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.
An almost half year dry spell marked my Divorce’s conclusion. For a variety of reasons I waited a long time to try all those basic aspects of the flesh. It was not without encouragement to the contrary, as friends and even Strong tried to coax me to find someone or something to fill the ah… breach. I got lectured on zipless, no strings fucks, coaxed to try dating again, etc… But the flesh recoiled at the thought. There’s particular ways it needs to be touched and more to the point, I need there to be respect and the time it takes to vet another human being for that sort of thing is extensive.
And yet, Saying sex and pain are, for me inseparable concepts, both makes me sound like I’m talking about chronic vaginismus and does not capture the nuances of how I experience it. I’m talking hands on sadomasochism.
So, sex. It’s about touch, really, light touches, hard touches, scrapes of nails, stinging slaps, pressure, joints straining and for me, the sort of push that digs to the bone. To have and be touched is a wonderful thing. And I’m enraptured by smell and texture, that clean sex musk, the veins beneath the skin and the softness of the skin that wraps a cock.
And for me, pain. To hurt and be hurt. I adore the way that after your body has been primed, the weight of the last hurt drags into even the lightest caress, so that your whole body sensitizes and touch becomes more than how it was before there was pain. And there’s the noises, the facial expressions, the changes of posture are all extremely erotic to me. Pain is such a raw thing to have, creating a suffusion through the flesh from where ever it has been triggered.
I turned 27 at the end of last week. My living room is still festooned with bunting and balloons, rainbow dollar store streamers put up with tape, hanging in frothy swathes. Leftover high end cupcakes sit in tupperware, frozen because that much sugar in the half dozen in one go would stun a horse.
I got a very pleasant visit for my birthday (I shall speak more on that later) and integral part of assembling the day together. As a result I have more or less dropped off the map, which is pleasant, though I utterly fucked ordering the munch for this month. Still, it’s nice when everything comes together perfectly.
As far as how it happened, that was a matter of delegation and getting exactly what you want. On that note, I got asked by someone random “(what a) Domme would like to have for Her birthday from Her subs, slaves, friend, boyfriend etc…” I wanted a made-to-order birthday.
Given the choice of various gifts, this one pretty much fits exactly what I want. And at the end of the day that’s pretty similar to what I think I would have wanted as a vanilla person.
I’m working straight through the weekend and I feel, overwhelmingly like I’m engaging in some form of cargo cult more than doing anything meaningful. I really, really want a Career with a capital C. Right now I’m underpaid, over worked and messing about with what the trappings I think a career should look like.
I have suits, but nowhere to wear a power suit to. I am doing all sorts of exciting things, designing a sales and marketing campaign, learning Google analytics in my spare time, working evenings and weekends… and I feel like I’m being driven by the idea of what a Good Job is supposed to look like and no idea if this is basically some sort of corporate shamanism where I align the bones and sigils in the hope of uncovering some sort of buzz word laden, money attracting magic.
Let’s face it, despite all the Christian Greys and fur coat having wealthy Venuses, the average dom doesn’t have a high power/high class lifestyle attached. I have no clue what class I am- I grew up on welfare and various government assistant programs due to regular financial insolvency in my family. At first that was the understandable consequence of being the kid of a single mother, but the rest seems to be inexplicable bad luck and quite a bit of mismanagement. On the other hand I’m relatively privileged I got through shit thus far with a BA and no student debt.
To be honest I want a Career because of a deep seated financial insecurity caused by growing up at the mercy of other people’s employment prospects. I don’t buy into the idea of being an uber Dom with impeccable self control and yet… I want control and security in a wa that borders on pathalogical. I’m honestly really happy to have money, any money. I’m extremely materialistic, not in the sense of acquiring all the latest tech toys but thinking in terms of life being something that’s bought piece by piece.
