O Thinking

Femdom Nouvelle and Beyond BDSM

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Louis-Malteste-Miss

There are moments where kink gets frustrating because no label is ever a good enough fit to eliminate the “yes, but…” factor. I’m a femdom, but… I don’t dress or act like a porn cliché. Is that a “Real Femdom“? Well, making that claim is as bad as calling yourself a Real Woman, since you can hardly argue your version is the definitive one. I’m a femdom, but I don’t act like I hold my male partners in contempt, so Sensual Femdom often gets used here, but… I also don’t play soft. And so it goes.

So I could just call myself a “femdom” and let other people figure it out, but I feel like 99% of the aesthetic of my sexual fetishes remains the property of a mostly male audience. I might volunteer moderate /r/femdom, but I don’t masturbate to images of these women. As they are depicted I don’t even want to be these women, as much as I respect their right to exist, and yet they are treated as representative of me. So, Non-Professional Femdom? Nope, that axis has some data points I already covered, but other than talking about the expectations of objectification  it is likely to slide into good old sex worker shaming. Lifestyle Femdom? Lifestyle implies I live in a removed culture apart from all things vanilla, like some sort of separatist commune and I don’t have a 24/7 dynamic.

All kinky people deal with trope and stereotype expectations- plenty of male noobs ask if they can love their subs or worry about being psychopaths in their own eyes or the perception of others. On the other hand, the imagery of kink is more concerned with servicing their needs than defining their image- there are the Christian Greys of fictions improbable standards and masculinity’s own traps and snares but there just isn’t the same instant pull “yes, that’s what a mandom is!” the way that Princess Donna and Mistress Madeline and their fictional sisters completely abrogate my existence.

Long term readers know my clinging to “Dom” as a self description without the gender modifier and might have picked up on my persistence in talking about male dom with the same gender-ed bracketing, because of that feminism thing where I try to shove a snowball into a mitten before popping it into a fire in the hope that using “Domme” only on those personally identified as such will stop it being the default people use on me. Because apparently I’m the sort of person who engages in Amazon Linguistics.

Thing is, the reason why femdoms seem to be really scarce is because it doesn’t really include much room for female desire and this has been a persistent problem, not because women aren’t kinky but because how we construct out labels is entirely an effort to coral messy, often fluid sexuality into neat niches and these niches *suck*.

So Lets Talk About You, The Reader And How You Experience Kink & BDSM

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Don’t Fear The 50Shades Newbies

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50screamWith the long promised movie coming up, internet BDSM communities are continuing the ongoing tizzy about how terribly awful bad this phenomena is for kink, particularly how we are going to expect a barrage of innocents any day now, who will totter in all starry eyed and come into some sort of unspecified calamity based on something they read or saw.

I’m going to bracket this by saying 50shades is not my cup of tea, and indeed is Bad Writing. Then again I can’t say I’m a fan of a lot of things- cheerleading, miracle whip or pastel magical unicorns are also going to draw out a bah humbug (and indeed given the injury rate, cheerleading is probably a lot more dangerous than recreational spanking). And for that matter the books have never claimed to have aspirations to high art.But, that aside, this still doesn’t mean the supposed tide of 50shades newbies we’re supposed to get (who have yet to present themselves, btw) are somehow this big problem we needed to dread and plan for.

True, Christian Grey is fucked in the head, while Anastasia is at least next door to having some sort of combination social anxiety and eating disorder, as well as weird jealousy issues and poor decision making. But BDSM literature as a whole is a zone of emotionally unhealthy characters- not in the least of which because we are a bunch of by and large sane people fetishizing horrible things. (I mean come on, depending on which version you read, Story of O ends in her suicide!) There are millions of terrible harlequin romances extant and somehow heterosexuality as a whole has survived all sorts of silliness.

Let’s take a look at some of the common worries, shall we?

BDSM is a super special dangerous thing you need training to do. Newbies are going to get hurt if they enter into kink thinking this is easy and safe. The books never get more intense than a beating scene with a prison strap, which is further addressed as being something it is both okay and understandable for the dippy heroine to not want. Hell, the first book ends with a break up because she decides she is not comfortable- and the middle book is about coming to a compromise that balances their respective crazy. But, more to the point, this is kinky sex, not rocket science. You are not part of the special sexual elite- 99% of what we do, while highly enjoyable, doesn’t exactly take annual certification and an OSHA inspector. And no judgement, but triple razor wire flaming suspension bondage is not a common activity for most of us, even scene veterans.

The other implication here is also that the 50Shades fanbase is somehow dumber, more naive and less inclined to do their homework than the person making that claim. Now you might point to how stupid you think the books are, but then again BDSM is not known for our high quality pornography. As Wildcard observed to me on the subject, I don’t think most of us were initially sexually inspired by high art.

