It has been true for the entire lifetime of this blog that fictional depictions of dominant women are really limited, and most typically tailored to what subs are attracted to. Or being more precise, what a certain paying audience of sub men will purchase. This standard tends to depict dominance in women as a vocation performed for the benefit of subs (or their vulnerability and persecution fantasies) and is often gender regressive as heck.
For example, there’s a whole dialectic around the ubiquity of strapons- is this like the little fake beard Queen Hatchepsut wore in her official portraiture, to project authority, or is this a rare overlap of the ostensibly hetero into queerness? Either way, it’s practically compulsory to penetrate and very rare to see depictions of your penetration if you are a dominant. Likewise much frustration is noted that dominants are seldom depicted as attracted to or even liking our subs. Not so in hetero male dominant/femsub land, where the slave princess fantasy is perfectly common in the stuff targeting women. And, at the very least in the porn for men, there’s definitely no shortage of degradation, but the femsub is at least the main event.
This has a carry-on effect that if your version of femdom doesn’t look like most typically available versions of it, you are more likely not to realize your desire. In the inverse, a lot of lifestyle dommes share their lightbulb moment was finding an image or story they just vibed with (often outside of conventional porn altogether) and chasing that feeling down the rabbit hole. Further, when all depictions of you are so very limited, if you are a dominant you get endlessly frustrated by a conga line of idiots who think fiction catering to them is an educational documentary about you.
In any case, lifestyle dommes generally agree that porn is collectively failing us.
Dealing with this is still a work in progress. Unfortunately a lot of folks get stuck in a frankly SWERF style approach – they decide that since most porn (and pop culture depictions of dommes) are garbage, that it’s actively malicious on the part of the people who make it to keep doing so. While I do think that the almost exclusively “Mistress Manual” dominatrix-in-a-box source of approach on the education side is actively bad, you have to be more nuanced in your tackling of the problem. Getting into a war with the existing content creators about how they are pandering internalized misogynists or fixating on the bad fake subs who just want to be catered to isn’t working. I say that as someone with a lot of yelling about not getting anything approaching the rep I want.
At best, if you fixate on trying to stop the existing content, all you do is make everyone miserable and some Republican/Conservative politicians cream their suit at what good potential ally you might be to their latest (bad faith) protect the kids crusade. But, we should be able to discuss the problem without doing things like trying to redefine the larger category of Femdom to mean “stuff only me and my friends who agree with me are into”. Sure you can argue yourself blue in the face that femdom should centre women’s pleasure more than it does, but the current content situation will point out that we are assuming the people involved don’t enjoy it. You can see how that’s a subjective dead end?
And, inversely, I am not saying to turn your brain off completely. There is value in consciousness raising discussion. All media is subject to criticism and pointing out trends and implicit biases is one of the ways we bring change and establish community with people who feel similarly. But is our goal here less content overall? Or is it more of the good stuff for dommes?
I think it should be the latter, and for that there’s a very big, slow next step. We are going to need to spend a lot of money or make our own erotic content, if we feel otherwise. You are also going to need to grapple with systemic barriers that exist outside of the business (and amateur hobby) of erotic or otherwise deviant to the norm content.
I’m also going to take a controversial stance and put porn, erotica and romance into the same general category.
Most people tend to conceive of labels as tidy little jars, even if much work has gone in the other direction to point out that there’s spectrums. Enbies, bi people, even switches are no exception, with more people than not approaching this self description with an asterisk. Very few people who don’t slot into a binary actually exist in a balanced average or a half and half.
More mercilessly, these middle spaces are more often than not messy. By this I mean disclosure to others of nuance makes it difficult to refute your hermetically sealed jar without sharing things people have deemed rude, or worse some ninnyhammer will mistake the information for an invitation and shriek you are “involving them in your sexuality”.
Enbies get assigned to be a third gender that must perform androgyny and release hewing to either pole of the existing binary. Switches are talked about like watered down dominants in a three step social hierarchy. And bi people, bless, are not only all tangled up in the assumption of being a swinging door, but also an uber slut who could never be content with monogamy.
And asexuality, well…
The paradox of asexuality is a community stereotyped as something either prude or pure (sex repulsed, traumatized through to bored by the sexuality of others) and the reality is more complicated, but falls particularly strongly into somewhere you face a social penalty if you give more detail. It is also a community that in actuality is often deeply horny.
These days, as dangerous as being gay is in most of the planet, in progressive spaces if you say you are a lesbian/gay/bi people will at least get the gist, shrug and move on. They may muddle trans-ness with sexuality more than they should, but but they also may just go a little trans medical and just nidnod and congratulate you that you got your binary sorted out. (Pour one out for the gay trans people tho). But there’s this tension between the constant human spew of sexuality and the human discomfort with that.
And the asexual spectrum kind of requires you to understand how varied sexuality outside of the surface detail. It holds your head under the surface and forces people to confront that arousal and attraction aren’t universally coupled. That there’s nothing, even fucking, that’s inherently sexual or inherently not sexual.
Every bit of queerness blows up some sacred cow like that beached whale some small town explosively detonated onto themselves. Asexuality removes the tidy little veil that lets us ignore whether a given human is horny or not by sincerely believing it isn’t possible. Like early 2000s highschoolers in hysterics that a lesbian in a change room might be into them, take things off the rails and for many folks all certainty is abolished. Men aren’t men, women aren’t women and bare breasts aren’t more platonically sexual than a shapeless wool sweater. The logic of asexuality being properly understood allows that if people are able to be out of a category they are also allowed to be in.
And you still have a person screaming into the void because the norms they used to feel cozy are gone
You can take the scathing approach and tell them they are awash in sexuality – the art, the assumptions, the background radiation of existing in community. But then, all they seem to do is get more stressed. The argument helps for the already convinced to articulate why other people’s disgust isn’t automatically their problem. But the paradox of a collective bent to erotophobia in a species that averages so horny this actually interferes with our ability to reproduce is more than a cosmic joke.
Julia Serrano observed in her book Sexed Up that occupying a marginalized identity meant a higher risk of being sexualized. What she also provided was a more nuanced definition of what that means, not just the presence of potential sexuality, but imposed assumptions on how that sexuality works.
If gender critical numpkins read predation into trans women, they are paradoxically acting from the same place by imply trans men are essentially losing the traits they associate with sexuality. In both cases top surgery to add or remove breasts are an objection to losing a power relationship where they can define what breasts mean for the person who has them. The security of that power is lost to them.
In the same way, to be on the asexual spectrum and be accepted is to remove the ability of others to assume or define your sexuality. The casting of asexuals as exclusively tragic trauma woobies or blushing loveshy naïfs is a projection as strong as the assumption bisexual people, (particularly women) are here to fuck anything with a pulse.
And, when confronted with the practice of the asexual spectrum in action, which in addition to the sex repulsed or disinterested contains the biggest bunch of perverts in the world, the reaction is to leap to assuming any awareness of the habits and practices of others is to experience violence. And you can’t do anything about it because the sexualization is coming from them, not you.
What asexuals deal with is part of queerphobia
I am old enough to recall how 2008 was about people pushing for marriage equality against folks fixated on wildly over stating the risk of rectal prolapse. The same stands for things like BDSM, that in collectively acknowledging that stuff that humans have fixated on forever could be sexual, suddenly it becomes that it must be sexual. From thence comes the fantasy of harm, and the assumption that awareness must be a performance of not for their benefit, at their expense.
This is how bisexual cis women end up being the second highest group to experience violence amongst queer identities. (Trans women are the highest, and we can assume bisexual trans women must have it even worse) To have sexuality becomes to be sexualized, and from there to be assumed to be up to trickery and malice. Bisexual women are cast as temptresses, objectified by men and treated as traitors by those exclusively lesbian. Everyone invalidates their choices as performed for someone else’s entertainment, and a higher rate of assault follows.
