Why I Make A Big Deal About Not Being A Pro Femdom

Last time I talked at length about how the pro femdoms are an important part of the scene and that they weren’t an inherently bad thing. This time I’m going to talk more about a problem: conflating what professional dominants and non-professional dominants are as if it were identical.

We need to stop acting like there is no difference between sex work femdom and fun femdom. And we need to stop pretending that clients are the same thing as sub boyfriends/girlfriends and husbands/wives.

Prodoms are to lifestyle as porn is to real people sex. Yes, many women who work as pros are just as much a dominant as I am. They are as capable of dominating as I am. I’m not better than them. But right now there is a serious problem between confusing the standards of their work with my dominance and it needs to stop.

Prodoms, if they’re any good, deserve their self title as experts. Many of them are good sex educators. I would turn to them in a heart beat for advice on topping techniques- and they’re a good source of how tos on safe ties and walloping people. I might, tentatively ask them about weird sub behaviour, like aftercare need variances.

But they really can’t represent me accurately any more than I can say I can speak for them as sex workers just because we both spank or fuck. And the conflation is causing problems.

Like, for example, prodoms face industry competition of errm, full service sex workers (generally sneered at as “hookers with whips”) who dilute their brand and encourage customers who want sex and dominance to demand both, or who offer less competent ‘budget’ approaches to dominance and fetish. They tend to have a degree of professional interest in protecting the parameters of what is and isn’t dominance. For example, as sex workers, the Gordian loops of the law in many areas often allow for fetishism, but smack down on people who move into more common sexual practices. And prodoms are very particular about minimal price controls- this is their livelihoods and they feel about their right to a salary the same as any working person. But this conversation is extremely alienating to non-pros. You see I’m kind of everything they talk about despising in a dominant.

I fuck, suck, snuggle and do things at the cost of a man’s love and submission, basically a price they can’t beat. I want dominance to be indistinguishable from fucking, because for me, it is. And I don’t want to be an expert. I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on tools and equipment and for men to want me because I am teh expert. I don’t want to have subs expect me to know them in an instant and decide my dominance based on that (are you fucking kidding me?).  They are supposed to love me because I am Pearl, not just because I am Miss. But being a professional is about convincing people to pay you by the skill under which you embody being the Mistress. You might put your own spin on it- you could even be a hairy legged, queer femdom and there’s a niche for male pros who generally serve male clients. But at the end of the day, even if the person also does it at a hobby, it’s a job.

And It’s incredibly hurtful and tone deaf to be told that my sexuality exists to give subs fuzzy feelings, and I’m good if I can and am fucking up if I’m anything other than dominance embodied. Not as in “good lover”, but the whole of my sexuality has been hijacked into something that gets men off and measured in terms of how much a (random) man will pay for it and my skill in opening up a random dude’s head. It’s been so tainted with the expectations of being a good pro that it kept me from self IDing as a dominant until my early 20s. Because I can be a fantasy object,  but that’s uh… the sort of shit you’d have to pay me to do, and not really a job I want anymore than I want to be client support at a call centre. Because pro-dom client pleasing has zero to do with my sexuality.

And the typical guys, even the polite ones, trying to send out client requests to me also have zero to do with my sexuality.

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The Secret of Being the Best Submissive

being the best submissive

I will punch you if you suggest there’s something wrong with my sub because he’s not a domestic slave.

Okay, it will be a no contact punch, delivered with my mind through making my eyes very narrow and growling at you, probably miles away, over the internet. I never claimed to be effectual about my anger management problems.

Any yet, it’s not unusual to make a big deal about being the best at BDSM. Both dominants and submissives worry about what makes them good at being their orientation. No online kink community is complete without a couple ongoing discussion threads to that line. Of course, regardless of the kink being catered to, the usual conclusion is that people want a sane person who can look after themselves. Which, unsurprisingly, is what all the Vanillas generally say they want too. We are not so different!

However, once you leave the territory of minimum obligations for healthy human relationships, that’s when people start getting picky, and you start getting the anxiety and the whining. And the posturing. And the fantasies. The top two things that seem to come up, time and time again when it comes to sub hunting, is male doms wanking about not wanting a doormat because it reaffirms their masculinity/dominance or something, and female doms and subs talking about how they don’t want another sexually objectifying asshole. And of course the male subs would please like to stop being treated like they need to pay to breathe and the femsubs are getting tired of being asked to relocate to Utter Pradesh after doing a naked webcam show for a man old enough to be their grandfather or young enough to be their son. Both doms and subs get pressed to be “true” and role conform.

