by boiling, and this. You get it for a bit of extra money online or through specialty (sex) shops, because even the good pharmacies in Canada tend to only stock water and occasionally oil based options.
Maybe we will discover, years from now, that we’ve made a huge mistake with this magical material, but for now we have bottles of this all over our home. Guests over means a quick whip round to retrieve them lest they require explaining. Sure it’s a bit odd to have it everywhere, but it’s handy. We use it for edging Silver, several times a day if that can be managed; for sex where it plays nice with my flora; and of course for the rubber escapades I mentioned, which compliment the whole BDSM femdom thing we have going on.
Getting dressed in rubber is about like the cliche corset yanking scenes in bad historical films combined with trying to haul a pair of mid aughts skinny jeans up to your shoulders. That is, if the garment in question cost more than most of your wardrobe and sometimes as much as a wedding dress, of course, and also needed silk stocking level careful handling. To do so you slick yourself up and the inside of it up. That’s palmfuls of silicone on your limbs, but also any expanse of you that you want the garment to go over AND squirting liberal dollops of silicone into the garment and then smoothing it all over.
You also don’t want the garment to be too slick outside, until you have it on, lest it sproing from your grip and you pull it on. Most pieces have a zipper down the back and there’s all sorts of hacks like using a boot lace and a safety pin to pull them up, but generally you also need to hold the garment closed while you pull. A second pair of hands dressing make all the difference, and there’s a technique on top of it, in dressing. Like getting a toddler into a snow suit, firm but not too firm. If you have sharp nails you further can protect your outfit by wearing gloves.
The garment (except for fresh from whatever atelier that made it) will also already have at least some silicone residue on it. For storage, after a wash in a very gentle (unscented!) soap, you rinse in cool water with more silicone mixed into that, leaving a surface coating. Once dried you further pack it with archive friendly tissue paper, so it won’t do the other thing rubber likes to do, which is stick to itself to the point of fusing. After it’s on, something will feel misaligned and you will probably gloop a bit more silicone in through neck or arm holes.
In short, you will be wearing a skin tight rubber bag very full of lube. The process of getting it on will also be surprisingly taxing, wrestling a full body resistance band. It wants to grab and pinch fleshy bits, at least if you don’t smooth it right or it doesn’t sit on your widest points just so. Then you will do activities that make you sweat even more, mixing with the aforementioned lubrication. And maybe other fluids.
When the deed, whatever you were doing, was done, be it a fashion shoot or fornication, you will be even more damp. Getting out is usually easier, with the sweat/lube mix enough to slide everything back off into a distressing crumpled pile on the floor. The first thing you will notice, once stripped, is that you are absolutely freezing. Your body in the latex adjusted itself for what it thought was the height of summer humidity. With the gear off, all that sweat and lube is now lukewarm and chilling fast as it drips off you. You will probably immediately want a shower.
And you will discover the other magical property of silicone lube is that it lasts and lasts. You will be spectacularly moisturized. If you used it in you, your cavities will still have traces a day later. After you wash your clothes, the sink or bathtub will need a good scrub. And while if you were smart your play (or model) space was protected by drop cloths (nothing says sex appeal like draping the room in old bed sheets!), but somehow or another it will also get everywhere else.
On carpet it tends to vanish into the “try not to think about this too hard” situation the way most invisible contaminants are left to rest. On tile or linoleum, well…
Our apartment is done with that currently fashionable, grey-beige faux wood linoleum, in all the main areas. The kitchen, living area, bathroom and the long hall that connects everything else is the same glossy grey, varied enough in texture you won’t spot where the pattern repeats, smooth and easy to spot mop. It beats carpet in my kitchen, but it has its own drawbacks. Remember how I said the first thing you want after latex comes off is a shower? Thanks to the layout of the place, that’s a near half minute trek in a connecting long bit that joins kitchen/living area, bedroom, office, bath and some rather large closets. Inevitably, somehow in the most trafficked area a few drops of silicone find their way. Invisible until you step, just slippery enough to make your foot slide askew and check your balance.
Days later, every latex session is still a slip and fall hazard, but worse, a camouflaged surprise one that can materialize anywhere down that hall.
This happens every damn time. You can mop it, but you can’t see it. Finding it is caressing your hand against a smooth surface and looking for something just a bit more slippery. Soap and water helps, but it’s not a perfect solution because of that aforementioned lube’s staying power. Even bringing out the big guns of a teaspoon of dish soap on where you think the spot is, and you very well can miss just a micro drop.
Dear reader, if my debauchery someday does me in, it won’t be breath play gone wrong. It won’t be a folie à deux into increasingly deranged power exchange, nor sadomasochism loosed to run riot. It will be a mundane slip fall where I break my neck because one tenth of a gram of lube escaped the mop four days after my submissive spent fifteen minutes in a neck to toe rubber sleep sack.
The Pacific Northwest is pretty and reliably temperate most months of the year. My life is taken on some comfortable aspects and some aspects of disquieting idleness, sitting in the sort of lucky it feels like impolite bragging to share.
I got married last month and elopement at a courthouse dressed and simple white broderie anglaise, quick vows and paperwork with two witnesses. I did so because I love him and this is the most reliable shot we have at together, forever. That’s staring down the gauntlet of more paperwork and a long exile from my homeland. But I can be very confident in my belief Silver is worth it. He’s worth is because he is wonderful, inspiring, makes me happy and is confidently happy to do the complex kinky things we both crave.