Make no mistake, compulsory sexuality can be violence, but compulsory repression as much so. Part of the harm I experienced was that there was absolutely no space to be my sexuality to the point that I had to figure it out by assuming I was doing regular sex poorly. For many, many years of feeling alienated from what I was told. At the expense of real pain and heartache. Like a lesbian raised in a culture that doesn’t realize it’s even possible, allowing space for my desires to be normal rather than vanilla or celibacy is important for my comfortable and safe existence.
But to this day, education about BDSM is suppressed. Although I was sexually active from the age of 14, a perfectly normal statistic for a Canadian, access to the idea of an asexual spectrum just wasn’t available to anyone really, yet at the time. And today, it’s a footnote in the rare places that permit queer education without much detail.
Going into any detail is back to that comment I made earlier about escaping your hermetically sealed jar causing people to act like you propositioned them personally.
This blog post, for example, would be treated like something that needed to be as mature content flagged. It is expected to be handled the same way as a picture of me having some sort of complex penetration with some other person or object. Nothing about it is particularly interested in arousing anyone, least of all myself.
But the fact that I fuck is a taboo, that my sexuality is different doubly so. Talking about how it is different as circumspectly as a person expressing the gender they are attracted to is still treated as twice as lewd.
Thus, talking about kink or BDSM isn’t tolerated to openly do in the mainstream. Not only do a bunch of folks still believe you can catch paraphilia memetically the way they think rapid onset gender dysphoria is a thing so they want to lock down any mention of BDSM, but pretty much even the kinky folk twist the concept of consent into knots that the least whisper of it is the same as pegging on a park bench.
While I like porn and want it to exist, the only real places I am permitted to be seen is incredibly marginalized barely able to escape censorship porn that definitely is trying to communicate sexuality OR fictional depictions that have all those flaws (unhealthy, trivial and covered with three layers of context obfuscation). This means that even grown ups like myself are out here causing chaos. We don’t even know what we can potentially be, so we waste years feeling shamefully broken, having dysfunctional vanilla marriage, and/or having painful and soul destroying sex that was simply unnecessary. If we are lucky we eventually figure that out. Many of us don’t.
Censorship as a byproduct of our nonconsensual sexualization causes real harm.
Thus, while the repulsed and disinterested, demi and the rarely/sporadically attracted get a grudging pass (demi with a bunch of bewildered other people going “but I thought attraction worked for everyone like that?!”… Nobody is ready for the entirety of asexuality the way that historically getting recognized as trans came at the expense of permitting being married to the gender people now acknowledged as being. Much as it turns out there are a lot of bi, gay and lesbian trans people who previously had to choose between their source of attraction and/or love and living as their gender, there’s a lot of asexual folks like myself who can’t live with authenticity because the larger society we live in doesn’t respect us as possible or moral. It’s not ok.
Note bene: someone, if I am lucky enough to get read at all, is getting real stroppy about queer to queer inter identity comparison. Yes, it’s not precisely the same, but it’s same enough we all have the common label. And part of this label is that we compliment each other in our overlap.
Asexuality permitted to be the whole of what it might be, and celebrated for it requires people to back the fuck off. Everyone would benefit. We would have a whole new toolkit facilitating coexistence and live and let live. There would be no downsides.
I think, as a community, we haven’t fully grappled with the fact that the roles of dominant and submissive are not always perfect puzzle pieces/mirrors of each other. When they do so, it’s typically either luck (two people are inherently compatible) or work (they arrived there via some sort of compromise). I also believe we keep trying to come up with a way of doing this that sidesteps the work *as equals* and gets hung up on the inherent properties of the roles we hope to embody.
Much effort has been put into grappling with what is or isn’t valid in kink, with some advice being bedrock to safety, like the importance of consent. Other approaches are not so helpful or actively harmful.
In the niche that is femdom (and a space like this), a lot of default advice is to lower emphasis on fetishes/things done and put more emphasis on submissive compliance. This works to a point, but it tends to be kind of assuming a collective dynamic on all of us (that dominants get to inherently define the meaning of both roles) when the practical reality benefits from the presumption of equality.
The approach that submission is whatever the dominant says it is… Is incomplete. And yet a lot of people seem to take this for granted in lifestyle femdom discussions.
Of course, in lifestyle femdom, there’s practical reasons this approach has tenure, in so much that we tend to be the flashpoint between gender expectations and one of the primary tensions in D/s. Women (and femmes) of any orientation deal with one sided objectification that can be incredibly dehumanizing while asking extensive labor from us largely to benefit someone with more socio-economic power. None of this is news.
And yet, the devaluation of what subs might use as framing *also* has problems. For example, it gets weaponized via whorephobia- eg the casual speculation a professional building a scene within the specifications of a client must actually be some sort of crypto-sub, secretly doing service. At the same time, this pushback makes it hard to have a conversation outside of kink roles, because there can be an overcorrection to invalidate what one doesn’t personally enjoy as “not true femdom”, rather than engaging with it as a complicated topic.
See pegging, which is a highly polarizing kink loaded with social symbolism and a very different relationship to the sensory part, depending on the individual and their anatomy. It can be simultaneously genderqueer, transgressive and incredibly patriarchal. The strap-on is at once the phallic tool by which you cannot dismantle master’s house, and a form of liberation. All of kink is like that with every tiny facet going to have an asterisk and the note “it depends/YMMV“.
The same follows with what I describe as the “two femdoms needing to coexist problem”, but this extends behind our particular niche.
The reality is what may make a submissive feel submissive (or turned on) doesn’t always match what makes a dominant feel dominant. If both orientations are starting as equals, neither is more valuable. That doesn’t mean a given person is required to perform the whims of another, but my whimsical fantasy nonsense as a dominant is not inherently more valid than a sub’s whimsical fantasy nonsense.
I believe, by extension, telling subs they aren’t truly submitting unless they do exclusively my personal fantasy nonesense is not going to get the results we hope it does, and it’s still objectifying the fuck out of me.
Instead, what we do need to acknowledge is that all dominants exist under imposed expectations, regardless of the gender of our partners, and that we often feel these assumptions overstep.
However, while this is particularly noted in hetero femdom, it’s also noted in other queer kink of any gender combo (with an associated top shortage). What tends to be ignored is that it exists in M/f as well. It’s just in the latter case the way we weight gender mean that there is a paradox, both that male dominants are more catered to, but also where they might not enjoy something that breaks stereotypes about automatic power, they are given less freedom to complain. I think I have it worse than the average male dominant, but the conversation needs to include that even he is under some peculiar rules. Even if you don’t want to listen to men very much, as dominants, you are still getting their warmed over norms.
And, at the same time we conflate gendered issues with BDSM niche specific issues- for example femdoms and femsubs spend a lot of time lecturing men to be less harassing. This exasperating reality of sexism we share, unfortunately, tends to be attributed not to a certain percentage of the population being encouraged to be abusive fuckwits, but each group respectively asking “why are subs/doms such trash?!” In my opinion the self sorting into niches is broadly helpful in many aspects (not the least of which is that mainline BDSM is hostile to female dominants), but there’s a certain dark comedy there too in the lost solidarity.
So, looping back to my title, the two versions of every D/s role are as follows:
The self perception and needs of a person.
The things that are projected onto us.
Thus, as a dominant there’s both the stuff that falls into the cluster of femdom gaze (itself not universal but more likely to be closer to the mark) and stuff about someone who is ostensibly me but more about a sub gaze. However the inverse follows that subs have stuff for/about them and also stuff for people ostensibly into them.
In femdom, the stuff for us is so embarrassingly underserviced that “where is porn for me?” tends to border on opening the metaphorical drawer and finding IOU. But if you look at M/f, you can see a much more robust amount of niche pandering that assumes different priorities by D/s orientation. And, it requires emphasis that say, erotica made for femsubs is not erotica for m-dominants. People of group A might incidentally like stuff for group B and vice versa, of course, or be excluded from everything, by personal wiring.