This month, for example, I upgraded my bedding to something stupendously comfortable. I found an inexpensive bed spread to cover my beat up couch. Just thinking about this *stuff* makes me feel happier. It’s not a popular opinion, because I think you’re supposed to take this sort of thing for granted or be above it. And yet…
This leads me to second guess my romantic desire for dominance. In an ideal scenario, I want some sort of Career with a house husband or otherwise to me the earner, have money and be valued for making money. I also want to be the decider in my relationship beyond the bedroom and that makes me uncomfortable- am I doing it for them or for me, and is it fair to leverage this based on cash? Do I want that because it’s realistic for me, or because I distrust other people? This probably is just Worrying About Being Dominant and Being Guilty.
So not only am I worrying, careerwise, that I won’t be able to hack a system posited on fundamental inequalities that I’m not even sure I should support, but I have to wonder if the sort of inequalities I’m fetishizing are the very ones I’d rather shatter in reality. Never mind, I support amnesty international and have water boarded two people. There’s room for me to become an evil suit… if I can just figure it out.
At work, I’m doing two and a half people’s jobs, thanks to the quitting of the person one step above me on the ladder. The green of spring had really gotten going, which meant that copious amounts of tree cum are ending up my nose. There’s been shit tests aplenty, as part of my new job, from playing the game of “should I fire this person”? (No, you bloody well should not, I need them to do reports…) to whip around deadlines and new projects where people have no fucking clue what they’re doing. At a potent deadline around the 14th…
The demands of my high stress job really engender in me the urge to go home and really… take up control and really force someone into that submissive space for my benefit. It’s not a kick the dog thing, it’s a craving that has only gotten stronger with age to get into that comfortable, lofty little cloud that is power over someone else.
The other overwhelming impulse I get is to over buy food. You would not, going by the usual state in my kitchen, think that I was all that domestic by nature. I’ve mentioned in the past that nurturing is a really big part of my kinks, and it really extends to a certain sort of domestic fussiness that permeates my life. I’ve noticed that the one thing I’ll do as far as stress shopping is buying more food than I really need. Not eating it, but acquiring it like I was readying myself for winter.
So it’s been a few weeks of furious horniness and dominance cravings combined with over buying eats. And over buying, and over buying… While my house gets really cluttered because the other thing that happens with stress is not wanting to do basic tidying.
So I’m the host to the 18-35 munch in Montreal at the moment, and we’ve been wildly successful and got very big. There’s some problems though. See this as a release of steam, I’m not mad at the munch guests.
1) The age thing- people trying to squeak under in their late 30s or older, or bringing an older partner. This is not making other people happy. I have to make a blanket ruling about this for the munches now.
2) Hosting issues- We’re too big for most venue’s reserved spaces. Everyone wants the cheapest possible drinks, a semi-private area, food and good mingling, but is opposed to space rentals. People are complaining it’s too crowded.
3) People behaving badly- I need to wrangle a harassment case, though the person making the complaint is stubbornly refusing to be specific. We’re getting big enough we attract creepers. There’s enough people that I’m now getting “too cliquey!”
4) I think it’s big enough to need to be a committee effort, but organizing that, alone, is also a headache.
Last Thursday was the 18-35 munch, an event that has exploded in size at this point, and now is pulling in quite the large group. We’re meeting in a larger bar now, and with our general scale I’m having to discourage older persons from attending.
We had a few old people slip in this time, and older gentleman get turned away, accusing me of being hostile when it’s his first munch ever- though there were a lot of folk of that age group so I’m not sure who of the older folk that was or even if the poor bastard was actually 34 and well weathered. The thing is, I don’t set out to make old people feel bad- the age limit is in place because gatherings of mostly 40+ aged people scare the 19 and 20 year olds away. And there are not so many options for the latter group. I’m not going to throw the 36 year olds out, but neither do I want this to turn into an all ages thing.
Especially sad, a lot of the older folk who sent me courtesy emails missed the point. Telling me that they liked younger people or looked young wasn’t really the subject for the limits- it’s not intended to be face control.
It’s an organization challenge. For one thing we’re pretty top heavy, with a big crowd, and everyone wanting something as cheap as possible, but with food and good mingling. A part of my fantasizes about saying screw it and not holding the event anymore, passing it onto someone else. And yet I might as well stick with it- it won’t organize itself.