But, I feel like submissives deal with a lot more silly assumptions on what they must do as subs, and how things are supposed to work. And it’s also a self inflicted thing as well as an external thing.

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Where Is The 50Shades Of Femdom?

Or: When are we going to see a femdom best seller?

I get this as a compliment/question, when people find out about the whole femdom writer thing. People assume that I’m positioned to write the next Fifty Shades of Grey. Only for F/m relationships. Unfortunately as awesome as it would be to produce a work of BDSM erotica that’s so popular that you can buy licensed pyjamas and softcore sex toys based on it, that’s not going to happen. Not without a bunch of variables being taken into account at least.

It’s not just that the average writer no more makes the best seller list than the average person who runs makes the Boston Marathon. The success of 50shades is also part of the genre that birthed it, and the cultural underpinnings that define pop culture’s approach to sexuality. But first, before I delve in a little deeper, a back story about the book for those living under a rock.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a trilogy about a BDSM relationship between virgin Anastasia Steele, the sub, and a billionaire hunk dom, Christian Grey. It not only crawled from ebook sales into the mainstream, but more to the point, began as a Twilight fan fiction where the two leads of that franchise were stripped of the supernatural and sent to college. When that got popular, the author changed the names to avoid getting sued and monetized it, building a following from the amateur reader/writer online groups. Pay attention, this origin story is just as important as the BDSM parts of the books.

One of the important things that defines 50shades is how classically part of the romance genre it is, including its parentage and all the various things that combined together, even more than just people wanting to read about kink in general, that pushed it to the forefront. Part of its success is that it is extremely formulaic.

Critics of the books get bogged down in two places, how badly written it is, which I think is unfair even if it’s true, and other critics point out how poorly representative it is to healthy relationships, kinky or otherwise. News articles trying to be click bait hammered the End of Feminism angle, trying to argue that all women are femsubs and that’s because having jobs and personal autonomy is not natural for them,  something they’ve been saying every single time people pay attention to women’s fiction. Which, moving onto my next point, includes the genre of romance, a pretty major segment of the publishing industry as a whole.  (By the way, that’s 39.3% of book sales according to some estimations, while other figures give romance 55% of the paperback book market.)

If you’re a dude, and/or don’t read romances, you probably have a mental image about pirates cutting ladies out of their corsets and really bad writing- and you’d be about half right. Romance has its highlights and low points, including everything from literary masterpieces to the throwaways you can get at the grocery store with titles like “The Millionaire Italian’s Lover”. But, because it’s such a big genre it straddles many other genres, so you may have a fantasy story with a romance in it,  or a sci-fi story with a romance, etc… It’s a little more than the story of a romantic relationship, although that’s one of the things all romances have in common. But, as a bit of a background- the genre is unabashedly female audience dominated, including a fair deal of pandering, and romance novels generally have something to them that compliments the “romance”. In the case of  50shades, BDSM is providing the compliment, and provides the tension to drive the story and create conflict.

While everyone who is not asexual and/or aromantic likes the idea of relationships, the genre gets its power from the fact that historically,  women dealt with the limitations that participating in the world can only be facilitated by the presence of a male romantic partner. Looking at the genre at its earliest days, writers like Jane Austen didn’t just want to pair off people because it was sooooo romantic, but were writing about making the sort of life choices that defined what freedoms their female characters would have. In her time period, Austen was mostly making a point about sensible matches with people you can respect. Okay, so what does Pride and Prejudice have to do with BDSM erotica?

Why, everything of course! Keep reading, I have a point here!

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Having a Sub Makes Me a Better Person

Subs get hugs

I’m the first to blow a raspberry at glurgey essays on how a Twue Dom is a magical paternal all knowing figure, and equally quick to whine about the pressure that gets put on subs and doms alike to live up to a higher ideal. I don’t think D/s is better than Vanilla. However…

From about the moment Strong wandered, perfectly innocently into my life, even before I thought of owning him as something “real” and was still trying to work through the ailing end of my last relationship, I’ve felt the compulsion to try to push for more. Quite frankly, his presence motivates me to deal with my shit. But, having him as something to think about is also valuable in examining how I approach the world.

For an example: I’m a fairly negative person, at least about how I talk about stuff. This often gives the impression I’m not a happy person overall. I have a few things that stress me out, but by and large, while I’m difficult to please, it takes quite a bit to wreck my day.