And thus, waving one’s hand at the stuff that caters to the presumed needs of sub men as invalid also oversimplifies. At the same time, these don’t exist in a vacuum, so a buck-stops-with-the-dominant approach still opens up all sorts of second guessing about authenticity. For example, the idea of a “Mistress” is neither a pure creation of subs and their fantasies nor dominants in their self expression. And additional tension exists that there’s a vertical loop as well, since subs and dominants find meaning within their respective identity as well.
The problem, as I see it, is not trying to extract the wishes of subs entirely from the idea of authenticity, it’s to extract out where the relationship is unequal in who is imposing what on whom. To do otherwise ignores the role external input has on what we want.
I think the “just do what the dominant wants or GTFO” isn’t the worst defense mechanism in the context of the over weighting of the fantasies of men and subs, but I think it doesn’t solve the underlying issue. I just also think I prefer to ask my submissive identified partners, regardless of gender, to do the work to get as close to equality as possible as I feel the self abrogation approach is just asking me to be lucky enough to get a partner who coincidentally never has any conflict between my needs and theirs.
This is also not from Dracula, but is vampire art from the same era, not inspired by Dracula at all.
Ah, Dracula. Published in 1897 by horror and fantasy writer, reviewer and theater manager, it occupies a space as the most well known vampire story, and also so incredibly copied and adapted that while everyone can agree it’s rather kinky, queer, and horny, the rest of the interpretations, of the author and the text that it’s also the poster child for pin-the-pathology-on-the-pervert. In consequence, Bram Stoker exists as a sort extra protagonist, in which people are forever trying to map why a person could possibly imagine such a chilling little parcel of ominous ambiguities without being moments from ending up in a padded cell next to Renfeild.
How did I come to write this essay?
Silver and I started a thing, several months back, where I read him chapters of various books I like. We both enjoy writing, and a component of this was sharing some of the influences of other authors on me, starting with Tanith Lee’s Drinking Sapphire Wine. The reading out loud part started as pushiness on my side- every time I otherwise tried to share a book I liked with other people, the vagaries of time and human flakiness meant they never read the damn things, often letting a loaned copy languish in their possession indefinitely. Knowing if he found it dreary or irritating I could abort, when I realized the first book I tried to share might similarly sit unexamined, I decided I would just do a chapter out loud and see how it went. And, in following from that, a somewhat indirect route took us to Bram Stoker’s classic, Dracula.
Somewhere along the way we discovered audio books from someone who loves you is the most relaxing thing ever. Thus, in this reading (currently ongoing) I have a secondary purpose in that every serious romantic relationship, to this point has revealed I have the power to put my partner into a somnolent nap. Not so with Silver, who rarely naps, despite some pretty chronic insomnia, but for whatever reason, three quarters of the way into a chapter of something and I can get soft sighing snores.
The choice of Dracula follows from another favourite of mine, A Night in the Lonesome October, an obscure book by Roger Zelazny; in which Jack the Ripper’s dog narrates how various characters from gothic horror come together, with their animal companions, to participate in a Lovecraftian rite. That sparked the query, that if Silver were to imagine a story from a character from that pantheon, who would he pick? And this proved to be Harker, the intrepid sort-of-protagonist of Dracula, and, unsurprisingly, subject to some pretty significant femdom themes.
These were further illuminated with a little sexted speculative erotic fanfic of Mr. And Mrs. Harker’s post Vampire defeat, following in the now storied tradition of taking one of the threads of the text and pulling until you have enough length to knit the outcome you want. However, I can’t write porn without plot. We ended up trying to piece together what precisely happened for small bits of logistics in the real narrative, and then, realizing it had been long enough since we both read it, realized it was the perfect candidate for our next read-together.
And rather than getting another paperback copy, since we both already knew we liked it, I splurged for one of those big hardcover, pretty shelf decorator editions publishers release periodically of classics. This one is grey with printed black flowers of a slightly ominous pattern, and contains a lush forward and author biography, and an enormous appendix of context, both an index to help you understand the archaic vocabulary and late Victorian pop culture, and other bits and bobs like the author’s sister’s letter recounting a cholera epidemic that eerily maps into some of the spooky bits of the middle third of the book.
Reading these essays as bookends, its starts with an attempt to paint how rational Bram Stoker was and how this story is a flight of unusual fancy, as well as set the theory that Bram Stoker’s awful boss (and celebrity actor) Henry Irving forms the inspiration for the titular vampire. We then traipse into a sort of commentary cliché of vampires, the psychosexual bits (yes, duh) but eternally mapping them onto some sort of latent fear of female sexuality/woman taming misogyny. To which I say, can’t a person have a complex set of sadomasochistic fantasies WITHOUT diagnosing them as neurotic, traumatized or worse? It is not just that readers seek to map the life and values of the author into their text, it’s that holy fuck, is Dracula a shining example of the personal peculiarities and biases of a century of media critics being projected so intensely onto a work that Marie Curie would be needed to measure the source and intensity of such radiation.
Meta-Dracula, Adaption and History Googles
In examining this work, we have two factors to consider. People have been making their own adaptations of this, willy nilly, since before it was even out of copyright (the famous silent film, Nosferatu, being case in point); and it’s absolutely demonstrable this book is horny and has queer and poly scenes out the wazoo. However, the character of Bram Stoker is also being pushed through an additional filter, the retrospective and highly ahistorical idea that Victorians were (with few exceptions) sexually repressed.
It can be simultaneously true that famous health nut of the era Dr. Kellog was advising people to pour carbolic acid on the clitoris of girls to stamp out masturbation, but also that this was a period of explosion in fetish content, of advocacy of birth control, sexual autonomy and free love, and by significant liberalization of divorce laws. It can also be true that much in modern day, a progressive position can quite lack the internal consistency and be stuffed full of both hypocrisy and nuance – much like a modern feminist might fall short in some measures, Bram Stoker was both a Suffragist and not a fan of porn enough to write an essay against literature that might encourage sin. But, in retrospective of this period, modern people have a skew that remembers Victorian satire about putting covers on piano legs, but not that fetish heels, particularly recreating the 18th century shoe, were a thing.
The same must be said that adaptions of Dracula tended to shove all the horny through their own lense, over more than a century. Much how characters are swapped or consolidated (Harker, Van Helsing, Dr. Steward, Arthur Holmswood and Quincy Morris collapsed or refolded, Mina and Lucy likewise adapted into one, switched in role, renamed, and so on), the dramatic climaxes of violence and agency are edited, rearranged and reframed. The reasons for this are manifold, and audience expectations, pragmatics, censorship of the era or honest interpretation can all play an equal factor in why something is changed.
Adaption often overwrites text in popular memory, which in turn makes talking about just the text sans bias impossible.
A classic example is the tendency to depict Mina as brunette and Lucy as blonde. What if I told you, in text, that the only reference to the hair of both women refer to Mina as having light hair, and describe Lucy’s as “sunny”? Adaptions that feature both characters have reasons to do this, from the incidental of who they cast, or to try to make the characters visually distinct, but also as a modern visual shorthand for our perception of the character of women through their appearance.
Lucy, we generally understand, is flighty and pretty, beloved by many men, while Mina is staid and patient. Critics following the idea of misogyny-in-text tend to point out the Hays Code style need to punish bad women… except. Uh, nothing in text is explicitly that simple, because the morals based censorship of 1897 is not the same attitude to tropes even a few decades later. For another example of gendered virtue bias, if you had to guess, which of the two women mentions she finds fashion boring? The pretty blonde who everyone falls easily in love with, who is more effusively emotional but a bit dim, or the employed-in-a-job patient woman who does endless looking after and managing things and imagines herself a lady reporter? Yup, it’s Lucy who mentions this- and both women discuss their relationship to the ideals of womanhood of the day with nuance.
