O Non-Fiction

Rants, scene write ups, reviews, basically everything that isn’t erotica.

#Service4Pearl: Candidates And Tea Interviews

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Outside of a few “oh dear god!” offers, and a few people who were on slightly the wrong page (looking for naked service more so than obedient service) but were not bad for wanting something different, three people who responded to my ad have stuck around enough to consider them as possibles.

I’ll be explicit about my expectations, I am looking for a unicorn scenario- a man or woman I can be friends with who wants as close as exactly what I want without requiring much in the way of compromise, but is also not looking for an intimate relationship. Needless to say there wasn’t much in the way of female identified interest to my ad, but that’s okay. I am happy to look within my social group for a lady who thinks wearing a frilly maid costume is her idea of a good time.

Qualifications That Matter Include:

  • Playful and imaginative
  • Does not sincerely believe in FemSup or “Always On” BDSM, where the Dom really is better the sub.
  • Actually into what I want and not putting up with this to get a dom, any dom
  • Will get along with everyone else (Wildcard, friends)
  • Fits into my surprisingly busy life

I screened people by asking them about their expectations- people who were strongly fixated on the obviously sexual aspects of service were gently dissuaded/politely rejected, while I talked back and forth with people who seemed more on the same page. I was also careful of people who redirected “What do you want?” back to “Whatever Miss wants!”, because contrary to it making them seem extra submissive, it hints that the person isn’t really sure about their needs.

That left me with three guys, listed in no particular order.

Catbus is so named because of a typo, cat for car, giving us a running joke about his favourite means of transportation. He’s the only one I met in person, but he’s very shy. I feel like he’s cool, but anything is going to take him getting a chance to warm up. However he’s a creative type and I bet he’d integrate well into our larger social circle. He is mostly hampered from his BDSM explorations by an evening job that inverts his social life into being a lost morning person.

We met up on a little tea place near McGill, which had the advantage of being open at all hours, tasty and away from either of our residences or work places while easy to find. I had a salted caramel cupcake and a vanilla bourbon rooibos. Numbers were exchanged, though he’s very hard to read because of the aforementioned shyness.

Classic is significantly older, and does not live in Montreal proper. He seems perfectly balanced about it, but is only in town to care for his elderly parents. We may have an issue purely based on scheduling, even before discovering if we have any degree of play compatibility. I’m also not 100% sure he is not in fact married and leaving that detail off the table, a fact that is a problem only in the sense that I don’t want to be up in someone else’s unhealthy dynamic.

Excellent potential to be my own personal Carson, one supposes.

Shoez is a foot fetishist sub, which is not uncommon. He does seem okay with the idea of not putting his mouth on my feet, and might be workable as a boot black boy, sock darner and underfootman (heh) based on how he expresses himself. However he’s very into superfluous capitalizations, so we’ll see if he can stop referring to me as “You”, which doesn’t doesn’t sound respectful to me but like someone’s all “Oh. It’s YOU.” with that sort of careful enunciation that ends with “I said GOOD DAY!”.

We’ll see if he can drop the superfluous fet speak or if it is too engrained in his desires to be purged, and whether this will end with drooly pumps.

Meanwhile of course Gentleman is contemplating setting up some sort of duplex for an upstairs/downstairs kitty maids residence scenario. Would that be living in a cat house or a cat shelter?

 

First Orgasm

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Let me tell you about coming for the first time. Not for the first, first way back when I was twelve and my sexuality meant breaking the law, sneaking online BDSM comics I wasn’t allowed to have, and discovering my precocious side with the same hopefulness I stuffed my training bra with. I mean coming for the first time with him, with another person bringing my body there.

It was new, and beautiful and vulnerable, over in an instant as I rock on the hard muscle of his thigh and my clit brushes the buzzing hitachi. The whole thing was unexpected- he decided to make me happy and I’d done this before, humping his leg with me on top, ever the aggressor in our relationship, and he had put your hand on the small of my back and took over the motion so the whole of his leg became my sex toy, adding the convenience of a vibrator at the bottom of the slope I was sliding up and down. And the feeling kept building and building and I thought that it would be like usual and I’d get too sensitive or roll off and frig myself into a quick orgasm. But I didn’t.