In reality I actually can get rapturous about raindrops and light dappled leaves once you get me out the door, and I may be liable to painfully twee “Good morning postal worker! Good morning grocer! Good morning Hassidic father with stroller!” style neighbourhood interactions, but in before I get out the door I don’t like leaving the house just a little bit, and tend to talk about stuff with friends like some kind of agoraphobe. Naturally, one of the sadistic things I tend to do to Strong is give him a stream on consciousness rundown of everything I get up to, what I’m feeling in the immediate moment, etc, etc.. He stoically puts ups with this. So he was getting regular grumbles about the audacity of my friends and them daring to invite me places.

And, he was really starting to worry about me. My litany of whinge would get met with a patient: “Try to have fun, Miss? Please?”

I had to assess something. I committed myself to clear communication with him, as one of the things that one does to try to make sure that one’s relationships are healthy. But sometimes it’s just as important what your words are communicating and I was painting a very dreary portrait.

It’s one thing to let yourself be Eeyore like, but when someone else cares desperately about you being happy, that can effect them. So, I decided to commit myself to communicating the better parts over the doomy and gloomy. After all, 15 minutes of whinge often prefaced hours of fun. Students of psychology know where this is going…

Of course the less you focus on little irritations, the less they effect you. It’s silly, and a little embarrassing, but watching my mouth to make sure I was representing reality accurately cut back on the pre-event grumbly feeling. It’s one of those feedback loop things.

It’s also made me a lot more confident about making the effort to assert myself, and much more focused on achievement. I’m generally pretty live-and-let live about life. But as much as I’m not sure if it’s based on wishful thinking and fantasies, I feel responsible. Like I need to get a nest feathered and ready as soon as possible.

Maybe it’s also because I like the idea of a kept man, someone being had and held for my pleasure, so I tend to be more in the school of thinking of someone as being mine to do for not as a more traditional gender role based desire to be done for, but it’s like a sub is the best possible acquisition who needs a nurturing space.

Hot/Cool Fictional Male “Subs”: Richard (Sword/Seeker of Truth)

Just because I didn’t like a series doesn’t mean it’s not  good example. In this particular instance, I’m going to look at a fictional male sub character who is cast as being cool, awesome and all around great with inclusion of pretty explicit and blatant D/s. There’s nothing stealth here.

And it’s not surprising. While there’s always the odd image of a tied up, tortured hero to tease viewers and readers, male submission is just so inherently normal that it’s surprising there’s not more things with such strong kink focus.

Richard: The Hero Is A Sub

Our Hero Who Is Always RightThe “Sword of Truth” books are a series of fantasy novels following the standard tropes of chosen one heroes, magic swords and the author’s own particular love for Libertarianism and femdom. Writing about this one is accepting that just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s not a good example, because these books are bloody kinky- and more to the point, it’s about as close as it gets to a femdom Gor without being some sort of female supremacy porn story or other niche work. It is also popular enough to have rated its own television series, the Seeker of Truth.

And it’s chock full of plot facilitated female dominance. It starts with the canonical female love interest/lead, Khalan is a “Mother Confessor”, a magical being gifted with the ability to make anyone fall passionately and unrevokeably in love with her to the result of perfect obedience. And your only protection is to love her that much already. And guess who, of course just naturally loves her as much as one of those magical slaves?

But the series doesn’t stop with Khalan. By book one we are introduced to an order of leather wearing, pain magic wielding Mord-Sith, who train people as pets and demand to be called “Mistress”. Later, another group of matriarchs, this time magical wizard trainers, pop up and incidentally have a penchant for abducting magic men and locking collars around their necks.

Rada'han

(To which the wearer in wizard training must willingly lock around his own neck)

And then another whole book has Richard slaved to a woman by magic, so he’s forced to be her fake husband. By plot convenience, although his love for Khalan is labelled as True, Richard is constantly abducted and dragged away by one woman after another, with them all being cast as sexy, hot bitches who want to jump Richard’s bones until they rattle. And his constant slave/prisoner status is never considered to detract from him and his masculinity. Even when the poor bugger is raped by a Mord-Sith.

Woo!

Rather the reverse- the noble suffering is seen as something that makes him cool and is used as a stand in for depth, as although he becomes emperor of the whole god damn world by the end, with all slavishly acting like he is Libertarian Jesus, he is explicitly allowed to have fallen in love with a Mord-Sith (simultaneous to Khalan) and sympathize with the numerous ladies who want him to be their property or teach him by force. The books have a bad habit of making the lead eventually show up everyone and everything by being just that awesome (all while being a “simple woods’ guide”), and I would not call them well written. But… when pop culture normally limits male submission to a punch line or a temporary inconvenience… the author managed to convince people to pay him a lot of money to talk about his submissive fantasies. And then film them without any self concious irony.

