(Brace yourself, I am being very verbose.)
I think, as a community, we haven’t fully grappled with the fact that the roles of dominant and submissive are not always perfect puzzle pieces/mirrors of each other. When they do so, it’s typically either luck (two people are inherently compatible) or work (they arrived there via some sort of compromise). I also believe we keep trying to come up with a way of doing this that sidesteps the work *as equals* and gets hung up on the inherent properties of the roles we hope to embody.
Much effort has been put into grappling with what is or isn’t valid in kink, with some advice being bedrock to safety, like the importance of consent. Other approaches are not so helpful or actively harmful.
In the niche that is femdom (and a space like this), a lot of default advice is to lower emphasis on fetishes/things done and put more emphasis on submissive compliance. This works to a point, but it tends to be kind of assuming a collective dynamic on all of us (that dominants get to inherently define the meaning of both roles) when the practical reality benefits from the presumption of equality.
The approach that submission is whatever the dominant says it is… Is incomplete. And yet a lot of people seem to take this for granted in lifestyle femdom discussions.
Of course, in lifestyle femdom, there’s practical reasons this approach has tenure, in so much that we tend to be the flashpoint between gender expectations and one of the primary tensions in D/s. Women (and femmes) of any orientation deal with one sided objectification that can be incredibly dehumanizing while asking extensive labor from us largely to benefit someone with more socio-economic power. None of this is news.
And yet, the devaluation of what subs might use as framing *also* has problems. For example, it gets weaponized via whorephobia- eg the casual speculation a professional building a scene within the specifications of a client must actually be some sort of crypto-sub, secretly doing service. At the same time, this pushback makes it hard to have a conversation outside of kink roles, because there can be an overcorrection to invalidate what one doesn’t personally enjoy as “not true femdom”, rather than engaging with it as a complicated topic.
See pegging, which is a highly polarizing kink loaded with social symbolism and a very different relationship to the sensory part, depending on the individual and their anatomy. It can be simultaneously genderqueer, transgressive and incredibly patriarchal. The strap-on is at once the phallic tool by which you cannot dismantle master’s house, and a form of liberation. All of kink is like that with every tiny facet going to have an asterisk and the note “it depends/YMMV“.
The same follows with what I describe as the “two femdoms needing to coexist problem”, but this extends behind our particular niche.
The reality is what may make a submissive feel submissive (or turned on) doesn’t always match what makes a dominant feel dominant. If both orientations are starting as equals, neither is more valuable. That doesn’t mean a given person is required to perform the whims of another, but my whimsical fantasy nonsense as a dominant is not inherently more valid than a sub’s whimsical fantasy nonsense.
I believe, by extension, telling subs they aren’t truly submitting unless they do exclusively my personal fantasy nonesense is not going to get the results we hope it does, and it’s still objectifying the fuck out of me.
Instead, what we do need to acknowledge is that all dominants exist under imposed expectations, regardless of the gender of our partners, and that we often feel these assumptions overstep.
However, while this is particularly noted in hetero femdom, it’s also noted in other queer kink of any gender combo (with an associated top shortage). What tends to be ignored is that it exists in M/f as well. It’s just in the latter case the way we weight gender mean that there is a paradox, both that male dominants are more catered to, but also where they might not enjoy something that breaks stereotypes about automatic power, they are given less freedom to complain. I think I have it worse than the average male dominant, but the conversation needs to include that even he is under some peculiar rules. Even if you don’t want to listen to men very much, as dominants, you are still getting their warmed over norms.
And, at the same time we conflate gendered issues with BDSM niche specific issues- for example femdoms and femsubs spend a lot of time lecturing men to be less harassing. This exasperating reality of sexism we share, unfortunately, tends to be attributed not to a certain percentage of the population being encouraged to be abusive fuckwits, but each group respectively asking “why are subs/doms such trash?!” In my opinion the self sorting into niches is broadly helpful in many aspects (not the least of which is that mainline BDSM is hostile to female dominants), but there’s a certain dark comedy there too in the lost solidarity.
So, looping back to my title, the two versions of every D/s role are as follows:
- The self perception and needs of a person.
- The things that are projected onto us.
Thus, as a dominant there’s both the stuff that falls into the cluster of femdom gaze (itself not universal but more likely to be closer to the mark) and stuff about someone who is ostensibly me but more about a sub gaze. However the inverse follows that subs have stuff for/about them and also stuff for people ostensibly into them.
In femdom, the stuff for us is so embarrassingly underserviced that “where is porn for me?” tends to border on opening the metaphorical drawer and finding IOU. But if you look at M/f, you can see a much more robust amount of niche pandering that assumes different priorities by D/s orientation. And, it requires emphasis that say, erotica made for femsubs is not erotica for m-dominants. People of group A might incidentally like stuff for group B and vice versa, of course, or be excluded from everything, by personal wiring.
And thus, waving one’s hand at the stuff that caters to the presumed needs of sub men as invalid also oversimplifies. At the same time, these don’t exist in a vacuum, so a buck-stops-with-the-dominant approach still opens up all sorts of second guessing about authenticity. For example, the idea of a “Mistress” is neither a pure creation of subs and their fantasies nor dominants in their self expression. And additional tension exists that there’s a vertical loop as well, since subs and dominants find meaning within their respective identity as well.
The problem, as I see it, is not trying to extract the wishes of subs entirely from the idea of authenticity, it’s to extract out where the relationship is unequal in who is imposing what on whom. To do otherwise ignores the role external input has on what we want.
I think the “just do what the dominant wants or GTFO” isn’t the worst defense mechanism in the context of the over weighting of the fantasies of men and subs, but I think it doesn’t solve the underlying issue. I just also think I prefer to ask my submissive identified partners, regardless of gender, to do the work to get as close to equality as possible as I feel the self abrogation approach is just asking me to be lucky enough to get a partner who coincidentally never has any conflict between my needs and theirs.