This time I just let it go back and forth, being in the moment and the feeling the push on all the sensitive spots on my body until I was making incoherent noises and I’d passed the point of no return, and there it was, one perfect moment.

He thought I was offended after, by my reaction, but I was shocked. When you are resigned, your whole long life to not care one bit that nobody can get you off, your sexuality becomes an intensely personal thing and the whole of what you can do with other people is in the same sort of category of reading a porn story you’re touching yourself to.

Suddenly I had to reassess all my carefully constructed patience, and stop pretending I wasn’t deeply disappointed nobody could get me off. Let that me a lesson to you, dear reader, that even the sort of person everyone treats like some sort of sex guru can cling to her illusions. No more being cool and modern and free, suddenly if I’m not getting off it’s not my fault anymore. Because there’s a someone else who can.

When you learn about sex, they teach you about the concept of virginity. I was as precocious about that formal threshold as I was about my own orgasms, landing on the first boy I could get to hold still for long enough. And I was deeply disappointed, not with the loss of something precious but that all I felt was slightly poked on the inside of my vagina. I feel like a person who loses their virginity was supposed to feel.

This feels like something lost and something gained, something learned and something very different than coming all by myself. It wasn’t even the most intense and spectacular orgasm that I’ve ever had, but it was shared.

I left a wet circle of myself on his pants.

#Service4Pearl: Worst Response To Ad So Far

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The inbox responses came in at a steady trickle, and alongside a few awesome guys, a few fine but not a good match guys, there’s always a few that just make you shake your head.

I don’t need to tell you “don’t be that guy”, if you are reading this you are generally able to understand why that guy is stupid and obnoxious. This is being shared purely because it’s the usual almost entirely out of left field, completely absurd weirdness that shows up in our inbox from time to time has the saving grace that it’s often so weird as to be funny.

Hi Amazing Lady !
Did you find your perfect sub/slave/toys?
you are truly an dream! I wish I can meet a woman as hot as you!
I’m sur you deserve to be serve and licked for hour and hour all over your amazing body!
I realy liked your profile and what you wrote !
You also have a nice fetishes list 🙂
Do you know anything about cuckolding?
Is this someting that may interess you ?
I’m pretty sur you can be an AMAZING Hotwife/cuckoldress!!!!
At least i would to talk about this with you if ever you don’t mind miss ?
Are you open to a real LTR ?
Would be a dream to have a real lady as you in my life wow So hot !
You realy seem to be very open minded and very amazing and so hot!

By example Would you love to see me going shopping for you/with you in the day, buying you sexy nice dress, shoes, accessories, cream, perfum, jewellery, everything to make even more appealing to men, and after when we got home, would you love I give you a bath, take care of your hair, cream all your amazing body, give you a long massage, put on you perfum, help you do your nails, warm you and your nice pussy with my mouth, help you to get dressed and drive you to one of yours lover and then go back home to do the home task, while waiting for your call to bring you back home, and maybe at 3 or 4 in the morning you will call me to say “Don’t wait for me sweetie Eric, I won’t go back home tonight, I will sleep to my lovers house, I will call you back tommorow at noon for you to come and pick me up.” All of this withou you asking for permission but only to le me know. then when you get back home you will ask me to please you another time by licking you to clean your pussy with my tongue from your nice creampie that your lover will have left Inside you, while you will told me everthing about your wonderfull night. then once you get your own pleasur, you will say “Thanks Eric” then you will sleep to rest yourself without having to give me back anything at all and until maybe your start back at evening. 🙂
Is this something you may like?
Is this something you may be able to do also ?

And just to prouve to you how much i really want this kind of Relationship and How much you can expect from me my full devotion to your pleasur and to prouve yourself that Only your pleasur will always count for me

So if you were telling me that you want to be completely exclusive to your lover/bulls and never ever let me penetrate you and this from the start thne I would accept it!!!
So if you where the kind of girl to tell me on our wedding night “Listen Eric, it’s official now, you never ever penetrate me up to know and you would never ever!
and you show me a new tatoo near by your amazing pussy!
A tatoo that say “VIP Only, Husband forbideen!!!”