I will also remind people, at this juncture, I am not claiming there is no misogyny in the text. Victorian lit, as today, frames gender through biases. What I am saying is that we tend to retrospectively add both the modern assumptions about gender and sexuality we do in fiction and that our retrospection in the past, likewise, summons ghosts less of the actual period we bring them than jowly disapproving caricatures manufactured today.
For example, a common critical read is that Dracula, the character, is uniquely an external sexual thing, inflicting his horny corruption on chaste Englishmen and women. This common push/pull gets dragged out in Dracula, both the idea of the wicked foreigner ruining our pure women, and framing anything coded as a sexual assault as a complicated seduction that us prudes only have to retrospectively read as a rape. At its apex, in criticism, we get the old horror movie canard that Lucy was murdered for having sexuality and doesn’t that staking seem like a phallic symbol? Ok, but did Dracula get defeated by penetration too? People trying to advance a feminist argument Lucy’s destruction is a corrective gang rape never seem to bring an agender top/bottom discourse into things.
We can’t have it both ways, the men either fucked Lucy to death and thus fucked Dracula to death, or there’s nothing default phallic about the killing of Lucy.
I also nudge that the famous, much adapted Lucy killing scene tend to emphasize her flash of sexuality during it as an evil femme fatale (the Brides menacing Jonathan were definitely using his attraction to him after all), so it’s an easy assumption to make. The problem there is that being seductive is a pre-Vampire Lucy trait. It could be more accurately argued that “corrupted” Lucy, up until this point eating babies, is reminding the men of her humanity. In passing moral judgments that the text is killing her for being a slut, also be aware that kissing one of her other suitors, in text is a symptom of her emotional sincerity, while in a modern work would be “leading him on”.
Lucy, in text, is not punished for being so giddy and boy crazy she wishes she could marry all three of her suitors (again in text). That’s a feature, not a bug- her attractiveness and charm are weighted as motivating features worthy of praise. If we want to go with blood-as-sex as metaphor, when her three suitors have given her blood transfusions to try to (unsuccessfully in the end) save her life, and explicitly contemplate the feeling this marries them to her, this is a plurality of people who would be rather arguing the person they all fucked was all the more worthy of rescue, never mind the metamour context. And, if I recall correctly, Van Helsing and Mina also donated. Mina and Lucy also have kissed, by this point, the former using it to break Dracula’s hypnotism.
Which, as an aside, if we are going to underline anything here, another known factor of Bram Stoker’s life is that Oscar Wilde was also in love with the woman he married. When Florence Balcombe preferred Bram Stoker, this caused a temporary rift in friendship of a few years. While one might not want to perfectly map parallels, it’s definitely a repeating theme of Dracula to be navigating monogamy versus plural attraction.
When Harker narrates his ordeal with the Brides in his journal, he is likewise most anxious (other than the imminent risk of murder) not that he was attracted to them but that Mina might be hurt he was capable of attraction to others. When he pops up again, having been missing for a while, Mina does cite a fear he’d stopped communicating because he’d found someone else, but inversely, she displays other security to the extent that when Harker first spots Dracula in England she thinks her husband is checking out a pretty girl. Rather than finding that bizarre or offensive, she checks the girl out herself.
Bram Stoker’s “Repressed” Homosexuality, Femdom And Queerness In Text
This one pops up periodically, that the author was probably queer. The psychosexual stuff in text do lend themselves that way, for example when the Brides attempt to devour Harker, Dracula violently defends him, declaring Harker to be his, albeit only until his purpose is seen through. Ditto the cutting himself shaving and almost getting bit part, and the dance of charm-but-also-fear in the early interactions.
Likewise, based the author’s his florid fan mail to Walt Whitman, I hold this perfectly plausible. What I do nudge back on is the equally obnoxious tendency of queer-finding retrospectives to engage in a little bi-erasure. One intrepid essayist goes as far as to suppose that Florence herself was a beard, picked as she disliked men, or more conspiracy theory style, was chosen as a proxy for Wilde, himself.
Since Bram Stoker knew most of the famous gay men of his era and country, and was firmly in a milieu where queerness was much more open than many places elsewhere, I will gently suggest that it’s not fair to presume repression. If he engaged in same gender relationships in the sexual sense, given its illegality, he didn’t put it to record, but if he wanted to bang a dude or dudes, there is also no reason to assume he didn’t.
We believe he is repressed because his alleged queerness was oppressed. One may follow they other, but also we must be careful not to replicate the very expectations we are opposed to into our critique. For example have you noticed that a woman with a rape fantasy is described as uncomfortable with her own sexuality, but a man imagining a sexy femme fatale ravishing him is described as uncomfortable with the sexuality of women?
Which winds my way back to the core thing that drives me to write a 4000+ word essay on a more than a century old book, the media critic habit of assuming that one can’t write about anything dark and spooky without having something wrong with you. This tortured premise gets stretched to the point of such wild speculation that Bram Stoker took 7 years to finish the work because he was grappling with his attraction to men, a fanciful belief that homosexuality apparently… makes you bad at deadlines?
Of course, on the subject of bi erasure, as a contemporary kinky person, one of the threads its easy for me to notice is all the femdom. There’s the overt, starting with the near assault by a trio of lady vampires on Harker, but also including a pretty much not subtext cuckolding scene, where Harker is helplessly mesmerized as Dracula comes upon the couple to assault his wife. But there is also the rather endless riff of male worship of female. Men are helpless before Lucy, but also Mina sails through everything as both a significant framing character of the story and narrator in her own right, but also mentioned from the first chapter that the initial goal of Harker’s diary is to make a travelogue for her. And of all characters, across gender, she’s probably the most stalwart in her agency and resilience.
Make no mistake, this is pre-suffrage England, and she is not particularly inclined to rail against her place as a companion and aide to her husband. But, as most adaptions unfortunately lose, it’s Mina initially rescuing Lucy, it’s Mina’s needs, wants and preferences centred by her husband, and Mina managing, typing records up, and so on that drive much of what happens. We even see here physically resisting Dracula during an attack, something we see literally no other character do. When word comes of her fiancé being found in great ill health in Budapest, it’s Mina, an unmarried woman, who immediately travels without the least reservation for Exter to Hungary, claiming Jonathan on the spot with a marriage. Likewise he surrenders his journal to her at this point as he’s wracked with guilt but also amnesia. It is then a matter of her motivation to solve why he’s had a second nervous breakdown to read the journal and link up with Van Helsing, providing a crucial piece to the group that he husband most definitely did not have the capacity to do.
If the menfolk do all go off to do the violence, Mina’s staying home is prefaced that her idea to be hypnotized to use the blood link to track Dracula is essential to the operation. Inversely, for all Harker is off with the menfolk, kukuri in hand, he’s an ailing, frail shell of very limited use in any prior altercation, defended by crucifix rather than trying to match Dracula with physical strength. While not all strong female characters are femdom, nor weak ones subs, taken as a whole, this is hardly to be read as a meek, passive person but rather an idealization of a woman taking charge of things, not just helpmeet, but amazon.
Did I mention that the book passes the Bechdel test, depicting a warm, intimate relationship between two women who talk about more than just the men in their lives?
Unfortunately, at least as far a remembering this, modern adaptions like to add a forbidden romance element, supposing a sort of love triangle, between boy next door Harker and sexy Dracula. These adaptations suppose being possessed by the latter is a state Mina might want or find alluring, were it not for her sexless obligation to be a Good Girl. This is emphasized by the tendency to turn Mina and Lucy into one character, and amp up that conversion to vampire makes all women horny. While I am not here to yuck anyone’s yum as far as contemporary femsub fantasies of being consort-princess to a powerful monster, neither can I say this is anything book Mina displays.