My writing brain hasn’t been with me for the last little while. Nonetheless, the desire and my sexuality maintains. It’s a relationship where, at a distance, we’d call thrice a day and have the energetic enthusiasm to edge him silly each time. Together, we share a bed every night in an apartment that feels much too nice and I plan a little gathering in the fall, with family, to celebrate my marriage.
I make tentative steps outside the home, to a femdom munch in Seattle, monthly, run sharper and smart than mine ever were. If you are in town you should go, and can easily find details on fetlife. I already met one reader, which is fun. Though those pesky health issues linger, I do my best to stay involved where my stamina lets me.
The kink remains foremost. We prioritized that from day 1. He is as randy as a man half his age and it fits what I want. It’s simply there, often light, a hand reach to his throat away. Likewise, I find him beautiful. He’s a Midwestern, blue eyed, built more spare in frame with a gymnast’s propensity to bending, under a relentless maintained layer of shoulder to ankle muscle. This is balanced at equilibrium that he neither wants to return to actual utility for his white collar life, nor allow into neck stiffening thickness.
My own body is softer, a little wonky, but the urges are still there under the flesh. I want and I remain hungry for this. I miss the energy I used to have, to do things as much as I used to, but I peck away where I can. I’m learning to crochet, and maintaining the health I do have by using the gifts of where I live to try to push myself to exercise as regularly as I can manage. It’s paid some dividends.
If you imagine our household s something of elaborate protocol, him constantly demeaned, you would be wrong. It is with respect my hand takes his throat. That he affectionately comes where I am curled on the couch in a nest of blankets and kisses the tops of my feet. Our vows did not reflect the ownership of my Property, true, but they carried in them the seed and scaffold under which we do what we do.
I think I have the best anyone could want or aspire to.
I love you very much, painfully so, with the yearning of spending too much time apart. We are that couple, together, in public, but just as much with no eyes on us but each other.
I cannot recall the music, writing this now, but I remember, in late February, dancing in the kitchen with you, guarding for the slight slip of my black cotton tights on the faux wood linoleum as we shimmy-twist. Alongside the peril of losing my footing, it’s distracting how beautiful you look in motion, in a blue blazer over a light blue button down. Your body tapers sharply from your shoulders, shimmying. I’m wearing the green vintage dress you bought me for Christmas. When we pull apart and I twirl, the skirt bells out, all picturesque.
We have returned from a Pike Place Market french restaurant, where I stole half of one of your crab cakes, and you took, at my urging, half my salmon filet. I think I got the better trade, though there was nothing wrong with my fish.
There was a window to the restaurant kitchen marked by a pile of citrus fruits, aiming to put themselves into the dining area to make things feel more casual, or maybe make the most of the space. Once upon a time, in the 70s, this was a jazz spot, but its so crowded I wonder where they used to put the musicians. Still, it’s well prepared fresh fish, bread with a $5 up charge and pleasant crab cakes. And noise, lots of it, more crush and clatter than intimacy. The hints of old music, there, are drowned out in the excess of the conversation of others. I am content, holding back my urge to nitpick this nice gift, but nevertheless we do not favour them with the opportunity to sell us dessert. You serve me icecream instead, later, after we have danced. Looking after me is just what you do.
When I arrived for the weekend, I took the train in. It’s always comfortable, but too crowded that particular night to fight the line in the dining car, so you met me with food. It’s been a bad eating week for me again, a fact that I am not proud of, but being home in my space is driving me a bit nuts when I try to cook.
I daydream about kitchens that are not shoved into main areas. I am well sick of exposed, designed for people who don’t cook counters that push atrocious storage and a strict inability to let anything be, lest it become noxious clutter. I keep optimizing, all the endless expenses to try to make the space livable. Hooks for this and that, shelves expanding outwards and upwards. Ultimately no compensation can fix a cramped, poorly laid out space with too many things in it. And there’s no walls in spaces, anymore, a victim of the open plan trend. Sharing these spaces is even more frustrating, because there’s twice as much room to let the dishes or the mess get away from you.
If, perhaps, I lived flung out from my work by another 30 minutes, I might have my own solo shoebox, on my comfortable middle class salary. It pays more, on this coast, but rents jack up to eat one’s earnings. But, even paying more, the kitchen would still be in my bedroom, or at best, still in my living room. On the west coast, new construction is the norm. I think they are so cheap, regardless of the actual cost, they would leave the doors off bathrooms, if they could justify it.
Case in point: Tech job or not, your kitchen, the one I danced in, is “open plan” as well. This pivot and swirl smooth space I slide about in is an island of no texture in the otherwise stucco and wall to wall carpet, an alley of linoleum fenced between appliance and an island counter. For this visit, you draped the island in a rich quilt, handmade in a medley of turquoise and blue, serving as tablecloth to display a bouquet of flowers. Pink and purple and green, stems capped by pale, fat roses that remind me of babygirl birthday cakes. Just for me, to be pretty to look at for the weekend.
