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.
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
The “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.
(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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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
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 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…
…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?
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.
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?
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.
Rant time, skip if you don’t wanna see my whine about internet strangers.
I’m normally pretty Pollyanna about how all the sexualties can get along, but then some earnest person posts this, on /r/bdsmcommunity, about getting the mainstream to accept kink.
Fourth, bdsm in all its many forms is base. It is primal. That is part of the appeal That is the entire appeal. Either returning to a “natural” lust where the man dominates his woman and she thanks him for it, or some subversion of that primal nature (ie: femdom). Either way it is all about power and submission. I don’t think I need to explain how base sexual power is, but perhaps most people don’t know how deep sexual submission runs in humans.
You’ve all heard of Stockholm Syndrome where victims start to empathize with their captors and can even get to the point of helping them. Well there is an evolutionary psychology reason for that. As it turns out, women being taken from one tribe and brought to another to be “assimilated” was a very common practice in our early society as a species. Of those women, no doubt many resisted either killing their captors, running away, or killing their new children/themselves. Those ones tended to end up dead.
The women that accepted their new lot and became model wives and mothers to the warriors that stole them from their homes got to pass on their genes. That passed on to us all. The psychological response from submitting to someone sexually and completely runs nearly as old as the response for forcing someone to submit to your will.
Because of this we don’t really have a high ground. Vanilla people will look down on us for the primal, visceral needs we have and we will look back at them in contempt for being sexually repressed. Humankind prides itself on pretending it is more than animal. We’re just a little more in touch with reality in my opinion. (Chillbro22)
Yeeeeah, that last bit of BDSM elitism is going to fly with the vanillas. Call them less in touch with reality. Yaye!
The poor OP can’t understand why this is blistering sexism “Either returning to a “natural” lust where the man dominates his woman and she thanks him for it, or some subversion of that primal nature (ie: femdom).”
Of course when I called him out, leave it to someone else to come up with an inventive (implied) rape fantasy for me:
Women are biologically physically weaker than men. As a woman, I understand that, and this is why I love being a Domme. But there is an argument to be made about the genetic psychological inherency of female submissiveness. That is obviously not for everybody, and in no way should that be a norm in a modern society (forced submission). But he’s completely correct – if YOU were taken and actually forced to submit in a third-world or tribal setting, typically you would submit or die. This still happens with women around the world today. You can’t view everything through the rose colored glasses of your cushy modern life. (AnonymouseDomina)
Yuck. I need a shower now. I hate that the OP is incapable of seeing that his stance is pro-rape and is hung up on defending not being sexist. Kinda makes me grateful for /r/femdomcommunity.
Though poor Chillbro22 provides an interesting launching point about talking about evo-psych and kink. He meant it as a way to convince vanilla people that kinksters (specifically male doms and fem subs) were more in touch with “real” sexuality.
They’re talking about this sort of scenario:
It’s a popular idea for the M/f set, that D/s is simply returning to some sort of natural order. Gor fans tend to be particularly enamoured with this, and the books make a big deal about how the female slaves learn to be true women, and finally get emotional satisfaction now that all choice is stripped from them.
But this sort of hindsight harkening back type thinking tends to be highly reductionist. As well as the PR harm of going around telling people that BDSM practitioners are simply primal rapists and telling people their sexuality is unnatural unless they do M/f, it very much I don’t know… blue washes the past. Never mind that individual societies are highly variable in the roles they allow for women, from out right exclusive to completely inclusive, it erases when women have been involved in society and ignore the legion of historically subjugated men.
First off, in real life, real bridal abduction (not the highly ritualized kind) is a traumatic event that doesn’t cause a woman to go into happy sub space. Case in point: in Ethiopia.
Of course you can point to the fact that the woman interviewed says she now loves her husband. On the other hand she is saying it is related to the fact that he doesn’t beat her anymore, and her marriage was painful. She didn’t go into some sort of subby trance. The ability for people to make the best of being raped and basically enslaved is not a good justification for BDSM.
The primal cave man walloping woman fantasy, outside of wanking, is shitty for a social model.
It presents a two pronged problem. In the first place it really confuses both social dominance, rape and BDSM. Additionally it assumes that what people do now is somehow un-natural and that humans have not, historically, included some kinky buggers among their ranks since time immemorial.
For example we know that throughout humanity’s history, and among other species, non-procreative sex occurs. In humans it occurs more than procreative sex. Even in a straight people fucking scenario, we take nine months to gestate, and lactation gives partial ovulation suppression. Most conceptions miscarry, or fail to implant, and humans fuck twelve months a year, every hour of the day, whether they are ovulating or not.