All that’s to say, I don’t think Bram Stoker was scared of women having agency, sexual or otherwise, just that later adaptions were actually less kind to women and more obsessed with “she secretly wants it though” tropes. We know from notes by the author himself everything of the text was seeded by a vivid dream of the lady vampires attacking him and having an old, powerful man intercede. The author himself, cites the witches in Macbeth for their inspiration. Can we perhaps extend the grace that what he finds titillating doesn’t need to have an inner conflict, and then add an additional lense?
Horny Asexuality and Dracula
Aha, reader, you read this far and I sprung a trap on you, I have my own queer soap box I am about to stand on. You see every reading to date of Dracula and its sexuality tends to emphasize whatever is horny is a metaphor. It means something more, every stake a penis, every voluptuous mouth a hermaphrodite cock-snatch, penetrating as it engulfs. Maybe so, but the queer lense none of the essayists seem to want to bring to bear is the possibility that sexuality in text doesn’t need to be re-simplified into its parts, as if one needed to only do math with the smallest factors a large number could be refined to.
Human sexuality is as much social as it is the mechanical business of heaving and rubbing. It wouldn’t be so easy to extrapolate the vampire into the sexual if it wasn’t. Likewise neither are all these other queer themes and tells, of the author’s life and his text, needing to sit on a hard binary. Just as Bram Stoker doesn’t actually need to blow Oscar Wilde to be queer, neither is he repressing his queerness if he didn’t. The act of writing Dracula can be enough.
I stress that adaptions are perfectly valid to sex things up in different or more exaggerated way than the text did, because there’s nothing wrong with putting your spin on an out-of-copyright work, or indeed fanfiction that deviates from the text so intensely it is practically a new work with old names. However, I do think, at this point I have done a good job of demonstrating how adaptions routinely add things that were not originally intended to be there, which then accidentally replace our understanding of the original.
Does, as one of Bram Stoker’s descendants wrote in a sequel, Mina need to have also been literally raped and impregnated by Dracula? No, absolutely not. It’s no less a sexual assault that the titular vampire was described as doing weird shit with blood after tearing open his own shirt, than if it were his fly gaping. The text, as written, assumes something very modern: Rape is a crime of power more so than anything as simple as mere desire.
Perhaps that’s one of the charms of the book, being about power and sexual abuse. Harker’s plight is made all the worse by a degree of innocence about the patterns of missing stairs (that old horrifying “everyone knows, but also puts it on you to avoid”), while Mina in particular has more agency in intervention because she has a frame of reference that allows her to understand sexual assault. Far from Lucy being punished for her sexy frivolity or Mina being seduced into having some, we see two (idealized) women and an author insert male lead deal, all with predation applied to them in a way that profoundly damages them. And, if you missed the power part of this being most important in text with sex as a tool, off to the side, Renfeild tries to replicate these power hierarchies: spiders to flies, flies to sparrows, sparrows to cats…
If you might read the actions of the suitors, Harker and Van Helsing as male outrage in defence of “their” women, what they are defending is the agency of the women. These women are not “traditional”, inherently passive characters by the standards of their era. What is outraged by Dracula’s attack is Lucy’s choice in only one of the men (or none). She retains her value to all of them even if she is not to be possessed by them, in contrast to Dracula, hoarding his harem of prior victims. This can be contrasted by how the men handle a woman’s agency when they don’t get what they want earlier in the story. We know from Lucy’s account, Steward and Morris want to stay friends, and then also in text, friends with their rival Holmswood because it’s her choice. Likewise, to Harker and indeed the other male characters, Mina is someone to be deferred to in her area of expertise, but to Dracula, Mina to be possessed, controlled as he does the female vampires already introduced as his victims, and punished for thwarting him.
I digress of course, to the other matter of asexuality. Much as other parts of queerness have taken a dreadfully long time to be understood, so also should I speak of asexuality not of sexual repulsion or, in practice, the absence of all libido. This is hard for a lot of folks to grasp, but probably because it’s such a fundamental part of so many folks’ actual wiring that it hides in plain sight: most people don’t just want to rub genitals into orgasm, and if they want sexuality in fiction they generally don’t leave happy if you limit yourself to literally “A person touched the other person with the usual bits of their body one might, until they both achieved orgasm in due course, the end”. To you, the reader, that sentence is satire, because you understand that sex is more than that. Thus, for the erotic most folks want nuance, narrative, even elaborate socioeconomically symbolic foreplay. At minimum, they want characters to have at least traits of a stereotype they can hang context on.
It’s actually pretty rare for someone to have uncomplex sexuality, even the ostensibly allosexual folks.
Because of this, sometimes things are more interesting and arousing if they do not lose the nuance. As a creator, while you can write a squintillion dick go-in-hole scenes, you aren’t just grasping for metaphor and other vocabulary as a matter of self-censorship and euphemism to tidy things, but also to convey a mood and experience that humans often describe as practically metaphysical and transcendent.
Even when anxieties of purity and corruption, or the censorship of the latter influence a work, this becomes an active participant, and any standardized tropes to express euphemism take on the exact property they tried to figleaf. For example, the old film cliché of expressing a couple had sex by cutting to a train entering a tunnel is a pretty intense and on the nose metaphor, if you think about it. And this push/pull of navigating obfuscation may become ultimately more erotic than the thing it is covering, like someone masturbating into a pair of frilly underpants they bought for themselves to do so, or being aroused by them on a mannequin, rather than even requiring an actual woman to possess or wear them.
Thus also Dracula and “monster fucking” in general long ago escaped confinement to metaphor and has occupied space in people’s primary desires. At the point Bram Stoker would be aware of them to use it in his story, they already had transcended both being an obscure, not particularly sexual eastern European bogeyman and an American mass hysteria around tuberculous epidemics, and into a metaphor for predatory sexuality, particularly of the queer kind. We must suppose a professional literary critic with a host of queer friends, and a prior history of writing fantasy adventures understood what he was doing. Not in the sense of “Aha! This vampire is a metaphor for desire!”, but rather that the vampire as trope correctly got across the mood and feeling he wanted to capture.
Maybe Bram Stoker’s original witches dream involved his penis, not his neck. However, the text, with its sinister, unearthly giggling ladies and teasing at Harker’s throat just sounds like a known place humans get horny having kissed, licked and nibbled. And if the language in the scene at no point said “Harker did a cockstand” as porn of the era might, nobody reading the scene needs to know he was aroused. Also, bear in mind the actual porn of the era wasn’t necessarily going to use the word we might. For example, in porn they used the word “paroxysm” as a common term for a female orgasm – even when vulgar and not at all worried about censors, the language trended florid. Thus, I emphasize: I think he wrote about the metaphorical rape monsters not because he dared not talk about other sexuality, but precisely because this was his fantasy.
Yes, he might not have been as sexually open as others are today, and faced a very real risk of persecution. But the counter argument that all this has to be queer self loathing supposes in a queer utopia a person who can screw their own gender openly, without discrimination, can’t write compelling queer horror.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a fanged maw is just as inherently erotic as the thing it symbolizes. And much as trans and same gender attracted folks continue to gently and firmly remind people they don’t need a fracturing seed event to be other than cis or hetero, so also does the buffet of other human stuff that is under the umbrella of the asexual spectrum not require injury to be perverted, or a boost past a hang up to get to some sort of normal sexuality.
Thus, in conclusion, the reader of Dracula might add all the extra sexy bits they want, but they don’t need to. It’s not missing a piece, the horror and dread not evident of a fear of being vanilla, of female sexual choice, or whatever other negative judgment people tend to make of authors of non-normative spooky fiction.
Not all sub men. Not all single, lonely sub men. But sure as the seasons shift through the front end of summer into the sultry, soup-warm of August, some chucklefuck is back at it in an online kink space whining we don’t give the Ratio of Dommes to Subs enough attention because it has specifically ruined his life. There are not enough dommes to go around. Someone has failed to bring enough for the class. Lamentations ensue.