That tatoo will not only remember to me each time i go down on you that i will never ever know the feeling and the pleasur to be Inside you while any other men can, but will also make Lucky all your lover and bull knowing they can fuck you but even your husband can’t!

What do you think about this?
Is in it a very good proof?
Would you like it or even require it from me ?

Please let me know
Hope to read more form you very soon
Thanks
[REDACTED]

Dear Idiot:

I’m in a relationship already, and this references nothing I mentioned in my ad. Also in the unlikely event I get a tattoo, I’d like to think it would be spelled properly.

Sincerely,

~MP

#Service4Pearl: In Which I Post An Ad For A Service Sub

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So I’ve decided to explore service as a kink.

house
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a fussy kind of valet/maid scenario, more Downton Abbey than anything more explicitly fetish. Wildcard is not a service submissive, being more of a bedroom sub, or as I often put it, strictly decorative. So, after discussing the matter with him and giving it more thought than is probably even reasonable, I composed and ad and posted it up on fetlife.

I’m looking more for a shorter term arrangement, and not a secondary relationship- basically a friend who wants to experiment and not a full time sub. I have a very clear picture in my mind of what I want, and a long list of things I don’t like.

There’s a lot to unpack in this for me. In the first place, as much as I don’t mind and even enjoy Wildcard’s extracurricular activities, the idea of sharing him with him having a full time sub makes me feel slightly distressed, so similarly I don’t think it’s a good place to try to run a concurrent relationship even if he’d tolerate imbalance. On that, I worry that I’ll be offering possible people a bad deal because I can only offer a limited amount of myself.

But it might be enough, so why not try it anyway?

Before setting out on this I tried to do a lot of research particularly with Tilari, of “How Not To Suck A Service Submission“, an expert on the subject matter, and she was kind enough to tell me a bit about what makes up a good ad, and a good request. She suggested that a good thing to aim for would be to be very clear about my guidelines and what I was looking for. That means down to laying out the kind of tasks I was interested in and my expectations instead of just referencing a “service sub”.

I think this is pretty reasonable- and it also meant a good excuse to talk about what I expected to give back in explicit terms, as well as to address the sort of trade for the “exchange” part of the power exchange. For me, I find the idea of acting like a dominatrix sterotype gross, but I see the sub’s fulfillment as essential to a healthy relationship.

I’m not looking for a naked house cleaner, but neither did I want to assume that me being a dom should be enough.

You’ll see the ad I created, after the jump…

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Femdom Problems: Being a Dominatrix VS Getting What You Want

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I browse reddit when I’m bored, and this comment thread came up on /r/relationships from a user (reluctantmistress) with a pretty classic problem that happens more often than I’d like in femdom: the guy who can only understand his own needs, so a loving and indulgent woman who actually enjoys it gets overwhelmed with service topping to fit into his ideal dominatrix.

I met my boyfriend, Pat, when we were both in college. We were originally FWB, then realized that we wanted more. We started seeing each other seriously, and have lived together pretty happily for 3 years.

We are best friends. We can talk about anything with each other, and we have helped eachother through a lot of tough times. After we had been dating for a while, Pat confessed to me that he has always had a lot of kinky fetishes, and wanted to explore them. I agreed, because it seemed exciting and he was so happy about it. As we started exploring this stuff, I realized that I loved it too.

The thing is, though, that I really just like regular sex. Pat is very submissive, and even though I enjoy being dominant, it tires me out and doesn’t recharge me or give me as much pleasure as just regular, plain, PIV while gazing into each others’ eyes.

We have been doing 24/7 chastity for a while now (working up, making sure the cage fit, and being safe, obviously!) and it is so hard to be “Miss” during every intimate moment. Even if I unlock Pat, there still has to be a kink element, because if we go from kink to vanilla and vice versa, he gets depressed. We’ve also been getting more and more into RAK (risky types of kink) like scat, watersports, and cuckholding.

Things came to a turning point for me when I visited a bull and had sex with him. It was ok, nothing to write home about, but I just loved the fact that we were just having sex. I didn’t have to worry about picking nipples or saying the wrong dirty thing or whatever. I could just lose myself in the moment and be myself. I liked having this need met, but I want Pat to be the one to meet it. I guess I am just naturally monogamous.