We’re in the approximate orbit or Valentine’s day, so we brought each other gifts to unwrap, too. Yours were piled up on the kitchen island when I got there, mine hand wrapped in sticker covered tissue paper and tied with real satin ribbon. You gave me a cape-capped coat dress with a flash red lining; a box of fancy tea; costume brooches; and spangle-sparkly tuxedo bodysuit that tugs at your fetishes to lift the collective sense of power over you, even as the glitter roughness of the fabric repels your touch. I gave you a high end, self thrusting sextoy by lovense.
In theory this was a last longer visit before I return to work. The two body problem kicks back into gear, as my office job cannot be imported over the border, WFH or not. I am a Canadian, and though Silver is more portable in his skill set, Vancouver consistently swings below competitive in tech salaries. We make do, but for now we cram the time together before I must return from portable disability to fixed labour law compliant behaviour.
It feels like visiting another life. He emphasizes “Home”, wanting me to feel that way, and makes every pain to make it that comfortable, but my practical roots are still paying $1000 to share a two bedroom with a friend, and my brain still parks myself there at my legal address. Home isn’t where my heart is, but where my childhood teddy bear, resting on my pillow, and my mess and the clutter I am still struggling to grapple.
With him, I think we have started to escape the honeymoon extra effort period. Even as he continues to dote on me, this feels sustainable. We have passed the first year or so where everyone is on their extra best behaviour. But, with the matter of the extreme step of moving to make this permanent, my life is an Elizabeth Barret Browning sonnet:
I think I could be happy in this quiet domesticity. Working on writing projects on my computer. A farmer’s market in the morning, doing our laundry in that continuous cycle of always being more to do daily, and making us meatballs from scratch for dinner. He puts up with my criticisms of his bachelor kitchen patiently. It’s not the franks’n’beans and no paper towels squalour we stereotype men with. It’s the not having to answer to anyone but yourself- so there’s a kitchenaid mixer, but the grater has a crack in the plastic frame, and things I take for granted aren’t there. And yet… Sure he has less cake pans, but he owns more pots than me, in fact in many ways more things on hand than I do. Deviance in our kitchens is more personal preference than otherwise. Though my tools tend to get junked when they break, I am still getting my shit together after what amounts to 5 moves in 10 years.
The steady progress here says that in another while, there will be a move there, too. All the things I established in Vancouver, my nest, will need to be upended, those possessions that transformed money into comfort and convenience winnowed for duplicates and storage. I am a person who wants roots who has lived relatively rootlessly. I wonder now, if my nest making was foolish and I should have expected to be shaken loose from each new home in the speed I did.
There’s a bit of care there, on my part, sensitive to feeling less than in the totality of the measure of our lives. Though I apply therapy to my insecurity like an ointment, the thought is ever there with a deep penetration. Reader, if you came here to see an ice and leather goddess regiment worms under her boot, or see a woman drift guilt free on a tide of consensual exploitation, alas it’s been ten years of disappointing you and counting. here, we have naught but the neurotic and horny, a fiercely distrustful and scruffy mélange that leads me to only half facetiously say I’m certified femdom trash.
To tell the story of Pearl, it’s a bit more than just saying I am a dominant sadomasochist.
At this point it’s probably clear that the whole femdom thing is indelibly stamped into the core function of my sexuality, enough that I have been talking about it a LOT lately, or at least my place on the asexual spectrum. But, part of who I am is influenced by something a bit adjacent todemisexuality, and that has been further effected by the factthat I fall in love easily. I don’t use the word “love” lightly, like I pop off crushes on lots of people. I mean the sort of heart soaring heavy nonsense. Getting there, for me, is incredibly easy.
After many years of having this part of my makeup, I also have determined not everyone falls that hard. Insights into the spectrum of human possible really does involve a lot of guessing, like discovering some people are ear rumblers or cilantro tasters. But, much like the latter case, if people don’t have the capacity themselves, they may suspect you are somehow exaggerating. Which, I suppose is just the part of the human condition that finds it comforting to suggest one is making things up, or that the severity will reduce with the right mindset, like comforting a child with a scraped knee.
For me, sex hormones and falling in love share an entwined history. In addition to my kinks, which grew from day 1, ever since puberty hit, so did the BigFeel capacity. The hardest part is there’s not a lot of support for it. Generally, if you talk about intense feelings of yearning for another human, everyone treats it like an obsessive thing you are choosing to do. Instead, as I experience it, it’s an involuntary WHOMP of an attachment. It’s the closest brush I can get to vanilla, in so much that there’s a tiny window my sexuality will be present without a mountain of kink between me and them.
It’s like those various brain integrated glands got the instructions to lay down the pre-framework, long before I dropped my first egg, and decided to say: “Hello, Miss Pearl (aged 12)! In addition to a single orgasm this year, and some now functionally vestigial parts that will ripen up over the next half decade, your already awkward ability to bond onto others will be amped up to 11. The only saving grace is that you will be completely frustrated in realizing these wants most of the time, thus safe from a lot of dumb follow up behaviour.“
This nonsense was probably made worse by the fact that there’s a cultural assumption that pushes eros into any male/female relationship. When I was younger, I preferred the company of boys for reasons of shared nerdy interests. I liked the company of girls before that- I am lucky I never internalized the sexism of assuming girls were inherently no fun. However, I followed my interests, and the kinds of games that could be played, which meant little in the way of female companionship. As a result, at the best of times, when I was way too young for it, adults were already imposing dating expectations onto my male friendships. But, inversely, even in these erotypical scripts, I had no tools to help me navigate having an Olympic level firework display going on in the brain of a child and young adult. Indeed, most people generally denied it could be happening to me, and further romanticized it as an experience we would be lucky to have once in a lifetime.
