O Non-Fiction

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

Review: Fealty

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Not many images of thisFeatly
by Ms. Mahler

It’s an often unreasonable criticism of something to accuse it of resembling a romance novel. Actually this is one of Fealty’s core strengths as a short  story. It’s free too!

Fealty works for me because it’s basically one of my fantasies, albeit treated much more nicely. The Baroness of the story, finding herself widowed and free to marry whom she likes, intercedes in the life of her true love when he swears an unbreakable bond of fealty to the wrong lord, an enemy to herself and their lands. Holding her knight captive through magic, she keeps herself entertained while holding him prisoner. He, in turn must reconcile honour with his love for the lady who is holding him.

I compare it to a romance novel positively, and it has a lot of the core strengths of the genre. As I’ve talked about before, romance novels are female achievement stories- and there also tends to be a focus on hearth and home that has the practicalities of a chatelaine. Since so many femdom stories focus on a male audience first, it’s a nice change of pace to have a by-women-for-women approach that otherwise characterizes romance as a genre. Much like the genre it’s very sweet about the sex- the language is circumspect even when she’s literally riding his cock- lots of wetness and rubbing, less vulgar. I am a filthy mouthed bawd and it’s nice to see someone be a hell of a lot more subtle without losing the point- and I can believe Baroness Myrtle is getting off.

Particularly worth note is the deliberate non-inclusion of rape in it. Although magic/fantasy stories allow for plenty of scenarios of beguilement, the female lead makes scrupulously sure that, prisoner or not, her captive knight wants all the sex. I generally shade a lot darker- but I appreciate the relevancy to a broader audience.

Category: Short Fiction
Rating: o~o~o~o (4/5)
How I got it: Free!
TL;DR: Short and sweet, more tender than mean. Captivity with consent, with a very fantasy romance flavour.

NonExpert Advice: Can I be a sub and an ‘Alpha’?

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I get a trickle of questions, much to my general bafflement. However, when they’re not strange men asking for training, I do my best to answer them. Like this person, who kindly allowed me to reprint their question. The wanted an answer to the age old question of if they got to be a sub without giving up the rest of their personalities.

Hello Miss,

I was wondering if you would have some time on your hands to help me understand the lifestyle and myself a little better. The reason I ask is because I find that you are aware of many things and I would love to hear your opinions and views on certain areas.

I have my view about the lifestyle but I think it’s time i begin my journey but there are certain things I need to know first. Also there are certain things I need to overcome first before I can say that I am ready to get involved in the scene.

I understand if you are busy but I would really appreciate any help you can offer as I have been struggling with this side of me for a very long time now and so far I have been doing it alone all this time. I know that there are monthly munches but to be honest it’s not really something that I am interested in.

I might sound like I’m all over the place and that’s because I am. Honestly I don’t know where to even begin and not to mention I suck at expressing myself so if there is anything that needs to be clarified please ask.

I think of myself living two lives. One of them is the so called vanilla lifestyle where I am the alpha male and the alternative lifestyle of submission to a female dominant. Can both worlds actually exists or am I being too greedy?

[Name redacted]

Of course he got a reply…

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Review: Erotic Tales Of Female Domination, Tomio Hall-Black

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Erotic Tales of Female Domination is an inexpensive ebook, containing three short stories, each one a closed BDSM scene, and each takes place within the boundary of a BDSM relationship. Everything, regardless of the theme, is consensual.

Tomio also writes over at “Masculine Submission“.

The first two short stories really did nothing for me. I don’t think they were that bad, but very dialog dependent, with very little ‘story’, much more sexual vinegettes than full tales in their own right. However the last of the three… yow.

Angela Makes The Rules– Angela, a loving girlfriend, and her boyfriend Andrew are trying out one of his D/s fantasies. With her boyfriend tied spread eagled to the bed and blindfolded, her tease and denials scene is all about control, with light touches and lots of talking. Of course, Angela discovers, she likes it.

Butt… Surrender– Loving D/s Pegging. It’s focused on the feeling of being owned from strapon sex. Read it to get a warm up for talking dirty without being very vulgar.

Be My Whore – This is the last and best of the stories. I had to go retrieve my socks from where they were blown from my feet. Whether it is the sexual pacing, the fact that it’s genuinely funny, or that there’s a little edge of cruelty, which I like, a make believe role play fantasy of whore, pimp and clients made me laugh and gave me warm and fuzzies.