We’ve talked about this for a long time, and have tried a lot of things. We’ve tried having different weeks or days where we’re kinky. It just made us both unsatisfied. I’m confused because I constantly feel like I am service topping – if things don’t follow a certain order or prescription, he gets depressed and shuts the scene down, which makes me feel like a failure and then wonder why I’m even doing this because it makes neither of us happy. Even if he isn’t in chastity, he is looking at porn on his phone. He admitted to me that when we have vanilla sex that he is imagining kinky stuff happening. That really broke me.

I don’t want to give up kink forever. I have my own kinks that I like, but when I try to intiate and I mess up the scene stops. I use kink to get Pat to do things like the dishes, or running with me, and he enjoys it, has even told me he prefers it to me nagging, but I just want him to do things without me putting on a show. I just want to top him my way, which sometimes means I’m in my pajamas. I don’t want to have to put on my sexy boots and use my sexy voice whenever I want him to pay attention to me.

I’m so sorry that this has turned into a rant. Anyway, any advice would be nice. We’re also involved in the local BDSM community, and gone to a lot of classes and workshops, and they have really helped our relationship but they haven’t addressed the big problem. I can’t really talk to any of our kinky friends because I’m ashamed of how I feel. People sometimes sh*t on vanilla people for being boring. I don’t want to be boring, I just want to be happy.

I’ve also talked with my therapist about this but she isn’t very knowledgeable about alternative lifestyles. I’m looking for a kink – friendly therapist or counsellor but I have no idea where to start.

tl;dr: My SO and I love eachother but our different sexual appetites are causing us to be unhappy. We want to fix this. What do we do?

See “Pat” find a loving, willing femdom. See Pat drive his relationship into the ground by treating her like a fetish dispensing machine. Pat, your girl is a super winner. I get that you have your fetishes, but you’re going to need to find a work around because right now you are trying to totally dominate that woman you call “Miss” harder than you’re even asking her to do to you. You need to stop that.

Poor OP. She’s even into it, but you’re wearing her down with this constant demanding. I mean really, now you demand kinky treats to do your house chores and just asking is “nagging”? Are you fucking kidding me? How is it that submission is your favourite thing ever, but anything that actually gives your Miss her way turns you into a sulky baby? Look, Pat, she will probably swear you are a great boyfriend and she’s probably right, but you are overwhelming her with your approach.

Think of it this way: I like sadism. I could torture a pretty man all day long. But there are limits of how to express things- I can’t torture someone 24/7 because that’s not safe or sensible or would probably lead to good emotional outcomes. RelectantMistress isn’t actually very relucuctant – she’s the very model of GGG (good, giving, game). However this is hitting against the thing other writers like Giles observed, the difference between letting someone have power and asking them to play out your dominatrix fantasy.

Okay, first it’s adult conversation time. Do you value your relationship? Good. You need to get your ass in gear and talk about that with her. I don’t know how she got the impression sex that wasn’t your fetish was boring, but mission number one is to take the focus off you and your locked cock and onto her- not because your fetishes are wrong, but because she matters too and her fetishes and interests are just as important as yours.

You, Pat are now going through the hardest orgasm denial of your life, the one where your cock absolutely belongs to her and not to you. No more porn and fantasy for now. You need to put as much effort into channelling your sexuality to please her as she’s been putting to please you. You love this woman, you know her intimately and you should have an idea what she likes.

I imagine that she’s put a lot of work into letting you know she finds your sexuality sexy, and that’s very comforting. However she’s set a good example about what love means, it’s time to reciprocate. True, how you perceive sex is filtered through your kinks, but you can at least make the effort- if she wants missionary sex without props and calling anything but her name, you can at least stretch to being her adoring fucktoy. Take some time to rediscover who she is. Practice that coo-ing romantic connection of sticky eyes, like when you first fell in love.

But on top of that, I want to talk about the house chores only being tolerable if dictated by Miss issue and the sulking if you don’t get kink. It’s really nice that she’s found a way to make boring adult responsibilities fun for you, but she shouldn’t have to nag you in the first place. Calling being reminded of something that needs doing, that you were failing to do ‘nagging’ is saying that neither her wants nor the task are relevant. Similarly, try to have a bit of quid-pro-quo empathy, imagine if every time you wanted kink she got depressed and moped and needed reassurance? I bet you’d feel pretty stifled. Being Miss is a fun thing for both of you, but the way you are subbing is turning this into a chore for her, not a joy.