(There’s an additional hypothesis one might have about my capacities: there is actually a deeper form of Eros I have yet to experience. If everything to this point was a “crush”, I will end up in a psyche ward when it happens, because this is already pretty all consuming.)
For the lack of support I grew up with, I blame abstinence only education, which depends very much on the idea of rare, monogamous and consistent attachments and no alternatives. It’s much easier to enforce a compulsory, marriage focused heterosexuality when you believe in abstract concepts like a single shot of “True Love” to save you purity for. And yet, when I dug further, past pop culture, much as most research on love is almost laughably primitive. Like sex, people have thought about it a bunch and made more art than a million humans could consume in one lifetime. And yet, the psychology is still in the classification stage. Limerance, the term for the intense attachment and search for connection, was a word only coined in 1979. University labs pair college students in research to see if sharing prolonged eye contact and facts about the self correlate to an increased chance of a relationship forming.
So, you have a paradox. Love, in the broad sense, is a big label. It’s been contemplated forever, and generally serious classifications start with mentioning it’s broken down into sub types to distinguish sexual passion (Eros) from friendship (Philia) or a bond with a family member (Storge), and so forth. Unfortunately, this also hints that a lot of the thinking about it hasn’t really advanced, like we were still using the Aristotelian concept of the atom to try to do physics.
Setting off to navigate the conversations around the asexual spectrum, by the way, is a further challenge of everyone having a different perception of love. All humans don’t have the same capacities or experience, but this is never discussed. So, the other half of the expectation around my experience is that it is on the one hand very rare, but on the other, universally possible. Much is said about “True Love” in art, but while you can find out the wavelength of the colour orange, try to measure dopamine and so forth in new parents, or calculate the age of the galaxy relative to its neighbours, love just seems to be. People expect it to happen, to the point that aromantic folk have to make it clear they are a distinct identity, including having to emphasize that it’s not the same as asexuality. (Though the whole Ace thing clearly has a bit of an umbrella label effect, due to the path of collective discovery).
I can’t know if you, the reader, experiences love like I do.
Moving away from the people who don’t love, or love as much, but further from the Greeks, trying to explain what is going on might be further clarified philosophical observation about love from the late 1820s, of something called Crystallization. That’s the process your entire brain gets melted and leaks out your ears, and in the process, elevates the object of your fixation. In my case, barring rare moments, I am about as attracted to the act of non-kinked sex with another human about as much as humans typically find upholstery, garden ponds, or fruit bowls erotic. If Love wanders in, then these parts actually work.
Moving through the timeline of people writing about love, in the second half of the last century you will find neologisms like limerence. The experience of the early stages, for me, is something I only semi facetiously call a “temporary manic episode”. The first burst of falling in love brings euphoria, dropped sleep needs, and a magnetic inspiration that slams whatever poor bastard I have bonded onto into a muse. It also has a regrettable history of encouraging me to be a pest, though at least my gender flipped pigtail pulling could be tempered by maturity.
But just as nature abhors a vacuum, I am not permitted to walk without attachment. A cozy monogamous(ish) relationship that meets my emotional and sexual needs is the only thing that turns it off. Elsewise, I don’t have it in me to be the bed hopping, casual sex loving slut I wished to be. I was born to burn for desire for one person at at time. More frustratingly, though this limerence allows a brief ability to have a more vanilla sex, trapped in a relationship without kink, my romantic attachment fizzles.
What dignity I have today, in love, is hard won.
I am not the hot mess I once was. I mean, I hope so, as I think I’m in the “middle aged” territory of womanhood now, pre-menopausal, but definitely not young. And yet, the insensity has never wavered. All that coudl happen is I got good at controlling my behaviour. That’s no thanks to pop culture, which excuses the theoretical actions of women in love only a little bit less than the carte blanche it gives a guy with the same thing. Fiction isn’t even really sure that dying for your passion is a bad thing, even if Romeo and Juliet has an aspect that’s a cautionary tale. Cathy might crash her immune system yearning in the moors in her nighty, but we are meant to see her passion for Heathcliff at least understandable and inevitable. Of course, luckily for me, love largely just gave me an opportunity to act like an embarrassing git. My teenage years are, lest you think otherwise, a cringe factory that I survive remembering only through accepting my own sincerity at the time.
Middle school (Junior High for Americans) passed in an unfortunate series of stupidities, to be met with an excess of eagerness in High School. While the adults assumed I was on drugs based on my general behaviour (lol, nope), and shook their heads at my sexual precocity, over 50% of the time such passions were unrequited. That is for the best, and it was only through this experience that a modicum of a clue and a shred of pattern recognition started to assert itself. I lived in an area where all the small town nonsense of the early 2000s was in full swing. It was the era of Purity Rings and second virginity, and I was a baby pervert who wanted to do BDSM. I had the internet, and bonded awkwardly on similarly aged folks there too.