Even cultures that don’t generally go in for oral and anal, still masturbate. We know that sadomasochism as part of porn, though it wasn’t bound up in the trappings of ‘leather’. Even the kamasutra talks about how nice coupling induced marks are, and Georgian era porn (Fanny Hill) has an erotic flogging scene and an erotic fetishism scene in its bulging pages, while many of the BDSM tropes we enjoy today were pioneered by the Victorians. Meanwhile Saint Sebastian writhes all sexy like with arrows sticking out of him from Renaissance paintings, Japanese people were doing fun things with rope, and so on and so forth.
It might be perfectly possible the human propensity towards rape influences our kinks. I have no issue with that. But reductionist arguments glorifying a sort of problem that is ongoing today (ie the abduction of girls to be bush wives) to justify male-dom and the claim that the past was some sort of M/f buffet is fucking bullshit.
History is not a simple narrative of warrior kings and simpering princesses being passed about as property. This particular problem with historical narratives is that it in no way reflects the rich range of human expression and how we can order our hierarchies in many ways. I’m not, incidentally, even talking about societal matriarchies. Even in some of the most ghastly, sexist times, women have had power and done shit. Humans are a bit more complicated than Man 1st, woman 2nd. For example the initial European colonization of Canada was funded as a religious charity project by French noblewomen. Very tribal/family oriented cultures are infamous for putting women in positions of power before they will give the role to an outsider. Some theorists point to the “all men are equal” thinking of the Enlightenment as a period that actually took some rights away from women as they moved away from hereditary power. “Men in charge” is not a perfect rule.
But that’s neither here, nor there, as the problem with the “natural past” hypothesis is that it presupposes that we are not natural now or that we were instant Savannah transplants who went from chasing down herbivores with pointy sticks to suburban commutes. Panties are not something that occurs in nature, but plenty of people fetishize the shit out of panties. If people fetishize rape, it is just as likely they are doing it because people are being raped today, than because people were raped in the past.
Using historical sexism to label femdom aberrational is also problematic. Obviously being treated like a weird mutant and occasional curiosity is in itself inherently harmful but…
BDSM, again, is not real power. A lot of harm is done in the community, especially towards male subs, by assigning unearned real rank to anyone who can call themselves a dom. Women holding power is not aberrant, as when the society we live in allows us to do it, we seem to have the same natural aptitudes for leadership as men. Perpetuating, as AnonymouseDomina did, that me being happily silenced is only not happening because I live in a rare bubble… well, again, bullshit.
I wouldn’t “submit” in the D/s sense, because I’m not a sub. Sure any damn fool can beat and torture compliance, but any bully can bully a man too. Hell, I have it in me to be a domestic abuser. And if you think for one minute I have lived in a world free of sexualized violence, you have not opened your eyes to what modern life is like.
As demonstrated in the Ethopia article- women are perfectly capable of organizing against the behaviour. The ability to make the best of a miserable situation (one where you are beaten for complaining) is not really the same thing as D/s, nor are we kinky because “Grrr, caveman!”
This isn’t a post about abolishing sexism, it’s about female dominance and power in an imbalanced world.
Unfortunately, the sexes are not treated equally in society at large. I’m not really prepared to debate this fact in some sort of “choice to be powerless” or “so what if you don’t have power, you have boobs and tears!” thing, and this isn’t time to be all “Activate FEMINIST RAGE!”
I mean that the relationship we have with sex/gender (I’m using the two together) really colours the shit out of our kinks. I’m speaking in terms of the norms here, of course. I’m sure you know some exceptions. But look: Female subs do not heavily fetishize cross dressing, male dominants are assumed to want to fuck their subs six ways to Sunday, and when people try ineptly to justify maledom they generally grab at concepts like primal, where as gender flip keeps trying to tell me I’m a wise Mommy.
Thing is, it muddies things in that doing things a particular way becomes inherently subby, at least as porn would have you believe. Whether it is getting fucked up the ass of wearing panties, or more extreme as to refer to the underpinnings of the relationship dynamic… It’s feels like a niche.
Take a dude doing housework as a male sub staple. Actually, dudes do housework, even doms. Not as much, on average, as women of all orientations. But if men want to eat and not fester in their own filth, adults usually have some life coping skills, at least as far as trashbag or can opener operation. But I cannot move for guys writing to me to offer to clean my house. Female subs clean house, often in a way that’s just as service oriented as male subs, but they don’t offer it up front as a mating signal. Because housekeeping is something chicks get delegated with.