The books sell an overtly controlling person as a super magical dom, and will lead to newbies not knowing that they could find kinky abusers.. Over the course of the three books its repeatedly addressed that BDSM itself is not the weird thing, but rather that the male lead is literally crazy. The implication about worrying about risk of abuse is that 50shades newbies are ripe picking for our resident predators. You know what that says? If you are so utterly sure there are enough abusers in the scene that you have to actively protect everyone who comes in you are acknowledging one hell of a missing stair problem. That is to say if you really think the community you are part of has more risk than the rest of the humans who are not part of your special sexual subculture, the problem is that your subculture is fucked up.

Maybe instead of trying to focus on some sort of welcoming committee, as many people seem to think needs doing, that energy should be used to clean house?

People who get into kink through 50shades are annoying dabblers not REAL kinksters. I’m sorry, you’re a snob if you think this. I am as peeved as anyone else that the bottom tier of cheap toys has taken on a distinct colour palette and branding. But, no matter how you feel about tacky satin blindfolds and rhinestone handled paddles, you do not get to make the distinction of sincerity versus weekenders. And if you try you are going to sound like a huge hipster trying to keep your exclusive hobbies from the poseurs. This also goes to people who think there is some sort of unbroken legacy that’s been handed down but will now be neglected- sorry guys, BDSM is an activity practiced in the private bedrooms of couples all around the world. You don’t get a monopoly to define and control kink and you never had one.

The problem with 50shades is mostly that it’s in the midst of a moral panic the like of which is typically found among suburban parents worrying about jelly bracelets and rainbow parties, but most people who don’t think its worth the flap are generally not invested in protecting ridiculously popular things. It hits just in the sweet spot between containing enough sex to make conservative prudes squawk, but not enough self awareness to make anyone who would normally be all liberal and sex positive happy. And yet, maybe its time to admit the franchise didn’t create any problems that weren’t already there to start?

Do Dominants Have All the Power in BDSM?

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hailthequeenOne of the most common questions in kink, particularly when you are trying to convey the concepts to newbies or people outside of kink, is who really has the power in a D/s relationship.

There’s differing opinions on that. The default people tend to go to is “The dom, duh, that’s their job!” but it’s matched by a now classic argument that the sub usually has all the power because they can withdraw consent at any time. One safeword or a serious no, and the dom is back to being Ms. Normalpants, right?

Some male subs argue femdoms have all the power by virtue of scarcity. On the other hand other, (clever) writers have pointed out a collective tendency to domism in kink society at large and in popular perception uninvolved vanillas, the idea that the more dominant you are the more weight and value your experience and opinions have. To a degree this is true- I have shiny dominant privilege that people tend to treat me like what makes me wriggle in me seat somehow comes with an extra helping of smart in my head. People generally believe that dominant sexuality is like an automatic mantle of leadership, or paradoxically expect that leader traits must match dominant leanings. This is something I can’t help bringing with me into all my relationships.

On the other hand, as I’ve complained about at length, femdom as a genre of porn is particularly weighted towards getting straight dudes off. There is very little stuff out there for femdoms, but a giant buffet of wank for male subs. It’s true that femdom is in such demand you can charge for it, but paradoxically professional dominants work hard for their money. If you are at all into identity politics, you can point out the big awkward sausage fingers of the patriarchy jammed up in my archetype expectations- indeed a lot of classic male sub requests are to hold up a twisted mirror of sexism- asking to be hurt by denying them or humiliating them with reminders of a code of conduct that penalizes femininity or failures to be conventionally masculine. And as Dee pointed out, there is a tendency to treat all dominants like our consent is set to “Yes”. Certainly stealth submission is offered more freely than anyone would suggest a dom should stealth take charge to get their jollies.

(At this point the non-gender equality obsessed persons eyeballs kinda crossed, while some MRA type is now posed with fingers over their keyboard to make sure I get told what I said wrong. Have at it- there’s a comment section for a reason. Oh yeah and if you just came here for the sexy femdom stories… sorry.)

We female dominants cope with it in different ways. Some, particularly the feminist professionals, point out they are doing what they want, and is probably pretty sexist to say there’s a right way to be female.  Others, like me, devote our scowly faces to being treated as a category niche fetish as opposed to being just a dominant, regardless of the contents of my pants. Meanwhile male subs often get all sad that a poor distinction is made between marketing copy of professional femdoms and the fact that male subs are just people like everyone else.

So nobody gets to go into their relationships without baggage, personal or otherwise. But what about power exchange?

The reality of asking who has the power is that you’re going to hit that age old frustrator of every duality ever, which is that it depends. While it’s true that subs can withdraw consent at any time, so can doms, who are just as capable of having limits. BDSM relationships don’t exist in a vacuum- as much as we like to imagine we all have sooper sekret chateaux where we host the most sophisticated sex parties, nobody stops being themselves just because they twig for something collectively presumed to fall under the kink umbrella.