I learned the triggers tended to be creating the fiction I craved together. Not every person, but outside of my first times, where mere positive attention seemed enough to turn me into a giddy idiot, it was a common denominator. I’m super lucky, by the way, that Silver’s sexuality is more primarily mapped on making “story” too. Unfortunately, I also learned a pattern that for most people I fell for, they would play out such creativity with me during a crush on me, and than put that away like some sort of courtship only thing.
Nonetheless, I eventually learned to handle it. It doesn’t force me to pursue a single goal, rather while I can’t temper the intensity, I can find appropriate outlets. It also doesn’t completely suspend my judgement. As an older teenager, I was already able to tell if something wasn’t going to work if we tried a relationship. Gradually I managed to shunt all that enthusiasm and energy away from the people and into writing projects and so forth.
Kink mismatches, and other hazards of love
This does give me a little perspective on the situation of the tale as old as time: the kinky person married (or as good as married for their socio-economic status) to someone mismatched in libido or what they want to do in their sex life.
I am generally on the side of telling people in monogamous, but kink free or dead bedroom relationships not to cheat. Divorce and seperations are economically and emotionally hard, but at least they are legally possible. However, I am a little more sympathetic in how a kinked person stumbles into a union with a vanilla person. Not only is their precious little information about kink, to help one make that self discovery, but circumstances like mine show how one might have a brief window where things could work without kink. Nonetheless, my self knowledge means I have to front load any courtship with what I am into.
Nonetheless, I have had variable luck. In the first place, one of the harder lessons in being kinky is that just because they technically have your fetish doesn’t mean you share it compatibility. Nowhere is this illustrated than among balloon fetishists, where popping/not popping is a deep schism. but even in BDSM and further sub divided into femdom, you can come from two wildly different places. It’s been the end of more than one relationship for me, and painful, at that.
I cannot, however, have much spite for the incompatibility. I did have one party claim to be more kinky than they were, but the delusion there seemed to be wishful thinking. Nonetheless, when things are kink-functioning, I am a very sexual person. That’s an irony for me, lacking all the typical attractions, but unable to sustain the head-load of romantic attachments if we aren’t regularly doing some sort of intercourse. I worry , these days, as menopause is about a decade or two at most away, if my libido will sputter out, changing the picture entirely. But, past evidence shows that even when brain meds tanked things, there was some sort of connection still there.
Silver linings
I think, however, there is one blessing. I have, more often than not, found adult me’s passions reciprocated. Even in my youth, I turned down one budding relationship because I knew were wouldn’t be kink compatible, but the poor person, at least, matched me for the gooey-glue of our wants. And I suspect I owe that to the fact that I love openly and well.
Silver, for example, says he likes the surety and openness of my feelings. I was many months ahead of him for the “I love you”. For him, it was a much more cautious conclusion. But I cannot help feeling that my quick heart probably helped me signal to solidify the relationship that makes me very happy. And, I also noticed, though my looks are often remarked on, I have never been courted because of them. My personality, my creativity and so forth have always been someone’s motive- even as I find my aesthetics are a bonus. That too, I think is related to my loving openess.
I think it is easier to fall for the “personality” of a person when they unspool themselves like I do. I might love immensely, deeply, but it does seem I have been loved deeply, a lot, as well.
As you know, health issues have been a core part of the sporadic hiatus, and emotional well being is part of them. It’s something I am a bit sad and sheepish about. In my happiest D/s relationship, most uncomplicated or “yes, but” tainted, I am also at a point where I am not giving the content here that probably would have helped me equivalent back when I founded things 10 years ago. But, maybe I should talk about the pain of how trying to bring change hurt me, within the community, too?
Content Note: transphobia, social criticism, bullying, burn out, mental health, and sexual assault.
Recently, after seven years in the role, I quit moderating r/femdom. I’d been basically checked out for more than a few years. This was, not in the least part, because ultimately the act of trying to curate porn that gives 0 space for my actual sexuality (while purporting to be about me) is about as inherently rewarding as watching the bailiffs auction your heirlooms to help settle the unpaid mortgage on the family farm they are also seizing. I had started, amusingly, because I got banned and publicly spoke out about how the environment was hostile to dommes, particularly lifestyle dommes and tried to seed a little foothold- not removing the fap but suggesting it could be otherwise. The trigger for quitting is betwixt the therapy I am faithfully doing and yet another DM attempting, in good faith on their part, to point out I was not doing enough.
This isn’t, by the way, an attack on this person. She pointed out, being trans, she was banned for content with her bio-dick, which the group gives a pass to with a strapon. Systemic unfairness is rampant- users flag trans people just for being trans, at the best of times. Since everyone is very, very off the rules, even if you could argue her post broke the letter of the law or spirit, she wasn’t without a solid point. But I was looking at her relatively polite appeal to me, pointing out the gatekeeping of the group, and something just came untied. It was that while someone COULD take on her crusade, I was so burned out and, tbh, socially burned by trying to help that I was the wrong person to do it. If I did, I would probably piss everyone else off, putting her hopes on me and then dashing them. This would also be no win for me, as excessive past experience shows that friendly fire is a pretty standard experience in progressive spaces, as well as fragging.