Of course, I am aware of giving some dude on the internet too much credit. Rebutting can also be a sort of endorsement, and platforming the lunatic fringe even to mock them can be a form of amplification. But inversely, the fact that I remember even if the last couple of years the discourse has shifted and I can trust folks to push back on this line of thinking, and we got that way by questioning the resulting assumptions, so I am using a random post on a forum to remind you that Femdom Ratio is incel logic for sub men and bad for men, women and everyone else.
Ratio theory, about the distribution of dommes always goes awful places really fast.
For example, this particular guy’s spin on “The Ratio” is that femdom is inherently abusive because male subs cannot meaningfully consent when having boundaries could get them eliminated from Having A Domme. Any domme. According to him, a sub must concede to whatever, or it’s a lifetime of loneliness, because no matter how atrocious a given woman is, a man needs a woman who will play out an approximation of his kinks. Were there one domme for every sub man who wants one, he reasons, his desire for one would not be at odds with what is available to him he would not consent to stuff he thought was terrible and bad for him just to try it.
If you are a long term blog reader you can already smell the self harming sexism from here. But, I reiterate:
The “Ratio” is bullshit because men (and it always seems to be straight men, queer discourse on top shortage tends to listen to the switches and blame the objectification of tops for pushing them to hide) who fixate on it don’t see women as people, but a means to provide a service they desperately want. They define a domme as any woman who will, for whatever reason, tolerate being fetishized and doing what they crave to them. They do not define dominance on our terms (as dommes), or imagine that we exist for any reason other than to be matched with a man. If they can find women who do that, the complaint escalates to either that said dominant women are not hot enough and this isn’t fair because if they weren’t kinky they could get a hot chick, and not pander to us stuck up hags. Or they get mad sexwork exists. Just exists, as if that alone were a crime against them they were forced to engage with.
It’s never about anything other than his belief he is entitled to a partner on his terms alone.
After 10+ years of terminally online discussion, when someone drags in “Ratio” as an argument, it isn’t going to be a nuanced take on the double barreled stigmatization of male weakness and female sexual exploration, it’s going to be hot torrents of incel garbage. No ratio-cel comes into this talking about what a pity it is that women don’t get to know such pleasure as domination because of broader social forces, they fixate on that they are lonely. Then they imagine that somehow they are a surplus, but that women are easily paired up with whatever it is they imagine they want, often also bringing gender reductive bullshit about how we just aren’t wired to be dominant, boohoo isn’t that hard on subs.
If a Ratio was real in the sense these men imagine, since the genders seem to be approximate parity, this would mean a percentage of women were also mismatched. However, since Ratio Theory is built on sexism, these women aren’t discussed or imagined to suffer to an equal degree. If it were true that women were either more inherently submissive (or vanilla) there would be a similar ratio of unmatched women condemned to similar singleness and thus equally pitiable. Ratio-cels have no such solidarity.
And, adding insult to injury, ratio-cels also imagine the torrent of sexual harassment women deal with is “plenty of subs will do anything to have you”, a tone deaf piece of sexism on par to if we told subs there was always the Kik scammers ready to blackmail them, so really they were rolling in opportunity. Likewise, there’s a nuanced discussion on how the male gaze pandering in being able to buy services and content isn’t always a blessing because the market still makes blanket assumptions about men that can feel very pigeonholing, but no… to a ratio-cel the biggest problem is they want the porn-but-make-it-free.
Further, as others have pointed out repeatedly, other populations deal with ostensible ratios, like the limited percentage of folks who are sapphic versus straight, and don’t turn this into a neo-Marxist argument about how women secretly own the means of male sub orgasm production. The Ratio (TM) as its proponents describe it is where they decide any woman who will embody their fetish has disproportionate power over them because… Reasons. Where the reasons are always that they are desperately trying to reap the usual incel style idea that you will get one Devoted Wife for showing up while meeting the minimum threshold, and that something has broken in society failing to give that to you.
The problem doesn’t stop there.
If it weren’t enough that they were just ambiently sexist, ratio-cels *also* end up pushing dommes out of any community they lodge in, since the desperate demand for a lady to metaphorically hump the leg of kills any other conversation – which actively increases the very problem they are complaining about. Dommes won’t stay in large numbers in communities where the primary focus is our ability to be found and made to gratify subs. The wall of misery posting also sets the tone for any sub joining, because their introduction to how things work becomes a wall of “Where is MOMMY??” Anxiety about potential rejection gets stoked in a sort of socal rummunition, where any problem that might exist gets reframed as the desperate need to have a domme now.
Ironically, you get where we started, dudes being taught by other dudes to unicorn chase, to lower their standards even as they inflate what they expect a domme to be capable of adding to their life. Conversations about reciprocity or “sub skill” or sub-on-sub mentorship are deprioritized over the conflation of what is fetishized with the whole people doing it. Everyone, the subs, the dommes and the community they might interact in, becomes poorer for it.
But any discussion about this behaviour gets derailed by trying to be sympathetic to single dudes because they are suffering. Unfortunately, as per vanilla incels cloaking themselves in how vulnerable they feel to be lonely, that’s how they get a wedge that makes them seem less toxic. In our desire to be supportive, we forget the fact that people who behave like misogynists don’t get a pass for having pain. The same goes that you have to be ruthless and at the wiff of anything arguing that “dommes have unfair power because they are rare” or men claiming their lives are ruined because they can’t get a domme-wife have to be excised immediately because the conversation gets so poisoned by bad faith possessive/controlling nonsense around dommes as panaceas and public resources that anything useful gets lost in the harm done.
I wish I could say I am a dominant without people assuming I am a pro (or a man), but I would also like that not to be at the expense of anyone else. To be a lifestyle only domme is, for the most part, invisibility, but the conversation on the problem is poisoned by whorephobia.
In this regards, even my writing on the topic, over the last 10 years, hasn’t always been ok. Acknowledging this issue, nonetheless: for our culture at large, the general handling of my desires is to treat it like something that will make others happy or at the very least, to focus on how it will make me feel as far as how others react to me. Dominance, in women and femmes, is not allowed to just *be*.
Even in lifestyle only land, our forums are dogged by the single minded demand: where are the dommes and how do we get them? To these men, I am not a thing that might want him, to be bargained with as an equal or a suitor, I am more akin to the rib they hope to rip from themselves into the form of a helpmeet. My existence and authenticity is defined by my ability to complete someone else.
Yes, the roots of this is heterofatalist nonsense, the same pressures demanding compulsory monogamy of vanillas. And yet, notably, my status as a thing that is presumed to meet desires doesn’t have the Domme version of warning me I’ll be a crazy cat lady spinster if I don’t settle. Likewise, no boyfriend, husband or fiancé will deter them the way that vanilla and Dom men alike imagine I could be claimed. A Domme, in her being wanted, is presumed to be there to satisfy. Hell, a Domme, existing, is presumed to be what is wanted. I’m not! I swear, I’m terrible.
This also is belayed in how Dommes are taught, formally and informally, to be.
Through workshop and book alike, femdom is packaged as a vocation or a toolkit that will empower you, not through discovery of your own pleasure, but the same old bad girl wins at hustle culture fantasy. Education is almost always gendered. Male dominants, for all their limited wardrobes, are treated as stepping into an aspect of masculinity, but for me, there’s a template and faking it until I make it.
It’s not all bad- the new topping and bottoming book are a bastion of gender neutrality and deserve their place in the canon. And yet, step out of the very performed-identity focused domme specific classes and into the BDSM scene at large, and prepare for just about everything to be built to assume you are a man topping women. And, get ready to deal with a steady train of people sure you are a less than, and if you dominate men that you are a threat and they are repulsive.