Superman, my last example, was very quiet about the femdom elements, but this one is loud, proud and in your face. He might not be *my* ideal male sub, but Richard is lovingly rendered, with highly successful sales, as the Best Person Ever and is widely adored by fans of the work.

Hot/Cool Fictional Male “Subs”: Superman

Okay, so last time we talked about Fenris, a not so well known character. But what about someone more well known? Sometimes your malesub fantasies aren’t about people who aren’t physically vulnerable, they’re emotional punching bags who just don’t measure up. They’re allowed to be less than. And sometimes a guy can get emasculated on a daily basis and still be popular.

Superman: Fun With Self Cuckolding

No, seriously. Superman might be superhumanly invulnerable, bends the laws of physics and take nothing after his biological parents (top tier scientist of Krypton), favouring a J-school background and problem solving based on hitting things. He’s a muscle bound power fantasy who can be hard to write for precisely because he is basically a god. But there’s a weeny little thingee in his canonical relationship with Lois Lane (or really with women in general) that hints the Man of Steel refers to his chastity cage not his strength…

Reluctantly. Riiiiight.

Superman dates back to 1938, making him a cultural icon that pretty much everyone knows. His creator, needing to make a living like everyone else, distilled him out of sketches of a socialist hero of the people into a heroic commercial success. But as well as a story about a man that bounces over buildings, it’s also a story about a rather repitative love life.

Once you leave aside largely forgettable perils, the general plot of the earlier stuff runs as a rejection tango- Superman as Clark gets pushed aside by the modern career woman Lois, who is, herself often depicted as chafing against her gender strictures and happily shrewish and controlling. She’s an Intrepid Reporter, of the kind that chases a scoop past sanity, and after being rescued a few times, develops a thing for manly-man superman, while overlooking her coworker- well actually she seems to like him a fair bit. They go on dates a hell of a lot for someone who is beneath her notice.

Of course she’s generally written as smugly thinking how nice it is she has Clark wrapped around her finger, something that is also spelled out that Superman knows. It’s dressed up as Charles Atlas-esque “needs a real man!” gender existentialism, and hand waved away that perpetually nebbish Clark is being trapped by his own unwillingness to share who he is. Which is ah…

I think the blonde is Lana. ;)The same artist who did this...

The artist responsible for Superman has a secret identity of his own, the pen behind a notorious book of BDSM comics, that was basically an insexe of its day. The publisher got time in prison, but Shuster escaped un-noticed thanks to anonymity.

But even as Shuster was dropped from his own product (comics are a mean business) that particular dynamic sees its echoes. For example, Superman and his cousin, Lana Lane. It’s essential to the character.

Even with cousin Lana, who knew him growing up.

He wants women who give him shit. Sure, he likes to play alpha when he rescues them, but this is like a guy with foot long cock wearing a falsie so he can have sph. And eventually, because the secret identity plots get resolved (repeatedly) if you tell the story long enough:


Lois, being Lois, even when being called “Young Lady”, still is going to boss Superman around, especially after she confirms she still has the upper hand in this relationship. Because the thing is, he is Clark Kent. Superman is a hyper mascho ideal he puts on to get shit done while still living as who he is, which is a guy who wants to chase women he knows are take-charge and think they are controlling him.

Of course you can take the character in other directions, and sometimes it wanders into tiresome Betty-and-Veronica style love triangles between the ladies in his life or into the wide range of superman being a dick.

However being reject by Lois is so iconic, that even when he comes back from the dead (Death of Superman, a desperate attempt to revive a moribund franchise) he has a shape shifter pretend to be him (as Clark) and have Lois reject the double to throw herself at Superman. We can’t have anyone thinking Lois likes Clark now, can we?

The most recent movie incarnation, as well as making him Jesus, dropped the journalism rejection subplot completely. But even that awkward mess of a movie still kept a bit of dependency. I’ll consider Supes hugging Lois’s legs and crying as fanservice.

Hot/Cool Fictional Male “Subs”: Fenris

Male subs and popular fiction generally have an awkward relationship. Although it’s now acceptable for the hero to end up in handcuffs for hanky-panky (though it’s aways the lady’s idea, to show off that she’s sexually fierce), there just isn’t really good options for an explictly male sub unless he’s a punchline.