Category: Fiction
Rating: o~o~o~o (4/5)
How I got it: Bought it!
TL;DR: Three loving femdom stories that focus on happy couples having fun. Everything is 100% realistic and the last story is particularly good!

Dominant Cunt Maracas (And Kegels)

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So, someone decided that the best possible way to train your vaginal muscles was weighted benwa balls. Or, as the official brand name of this toy is called, Luna Beads.

They come, like many sex toys marketed to women, in non-threatening pastels. To make the experience of stuff to shove in your vadge seem classier, you get a little black box and a white silk storage bag. The actual toy is designed with a degree of customization- you have powder blue or pink balls of different weights, two with a little loop string so you won’t lose them inside yourself and then have to guddle a loose, slippery ball out of the pocket up near your cervix, and a white silicone harness that holds two balls together (see picture) in which ever colour combination you like.

The outer balls are hollow, hard plastic with heavy disclaimers in your accompanying booklet about it being the being super safe kind. The weights inside appear to be rubber covered metal ball bearings, about the size and shape that you used to find in an old track ball mouse. You use it by shoving it into your cunt until it’s past the muscle that allows a vagina to hold things in. In theory the weights are supposed to tone your vagina while the balls within balls are supposed to provide sexual stimulation.

This is not a good product for a reason I will get into. An actual set of baoding balls, which are metal hand exercisers following a similar principle, generally vibrate in a vaguely harmonious way. If you like vibrations, which I get nothing from, this could be a good thing for a no electricity route to self gratification. Luna Beads, not so much.

Clunk-clunk-rattle-clunk. The internal balls do roll around freely with every motion of your hips. However I will provide the clarification that the do so by random, not very rhythmic bonking. If having something gently but abruptly clonk you on the inside of your vagina, hurrah. And don’t let smarmy marketing copy make you think you’ll be wearing this to the bank and the gym. Theses little clonks are surprisingly loud!

The net result is essentially about as erotic as the maraca it’s going to turn you into.  I’ve tried wearing these numerous times, including during my very vigorous masturbation style, which should have made them the most stimulating with how I get myself off. Usually I like having something heavy inside me, but this was not a good idea. However, again, sounding like a four year old’s attempt at percussion does not a happy dom make. A rattly dom, but not a happy one.

As far as a pelvic floor exerciser I’m undecided. I’ve been doing kegels since childhood, and have no trouble making my vagina do lots of micro-contractions. Wearing the balls over a prolonged period, like half an hour, at the heaviest weight, appears to produce some muscle pressure. But I have to feel like the inconvenience of their rattling isn’t to the benefit and it’s not like vaginal grip strength is easy to quantify.

At the end of the day, a strong pelvic floor, as well as muscular awareness, is good for both men and women. However I’m pretty sure that the defects in these rattles make them unsuitable for most people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The ProDom Problem Thing

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Or: In which Miss Pearl opines on what she knows not.

Disclaimer: I am not a sex worker. I do not speak for sex workers. I really hope this is not patronizing and this is me trying to think about what I’m bombarded with. Tell me why I am wrong in the comments if you would like.

Professional female dominants are such an integral part of BDSM communities it’s functionally impossible to imagine the scene without them, but they are also one of the groups people get pissed off at most. Amateurs hate the fact that it turns sex into a job (especially non-pro femdom, where there is a decided difference between beating men because it makes you horny and beating men because you get paid, so the fact that news outlets generally are obligated to quote one pro per article on kink-in-real-life really colours things) or encourages judgment on performance standards. Male subs complain about getting spammed with business solicitations, or hand wring about the vulnerable and the naive being preyed on by wicked fraudsters. All these things suck.

But, in their defence, prodoms generally own the dungeons we play in, they make a reasonable deal of the porn we enjoy, and they tend to end up as sex educators and active contributing community members.

There’s more reasons…

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The Secret of Being the Best Submissive

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being the best submissive

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

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

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

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

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

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Hot/Cool Fictional Male “Subs”: Momo

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We’ve looked at subs who were supposed to be taken seriously in the stereotypical masculine role, from fantasy lead, Richard, to the original super hero, but that’s hardly the entire picture. male submission is no limited to performance in traditional roles. This next sub, very explicitly in an Owner/pet relationship and the work deals with loving someone despite not measuring up to the assumptions about what a man should be.

