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

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.

Now some pros may just be naturally promiscuous women (because why not!) who are simply paid to do what they love, but take away their paychecks or expect them to go dutch (as i would consider perfectly reasonable) and most of them would seriously curtail their activity. Talk about my fantasy of having a kept man and most people look at me like I had three heads. (Nobody blinks when femsubs want to be a kept pet, mind you!) The ability for there to be a whole industry built on things claiming to be my sexuality for the purpose of male sub pleasing had gone beyond a nice thing to have and into making me invisible.

Think I’m over reacting? It’s not hard to find examples.

The other night I was listening to the generally thoughtful Dr. Sue- specifically to her podcast about the pet peeves of dommes, in which she explained that “a good dom should be like an escort” (as opposed to a street walker). Leaving aside that street walkers are generally not doing it because they like being on the lower tier of sex work, I basically had to stop listening at that point. Imagine if they said “a good heterosexual woman should be like an escort, not a street walker”.

For me, professional dominants were the first introduction to me of what female sexual dominance was, which is like if I’d learned about the existence of sex as a whole as something you need to be paid to do normally. I don’t think I’m alone in this- in fact there’s a comment on the sister piece to this blog post to that effect. It’s part of what drove Bitchy Jones to spin out her marvellous words. And it’s got to fucking stop.

I don’t mean that prodoms should stop talking, teaching and sharing  and it’s not their fault that our world is broken, but sometimes I feel so damn lonely in my own sexuality. I feel alone in my needs, when guys can’t understand why bribing me with dishes or offers of money doesn’t make me feel dominant, when some of my male submissive friends can’t understand why I won’t go pro. When they can’t separate client pleasing behaviour from my behaviour and when it has to be a competition of whip skill and psychological intuition.

Being a pro is not about the giggly, strange and serious path of sexual self discovery, it’s being a vessel by which the submissive experiences his desires. No matter how they dress it up, while dominant-for-fun can be pros, it is inherently coloured by client wishes and cannot function without the client. My sexuality at least, can get by on masturbation during a dry patch where as pro-dominance is performative. And at the end of the day, while I like and respect many pros, I am not like them. I am a sister, not a twin, and we are only siblings in a bigger family, to which I am just as much a sister to a male dom, or a female sub or a male sub.