But a lot of D/s doesn’t call itself explicitly kinky. It hides in plain site. Just like Catwoman wasn’t literally a dom until Frank Miller got his hands on her, these fictional representations are can even end up informing archetypes and breeding new approaches to kink. The male characters I’m going to talk about here might not be your ideal submissive. They’re not even necessarily characters that get me going, but they’re all guys you’re supposed to regard positively.

Fenris: Pandering To Geeky Femdoms

Fenris according to his corporate picture.First, a tiny bit of background:

Dragon Age is an RPG franchise belonging to Bioware. Thanks to a focus on character interactions and a willingness to pander to everyone, they (and Mass Effect) are particularly beloved among the female half of the gamer population. DA2, part of the series, broke ground both with a heavy effort to push the option for gay/lesbian romances (as well as not making it required, the hero can be asexual if you like) and served up a brooding elvish slave boy for people into heterosexual relationships to drool over..

He’s faye and pretty. He’s got badass tattoos and badass battle skills (and a bit of a bad attitude), but deep inside he’s damaged, wounded and his slave experience is a big part of his sub-plot, while reconciling with that is what he needs for character development. Although the game itself is not as well regarded as some of the other titles in the series, Fenris+femaleProtagonist is popular and as richly fleshed out as the other romance options.

That's the protagonist

(That’s her on top there “LadyHawke”)

Of course it’s Bioware, so everything is in animated barbie-and-ken RPG dollies for actual game footage:

You can also run this scene with him being more fighty and shoving you before you shove him and dissolve into PG-sexy times. I’d also characterize the romance here as something you need to pursue- unlike some of the other characters, this is one where it’s female initiating on male.

The result has meant an outpouring of fan art… Note, most of the stuff is being drawn by women. We like this shit. Attention boys who want to be taken seriously and be seen as masculine and be nurtured, protected and cuddled… and tortured…

Fan art, orgin unknownYou need to give him love!
Subtext- the red thing is the

…there are horny women who really, really want this. For me, with my huge nurturing streak, this one works for me so well I’m embarrassed. I’ve as yet resisted writing bad Fenris fanfic, but I know that I can’t be that unique in my sexuality given what’s out there.

But other than talking about things that get me flushed and flustered, I think another thing that makes these things very worth examining is how they can help us talk about the relationship dynamics we find sexy in a way that doesn’t have quite the same harmful baggage.

What’s your favourite fictional male sub or sub like character?

Cum

Cum tastes kinda like baking soda.

Sorry, that’s the non-erotic truth. Porn (especially cartoons, which have a lot of artistic licence)  generally go in for creamy, squirted cum shots like it had the consistency of slightly diluted dish soap, a couple of gallons at a time… Often it is things like soap when you see it in real person porn, and actors speak ruefully of getting a mouthful of Cetaphil more often than they’d like. Real life? Not so much.

I like semen. On me, on him.

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Horny Women: Turning Me, and Females (Animals and People) On

With various corners of the internet talking about a book that just came out “What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire”, and the accompanying media articles, I suppose it’s topical to discuss my own relationship with the subject.

Thanks to Puritanical morals, human sex research has been greatly hampered. From the only recently formally discovered “internal clitoris” (circa 2009!) to decades upon decades of fucked up animal sex research because we assumed that certain human social models apply to the animal kingdom as the biological gold standard. As well as it not being polite to talk about all the gay animals until very recently, one of the things that’s getting talked about is female desire.

So… what do I think about my own sexual desire, as a woman?

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Femdom Role Model

For me, the paucity of female dominants creates another problem. Specifically  as much as I argue against the idea that a mentor is a requirement, scarcity allows for definition of the role by the few, and this is a role with very few people in it indeed, the most vocal of which are paid to dominate.

So from the outside, way back before I got heavily involved in doing it, the whole thing looked, not like a barrel of fun and horniness, but somewhere between goth playboy bunny and indulgent girlfriend.

The pageantry  protocol and fetishware do no help to an outsider- while femsub gets constant reinvention (even if standards referenced by The Story of O still hold pretty fast for something first published in 1954 and translated to English in the mid-sixties). There is also, paradoxically  a lot more agency of actual women in building the fantasy. Gor might have been the wank of a male philosophy prof, but everything from Story of O through to 50 Shades has a female author getting her wank on, and one mustn’t neglect all the stops along the way in the highly fertile genre of romance, heavily seeded with women writing for female consumption.

But what about me, a dom?

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