You’re My Pet: Momo

Kneeling before his new ownerMomo is the name picked out for the male lead in a manga and live action television show (Kimi wa Petto/Tramps Like Us) about an explicitly Owner/Pet relationship between a stressed out career woman (Sumire) and a dance prodigy (Takeshi). After finding Momo homeless and sick on the streets, Sumire rescues the diminutive young man. As he recovers in her apartment, he begs to stay, and her joking suggestion that he can only stay as her pet gets met by enthusiastic barking.

She names him “Momo” after her childhood dog, and the two set up living together. But, she declares that it won’t be a sexual relationship, she only sleeps with men with higher height, higher income and higher career/education. This is part of her challenge as a character. Sumire is non-conforming with gender expectations, with (for Japan) stereotypically masculine hobbies. At the story’s opening she had just gotten a demotion for hitting a sexual harasser. Frustrated in love and picked on by female coworkers for her unemotional demeanour, Sumire hides a very fragile heart inside a shell of hard hitting professionalism.

Momo provides her with the unconditional love of a pet. His challenge is dealing with his own career, as a modern dancer. Unable to continue as a ballet prodigy because of his height, Momo has turned his talents to modern dance. As well as proving the stereotype  of dancers being kinky, for him, being a pet lets him feel safe, loved and wanted. Sumire looks after him, providing him with food, shelter and bathes and cuddles him. sometimes he acts more dog like, especially to amuse her, and sometimes he’s more human, although she generally has to look out for him and he’s goofy and a little derpy about his responsibilities

Bath time!
Cuddles!

Momo’s boyish exhuberance is undimmed by Sumire’s controlling tendencies. But, don’t take my word for it, check out an english language translation of the manga!

A very typical exchange.

Although they are perfectly happy together, much of the tension comes from hiding their relationship from nosy people, and the fact that Sumire cannot reconcile the bliss she has at home with what she should want. The reintroduction of her college crush kicks off the main challenge of the story, where she attempts to date someone who is everything she thinks she wants. In practice she has a lot of trouble opening up and relaxing with Momo’s rival, and although she finds him hot, everything is depicted as stiff and awkward.  Faithful Momo allows her to lie and claim her pet is her brother in order to not scare his rival away, going along with her explanation and being supportive of her stated goals.

The rival!

Meanwhile of course, Sumire and Momo develop some healthy romantic tension. For Momo of course, this is forbidden and for Sumire, incredibly confusing. She’s only initially able to accept having a boisterous young man bouncing around the place by making it as unsexual as possible, and she also has to deal with redefining what she considers attractive.

Woof!

To be a bit circumspect in the name of spoilers, resolving the conflicts of the story, mean reconciling who people really are. Momo is able to be the most honest, and his subplot is pretty much just figuring out his dance career and how that might take him away from his beloved owner, while Sumire must come to terms with the fact that she doesn’t really want a guy who outdoes her in everything and that she likes who she is and likes that he likes who she is.
The manga VS the show

It’s a romance comic/show aimed at women, and it’s a conflict that’s not unfamiliar in femdom, when you first set out to try to make sense of what works for you. While M/f has to reconcile explaining that it’s not some sort of reactionary right wing abuse excuse,  F/m bumps up against gender expectations in a way that’s often a challenge for doms and subs alike. Although I’ve never personally worried about being gender conforming, this post is a bit personal for me, because I know that Sumire expressions of dominance are really very close to mine- wanting to look after my property, and liking playfulness. It’s also a good example of something that’s very blatant without ever really touching on the explicitly kinky nature of what’s going on in the story. Which is pretty valuable because not everything kinky that people do is dressed up with whips and leather.

Fiction often gives us the tools to discuss the things that work for us and codify them. The entire manga/show “Kimi wa Petto” is also charming in that the dominant is not a villain and she doesn’t have to stop being dominant to be able to love Momo, nor does he have to stop being her sub. There’s some aspects of “melt the ice princess” but she doesn’t stop being a pet owner in her thawed out state. And, Momo is presented as the one you want to root for in the comic. Cute, bratty, but above all loyal, Momo does not lose his sexiness just because he’s property, neither does he need to have a “hero” moment where he has to put his submissiveness aside to get things done.

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Next week, we’re getting thin on content again. I encourage you to post in the comments about a pairing you’d like to see, and why you feel the male half is a good example of a sub. It can be subtext or explicit, porn or not. The only rule is that the male sub needs to be either hot or be awesome. Or both!

Where Is The 50Shades Of Femdom?

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

A woman's grey shawl, pale, softly draped on a white mannequin torso, that is also wearing 2 strands of pearls
Grey shawl image borrowed from etsy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Having a Sub Makes Me a Better Person

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Subs get hugs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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