Whatever power is the amount you bring into the relationship with you. It never really goes away- it just gets moved around. Doms, femdom or otherwise, are not all just filling the fantasy of the sub, but neither, to the protests of some, is submission diminished by considering the desires of the submissive. The power is just as much with the dom to indulge or not.

30 Days Of Kink: The Whys, The Whats and the Maybes

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Day 13: Explain as best you can what the appeal of kink/BDSM is to you?  Why are you drawn to what you’re drawn to?

It’s my sexuality, and I find myself repeating this a lot. That being said, kink-as-a-set-of-expectations provides a codified structure to try to qualify and quantify and abstract emotional concept and a bunch of loosely connected fetishes. Human sexuality is squishy and determinded by the individual- this is a way of trying to characterize it so I can talk about what gets me off with other people.

As for the whys- if I knew I’d be an award winning, possibly noble prize worthy discoveries for achievements in psychology and human motivation studies. There’s lots of theories, some of them absurd (my favourite stupid idea being that spanking is just some sort of pre-species throw back for red behinds). I still go with the idea that human sexuality depends heavily on whatever symbols and social patterns that gelled with us whether you are ostensibly vanilla or kinked, and there really isn’t a ‘normal’ that people are born with that is perverted, just infinite shades of perversion.

Day 14: How would you say real life BDSM/kink varies from fantasy BDSM/kink?  If you haven’t experienced real life BDSM/kink how do you think it might differ?

Fantasy kink tends not to take real life into consideration, while amping up the petty and awesome as high as they go. Thus in fantasy, all the doms are super competent, all the subs complacent into the role, or if unwilling, unwilling in a way that is not simply truculent. Everyone is gorgeous and wealthy- typically old money or steeped in whatever the writer considers markers of high class. Everyone does whatever the person likes best as a normal thing, say if there thing is cuckolding and latex, hotwives and body condoms are what femdom is.

This sets up unrealistic expectations of good looks and easy dynamics that I’ve never seen happen in practice, with kink parties not being stocked with model hot millionaires. Meanwhile kink activities and needs, are, as I mentioned, much more about what a bunch of individuals are trying to do in a barely functional consensus.

Beyond that, probably the biggest fantasy/reality conflict is the expectation that just being whatever you are will cause what you want to happen. The inherent vulnerability of having to ask someone to submit to you is routinely glossed over- stories giving you things like infinite amounts of money or a pre-existing position of power over the sub, or just the fictional magic dom aura sucking in subs through their desire.

Day 15: Post a BDSM/kink activity you’re curious about and would like to try.

I’d like to try a more prolonged D/s dynamic, and I’d like to explore service a bit more, the latter as a matter of personal development and exploration.

Although Strong and I did owner/property in a way that was technically 24/7, distance and practicality put limits on things. Meanwhile most of my other experience is scene only. I’ve also never found a service oriented person I clicked with- it all felt like too much and too overwhelming to my personal boundaries.

I’m not sure how realistic a prolonged power thingy is. Wildcard and I have been glommed onto each other for a bit shy of a year, and formally hooked up only since January. One of the things I learned with Strong is that it’s hard to try to run a lot of things concurrently in the same dynamic- we flamed bright, but burned out fast and it didn’t survive having to accommodate being human.

Meanwhile as far as prolonged power experiments, I can’t say it’s gone as well as I’d like- the Ex constantly attempted to delegate personal responsibility for various things onto me, for example trying to give me control over his diet so he’d stop binging unhealthily or motivating him to exercise. This would last for about a day before he’d decide he didn’t actually care or want it. I’m going to chalk Strong and I’d thing up to one of those deeply meaningful short term things that wasn’t built to last.

But, as I mentioned, in fantasy, dominance is supposed to basically work like mind control and bring about exactly the results I want to achieve, and somehow make them fit well for the sub. In real life, humans are crap at habits and rules. What I can do is always deeply effected by what my partner can consent and conceivably do, and that’s a big part of the secret vulnerability of dominance. You say ‘Do X’ and it doesn’t happen.

With Wildcard, what we do together is also strongly influenced by his self exploration. Up until recently much of this was confined to the realm of improbable fantasy for him. Like many people he’d assumed that dominant women were so scarce that meeting one was a lottery win on its own.. This has meant a very odd scenario where I am both in a position of power in so far as my position of guidance, but also restraint, since realistically it’s hard to consent to big things when you are learning your limits. So what we’ve done in the direction of more prolonged dynamics is developing rituals and habits- Tuesday “Punishment” is certainly doing a wonderful job. That sense of constancy is definitely something that works for me.

He’s been a pretty good sport for someone who spends a lot of time exploring the upper edges of their comfort zone- and I’d have to describe myself at impressed with his courage about a lot of this stuff. Especially the really hard, ego destroying stuff where you have to admit you’re not up to doing what you actually kinda want. Add a sincere desire to make me happy and I really couldn’t ask for a better person to try to muck about with.