I wouldn’t be able to get the other moderators to be able to make a useful change, all they would be is more burned out and pissed off. I was the most approachable for her issue, but holy hell was I holding on by a thread. I knew that the team I worked with, however well meaning, were similarly ground down. Bot campaigns, hate mail, trashing and bad faith social justice flavoured appeals had all done a lot of damage, leaving a team that was doing the bare minimum to keep the lights on. Fragility, in its various forms has been called out as a barrier to change, but being what people call a “Geriatric Millennial”, I am old enough to see that while conflict might not be abuse, it is labour. It’s labour to sit with the discomfort of your own faults. The work doesn’t go away, even if it is important, no spoons magically materialize extra to make people more resilient because the work is important.
You can definitely power that gap on anger, or fear, but that is a quick way to cPTSD.
Oh, poor Pearl, making excuses! Nah, this is honesty, not an emotional appeal to you. The direct truth, here, is that me in the moderator role wasn’t going to help her with her problem. BUT. Me in the moderator role was probably standing in the way of someone who could. Not because I was actively blocking someone- like most load bearing, endless in scope volunteer roles, being present was leaving people comfortable enough not to do the work to fix things or let them fail.
I wanted to tell her that I already thought r/femdom being essentially r/grumpypegging and low effort spam killed my joy. I wanted to say that the standards we tried to determine who was/wasn’t a dom were nonesense, that they reflected a mindset that was fundamentally anti-sexworker, while still consuming almost exclusively commercial content. Femdom is subculture that, due to collective marginalization of lifestyle only and pro dommes alike, needed us to be allies. But the conceptual way reddit’s larger user base handles porn still has the pre-revenge porn laws mindeset. It’s a harassing, greedy and piracy first attitude that bred The Fappening. And, ultimately, it wasn’t my subreddit to decide to blow things up to turn into a feminist sex utopia. Nobody died and made me in change, and, nobody gave me a private army to accomplish some sort of coup-by-doing-the-work. But I didn’t, cuz she didn’t message me out of the blue to support me.
How about saying “I just work here, ma’am”?
I knew that wasn’t a good enough reply, either. Ultimately while the rewards of helping were minimal, a reputational boost translating to such a miniscule amount of privilege compared to say, working the same hours at McDonalds and using the money to self promote via ads- I was still there. Why was I doing this? Because I thought, in some small way I could push things to be a bit better for everyone.
I volunteer to feel safe, and foster a sense of belonging. I’m autistic, which doesn’t mean all autistics experience things this way, but like all humans I have people needs. My people needs were nurtured in socially abusive environments, while my head is full of boundless creative energy and vision. I unavoidably stand in the foreground, becoming a lead weight on a rubber sheet, warping the gravity of an environment I am in. Maybe this tendency to check out when I am not actively engaged is an ADHD thing too, but nevertheless, it is a thing. And this trying to be in motion, positively, has a history of harming me.
Then Perish.
My therapist asked me something a few weeks back. Why do I mention taking on an “11 victim serial rapist”, a fair bit, as an anchor in my life narrative? He’s a good therapist, so we have the rapport where the pillars of my self can be poked without hurting me. It was a good question. Taking on a series of missing stairs, culminating with that last one, and trying to emphasize the shit I dealt with, with Dunter, to get people to listen, did me irreparable harm, and alienated me from the Montreal kink community. Oh, and my relationship with my partner at the time fell apart- it needed to evolve because of core incompatibilities, but holy fuck, the timing.
Losing your social group to ostracism sucks. It’s actually potentially spectacularly fatal. I wish it hadn’t taken Lindsey Ellis having a second breakdown due to extended social abuse by mob to trip over: “Hot Allostatic Load“, but it helped understand what was going on.
Trying to understand my mental health can be put through a few lenses. One perspective is that things have never been ok- I was an anxious child, to begin with, who experienced ongoing abuse trauma. Another is that my early twenties to thirties were cyclical disasters: boom and bust, functional to non. Or, a person with existing vulnerabilities moved from an abusive family; to an abusive relationship; to an abusive situation in her community… to another even more abusive community, outside of kink.
Being accurate, when I took on Kommandant and Dunter, both sought to destroy my reputation, the latter by implying that I was abusive as well to change the subject. Then, because I had a reputation as the only person with a spine, when I didn’t deliver the results that people wanted on yet one more of many issues, fairly unpleasant humans decided to dox me. They did so because in social justice, any damage for progress is and ends justifies the means. Nothing like deleting a post using your real name on fetlife, and then being told you were silencing them. Guess that’s tone policing now, isn’t it? >_>
I am not just bitter, I’m traumatized. Also bitter. But, mostly trauma.
At the same time, by the way, my online life was picking up stalkers. Pretty gnarly ones, the kind where yeah, there’s clearly some mental health issues going on, but also someone you have never met or interacted with is hell bent on personally punishing you for a relationship they imagined you had with them. Most crazy people don’t do that, this was more the celebrity dehumanization effect.
So I quit, running away into a LARP club, and into Vancouver. And on the way, the LARP club ripped my spine out through my ass. Because it turns out vampire LARP’s poisoned history makes the sexual abuses of the Montreal BDSM scene look like a walk in the park.
Bleeding out various metaphorical injuries got round 2 of disordered eating, followed by covid’s impact just kicking what little stamina I had left. I have been cooling my heels on about 1.5 years now of long term disability. What can I say about that?