I took care of some tax paperwork that needed doing, and followed up with the Ex so he knew that as far as cofiling for 2012, the ball’s in his court again. Next month I’m turning 27. Perhaps for that reason I’m filled with a particular impatience, as if nothing is coming at the speed it should.
And yet, I took a pretty big leap in January, to correct something that was demonstrably not a large sign of maturity in my life up until that point. I broke off an almost six year relationship, expecting to abandon everything that didn’t fit into a taxi. With my Ex, I’ve been particularly careful talking about it- his privacy deserves respect and nothing is worse than tirades about a person who cannot defend themselves.
Breaking up didn’t make me a happier person per-say, because I’ve always been particularly good at living inside my head, and from that point, manufacturing my own contentment. I think, to apply a lesson from that situation, the problem was not basic sexual incompatibility, because I was quite capable of finding him attractive. It wasn’t ideological issues, though we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff, because I again, tend to have that space in my head that generally lets people I’m close to be people. It was a fundamental lack of respect that was eventually starting to go both ways that was making it bad for both of us.
Again, I think I’m on pretty dubious grounds as far as telling the whole wide web, though I’ve also talked intimately of my sexuality in other posts so… I’ll try to stick to talking about me and not him.
A lot of people seem to think that being a D-type makes you magically able to pilot relationships to the point that a few lonely-and-delusional sub types will chime in about how you just need to put glue in the lock of the chastity cage and everything will come up roses, and yet I think this sort of problem is something that could happen to anyone, kinky or not.
Things I took into the relationship, that were pretty important, is being a survivor of child abuse, and being part of the addict-and-enabler song and dance. A lot of people have gone through what I did (there’s no apparent correlation between being kinky and childhood abuse survival) and it grinds a pattern into you that is so familiar and reliable that I can meet someone from the same weird world and just about close my eyes and run my fingers, blind, through the maze they’ve got embossed on their psyche. What does that have to do with my Ex? Learned helplessness is a bitch.
In the oddest way, kink did kill our relationship. Not basic sexual incompatibility but some older person on fetlife advising me that as I aged I would understand all those “[Sigh!]… whatever!” things women are supposed to give in response to their male partners. I find the idea horrifying. And, one of the prices of staying with the ex would have been fundamental acceptance that I would never be listened to, in any particular capacity- I’d rather be a crazy cat lady than resigned.
But independence is pretty amazing. I like having my own apartment. It needs work, but even the relative lack of resources that came as a trade off of not being in a shared household… does not seriously impact my quality of life. I have noticed that I am being treated like I am more attractive, which generally tends to go with being on the lighter end of my weight fluctuations and is a definite thing. People are shallow. Then again, I’m not living as much inside my head as it was, so that’s a positive trade off.
I engage in lots of little projects, as is my habit. Honestly, it keeps me occupied. Each month brings some small improvement. Not bad for someone who was sleeping on a pile of laundry mid January! This week’s extravagance will hopefully be updating my bedding, at least to get a nice duvet cover that doesn’t have the general texture of sandpaper.
And on the flip side, I’m enjoying the challenges of my job. Hilariously, my boss wants me to temper my “direct” communication style, which means code switching to utterly fake corporate cheerleader in all external emails. This is not challenging for me, but if I actually believes in True Dominance (TM) I’d claim it was my nature shining through.
Instead, insincere exclamation points.
This is generic stock art. No idea where it started out.
This is part 2 on my advice for how to make your profile sell yourself effectively. Last time we talked about choosing the perfect profile picture, and so now you can be confident you have the visual side of your search taken care of. But what about the text part?
Your Profile Text Opens a Conversation
Many websites, from fetife to collarme allow you to have some personal space to talk about yourself. If you’re not a big writer, this part is particularly daunting. Nonetheless, it’s a great way to intrigue people with what sort of person you are. And, when crafting your profile there’s a few things to take into account that will maximize positive results.
Avoid the Negative
One of the most common dating methods people use to check for the stability of the person is how bitter or negative they seem. Thus profiles like “Are there any good women out there?!” or “No fakes, time wasters or crazies!”, rather than warning people away, make them feel like you’re surrounded by a dark cloud of drama. People who are ghastly don’t think they are ghastly, and it won’t protect you.
