All my pain games with my partners, my denial, teasing and so forth are pursuing a very particular outcome. Because it turns me on and makes me feel deeply connected to my so called victim. It is not a script- the means and confirmation of the goal is subjective; psychologically intimate; and physically impossible to clone beyond that creative moment, together. For me, my sadism is an intersection with my empathy with their suffering, and that sense of lost of will and control I perceive from them.
My biggest challenge in partners is that I need them to be aroused by what I am doing. I cannot do pain just as a power trip, no matter the consent offered. The desire can be after, or in a complex way, but broader experience has taught me that there is a scope of sensation and framing here I need to have echoed back.
As a submissive, Silver answers with joy to being called a “slutty little masochist”. I could not have it any other way, but if I thought about anything in sincere terms of being blessed, his welcome and obvious lust at my sadistic femdom cravings would go high up on that list. Torment him and I am riding a buzz. And, hilariously, we always end with being surprised to be getting a thank you from each other after. Each thinks the acts of the other are a gift.
Hurting Silver, last night
The rubber band snaps and he gives a yelp that is closer to a sob. Silver is in latex, transparent gloves and corseted leggings. We have explored with the potential of the tens unit I got him for his birthday last year, and of rope. A Lithuanian supplied, Soviet army surplus rubber gas mask gives him an oddly cute look, the old fashioned metal circles of the goggles amplifying the size of his pretty eyes. It was a a Christmas gift for him this year and I am very pleased with it.
When I want, I can put my hand over the air flow, instant easy breath play. The shape is snouted, adding an unexpected stubby cuteness. For fun I put him on all fours and reach forward to put my finger over the air intake while I slide his cock down my throat. It’s intense for me, and I feel him brush against my teeth, playing the game, no air for you, no air for me. When he is settled in place, it’s a rare moment where he doesn’t essentially freeze up in obedient attention, his cock begins to pump in and out in my throat. Yes. Fuck me. No concern for himself and being proper, mindless thrusting into that still unfamiliar wetness with the threatening edges of the possible sharp bites I could give.
I am in black latex, cat suit, neck to toes. The sweat pools at my hip level, mingling with the wetness of my arousal. I feel squeezed but not restrained, after a struggle to get it settled just so. I under lubricate my latex, I don’t like slime on my skin. And, even if it hurts a bit I like that rubber grip tugging where it touches.
The rubber bands for his cock and balls started for my hair to help it stick out the ports of my own latex hood. That garment is now discarded, and when the tens unit got its tour, after brief session wrenching his traps, I went after his cock. The pads weren’t interested in sticking- it didn’t like his skin very much in general, but I m a clumsy improviser, the drunken boxer of kinky sex. Elastics made the pads into proper contacts for the prickles of the electricity, to tease his erection.
Only a tease, though.
It was an interesting sensation, but even on high it didn’t hurt him significantly. I needed him to suffer, this wouldn’t do! When it forced the big muscles on his back to shudder and twitch that was, at least a delight as far as the look of disquiet and pressure on his face and the aesthetic forced flexing. So, this toy was put aside for other games.
And yet in my check a single black rubber band was left on the mid length of his cock. There are the thin kind, designed to be invisible in my dark hair, not thread or cloth wrapped. It looked like it was meant to be there, with all the latex.
I played at bondage, earlier, capping the tops of his opera length gloves in a way that let me pull his arms behind his back. I put him in a web, with that grey rope, to admire the warm swell of skin. Now he’s free of ties, except for that thin black line. I go to take it off, and then playfully pull and let it snap back.
It hurts. Its sharp, even against the mid length of him. SNAP. Again and again, alternating targets and sides. I move it about, finding misery in the thin band just below the head. And of course his balls. SNAP.
Those are even worse. Some cosmic jester decided, in protection of the species that cocks were made to take a beating, dumb things that they are, for all the hold nerve rich promise of an orgasm. But, break your balls, and all bets are off. SNAP.
I can’t do serious harm with a cheap elastic. After four or five pulls it is starting to permanently stretch out, losing bite. I smile, drawn in by his whimpers. He does not like this. Like virtually everyone I have played with, Silver prefers thud over sting. Masochists are descriptive connoisseurs, communicating their feelings in a million ways. I think that’s how they know they need to seduce us, if we can’t feel what they feel secondhand, what are we dominants to do?
I fetch two more elastics and make free with him. I am being intentionally nasty, putting on the bully voice. It’s a bit meta, acknowledging the ridiculousness of all this. If a cat could speak while it made a game of the mouse, this is how I imagine it would sound. Predatory violence, not reactive, joyful not terrified.
Its already a mind fuck to grapple that he can barely stand a rubber band or two popping him in the balls. Little pinpoint, plum bruises make stars where I have snapped. And I keep asking, “oh, what’s wrong, does it hurt?”
Edge play now.
I keep asking him if he thinks he wants to stop. Every so often he needs a break and then says he can continue. His erection hasn’t left us, maybe because of the beautiful trap of his latex fetish and my clear enjoyment. If he went soft I would stop. I wonder if he knows that. I know he can take more, its abrupt and awful, but not like being burned or similar past human sensibility ways to make a point.
Overthinking the thoughtless part
I find it interesting that in all the talk about how to femdom, very little goes into the why, or what is going on for a dominant. There are lots of sadistic women, professional and not, but our voices are so muted as to limit us to talking about how what we do makes us amused or empowered. If you are a long time reader, you know how frustrated I am that outreach to make us acceptable makes this sexless. What further surprises me is that male sadists, outside of a pornographic, aren’t that vocal about the subject.
