“Sharyn Ferns” or just Ferns, as they are known to the internet, is an lioness of the Lifestyle Femdom Revolution of the late aughts and 2010s. These days, that seems absurdly dramatic to say it happened. Young kinksters make Mommy or femboy jokes with casual comfort. Whole forums are dedicated to a squintillion facets of how to femdom with thousands of members able to drill down and look for what they want. Mainstream romance groups periodically demand more representation.
And while censorship is threatening all that has been built, we have never had it so good, thanks in no small part to this person.
Before, there was a time when ideas that femdom could be anything other than a strict fetish dominatrix being paid or that anything vaguely male and submissive could be attractive to a woman were both radical even among niche libertine pockets of the world. Gentle Femdom was a novel idea. Wearing your pajamas to play was an act of surprisingly scandalous rebellion.
But, then things started to change. Tumblr had glorious indie porn, Fetlife had thriving discussion groups and most information about kink was disseminated through blogs. People pushed back on the status quo, sharing, arguing and creating. Ferns was a part of all this, stalwartly managing various bickering groups and sharing her journey on first a blog and then later a podcast. If you are under the age of 30 and into Femdom with partners outside of a professional context, even if you don’t know her or of her, you have probably been influenced by her work.
A huge part of that was making information more accessible, and working on improving representation. Her short read guide books remain a great introduction to the how to part, while her collated anthologies of Happy Femdom Stories are of enormous importance in recording the words of people who are seldom otherwise allowed to share their world. Domme Chronicles, on the other hand, is her story, and as much an important part of her achievements as her support of others in pursuing personal fulfillment.
That being said, when the book came out circa 2013 and review copies were being handed out, my rather exacting approach to review made me a poor fit. What this is to the author is less a commercial endeavor and more an act of extreme vulnerability. It is published in the spirit of that old poem:
“I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
W.B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, 1899
So, how to describe this book, then, over a decade later? It is a collection of short, really bordering on flash fiction erotica. No, that’s not enough to sum it up. It’s a raw ripped open glimpse of hunger and hope.
Ferns gives you a full immersion of the sensation of desire where sadism and adoration are so tangled up in each other that the sub becomes an elusive ideal, hunted, and to simultaneously be had and consumed. It’s the caught breath when your lover does something that just clicks in your brain and shoots straight down your spinal cord into arousal so intense it’s an act of masochism to feel it and something transcendental all at once.
Ferns made her blog about the surprisingly mundane, discussing the functional bones of relationships, the gripes of her cohort and the mundanities of life. For an activity treated as the lewdest of lewd like BDSM, there’s very little sex in most of what she’s written there. Not this book. That’s where the metaphorical clothes come off.
And while the majority of it is intensely loving, almost worshipful in the presentation of how impressed her nameless partner(s) can make her, and the pieces could be read as stand alones, the back and forth is telling a larger story that allows it to carry along the darker bits. For example, nestled amidst multiple paens to the pleasure of a beloved partner coming home is a savage fantasy that can only exist in that context of the imaginary, of murder. Alongside a dozen or more likely real life stories of things going very well is a little memory of a first time going very right at a BDSM club, where by all measure they shouldn’t have. It’s a very unsafe story of being flung well out of your depth and swimming despite a world that set you up to sink.
Contrast here is important to the work as a whole, with the softer bits almost serving as protective padding to the metaphorical knives. Nothing is particularly very long, but some things are very sharp.
I think, also, in reading this it might be helpful to realize they are designed with another intentional aspect. The stories’ short (often almost abrupt) length and prose structure makes them read aloud ready. There’s no narrative of a single character here, indeed nobody has any names and it’s never clear how many different subs, real or imaginary, are being talked about. But that’s rather the point, as this is her voice, and ultimately about being allowed to want things.
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I cannot tell you how much I loved reading this, and how much it means to me.
Not just because it’s a glowing review while also giving me some very generous historical credit I doubt I deserve (though there is that :)), but because you ‘got it’ in exactly the way I felt it and tried to put it on the page, both as a whole and as individual snippets.
That feeling of being truly *seen* and understood is such a huge gift, and you expressed that understanding so so beautifully, I could float on it.
TL;DR: I’m so glad you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for this amazing review.
Ferns