And the stupid femdom uniform or the fact that we use the term “femdom” or “Domme” to delineate. There’s definately a “Mistress” outfit that people expect. In practice male doms have the utilikilt leatherdaddy look, but put on some spike heels and shoot from below and -ping! Femdom. Or uncomfortable goth slut. The uniform muddies the conversation about femdom, because what you wear is often treated as important as what you do.
And there’s all the vocabulary. FLR (Female Led Reationship), I’m looking at you. As if you had to make a special category to get away from the default. Because the current standards are “traditional” (male dominant) and “equal” (egalitarian), there has to be a special term for being a dom in a TPE dynamic that coincidentally is also female dominated.
And then there’s female supremacy. The premise of it is that if women were in charge, either it would be paradise or castrating harpies. Curiously, I can think of few explicitly male-dom world ideas that are not rape happy weirdness. It’s less popular, as a kink, and nobody who gets hot and bothered about the idea thinks that men being in charge is better.
Because they already are occupying most of the top spots. So I find myself in the awkward place of telling people to stop calling me perfect. But I live in the world I do and it’s going to colour all our behaviour.
One of the great unkillable D/s narratives is the dom-as-leader. Honestly, as long as you don’t take it seriously, it is hot. On the other hand, since so few women get to be leaders, at least compared with men, it seriously colours the fantasy. And it is to the point that an expression of being your own person, as a woman, codes as being dominant. It’s like we can’t completely escape hierarchy thinking.
I think one of the reasons why male subs get so much crap is because they are assumed, if they are beneath a woman, to be beneath everyone. Like some sort untouchable caste, in a highly hierarchical pecking order (and D/s is often about getting off on abuses and strengths in extreme power disparity) subs of both genders get shamed in the fashion that is typically used to batter their gender.
And the stakes are pretty crappy for a dude. While women are coaxed into infantile passivity, and made to be concerned with sexual purity… men at the bottom get all sorts of fetishes that are related to how men have been historically pushed down and about stripping them of male privilege and treating them like women- they are pussified (and I use that term deliberately), cuckolded, denied sex and put through forced bi. And yet the comparative approach to bisexuality in sub women is generally about sister slaves, and putting on a show, and lesbian female dominants. fucking women is presumed to be something that everyone wants to do.
All that aside, when we construct BDSM fantasy societies, there’s plenty of egalitarian examples. Whether the concept is a secret world within our world or a whole planet of kinky people though, again you get the perennial bi women. It’s to the point that the hard ass second in command to a head femdom is a kink cliche.
So where does that leave you when you are femdom fantasy building? Technically it’s a fantasy so you can do anything you damn well please. If you want a lady with a harem of bisexual slave boys who doesn’t even understand the concept of gender, much less descrimination, you can knock yourself out. But like how the genres of fantasy and sci-fi are lamentably tainted by the cultures that birthed them, and keep serving up patriarchy in the far future and magic-far-away-land, femdom’s presumed tropes are well attached baggage.
I did it in my own work. Catamite, despite being scifi, is set in a very patriarchal world. It’s actually much worse than anything I personally have ever dealt with, being neo-Victorian. Annette, as a character, has an unusual amount of liberty for her imaginary geography. This is not really a spoiler, but this is intentional in a place where the world the characters are living in is actually one of several planets, and the place they are in is very much a weird cultural backwater. I wanted a society with vast inequality, I did not want an amazon fantasy land and apparently this is what I defaulted to.
I wonder if my interest in that means that I still am constructing power in relation to men and unfairly excluding women from the picture? Catamite doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, though in part because it is a story about heterosexual relationships. In theory it wouldn’t pass in the opposite direction- I don’t think there’s a single male-on-male conversation where women aren’t the focus in Catamite either.
On the other hand it means that my domly-dom character is still subordinate. There’a a bit of me that wonders if I’ve created something straight out of the Office skit about not being the one truly in charge even in the infinite realm of possibility.
Dwight: I am gonna be your new boss. [laughs] It’s my greatest dream come true. Welcome to the Hotel Hell. Check in time is now. Check out time is never. Jim: Does my room have cable? Dwight: No. And the sheets are made of fire. Jim: Can I change rooms? Dwight: Sorry, we’re all booked up. Hell convention in town. Jim: Can I have a late checkout? Dwight: I’ll have to talk to the manager. Jim: You’re not the manager even in your own fantasy? Dwight: I’m the owner. The co-owner. With Satan! Jim: Okay, just so I understand it, in your wildest fantasy you are in Hell and you are co-running a bed and breakfast with the devil?