But on the side of my limits, I don’t know when or how I’ll experiment with the service thing and that’s definitely me baggage. For example one of the biggest barriers to enjoying service is the sensation of helplessness at having other people do stuff for me. I also don’t like the controlled, free lunch approach a lot of service subs take- I think this is more me being gunshy than them necessarily being wrong- but, it occurs to me that at this juncture in my life I’m feeling a little more comfortable with ordering someone to do for me.

On Scamming Findoms And What They Say About Femdom

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Money!Brace yourself, I may bloviate a lot here. After a discussion on fetlife about malesubs being irked at all the scammy women demanding money just for declaring themselves to be dominants, or to consider a guy’s submission. If you’ve been living under a rock, this is a thing. It’s a thing far more than the minority of male subs who fetishize handing over cash for whatever reason. So, why is it a thing?

Well, outside of the fact that humans are inherently scammy sometimes, there’s a number of factors going on here, which I’ll do my best to unpack.

The jist of the problem boils down to 3 things.

  1. The popular perception of femdom as a vocation, not a sexual orientation has re-enforced the idea that asking for money is the norm. I talked about this problem already here, regarding the confusion between pro and not pro.
  2. Female desire is being presumed to be either identical to whatever the sub wants, or to be absent from the interaction by default, part of what feeds into cause #1.
  3. There is limited information about kink, so people looking to become active this way have to deal with the challenge of sorting through all sorts of different norms, some of which are based entirely on fiction, and/or contain attitudes that re-enforce cause #2.

I’m not personally opposed to sex work, but the specific problem of findom-as-a-scam thrives because there isn’t really a clear separation of expectations that presume that a female dominant is not serving male desire. The barrage of ‘sex me this way plz’ messages are the other side of the same coin that allows women to announce that they deserve cash for absorbing oxygen- it’s one where female desire has otherwise been taken out of the equation. Or, to be exact, female desire is still there, but a little bit of ‘lifestyle’ polish on a professional is like a porn star having an orgasm- the desire exists only as it conforms to the package-able script.

Precisely speaking, findom scams are also the cousin of the beatings-for-housekeeping deals. By these, I don’t mean people who enjoy service, which is glorious good fun, but the all too common case where men feel like they’re making a trade of service for what they actually want- and I don’t doubt that some of the women are enjoying the inherent power of having a houseboy, but I’ve read all to many accounts from women ending wryly with that they’re going to end a session feeling vaguely used, they can at least get a clean kitchen floor out of it.

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The Scars That Contain and the Scars That Sustain

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Today I’m going to talk about scars. Not the flesh kind that give the physical body its unique character and where an injury didn’t quite correct itself on the skin, but where the scar is ripped or worn into your psyche.

Reading based on stereotypes, it’s not a ‘done’ thing to be a dominant and have been an abuse victim- not unless it’s well into the past and you are speaking from a place of power. I’m not old enough that my relationship mistakes are youthful foibles compared with my current conduct. I went through a really, really bad relationship and it ended at the start of last year. The impact of that lives on.

I can’t masturbate while someone fondles and touches me from my right side. That’s the legacy from my Ex. Being touched that way was a typical conclusion of sex I was profoundly not into, and the flashpoint for one of the major sticking points of the relationship, my ability to leave into the inside of my own head. When things soured, I was too pissed off at his mistreatment of me, and him too selfish about my needs for us to work well as a couple, and I was too terrified of dealing with him and how treated me when he was upset to want to address my anger- besides, I fundamentally had lost trust of him and thought he didn’t care about my needs.

So we had a lot of sex based on me being annoyed that my orgasms were slaved to his, and that I had no choice- I had to come to get him to fuck off. It was an earlier trend- when our relationship was mostly cybersex based, when I wanted to sign off and go to bed he would make sad noises at me unless he himself was physically tired enough to sleep and emotionally satiated- and he needed to know I had an orgasm in order to not make noises of distress at me, distress I found almost impossible to respond to. Net result, a bad trend that self replicated through our relationship.

Why I was dealing in defensive mode with him all the time is partially where he had demonstrated himself to be frightening to me, and partially from scars that were cut into myself by earlier relationships. Likewise, the endless need to fix and tend is a part of my personality that seems to be my biggest strength and one of my biggest drawbacks.  I’ve talked about the darker side of caretaking already, but more personally I know damn well that my childhood was the textbook of how to raise someone particularly inclined towards the sort of victimization that happened to me. Getting away from my Ex meant referring back to where I got my first scars, and learning where I’d learned to be helpless.