Don’t blow it, Pat, give Miss what she actually wants, rather than what you feel like a dominant should want. Or she’ll eventually pull away to protect herself, after a great deal of crying and feeling sad and guilty and unloved, and you won’t have a Miss anymore.

I posted this here because I think this is relevant for all of us, and points to the fundamental problem in femdom as delivered by popular culture- we are rated at how well our kink pleases men, not by how it pleases us. This doesn’t make our partners bad people, but it is a common trap we can fall into. Femdom will never work as a major menu item unless her desires are part of the package and you cannot expect to get a lover who is all into your kinks how you like them only.

30 Days of Kink: The Penultimate Post

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30 Days of Kink (in this case several days crammed into a post ‘cuz this isn’t tumblr) is drawing to a close. The last challenge is to pick your own topic, but this time they asked another question about my identity.

Day 28: How do you dress for kink/BDSM play?  What significance does your attire have to you?

99% of my “play” is a slightly kinked up version couple sex where I give him a hand job, and I’m wearing nothing, or whatever lounge wear I’d like. in a better organized world I’d be in scintillating lingerie, but sex tends to have a very broad unscheduled aspect. Particularly to Wildcard, who requires a certain degree of spontaneous, where Punish Tuesdays are as planned as it gets.

I like looking sexually desirable. I buy nice panties and stockings. I have a whole wardrobe of cocktail dresses and cheap heels, the latter the kind that cost less than $25 at chain stores which also sell hair clips to teenage girls and six packs of earrings. I like attention, assuming its polite and makes me feel like I’m in control. I find the constriction of corseting pleasant.

My female protagonists are fussy dressers, and I myself don’t like blindly throwing clothes onto my body. I see clothes as a visual medium for communication and like having the ability to express myself exactly how I want.

As far as the “Mistress” look, I’m more likely to throw together a feigned fetish costume than go all out- pleather booty shorts from another cheap mall chain that does a lot of club wear, bikini top from AA, knee high boots from that selfsame cheap accessory store. That’s about as far as it gets- I don’t own any latex or full leather- the cost being astronomical. Of course, given my druthers and infinite budget I’d probably aim more for dread Empress than dominatrix.

Day 29: Do you have a BDSM title (e.g. mistress, master, slut, pig, whore, princess, goddess, ma’am, sir)?  What is your opinion of the use of titles in general?

MISS! My title is something I like, but you are no obligation to use it unless we have a consenting BDSM dynamic. Pearl is fine otherwise, or Miss Pearl for branding recognition purposes. If I know you in real life I’m happy with my real name.

Asking I call you a title when I’m not in a dynamic with you is a little odd. That being said I get a little thrill from overly formal fussiness and I generally don’t think about someone whose handle is LordButt being called Lord and not just Butt. However I’m weirded out if SlaveButt insists he has to call me and all the other women Mistress or something, even if his dom told him to.

For my last post, I’m opening myself up to questions you are curious about and want answers to. So, folks, what’ll it be?

Real Life Again & Emotional Health

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As mentioned, I’ve just come back from an Alaskan cruise, a family thing that was well appreciated but kept me away all last week. Despite the ability to create your own event (LGBT, friends of Bill W.) I resisted the urge to organize a floating munch. Wildcard insisted on using banked time to drive me to the airport and picking me up after. He brought my much beloved but bedraggled teddy bear to meet me by way of greeting. I spent the time working on me, with exercise and yoga and trying to meditate beside the pool and getting to know my largely absent father.

Wildcard had a crap time in my absence. Probably because I left him my summer cold for his already weakened immune system to wrangle, but also because he’s rather attached to his regular supply of snuggles. While I was away, he played with “Princess”. She ended the session in a crying mini panic attack not because he was hurting her, but because of his desire to know about what she wanted. Faced with the possibility of her own happiness, a yawning, overwhelming sense of inadequacy and failure took her out at the back of the knees. He comforted her, but she remained embarrassed Telling him “You and Pearl are so effortlessly cool and together, she feels so stupid losing it!”