I’ve seen a few talk about subs looking cute or sexy in suffering, but sadists don’t babble on the way that masochists have their version of the metaphorical hundred words for snow we assign to the poor Inuit. I think we might worry about being scary. Certainly for all the way everyone dreamily says they want a top, I am not sure “I am a sexual sadist” is ever going to be on the front line of asking for broader social acceptance.
I write this sort of knowing that me being a femdom who REALLY gets off on hurting people can be held against me by all manner of concerned imbeciles. Which is why it needs to be said, their pain reactions is my fetish, the loop of hurting someone a loving joy. To hurt is to connect. It’s not about the most pain, but the right kind for the individual.
Safety necessarily comes first, but there’s so much discomfort out there that won’t damage or permanently harm people, that I think we perhaps need to get beyond talking about just not maiming, asphyxiating or traumatizing people. And I think another thing I find absent from the conversation along with our *whys* is the
It’s also oddly painful for me, the arousal it gives me wrapped in a kind of stabbing empathy.
Sadist or not, I am also a masochist
There are different kinds of masochist out there. There’s the kind that endures to please and elevates unwanted pain as the most sincere example of service. There’s kind that seek to cleanse a feeling from themselves, punished until some knot of guilt or an unwanted behaviour is purged from them. And there are those like me to whom pain in certain contexts is indistinguishable from pleasure in it’s outcomes. Being the latte, this misdirected me. Since I have that common preference my partner be attracted to what I want done to me, I spent some time feeling perhaps I was a switch, and trying to submit.
Submission turned out to be a poor fit, psychologically. I quickly discovered that outside the visceral moment of enjoying the sensation of being desired so deeply the person hurting me was feeding off it, I lacked the want to please. I didn’t want to kneel at someone’s feet, I wanted to play cat and mouse with high stakes, to not just top, but full on dominate from the bottom. I think a lot more women end up in this state, where typically feminine described ways to have sex and seduce get falsely summarized as passive and yielding.
Exploring my sadism took longer to get to do, probably because of gender biases in kink and the larger world. The era I exist in permitted men to understand the idea of a woman asking to be “ravished”, but those first boyfriends balked at anything that gave me control, or explored their suffering. There was a high school romp or two, but nothing could manifest without a lot of work on my part. And in that periods, partners would agree but back out mid-fantasy roleplay if I dominated.
With my awful ex he wanted some of the visceral “take me over and fuck me” desires, but his version of submission was destructive to my personhood, and my comforts. I could spin a fantasy of domination, but more often than not he wanted to assert his own control outside of BDSM.
It wasn’t until the Swede that I really got my claws on someone who enjoyed pain, and the time to enjoy myself. I will appreciate him dealing with the emotionality of my twined up romantic/horny. Ironically, at the time my most psychologically dominant act was to teach him he had that switch part of himself. The prospects otherwise offered was a roaringly receptive target in a loaned out friend or two, but a mixed bag. I definitely refined these desires, though I kept pulling super masochists which did my learning curve no help. Wildcard was in the middle space of pain, and required me to learn to accommodate, probably good for me, but a bit bumpy. Unfortunately how dominant you are and how good at topping you are are also socially tangled, which sounds sensible but ends up like trying to measure how gay you are by how good you are in bed.
If I could change one thing about BDSM, it would be to uncouple dominant desires from being something admirable and over achieving. This pressure effects us all, but becomes a sort of toxic-masculinity lite, with phrases like “not a real dom” being tossed about in a very subjective way, but also unsought external social elevation. For some reason, topping is also phrased as a person receiving a unilateral benefit from the bottom, which is also ridiculous and gets in the way of making healthy dynamics.
In my life lessons, I also figured out that to “bottom first” isn’t good advice for any number of reasons. Particularly as being on the further end of masochist, the painful escalations I was treated to did not prepare me to understand how to modulate. Reader, I will repeat, learn by receiving is absolute nonsense when you are a heavier duty masochist and you are the blind leading the blind.
Sadistic femdom is never hateful femdom for me.
It has been the fashion, over the last decade, to divide gentle femdom from everything else. The assumption is the default is sadistic femdom, but pain comes only from a place of dislike or disrespect. Thus, to this day, the poor lost boys of r/gentlefemdom insist that the difference is the love they have that regular BDSM does not. Realistically, virtually every lifestyle domme expects cuddling and sweetness in her intimate relationships, and none make a habit of playing with people they don’t like. Contempt, at least the real kind, kills vanilla and kink relationships with equal speed. Unless the top is a degradation focused meta-masochist, obsessing over the repulsive just isn’t our collective habit.
You would think, given the guys moaning that they don’t know how to find a domme, in the scope of things they would realize liking them has to be part of the equation. It’s almost like a self selecting bias, that you can tell the guy will never get very far if he makes everything about nasty mistresses doing this because he deserves it for sucking. Which is a perfectly fine fantasy, but not a good sell if you want relationship, or even for her to listen long enough to get to the part with the whip or the cock cage.
Empathy is the twin of sexual sadism. If you cannot feel what they feel, you miss out on much of the benefit. I imagine it’s different for everyone, to a point. I don’t think sadistic femdoms come out of a clone batch, but I cannot help but notice our gratitude at a good submissive is a collective experience. I think that little graph I attached with this article is going to vary by the individual, but it remains true: we are not coming from a place of hate. Whether we merge with our partners pain or want to understand it so we can feel the extent of the burden they take on for us, to want to hurt our submissives is to ask to know them and be known.