Because I had a family life that taught me I was needy, undeserving and my feelings didn’t matter, it was easy to accept a relationship that was like that. Living with a parent who was mercurial with their indulgence and gave out affection and attention only with a  heavy toll later in accusations of being demanding; who enabled and modelled accommodating abusers; and who taught, early on that I was only there because I had a need they couldn’t stop themselves from filling, as was everyone else, gave me the sort of scars that teach you to accept abuse, and to try your best to be an every full vessel for others to drink out of.

But getting free also meant escaping another sort of scar, the kind intimacy leaves on everyone.

I don’t feel this gets talked about enough with advice about breaking up, but relationships thrive on comfortingly familiar patterns. The way your bodies fit together, the way you learn to talk beyond words and the way that the other person responds. It builds a bond and in that bond people end up tied together as strong as an addiction. Love is wonderful and terrible, it grows where it shouldn’t, the roots burrowing in and cracking apart what seems like perfectly sensible social constructions, or holding together edifices that have no sensible or sane business being upright or together.

It gets some lip service that breakup advice tells you to take some time off, two weeks being the standard time keeping, to accept that you are not in your right mind in a parting. What popular culture doesn’t tell you about is what to do when a person who is bad for you sucks you in easily. It is mentioned as weak and silly that someone’s words can sway you, but never why you might want to return to something you know to be terrible. My Ex and I developed a cycle- I would get some time away from him and stop feeling so emotionally exhausted I could think again. I would feel better and happier than I had in months, like a weight was taken off my shoulders. Then whatever was keeping him away would end and I’d start feeling a full body sensation of frantic panic, bracing myself for when he’d come back and I’d be smothered again. I’d use the remaining solitude to try to escape…

Only to get sucked back in as soon as he was in my life again. A little bit of contact and I went from solid and upright, to crumpling down into a doll-person who couldn’t do anything but react. The least bit of positive overture from him was like the rush of a drug. I wanted, more than anything else, to be wrong and for him to actually care about me as a person. Since the work of being a relationship with him generally left me with a patchy support network and limited resources, I ended up being hauled back in.

Or I would try to break up and somehow shut down, my head screaming “no, no, what are you doing?” and I folded up where I needed to be strong. I know in hindsight that some of it was that the deck was stacked with abusers tricks- that he would fuck up shared expenses to keep me broke and then arguments would tell me to physically get out of the house, that I had no personal space or room for myself- but that intimacy groove and his ability to maintain a pattern kept me locked closer than if he’d leg shackled me to something.

Meanwhile our fights got less and less rational and his behaviour in the relationship incrementally but steadily worse. Eventually I gave up and hid as much as I could, losing a summer to hiding in fantasy games with strangers where he couldn’t get to me. And we fought, but I was past exhausted and straight into numb- I could no longer perform as he wanted me to and I just lay flat out and cried helplessly while he tried all the tactics to try to get me to do what he wanted. I was pretty much sucked dry- I didn’t even feel miserable anymore as much as numb.

But this complete surrender ended up giving me some space- the online environment give me some friends beyond his reach, Strong became among them. Strong was, to be frank, blanketed in need. Without going into the intimate details of his life, I began to interact with him as a tool to motivate myself- I never really got beyond my base over-nurturing tendency but it was part of getting distracted enough that my ex faded into background noise. Strong was tempting in a way that reminded me that I had alternatives.

So I fixed my life- I found a job, started stockpiling money, started getting exercise every morning and trying to look after myself, and started taking long walks in the evening, talking to Strong to push the walls my Ex had built around me. I tested myself, repeatedly, making myself do physically unpleasant things as a sort of inoculation, telling myself that the actual breakup would mean the same amount of discomfort. Until, eventually I broke away like a person fleeing the country, and I was gone.

But the scars he left remain. Dealing with my Ex was always very unsettling because I was never sure that my backbone would hold. Fortunately for me the fact that I was helpless enough to need him to the degree he could control me was an elaborate fantasy he had built in his head and got me to buy into- independence gives great perspective. He stopped sounding like he had anything positive to offer and started sounding a little unhinged- joking about putting a shock collar on me so I couldn’t run away became an all too real, literal interpretation of what he wanted, while efforts to offer me a loan came out as bald faced bribe that disrespected the fact that I made my own damn money.

But in the most fragile few months of building that solid space, a fair quantity of credit has to go to Strong for being distracting. Simply keeping me busy, alongside preemptively blocking my Ex’s ability to reach me were two things that mattered more than relying on raw willpower. But it was amazingly hard- even though all talking to my Ex meant being unhappy, a part of me stubbornly wished that I could just talk and be friends and it would be okay. Knowing about that means self loathing and guilt- fighting that’s taken many months

It took a long time, about half a year, to get to the point of being able to feel better enough i didn’t tear up anymore. And even now, with Wildcard, I still find little landmines leftover, scars that are rough, echoes of the past. He occasionally ends up asking “Was [Ex’s name] literally an ogre?” He sees me flinch at something, finding a splinter from the past lodged somewhere tender. It can run up against my prickly sense of independence- if the Ex did anything it was re-affirm my early lessons that my needs were my weakness, but now I have to unlearn that, soothing what is hard scars with something to soften them so I can unbend.