He laughed, this is hardly unfamiliar territory for him… Or me. We often accidentally give the impression that we have a sort of infinite reserve of poise- its not unusual for people to confess how dominant and unassailable I seem, but the reality is a lot more mundane, from giggles and skip-hopping about to wallowing in insecurity. This is not unusual; my kinky friends are no more or less nuts than my vanilla ones, which is to say a good measure of both camps have doctors fine tuning our brain chemicals via a daily dose, while a bunch more really should be being looked after properly. We make do.

Last summer shit got nasty for me: food became inedible- I was unemployed, in the best shape of my life from trying to run my feelings off, and absolutely miserable. I took it as responsibly as I could, to a doctor to deal with to triage the immense and inexplicable pain I was feeling. Citalopram and therapy helped, definitely more so than the exercise had.

I’m upright again, a little plumper and better centred, and also employed, the latter most important in the unrelenting world of adult bills. Feeding you guy’s desire to read my stuff ain’t cheap.Trying to sum that up got me thinking- I feel like one of the big challenges is that the mundane of (kinky) life tends to get lost in making a narrative. You hear about me playing with Wildcard- not so much the sex dead week where one of us feels like the idea of anything other than vegging with a screen is a step too far to consider. You see little glimpses of ecstasy, you miss the weekend when I come back when he’s in a little self castigating spiral of doom because he’s too busy feeling like a bad boyfriend because he’s not in the mood for sex to notice I’m feeling sore, bloated and fragile, hardly horny at all.

I trailed comicon with the company of someone I see as effortless cool. Let’s call her “Tattoos”. Gosh, I thought. I hope she wants to be friends with me. She’s so funny and pretty! Tats, meanwhile was struck by my dominance and having a hard time internally not calling me “Miss” and kneeling.

I, of course, don’t see it. I see my often cheerful, consistently awkward self. Which of course gets complimented as confidence, as what is my own obliviousness or mechanical social performance doesn’t have a disclaimer to outside observers. Such is life.

 

Answering: “Am I A Femdom?”

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vintage_whipOne of the hardest things about being a dominant woman is still got to be that initial hurdle when you have to reach that question in the first place “Am I a femdom?”

The usual answer is “only if you choose to identify that way”, but for many people, that’s not enough. What, after all, is femdom? What benefit is choosing the label of dominant?

I’ve said it before: the state of education for new or curious femdoms sucks and the parameters for how it is expressed in popular culture is depressing. Even undergoing a sort of renaissance on the subject courtesy of the internet’s impact on the widespread acceptance of BDSM, the fact remains that this is part of kink where getting shown the proverbial ropes is a random and unstreamlined process. New doms fall into this the same way they always did- because an idea or a relationship dynamic they encountered resonated with them, or because they met someone with that kind of chemistry.

Only, for female dominants, its hard to find stuff aimed at us to try to get comfortable with the idea or be intrigued. And some women genuinely like the black clad villian dominatrix archetype. But one of the hardest things about being a female dom is making the expectations gell with your identity, and most of us grow up with other personal archetypes than Wicked Wanda.

So, what then?

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Fanmail & Celebrity

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Gosh, being a teeny celebrity is nice! Recently a person who has read The Pet Gentleman sent me a nice thank you with an extra special treat. There’s them enjoying a wonderful Canadian vacation with their kindle and some amazing views.kindle2

I wanted to mention how much these sorts of things really make me smile. I’ve sincerely never expected this blog to take off as well as it has, and the love (and sales!) you guys have thrown my way make me smile on a regular basis. Like, daily. There’s few feelings more awesome than knowing that your art and ideas resonate with other folk, whether you’re here for the porn or just reading for the articles.

I sent this fan a personal response, but I want to take the time to thank each and every one of you readers. Without you this blog is me shouting at clouds and masturbating in a corner. You’re also the biggest encouragement to keep writing.

kindle1 And yeah, you guys who pop up at events and come tell me how you read my stuff aren’t being awkward, you’re being awesome. Really! My ego isn’t going to swell itself and that sort of thing is just the food my sense of self importance needs.