So is it some sort of sexism on my part that the setting I threw together to provide a great range of power imbalance is extremely male dominated as a side effect? Probably. I was also interested in writing about how Annette navigated the space she was in, and how power is very fluid and unreliable, yet I still did a retread of the patriarchy.
Be that as it may, if you fetishize power imbalance, even if you disapprove of them in practice (like a person with a rape fantasy), the bullshit around gender is also fantastic source material. I don’t necessarily think I conveyed it properly, but Adam/Phillip’s behaviour is supposed to have been guided by his own relationship to the masculine expectations of his culture.
And yet, fetishes seem to by and large follow cultural trappings. I understand that cultures without much ethnic diversity with inequality don’t really get up to as much of the weird ass “interracial” stuff the US spews out. If, perchance, we stopped having weird inequalities based on your perceived chromosomes, would this eliminate thing like cross dressing being used as a punishment?
So what would dominance be if there wasn’t some sort of significant gender imbalance?
—
I have no idea where this lovely homage to a classical painting came from, but if you know the artist please tell me.
I’m really bad at a lot of stuff. I don’t even touch single tails or floggers anymore, I feel like it’s such a lost cause. My ropework looks like a cat’s been in the yarn. I have an aim that hurts me as much as it hurts the victim.
But I think the biggest learning curve for me, has got to be the psychology behind D/s. From initially having a sadism style like a rabid cat being pelted out of a catapult and having to tone it down in my initiation and learn sub does not necessarily means masochist (oh, that wasn’t okay? Ooops…) to being rather baffled by sub behaviour, it’s one of those things where I’ve been learning by doing.
I never get more reminded that we’re animals than by seeing how god damn weird the effect of this stuff is. Porn just doesn’t do it justice. In example, I got asked if I do “the voice”. I had to do a double take, but that’s actually a real thing subs and doms do.
And it’s not just one voice, it’s several. The first time I heard a sub putting on the small voice I thought he was making fun of me. Basically imagine an adult man suddenly having his normal speaking voice turn into a soft coo. Like, the least threatening baby-voice ever.
And there’s the dom voice. I am demonstrably comfortable being a hell on (w)heels angry dom, but that’s not it. Being that pissed sounding is an emotional bludgeoning tool. The dom ‘voice’ It’s a sort of eyeflashing, looming, controlling cajoling that’s just as much a singsong as the small voice. And above all, it’s smiling.
And there’s the triggers. A million and one bloody buttons. At first I generally rejected them as tedious- you can only listen to a guy tell you about how the sight of a knee sock pinching into a fat thigh makes him feel weak for so long before you get the urge to never wear knee socks again. I guess, lacking the ability, I never understood what feeling submissive really meant until I saw it in action.
But it’s really, really good to feel someone doing that for you. To watch them slide down into the ‘less than’ head state. To hear all the little groans and see how they change how they hold their head. For me, the triggers are probably someone’s vulnerability and finding the little hooks that you can pull that spread them wide open so you can see inside their mind.
I asked on reddit what people’s dominant or submissive triggers were. The trend seems to be tone of voice, or certain special phrases, or being recognized and appreciated. Strangely for all the dudes outside the scene who talk my ear off about panties or ponytails, this is not a common occurrence in conversation with people inside the scene.
In day to day life, I do wonder how actually vulnerable people are. My friend Kay goes into a sort of boneless state like you rebooted a computer and you’re watching all the jaunty loading screens… if he’s hugged by a dominant woman. When he drops it’s like a ton of bricks, and you better be prepared to put him somewhere safe. Another friend, Mr.Sub, doesn’t really show unless you pay very, very close attention. But when dropped he reports that he basically loses the ability to resist.
Is this the same as the much vaunted “sub space”? That’s usually communicated to me as coming from more masochistic areas. Like a meditative thing that creeps up on people during a beating.
I bottom- I’m familiar with getting pain drunk. It’s a weightlessness, but it’s nothing like the way I see people curl in on themselves in a way that drops all their defences. And it’s nothing like the wildness that seeds in me when I have a victim. So what, I wonder, is the pleasureable head state people are getting?
Unfortunately people are still trying to come up with relationships between D/s and personality and we’re a long, long way away from being able to stick masochists in MRI machines. But some day I’d love to know what exactly is going on when I watch a man’s face change, and his eyes shutter as his lips pull into a vulnerable startle and the veil of ownership has enveloped him.