I don’t want to be a person who can’t relax and rely on other people, it’s literally insane behaviour and it’s going to take me a long time to let go, if I ever can completely. I might be a dominant by self description, but I’m not some unassailable bastion of good sense.

But all the scars from my experience gave me one other gift. Knowing the hard way, where I was vulnerable and my Ex hurt and held me stuck to him, meant that when the time came to pay it forward I knew how. So there’s that- my escape let me serve in vigil to others who needed the same framework and support- and frankly, distractions. And that is the upside of the scars that never leave you- the lesson you learn doesn’t either.

Me and Poly (And Monogamy, and Sorta-Monogamy)

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So, what am I, anyway? I am complicated when it comes to the subject of monogamy. Personally I don’t think I’m one of nature’s 100% monogamists, but I’m not fully cut out for full bore sharing.

A recent fetlife thread asked readers to justify monogamy, which I think is a good leaping off place. Why pair off when you can have many people?

I’ll start be saying how you set your relationships up are your own business. When it comes to polygamy style serious relationships, rather than more fluidity on who can do what to whom, the practical reality is that even in cultures where polygyny is normal and accepted (and the ones where polyandry happen are eeny-weeny and generally involve marrying several brothers) the majority of couples still live in monogamous pairings. In that case it’s usually due to division of resources, much how we associate having a mistress in the infidelity sense with a certain sort of wealthy male.

Of course poly as what us kinky folk get up to appears not to have the serious drawback of polygyny cultures- which is that an artificially maintained woman shortage makes controlling access to wives come at the detriment to the development of the women as individuals. Poly kinksters, on the other hand, tend to be well educated egalitarians who like to have complicated sex, not tribalist patriarchies, although the all too common ‘one penis policy’ phenomena is what I’d call seriously suspicious. I’m looking at you “yes you can fuck all the woman you like and me too!” dudes.

But, not digressing the point is that even in cultures with no barrier to stacking spouses, is that it tends to be the less common model because it’s harder to pull off.

Poly is perfectly valid and viable- for some people. I think if I were critical of anything it’s that multiple serious, equal significant others is really time consuming!

Now the argument is of course that love multiplies and that love is not finite, and I agree with that. However, as much as we use kids or friends as an example, plenty of people have a favoured child even if they don’t want to admit it, or a best friend among their friends.

Me going poly boyfriends means that I would need to split my needs and energy between one or more additional persons. This on top of having friends, a job, hobbies, etc. The statistical odds of having two people who also get along with each other, who meet my needs the way I want, etc… are so vanishingly slim I don’t think of it the way that I don’t plan my life around becoming a Member of Parliament or winning a lottery. And if I have a someone, I won’t be particularly obsessed with making sure we have a someone else set up just in the dynamic I envisioned. No ‘looking for a bisexual girl to complete our family’ here.

But in my personal life, I fall somewhere into the muddy waters of not purely tied up with one person for all sexual activity but not into a fully open, no questions asked deal. For one thing I have some fond, long term play friends. Technically that makes me poly in the way that all the women I’ve had sex with makes me bisexual. To be precise I have a long standing friends with benefits relationship with three people, actually. That has transcended all three of my couple relationships and given a couple more years will be longer than my longest dating relationship. Hell, my friends were extremely eager to bring Wildcard on board (and horrified I might be lost to vanilla land if I did get a boyfriend after Strong) so I gather they like me too.

And I think that we all set our limits on a spectrum, even people who ID as mono- for example some couples do not allow for porn, while others do. Of course some couples don’t allow for opposite sex friends (and some couples don’t allow for any friends at all and those ones are CRAZY!). Some couples do threesomes only. Myself, I am mostly focused on emotional fidelity and the really complicated issues of my own jealousy.

On a purely fetish perspective I like the idea of whoring my male partner out. This ranges from sending him off on his own devices, to handing him off to women on loan, like property. “You, look after her needs!”

A sticking point I’ve seen come up is when the guy has tastes that are decidedly not you, but it’s only happened to me under odd circumstances. The Ex hated my often wild witch hair and disapproved of my lack of STEM major, but I don’t think a new woman or an alternative woman is what he wanted as much as inevitable annihilation of me as an entity with a personality. Strong, on the other hand, had a major red head fetish, and his anxieties about that pretty much were the problem more so than me never having a desire to dye my hair, even if he wanted it- I didn’t feel worried about competition, but he was in a constant tizzy about how sooner or later I *would* be jealous. It turned into a case of having to ask if the person was having a relationship with me, or with their anxieties, with me serving as a prop to justify them.