I am getting better. I am anxious I will never be fully “ok” to function, of tackling permanent disability to work full time. I am filled with so much guilt and anxiety around the Patreon thing falling by the wayside, I can’t even bring myself to open the site, even though I probably would go back to it much sooner if I did. But a lot of where I got so far in my recovery is heralded by abrogation of responsibilities. Quitting things.
I first noticed that in the larp side. Like most creative hobbies, it’s notorious for volunteer labour making even “for profit” endeavors possible. The pocket I enjoyed is even more shoe string, nourishing a community where even minimal membership fees are a hardship. Leaving aside stumbling from sexual abuse in kink to sexual and other abuse in LARP, there’s very much an over reliance on “hero” volunteers, running unopposed for elected positions of implied sort of leadership, but largely admin. And the people in those roles are a smaller pool than the member base, doing it at the expense of personal life, reputation and health. It continues, because if they stopped the event would stop.
And at some point I sad down and did the math- if it wasn’t important enough to people to support it, then they didn’t deserve to have it. Would this event, this idea or project die but for one person or team? Then perish.
When I left Montreal, the munch I hosted vanished.
Inheritance, alone in an era of missing stairs and #MeToo, became a mess. Events that didn’t act to make themselves safer, ironically, faced less damage. Not because they were better off doing so, but because the 18-35 community didn’t have its shit together not to turn into a ridiculous mud sling if said can of worms were opened. They grew too dependent on Pearl spending $40 a month on a drink she wouldn’t otherwise consume, and a taxi home so she could host a gathering that was slightly safer and curated than others. The fight over the amorphous cluster of folks that became attached to this group overshadowed the labour of keeping things safe.
Cliff, of Pervocracy, talked about this as well. They have one of the most influential theories on moral and social behaviour of groups, but their Missing Stair essay came at a cost I became familiar with. I became, much as they described their own experience, the holding place for the trauma of others.
You don’t get to one and done, to pick up that sword becomes a lifelong commitment, in the eyes of others. Which sounds noble and ideal for everyone, because, like, shouldn’t we all be unstintingly fighting against abuse? Most of the space we call social media is that sort of participatory effort, a push in all directions, so you would think there would be more people doing the work that needs doing.
Only we clearly aren’t. Because the larger world is a hostile place, the burdens disproportionately fall on these load bearing actors. and then the price of failure or imperfection is “we trusted you, the status of being trusted should have been enough”.
Just purely hosting that Munch was, shocking to me, revolutionary to most folks. One evening a month, emailing a bar and making a fetlife event. It spawned two direct (welcomed) copycats that filled needs my event didn’t. And yet at the time it was a remarkable act of will and inclusion even before I started taking whisper network warnings and shouting them. Acting on them, banning people.
I sort of wondered about those legendary wise people and oracles, with people seeking out some poor bronze age bastard to judge their legal dispute or tell them how to plan their personal lives and granary systems. I think also about the shock people forever have when they discover someone popular isn’t rich, works a regular job.
To help others or to speak is to barter your participation in a group
A pithy bit of writing I stumbled over recently observed that in spiritualist societies, when you started having personal occult revelations, your existing group or church would typically exile you. They might have even be founded by another exile with a vision, but yours would become a bridge too far.
I feel a lot of kinship with Contrapoints, just a girl talking, who lucked into being better at talking and entertaining at the right time. Hers was a monkey paw, trying to protect her community and understand the human condition, which arguably made her inevitable transition a bit smoother, but I can’t help thinking that she was smart/positioned enough to make the same income in a short sleeve polo as a software engineer. Then she could still have spent, as she put it “luxury car money” on the medical side of alleviating some of her dysphoria. There sure are a lot of Tesla orbiting every FANG hub I have been around, and a lot of folks participating in the resulting countercultural communities that spring up in such cities.
Instead, the poor woman became a living goddess style avatar in the way we modern people do it. If you were fanciful and biblically raised you could say the Eden breaking nakedness Adam and Eve traded for was an awareness others could see them and care. Sort of like people suggest the god of foresight, Prometheus, isn’t being punished for stealing fire, but giving humans the anxiety of being able to live outside the now. The maker of the monkey with anxiety, if you will.
Other people have written on the toxicity of the traumatized trapped in a marginalized space, retraumatizing each other endlessly. But, with my double helping of the usual monkey anxiety and being a freak among the freaks, now what?
I guess I do what I always do: process my feelings messily and publicly in a long form essay. But I think I will also suggest that we need to do a way better job on foundational shit. Missing stairs exploit being more effort and social complexity to address than to leave as a shared hazard. Believe the victim was a nice start, but it’s not making a tangible structure of next steps or what to do when you “believe the victim” but all the doctors in the hospital are gunshot victims too.
I need there to be a community that supports me without eating me alive in the process. And I need there to be a community with diffused labour-of-justice that is not done from a place of constant high amp. I don’t know what that is, but right now I won’t be trying to found it, as I am a bit occupied with trying to smelt a few more spoons out of the pile of scraps, swords and old razor blades I have been given to work with.
Oh dear. Lots of promises and then intermittent hiatuses. Bang out something- an article or some such, and then vanish again, after making hopeful plans for more. A therapist, a neurologist, an OT, a GP and the hapless bastard over in insurance land who had to navigate this further works on trying to get me functional. Now is the winter of my body’s health, made glorious by spring. Trying something new, the old way I used to write, churning out posts via stream of consciousness, not structure or schedules.