I decided, in the end, weird rapey ropetop dudes and femdom’s closer embrace to queerness and it’s transgression were enough to make me pick a side… But, as a Domme, I am (largely) not interested in being skilled, or having presence. I want a “persona” like I want another hole in my head. I don’t think nobody should want these things, but none of this is to the benefit of my orgasms and dorky power fantasies. Even as a least bad culture fit, the real me is very much an afterthought in femdom.
Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to have a sub and know my way enough around what I am doing to do so safely. And I am lucky that there’s plenty of humans extant to which a domme can complement rather than complete. Likewise, I don’t have a strong opinion on “pyjamas vs corsets”, I like both of them, but I like them from a position of being certified trash who doesn’t want to be compelled to wear either. I am writing this in an ugly beige t-shirt dress that I threw on because my stamina fell out the moment my work day ended. This isn’t a mark of my authenticity, it means I have given up on life for the next 3 to 6 hours.
Someone might find that hot, but I don’t care and I don’t want to care.
That part is the problem. It’s where the gaze is turned, all the damn time, unrelenting. On me, never from me. And yet, despite having the worst temperament, flabbergastingly people keep kindly trying to nudge me to hang out a shingle. Some extremely well meaning people in the field have even encouraged me as if I lacked confidence. Me, the don’t wanna be touched, don’t wanna be vulnerable train wreck, was told I could definitely make it work, because my dominance could push through pretty much anything. No, being a pro is a hard, people focused job. I am a pervert, not an entrepreneur.
I don’t want to be paid to dominate, I want to be pandered to by creative professionals who want to take my money to sell me my fantasies, usually via prose and illustration. Just like the femsubs and dudes of any orientation. They enjoy an ocean of porn. Seriously, in the case of the femsubs, they are so omnipresent that in any given romance novel the odds some lady’s do me sub fantasies are getting tickled is about 50/50.
Instead, I am told for money purposes I don’t exist. I am as elusive a market to care about, as I am to the dudes who seek me to complete them. And boy howdy is that an incredibly alienating place to be.
If you spend any length of time in the femdom side of the internet, you are going to encounter some version of this idea:
“Femdom is about female power. If you were truly submissive, all those other things you want would be less important than whatever a dominant you submitted to wanted.”
(Paraphrased from a squintillion posts, tweets and nudges)
They mean well, unfortunately. Femdom-as-a-culture is currently over-saturated with things that cater to the fantasies of male subs more so than female doms. To be a domme is to be perennially assumed that your primary interest is performing in a way that meets the needs of subs. An additional pressure is applied that not only is your authenticity measured by how well you meet another person’s fantasy, it is idealized that you just happen to do so by being who you are. A push/pull forms around you, where you being powerful is fetishized, but that power is put on very tight rails.
For a dominant, being told you are all powerful while being confined to a rigid script can feel like a cruel joke. As such, the last 10+ years have been one long push back, against the ubiquitous uniform, against the idea you can’t do certain sex acts, against dehumanizing stereotypes that you are (only) a selfish monster or selfless mommy. Likewise, the matter of courtship became a debate on methods – with a fixation on changing (male) sub behaviour. We endlessly hashed over developing magic bullet first messages and dating profiles; on service resumes to trade labour for kink; on the entitlement of all dommes to expect some nominal payment; and how best to broach having a kink with your wife/girlfriend so she would either do it or agree to give you a hall pass. And, every step of the way, matters were made much harder because however you changed stuff around, somebody fetishized it.
Gentlefemdom and the idea of the domme in fuzzy slippers started to fight the idea that there was one rigid, dungeon bound way to kink, and looped back into absolutes and people wanking about how much hotter the domme next door was. The service resume trend led to the people into service being treated as the true femdom, and a bunch of people who thought it was a trade being bewildered now the service focused dominant wasn’t reciprocating. That’s not even opening the can of worms that is gray-area sexwork and findom! Not all changes were bad, of course, for example the discouragement of people randomly subbing at any dominant they met willy-nilly is a huge relief. However, through every new solution, once nuance vanished, so did
So Why Not Encourage Subs To Be Completely Selfless?
The problem, however, is that an effort to make the needs of sub dudes less overwhelming has come with the nuance-free version that deals with it by chucking his needs out the window. At the extreme end, back in the day when a wife said no or he feared her reaction to broaching the subject, we used to tell men in vanilla relationships to embark on “stealth submission”. This pretty quickly got called out for being dubious consent, particularly where the party being submitted to already said femdom made her wildly uncomfortable. However, I will go one step further and say that it’s a dumb idea because it doesn’t even meet the human need of the sub to be wanted for who they are.
The current advice, that as a (male) sub you should just front load all the whims and needs of the dominant, doesn’t solve this problem, either. You end up with one of the following:
The sub in question didn’t have much more than a service/obedience fetish, to the extent that if their partner decided anything from a vanilla to an M/f dynamic was what they wanted they would be gung ho. Any quick look around at people who identify as subs and dominants would show this population is a tiny minority, and to be honest even they tend to have some pretty significant caveats.
The dominant just happens to luck into meeting the sub’s other needs because she wants to. But a conversation about *why* they might want to gets ignored, including that some dominants are motivated by understanding the desires of their subs and meeting them while others are not. One cookie-cutter domme template has been imposed over another, but we are still stuck with a very rigid default for everyone.
The sub creates a one sided dynamic for themselves that is not sustainable. Everything carries on for a while, until the weight of not getting what they want causes things to fall apart anyway. Then nobody is happy, and the dominant can’t trust the sub to know their limits.
Ultimately, the idealization of the “no needs” sub is an effort to side step the inherent equality any kink dynamic should be built on. It’s either still fap (shoving anything an ostensible dominant could do on a pedestal while the sub gets the thrill of self abrogation) or a bargaining tool to avoid rejection. In the very best case it’s a temporary pause to try to undo the damage that being too pushy or to help a person ease into kink when they are uncomfortable with parts of it.
While I am all for not being excessively pushy, and I recognize that your average ostensibly vanilla partner may be alarmed if you front load the more uh… dark and complicated kink activities one might get up to, I suggest that inversely, the thrill of “femdom is whatever she says it is” is overwriting “femdom is whatever we make it to be”.
Who Am I to Tell People They Are Doing It Wrong?
I caveat I am speaking about general approach, not your personal relationship. There is a whole rainbow of ways people might construct a functional dynamic. If a given couple likes to make the needs of the dominant their primary focus, cool. Where it becomes a problem is when that fetish is imposed as a one size fits all solution or held up as a purer/better way to do kink. My criticism is in the assumptions it requires as general advice and the problem is when completely back burner-ing your needs is presented as a universal solution and starting place, not when it is your personal fetish.
When I say power exchange needs to come from a place of equality, I mean that. You cannot exchange power until you both have it. You can pursue your equality in an intersectional fashion, building in a foundation that is as once robust and elastic as it navigates the many aspects of our identities However, if your starting premise is “because I am a sub, all my needs are less important than the whims of the dominant” you need to add another layer before that: “My needs have the same inherent worth as those of a person who happens to be dominant”. This can still flow to “I feel fulfilled when I prioritize the needs of someone I perceive as dominant to me, more so than any other activity.” But if you start from devaluing what you want, you are over valuing the other party before you have agreed to a mutual hiearchy.
Finally, one of the reasons why I find this particular piece of advice needs countering is the fact that it keeps being imposed at dommes without acknowledging that it’s just as fetishistic as the guy with the elaborate fantasy of being transformed into a coat rack, whether I need a coat rack or not. While the intent is trying to come from a good place, the reality is a lot more like announcing you know what we need – a blank canvas, so perfectly smooth and unresistant. And yet… it remains a wild overcorrection, both unsustainable for most people, and just as dehumanizing to dominants as treating us like fetish dispensers.