Do not make a big deal about your negative qualities either. Even if you think you’re ugly or unattractive, let other people be the judge of that. Your adult acne is another person’s “rugged, rough good looks and ruddy complexion”, your lack of experience with sex is another person’s “touching and enthusiastic innocence”.
If you need to qualify something you don’t want, try to phrase it in a positive way. For example if you don’t want to be involved with pro-work, avoid angry tirades. A simple “I prefer my D/s to be part of a romantic relationship, not a financial relationship.” gets your point across best.
Describe Yourself, Not Someone Else
Another common mistake people make, both in kink and vanilla dating, is spending more time telling people what they’re looking for and not enough time talking about who or what they are. This would be as if you applied for work at a company by describing the company to them instead of sharing your resume.
So “I’m looking for a cruel, strict dom with ebony hair and crimson lips” or “I want a male submissive who is slightly chubby and into puppy play” does not help. People who meet that description have no reason to know that they would be attracted to you. Furthermore people who meet these characteristics may not recognize that they have them or will be worried you are only interested in them because of those factors.
It’s okay to mention the types of relationships you like, but they should be showing who you are as a person in relation to that. And remember, you are not your fetishes, they are a a part of you.
Talk About More Than Sex (or Love)
Even if you want a quick lay or a relationship based on sex, letting your personality shine out is part of what makes you attractive. And it can seem tempting to talk only about the sort of relationship you want, it’s rather as bad as talking only about the sort of person you want.
Everyone has at least one good feature and beauty standards are so flexible that there are positive words for even things that are out of fashion right now. Hot people are often hot because of how they present themselves, not just a nice face or figure. And extroverts and introverts are just as attractive to the right person.
Things to think about:
Are you more passive or active in daily life? Shy? Out going?
Is your sense of humour mean or sweet? Do you like cute things? Are you sentimental?
Realistically, what are your hobbies?
Is this a bedroom or a lifestyle thing for you, ideally?
Talking about what you want, as far as fetishes, can be a particular challenge. You don’t want a laundry list of kinks, but if you’re trying to date kinkily, you probably want at least touch on them. However every couple (triad, etc…) has their own particulars so remember, the relationship you get will probably compromise and touch on some fetishes you have in common and some you don’t. You should also lead with your personality hobbies and tastes in vanilla things first, kinks second. A lot of stuff that people would never normally consider is sexy with the right person.
Consider the Value of Shibboleths
A shibboleth is a marker of group membership, often arbitrary. We have a lot of inbuilt assumptions about certain characteristics. Dating websites like OKcupid let users tag themselves with hobbies and interests. Their data shows that this can have a powerful effect in initiating conversation. For example, atheists tend to glom onto each other.
When you create a profile, you should seed a few topics you are passionate about enough to have fun talking about them. More strategically, if you have interests that are particularly appealing to the types of person you are interested in, it’s worth emphasizing those. For example I like nerdy males, and it is to my advantage to signal heavily that not only will I tolerate your gaming night, but I’m liable to be the face behind the DM screen. (Yes I am nerdy!)
Format to Be Readable
Avoid wRiTiNG liek tis. Fetlife doesn’t let you get too out of control, but other websites let you choose other colours and fonts. Do not indulge too much in wild changes of colour or eye bleeding contrastsand text effects. Furthermore a quick once over can’t hurt you any and avoid typos that make you sound less intelligent that you are.
This is hardly and exhaustive look at profile writing, but it’s a good leaping off place for you. In another post I’m going to give you some profile writing prompts to help inspire you about what to talk about.
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:
Allegedly the first Romans got wives by abducting a bunch of Sabine women. The story, and legends like it, informs popular culture, to this day.
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!”
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.
I turned 27 at the end of last week. My living room is still festooned with bunting and balloons, rainbow dollar store streamers put up with tape, hanging in frothy swathes. Leftover high end 
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Last Thursday was the 18-35 munch, an event that has exploded in size at this point, and now is pulling in quite the large group. We’re meeting in a larger bar now, and with our general scale I’m having to discourage older persons from attending.