The femdom blog goes on
In December of last year, a friend helped me rescue the site from its state being hammered by all manner of bot based attacks. WordPress is old bones, as we have well crawled from this sort of site model. The cool kids are all off doing video in walled gardens. I maintain this outpost here that isn’t perpetually fearing being banned, blocked or deplatformed at the cost of relative obscurity. Blogging is a dead art, like speaking Latin it’s a cool trick that no longer sits at the center of the internet. These days if I tell people I am a blogger, the younger ones may ask what that is.
The day web bots learn to parse the audio of all the video content enough to make that viable for search, and I suspect the nail’s in the coffin for this artform too, sure as magazines. Nevermind, it was only being economically sustained on an advertising model that depended on a trick of how search bots worked in the first place.
I have three different SEO marketers asking me if I can do a “guest post”, fresh in my inbox. They want a link or two so a robot can be tricked to think a human would care to connect with their commercial endeavor: brothels in Australia, sex toys around the world. Periodically, a company in China still valiantly tries to offer me a load for “review” to coax the same links to appear. I should say yes to the former and toss prices at them. You, reader, would get some erotica out of it. That’s my strict policy, no glowing random announcements that you absolutely need whatever, just to segue the link into post.
I have a nice relationship with my submissive, and it’s serious
It’s 5:30 in the morning, and he’s still asleep. I crashed out early last night, going from flaunting in a latex cat suit to a migraine with enough intensity that I had to fall onto my talent for radical acceptance for the three or so hours until I could go unconscious. Such is the current situation of my life, with my poor flesh, intermittently functional and then dashed down by one thing or another. The seasonal allergies(?) are still there, though also a lingering fear that it’s a garden variety summer cold I am spreading. My breasts have decided to be huge and plump, the latest experience in pandemic weight gain shooting me to something in the flavour of a 32D. When I put my laptop against my solar plexus to type, their swell rest against my arms. It reminds me of trying to do things while holding a baby or a cat.
I am drinking tea out of a mug with a linocut style octopus, a gift from Silver, who saw me crooning over the display of different animals. He likes to do the little gifts like that, or surprise me with something pretty to wear. This week we poked about neighbourhoods and apartments, trying to square the circle around the problem of geography.
I am a Canadian citizen, and he, American. We can each spend half the year in each other’s realm, true, but the legal technicality that is a problem is that neither of us is supposed to work. Contrary to the people telling you to become “Digital Nomads”, even remote work, abroad, is illegal. Those people enjoying Thai beaches while doing some sort of web marketing or contract programming scheme enjoy the privilege of their citizenships that being an ex pat means local laws telling them to not be doing that are unlikely to be enforced. Immigration is a mess that way, everywhere. Specifically, the time to process a spouse visa means a good year in limbo, deliberately overstaying the visitor level. Were I to marry Silver, and all paperwork filed like good upper middle class people, I would be out of the work force entirely for a year, cooling my heels, legally allowed to own businesses but not work in them.
Needless to say, it’s a law everyone expects to be broken, and then uses to cudgel those who have other reasons to make good scapegoats. Were I wealthy, I would hop into some sort of education, while other visas processed. Easier to take some intensive classes on that kind of visa, or find one of those money-for-graduate-degree schemes to anchor one. (I mean, when you hit fuck you money levels, you don’t even need to do that, you can just anchor yourself based on being able to invest stupid levels of money into a country, because there is one law for man, and another for the gods…) All that digression into unsexy politics to say we are stymied by one thing that would be sensible- the ritual of living together BEFORE making it “permanent”.
I now laugh at my somewhat naïve suppose, when Wildcard and I parted ways in the romantic sense. Divorce decimates the finances of women more so than men, statistically. Both take a hit, one does not recover the same. Rebuying what you need for a second house over and over and over again adds up. I told myself mayhap that I wouldn’t cohabit again until I was sure enough to marry. The romantic notion of not living together until after a marriage appealed to my whimsy.
Reader, be careful what you daydream. Your 2017 fantasy of independence and sluttery to cool the sting of domestic failure may manifest four years later. Nonetheless, it’s not the worst problem to have. At least the somebody, Silver, is worth making squinty faces at immigration law and fussing about demo apartments in Washington satellite towns.
Femdom Writing?
Periodically people still ask me if I will pick up what is apparently my best literary achievement and finish the planned trilogy. The Pet Gentleman still sells a few copies- though my sales stats tell me that I never breached 500 editions in ebook or print. I always have that following me around like the alleged slaves who whispered in Emperor’s ears’ they were merely mortal. Truth is, I am not sure can write that well anymore.
Something scratched out desperately in a dying (abusive) relationship while I worked in a call center might be my best work, at least as far as artistic talent and uniqueness intersecting with something people crave. These days when I fiction, things go very rambly and plot heavy. My writing’s been infected with run on sentences and passive voice. I still write, but I notice that the erotic is a lot more padded these days, and the odds of a happy ending a lot more probable.
Maybe I am being self conscious. A decent editing can make my prose a lot less recursive and rambly. In my bleakest I worry various health issues fried my brain and reduced it to pudding. Maybe I will write something that “good” again, but I try not to feed my perfectionism. And… So it goes.