Photo of Lady Justice by Dev Kulshrestha, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
A little while back, a judge in the US was caught and fired for engaging in sexwork. Specifically, he made gay porn – and the booting overlapped with a period where he was critical of anti-trans bigotry by a city councilor. On the other hand, as the case came out on social media, people were quick to fret his advertised sex work engaged in implications he mixed his work with his sexuality. In reaction to that, even people who were generally leftist and might even otherwise be inclined to stand with a sexworker were quick to point out it showed poor judgment, even if he described his framing as kayfabe.
The choices of Mr. Locke were relatively benign in the spectrum of things, basically sexualizing himself in his role.. Nonetheless, he will have his career ruined as firmly as if he had committed some crime of violence. A few moonbats like myself will mourn in vicarious humiliation and he will get some media footnotes alongside his tabloid dragging, but nobody will effectively petition or protect him in any way that will get him his job back. That chapter of his life is effectively over.
My position on this was pretty clear: I want my judges to be sexworkers, past or present.
Heterosexual femdom is weird.It’s not colouring between the cis straight lines, but it’s going to get you even more side eye if you call yourself queer than a bisexual woman with a boyfriend does. I tend to settle on the lukewarm “queer adjacent” to avoid some traumatized wee LGBTQ+ getting verbally abusive at me because they aren’t comfortable with spectrums, only binaries. Nevertheless, because our understanding of “normal” heterosexuality has certain gendered power expectations built into it, if you lean F/m, you are going to travel to where your behaviour relative to your gender expectations are not in alignment. That’s even if both of you are the most cisgender folks on the planet. This disconnect is a frustrating, orphaned space. These days, how we perceive the progressive and “safe” is a kind of hierarchical tightness that doesn’t know what to do with things that don’t fit into what is mainstream, but also don’t have a perfectly overlapping experience. No wonder we had to carve out our own “femdom” niche! For its many cultural faults, there is a reason why we are our own distinct identity, and I often feel like the aesthetics of gay men are the only other place you are allowed to consider male bodies as more than a vaguely threatening symbol of potency.
Submissive men offer the opportunity to flip the subject/object nature of typical straight relationships
Sexual perfomance expectations for women are like that old metaphor of the swan, gliding serenely on the surface and paddling like mad underneath. An infinite amount of work, primping and positioning goes into performing femme for fucking, but then there’s a demand for aloofness that borders on disassociative. You become the prize he is then expected to pursue, the elegantly prepared feast to be devoured. Though I don’t doubt submissive women have their own canny inversions, if you are anywhere femme of centre, femdom has the best possible route to flipping that on its head without switching to a same gender partner. Not by default, mind you, as transgressively centring him, his looks and his beauty are hardly the default of mainstream BDSM porn. Nonetheless, big titty anime mommies and needy idiot fanboys or not, there’s a reason gentle femdom tends to be a land of painful yearning. And when you talk to dommes, outside of marketing copy; the people who don’t like submissive men; and the naive morons who think an actual personality like cat piss is a symbol of power, there is a visceral, all quenching immersion in him. He is there for us.
So, even if you have a complex asexual thing going on where it’s the sadomasochism not the aesthetics that matters to you, it also flips how we can interact with the bodies of eachother. One of the most depressing parts of the male default identity is how they are taught to relate to their bodies: penis, penis and yet more penis. Dudes learn this pretty early: Don’t touch anything else, not your nipples, not your lips and for gods sake, not your ass or the puckered hole between your cheeks. It’s no wonder so much straight porn treats its male actors like a life support system for an erection! For a shocking number of men, they live in an inversion of the previous century. Sex positive feminism taught women to look at their vulvas in mirrors, touch themselves down there, and see their genitals as something other than a dirty shame. But for men, almost a century from when your metaphorical (and my literal) granny squatted over a mirror, guys are worrying if proper hygiene makes them gaaaaay.
So, if straight men are putting their prostates off limits out of shame, forget nibbling the inside of his wrist, fingers, sensitive pulse points, etc! By now, our collective sex lore says these are all things that you have to teach men to explore on women. It’s expected it’s not intuitive to him, but agreed on as required, much how millennial dudes and younger now all osmotically learn cunnilingus is the new chivalry. Him though? No dude needs that! Just be hot and grudgingly consenting, ladies!
Of course that’s nonsense. Human bodies are so much more like each other than not. While the individual always varies, the layouts of most things anatomical are lazy, even putting nipples on every dude, and folding a structure that is shockingly analogous to a penis into the groins of cis women. Nerves are nerves, and we are not so sexually varied that a man lacks the physical capacity to enjoy all those erotic sensory things, from finger sucking to a hand pressed to the throat.
Whether you are hurting him or just exploring him, femdom unshackles you from his dick.
So don’t get me wrong, the end argument is not just to lock up all the penises. I agree that men vastly over state how much cock cages and chastity are a universal benefit to women. Men are not actually ruled by their libidos like it was a life sustaining drive akin to hunger or breathing. But what we don’t talk about in so-called chastity is how much it breaks everyone of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, including giving him permission not to receive it. The whole rest of the boy is on the table.
And whether your kink is inadequacy or display, you also get to really look at him. Just as my body is socially considered to be open to public commentary too much, men blunder around uncomplemented even by their loved ones. Stick that guy in the s type role and you center a female gaze that may or may not be pleased, but at least it’s pretty much universally there. Ditto the tentative exploration of lingerie for men, both to humiliate as emasculation via consensually weaponized dysphoria, and my personal preference, to decorate and emphasize. Though dommes grumble that our more shallow needs stay uncatered to, if you are here to oggle a pretty man, whatever your tastes, the options have only been getting better, gradually and grudgingly, over time.
I mentioned GentleFemdom, and while it’s drifted past interest for me into a fandom sausage fest, you have guys pressing in the other direction for a different idea they might be pursued and desired. And while the stock characters might not be my cup of tea, again, the manga influence heavy illustrated boys are most likely to be treated with dialogue that assumes he’s cute.
And likewise, just as his appearance becomes worthy of opinion, physical sadomasochism also needs a bigger canvas. Sure, you can hurt a cock and balls. I do, and enjoy it, but it’s a touch monomaniacal if that’s all you ever do. While you could glide through vanilla on kissing, hugs and touching his dick with bits of you, sadism means you need to get intimate with the sensory possabilities of everything. To stay in the sweet spot of permanent harm free, extended ouchies means more square inches than whatever is between his legs.
Male masturbation toys enjoy more use in femdom
BDSM in general favours a more hands off approach. Be it a flogger, a dildo on a pole, or a bog standard magic wand to give someone a forced orgams, we like our gear. It’s a sexually permissive society that’s has less emphasis, even in femsub land, that you should insist that a vibrator is competition to a man hoping a woman will have an orgasm.
There’s no weird hang ups about it being a cop out to use your belt, not your hand, on the pert behind of whom you are topping. Toys *on* tops are still a bridge too far in most content, and people can normalize for play, regardless of whatever gender combo is featured. However, male subs are the vanguard gradually dragging everyone to admit you can put a vibe on him as much as her. Through our purchasing needs, the plethora of strokers, milkers, butt plugs in various bulbous shapes from the Aneros to the usual blunt christmas tree style stopper are ever so gradually being dragged out of the “gay men only” silo they are stuck in.
Toxic masculinity ruins everything. While I can buy vibrators at Sephora, and female intended sex toys are now aggressively marketed assuming I am the primary consumer, male recreational appliances have a ways to go. And it’s generally part and parcel of femdom subculture for me to be able to talk about using something on Silver without people acting like it’s weird.
I’m enjoying it. One of the most common things I get asked to review, these days, has been the burgeoning male market, and it’s clear it’s a whole new ball game (snrk), with established manufacturers and new brands popping up every day. Between the new toys, and old toys getting more availability, the increasing presence of lingerie and more space to put his body in one’s metaphorical cross hairs, everyone’s sex lives will be better for it. Now to convince more dominants that they can use butt plugs or be masochists. 😛
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.