In the end, in that case, after having the red head thing be brought up to the point where it was actually starting to grate on my nerves, the hardest part there was possibly not having permission to actually you know, feel something about it because I was being preemptively accommodating to someone feeling bad about me feeling bad in a hypothetical future. This, while being perfectly happy to have Strong go out on jaunts to hook up with other women for his non-sub side.

I guess for me the point of jealousy is whether or not the person was into me and the degree they are- like there is always going to be an alternative that is always appetizing to that person- and this won’t even always be sexual. Like people will have friends, and hobbies, and jobs, as I was talking about earlier, and I’d be a bit miffed if I lost out to a minecraft server or the like. The point where I will get insecure includes- where I think the person wishes I was X while I was Y (latest soul crushing fear: wishing I had a particular appearance characteristic, but putting up with it for my generous personality and stunning brain); and if their fondness for X precludes me, as in the case of something being more important than me.

And yet, I can’t do the “get X need met outside the couple!”  Like, there’s plenty of cases of seeing other people get what they want outside the boundaries of a relationship, either they have a kink partner in a vanilla marriage or a sexual partner to deal with an asexual significant other, etc… But for me I end up feeling if that’s a deal I’m being offered I’m liable to start looking very pointedly at the door.

And yet outsourcing doesn’t bother me if it’s a partner going elsewhere. I just want to be wanted, but i can be more flexible about their needs than how mine get met.

It’s bizarrely complex, isn’t it?

Topping From All Angles (And A Bit Of How I Dom)

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Let’s talk about topping from the bottom.

Recently I did tentative discussions about stuff with someone about kinky fun times- the usual things about what happens to whom, and how. and, over the course of very gentle exploration, we discussed that there were things he liked, yes, but he didn’t want me to think he was topping from the bottom.

A bunch of people are weighing in on this particular dispute topic right now- the danger on emphasizing the negatives of that term. Snarksy blogged about it, where as over on Twitter @MsCrosswords from Beyond the Valley of the Femdoms was talking about the challenge of a partner who thought he wasn’t allowed to ask for stuff. At all. I’m old enough, in terms of participating in the online kink stuff, to remember when the term was not out of favour in the circles I run in. To be precise, “Topping from the bottom”, when I first encountered it, meant the phenomena in which the one who is receiving the topping (the bottom) or the person who is ostensibly submissive, is calling the shots in some format.

Back in the day, it was often a term used for a punishment dynamic gone wrong, where the rigidity of the rules meant that a masochist was getting rewarded for doing stuff the dom really didn’t want. It’s also was expanded to refer to the phenomena of the laundry list, something that seems mostly particular to F/m more than M/f.  In that case, it was a  series of demands based on the sub’s perception of D/s in exclusion to what the dom wanted, often with poor desire to respect boundaries. It’s good to have a term to talk about this problem, right?

So how can this go wrong?

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Queen Hatshepsut’s Strapon, “Penis Envy”, Penetration & Me

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Note false beard of regal powerI like my strapon harness. It’s made out of sporty materials so I can just run it through the washing machine, and the O-ring system gives me a great ability to adapt. Putting stuff into people’s orifices is fun. I like penetrating people and pegging them.

Of course, because I’m also unable to have sex without over thinking things, I’m going to discuss the inherent baggage that comes with strapping one on, especially as a femdom.

If you are a female dominant, you’d have to be living in a box to not notice that wearing a fake penis is part of the stuff people automatically associate with you. Practically, a strapon is only one of the many ways you can stuff and stimulate a hole, but like a lady hyena, if you’re the top mammal, you seem to get a phallus. This association is so strong that guys into getting done up the ass routinely mislabel themselves as submissive. Much like male heterosexual transvestites also get wrongly filed under the submissive label (because panties and cross dressing as a woman are shameful, don’tcha know?) every femdom gets the joy of routinely reminding dudes that being pegged is only as submissive as they want to make it.

Of course, linguistically and socioculturally, people who like stuff in their bits deal with the fact that penetration is also generally associated with power. “Cocksucker!” is not generally used as a term of respect. There is also the problematic habit of characterizing the female reproductive system as, rather than being an internal but no less valid set of equipment, as being an absence of penis. Thankfully, the concept of “Penis envy” is generally discredited as being something that Freud got a bit carried away with (and is as probable as “womb envy” in men) but as much as the old guy got things insultingly wrong much of the time, he was correct in the way that guys and the cultural narrative they control seem to make power revolve around penises.

This, incidentally, also comes up in some of the chastity play and SPH, where again, the potency of the penis in the relationship gets to be a stand in for the potency of the dude that you are so lovingly debasing. Although this is not the rule, for example if you are showing the commitment to orgasm denial that uses topical lidocaine to numb the guy out before fucking, you’re probably not saying something about the actual equipment.