(The other book is a short story, Mistress Plays For Keeps. I’m pretty sure I accidentally ended up using the gorgeous Ferns of Domme Chronicles as a cover model there. Not intentionally, it just worked out that way. I guess when I told the artist that I wanted a hot blonde, but older woman that was what popped into her head. :P)

Oh yeah, this weekend, July 25-26, 2015, Selkie Shows Off is a free give away on Amazon. If you don’t have kindle, the smart device app is free, and they have a computer based reader too.

On Femdom In Popular Culture

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princessI guess one of the hardest parts of conventional heterosexual femdom is how damn disempowering it feels. Maybe some women get joy out of it in the porn and movie version, but in my perception, it takes the idea of female power and turns it into a grotesque parody, one propped up by a very narrow definition of attractive, garbed in clothes worn to thrill the audience but also reassure them that the boundaries of the dom’s power are entirely the time it takes them to wank to completion. I hate how angry and unhappy it makes us be, like we are uncomfortable in our own skin, that we deplore sex and men specifically.

I tried it as a teenager- I liked (and still like) the idea of getting power from my sexuality, liked the idea of men fawning all over me and certainly fit nicely into my dark sorceress fantasies. But in practice it was such a bother to get someone to play along- teenage boys aren’t, as an audience, adept and ready for consensual domination. The ones that are tend to have got there via porn made just for them. And if I’m good at anything its forming myself into other people’s perfect fantasy. But oh lordy was it a series of tedious tick boxes- no tension, no zing, so service-y.

I rejected femdom then as a fool’s game entirely for professionals and with nothing to offer for me. Given how it is presented, its no wonder there’s so few dominant women when people go looking!

On that line, people have occasionally found it remarkable that I refuse pro work. Wouldn’t it be perfect to be paid to be me? It’s not out of a rejection of sex work (I’ve made it abundantly clear I’m an ally, if often a clumsy one), but a distaste for the profession in particular because it is NOT me. I write, not to condemn the hundreds of women who pay the rent acting out a very specific and much beloved service- but precisely because it is next door to my vulnerabilities. For me, professional domination is taking an intimate part of myself and putting it to work for the needs of others. That’s the part of femaleness that makes me feel least powerful, the emotional shepherd part of the glorious indoctrination of girlhood.

And inversely, I don’t like that being a commanding woman is itself considered to be a niche fetish, with a special wardrobe that fits into no context except for that of the dominatrix- rule and people start cracking jokes about whips in the same way they’ll call you an aggressive bitch. People moan about the lack of clothing choices for dom men to be “fetish” wear, but a codified dom uniform for women doesn’t exactly scream inherently powerful either- maybe sore feet, sweaty and short of breath at best. I’m not saying you personally should give up your “mistress’ heels or whatever, but from my perspective if you have to wear a special outfit to be taken seriously, that awards the outfit more power than you.

Granted a lot of the other stereotypical female power things don’t help either. Step away from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS’s angry, black clad sisters and its all about The Goddess. Not any specific goddess, mind you, just middle class white folk’s idea of the primitive feminine- and that trip traps into sacred motherhood, where all I am goes from being the bedevilment of men, to the state of my womb. This is not an improvement.

Maiden, Mother, Crone… even with religions that are not some sort of cargo cult constructed to summon a hypothetical ancient tradition that’s more wishful thinking than a part of anyone’s heritage, religious history gives you shitty options. At the very best, you get a goddess who’s some sort of primal force, while the real women of the culture are getting their faces rubbed in the dirt, same as everywhere else and the religious women who get respect are paragons of self denial and chastity. Among the Christian saints, someone’s mother or someone who died a virgin are about your only options of your own personal halo. That puts the feminine-as-a-power-source as an awkward place for a barren woman to try to be. By choice, over about half my life, I’ve stopped up my womb with the best medical science can offer, with no plans to stop. The thing between my legs is strictly an organ of pleasure with an excretion mechanism piped through it. Making it so is my aberration and my actual expression of power over myself- being maiden/mother/crone by default is a profoundly anti-choice. Respecting women as the generative sex, and making that respect’s primary root, treats childbearing as the spontaneous reality for every woman.

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