Anyway, be that as it may, it means that there’s two reasons to jam something in someone’s holes: it feels good (or bad in the right way) and for fun with symbols. I generally fall somewhere in the middle in this sort of spectrum- but I also have to admit something…

Fucking someone with a strapon is actually really hard work, and no matter how you slice it: you’re putting a non-nerve ending having artificial extension of yourself in someone for primarily psychological effect. On a physical front, It is considerably less effort to fuck someone by hand, or even, honestly, kneel down and blow the guy. Now I happen to like fellatio- I’ll never be one of those doms who never fucks. But even if you get him to ride you, if you’re on the bottom this may get uncomfortable (oomf, oomf, oomf!, quoth your dom from below, as a typically heavier male impales himself repeatedly). I really like fucking my partners this way, but it’s one of the least stereotypically “dominant” and self focused tricks in my sexual repertoire, and to be frank, since I see nothing inherently humiliating in being penetrated, this will always be an act of love.

Seriously. Wanna know what strapon sex feels like, mechanically? Try jamming a slightly soft peg into a well lubed, elastic hole hidden in two cushions, when you can’t feel the end of the peg, and you are steering with your pelvis.

Pegging is also weird because it is very much something that exists in the heterosexual space. Actually for that matter so does Futa, since a lot of the examples I’ve seen are either real transgendered people, to whom the penis does not trump their femininity- the labeling being chicks with dicks, not dudes with tits, even though the possession of other typically female characteristics like breasts in no way automatically marks that person as woman, or illustrations and photoshops of women with penises. (No really, even if you deny transgender as a thing, gynecomastia most certainly is a real phenomena).  It is the thing that the lady who likes the dude does to the dude. It is most certainly not the thing that the dude who likes the dude is using as a surrogate replacement for in the lady, except in those rare edge cases that exist to derail arguments.

So with the dildo-in-harness thing, strapping one on exists in a weird zone of being a penis for the people who are otherwise categorically not penis havers, and does not trump gender. It’s very much important that I am a woman penetrating a man for the psychological impact, though bizarrely, when a guy straps something on it goes in the opposite direction as being an adequacy insult.

Mind you fucking someone raw is still pretty hot. And if I temporarily had a real penis I would probably use it on someone.

But you know that the number one impulse strapping one on gives me?

Wibbly, wibbly, wibbly.

Why Feminism and BDSM Go Together Well

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Oh Noes, Feminisms! Red Alert!

Bra go poof!Say feminism, and 95% of your audience battens down their hatches like you said “hurricane”, or finds something else suddenly very, very interesting. Like the carpet, or their own shoes, or that urgent appointment they just remembered to alphabetically file all the food in their pantry. At least, as a femdom, I can be openly feminist and nobody bats an eye. Of course a significant number of people will confuse this with female supremacy, which is an entirely different thing. The relationship BDSM, as a whole, has with this philosophical approach is a bit more dubious.

Much of this is because BDSM is made up of people, and people have problems with feminism. In my mind part of the problem with feminism, is that it’s a really big tent with a couple of centuries of activism and writing under its belt. There is no central board of feminism, so pretty much anyone can do it, and say whatever they like. And like any big movement, it’s  going to be in a state of constant internal argument. It’s also part of the left, which means that like all forms of left-y ism, it occasionally shades into woo (the Goddess!) or becomes way too self flogging for popular consumption (freegan-vegan!), or the lingo of the current generation of activism  makes it impenetrable to the novice (check your cis-privilege!).

Before I launch into talking about the subject, it’s necessary to address a number of things- first of all Straw Feminists. If you’re not familiar with the philosophical ideas, it’s quite possible that you imagine a feminist to be an angry, ugly woman who seeks to do horrible things to men. This is one of the reasons why as a femdom nobody assumes I shouldn’t be feminist (at least the angry and sadistic part) which is depressing for other reasons. If your idea of feminism is about doing mean things to men, you are doing it wrong. 

Of course, some, if not most of the shit that feminism gets flung its way is the same old tired misogyny that makes women expressing themselves be subject to attacks so vile that they functionally justify feminism.  If you think feminists are all angry scolds, you are part of a proud tradition that dates to before women were permitted to own property or vote. And you don’t know what a feminist is.

Another thing you need to take into consideration is that feminism only exists within the bounds of the same culture that everything else does. Thus there are feminists that are porn hating prudes and feminist porn stars. There are feminists who are sexist, or transphobic, and feminists who love everyone equally. Any idea within feminism can be taken to extremes just like any other idea could.

On the other hand, I’m taking it for granted that if you are this many paragraphs into this blog post you are probably sex positive, probably pretty diversity friendly and you like lots of different kinds of people. If you don’t identify as a feminist you at least think equality is a good thing (unless you are secretly or not so secretly under the impression women should rule). If you’re not, please feel free to get nice and foamy in the comments. Additionally, I’m not going to address the “Not a feminist but…” thing in this post, but save that for another time.

But, onto how feminism gets treated in kink discourse!

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