On Having Porn For Dommes

It has been true for the entire lifetime of this blog that fictional depictions of dominant women are really limited, and most typically tailored to what subs are attracted to. Or being more precise, what a certain paying audience of sub men will purchase. This standard tends to depict dominance in women as a vocation performed for the benefit of subs (or their vulnerability and persecution fantasies) and is often gender regressive as heck.

For example, there’s a whole dialectic around the ubiquity of strapons- is this like the little fake beard Queen Hatchepsut wore in her official portraiture, to project authority, or is this a rare overlap of the ostensibly hetero into queerness? Either way, it’s practically compulsory to penetrate and very rare to see depictions of your penetration if you are a dominant.  Likewise much frustration is noted that dominants are seldom depicted as attracted to or even liking our subs. Not so in hetero male dominant/femsub land, where the slave princess fantasy is perfectly common in the stuff targeting women. And, at the very least in the porn for men, there’s definitely no shortage of degradation, but the femsub is at least the main event.

This has a carry-on effect that if your version of femdom doesn’t look like most typically available versions of it, you are more likely not to realize your desire. In the inverse, a lot of lifestyle dommes share their lightbulb moment was finding an image or story they just vibed with (often outside of conventional porn altogether) and chasing that feeling down the rabbit hole. Further, when all depictions of you are so very limited, if you are a dominant you get endlessly frustrated by a conga line of idiots who think fiction catering to them is an educational documentary about you.

In any case, lifestyle dommes generally agree that porn is collectively failing us.

Dealing with  this is still a work in progress. Unfortunately a lot of folks get stuck in a frankly SWERF style approach – they decide that since most porn (and pop culture depictions of dommes) are garbage, that it’s actively malicious on the part of the people who make it to keep doing so. While I do think that the almost exclusively “Mistress Manual” dominatrix-in-a-box source of approach on the education side is actively bad, you have to be more nuanced in your tackling of the problem. Getting into a war with the existing content creators about how they are pandering internalized misogynists or fixating on the bad fake subs who just want to be catered to isn’t working. I say that as someone with a lot of yelling about not getting anything approaching the rep I want. 

At best, if you fixate on trying to stop the existing content, all you do is make everyone miserable and some Republican/Conservative politicians cream their suit at what good potential ally you might be to their latest (bad faith) protect the kids crusade. But, we should be able to discuss the problem without doing things like trying to redefine the larger category of Femdom to mean “stuff only me and my friends who agree with me are into”. Sure you can argue yourself blue in the face that femdom should centre women’s pleasure more than it does, but the current content situation will point out that we are assuming the people involved don’t enjoy it. You can see how that’s a subjective dead end?

And, inversely, I am not saying to turn your brain off completely. There is value in consciousness raising discussion. All media is subject to criticism and pointing out trends and implicit biases is one of the ways we bring change and establish community with people who feel similarly. But is our goal here less content overall? Or is it more of the good stuff for dommes?

I think it should be the latter, and for that there’s a very big, slow next step. We are going to need to spend a lot of money or make our own erotic content, if we feel otherwise. You are also going to need to grapple with systemic barriers that exist outside of the business (and amateur hobby) of erotic or otherwise deviant to the norm content. 

I’m also going to take a controversial stance and put porn, erotica and romance into the same general category.

I’m on team asexual spectrum.  However I am an avid romance reader and active in those communities too. The reality is that if you are a kinky person, the fine distinctions between all three tend to be pretty arbitrary. Whether you are talking about a human relationship sans a whiff of anything that would be normally described as of sex, or with explicit full on the page imagery, all humans impose narrative and story onto all content. We want to. The tiny minority that is completely asocial even to wanting a bit of context or background in the erotic isn’t the people with this particular problem around porn for dommes.

And, ultimately, romance deals with the same push pull in its plots and scenarios as any other depiction of humans doing things with feelings. At the same time you would need to be willfully blind not to notice that Romance as a genre has a fandom that approaches it with just as much drill down for the horny specifics as your average OnlyFans subscriber’s search history. And, romance writers deal with the exact same censorship issues as all the other creators across porn, erotica and so on.

Finally, the historic romance vs erotica vs porn dispute is littered with a bunch of ugly distancing from porn that’s the usual whorephobia of trying to create a category of titillating material that is more legitimate and pure than that other category. All while everything is just art. Chances are porn for dommes, like most stimulating media for women, will describe itself more as romance or erotica, but I have a hard time pretending the intent isn’t the exact same.

So let’s drop some of our illusions about porn and how it’s made

Porn, contrary to the way we talk about it, is a marginalized industry, disproportionately queer, with most people not making much money. Artistic talent and skill are not evenly distributed – nevermind that you need to be a wizard at marketing, with a work ethic that is punishing on the body to make it as any kind of artist, sexy or not. That’s on top of an ever increasingly sanitized internet and the frankly censorship oriented nature of most payment providers and most publishing platforms.

Writing, illustration and modeling are also incredibly poorly paid, whether it’s R, E, or P. One of the first things consumers need to know is that the big names are lottery winner, and most stuff falls into the obscure outsider art and cottage industry level. People who create stuff are not trying to cater to the patriarchy to be willing agents of it, they are navigating razor thin profits, fussy platforms and content saturation of a competition that puts you at odds with not only every creator currently working right now, but every surviving work running back more than a thousand years. And every other possible way humans can amuse or occupy their time.

And it gets worse.

The reality is that if you provide something a bit different there’s a missing infrastructure for curation of stuff, and you tend to get “oh, well I want this to be different but this just isn’t for me”. Women are not a monolith and while their pleasure sounds like a good place to start for inspiring better work, it’s pretty piss poor in practice for trying to create a genre or artistic movement. 

Select 10 lifestyle dommes and ask them about their pleasure and preferences and you are going to get such varyingly personal answers that you would probably need to write 10 stories or shoot 10 videos. 

Creative work depends on entrenched audience expectations. Making something is always a balancing act between existing formulas and novelty. Things that challenge those expectations, even when people want them can also make the audience uncomfortable. Audiences also depend on familiarity and recommendation to take a gamble on new material. Successful creators aren’t just that way because their work is good, it’s that people want the similarity in what they produce. The median American reads 4 books a year, with the average around 12.6- but media consumption in general follows people only having limited time to invest.

Hell, the opportunity cost of this essay is me choosing not to get a healthy walk or read the rest of one of my library books. I am not reading “The Cruel Princess” or playing the Sims and finishing building my dream cottage. I mention this to underline just how crucial the curation part of improving thing needs to be.

We need smarter, aggressive curation and we need to have a lot more patience

The truth is that over the last 10 years there is simply more femdom4dommes content extant, but these works can only penetrate so far.

For example, Sadistic Beauty is a 37 page webtoon following the self discovery journey of a (bisexual!) domme as she transitions from seeing her fetish as a form of revenge without much limits to a healthy way to be loved, with boundaries. It would, using Tappytoon’s weird internal currency, cost you about $14 USD to read the whole thing. Less if you skip one of the super dark epilogues (the characters who don’t end up with her get romances of their own and one is… not cheerful or healthy). To know this exists you need to clear several hurdles – you need to be actively doing social media where femdom stuff is shared (and hope someone provides a cite link as it’s a popular source of screenshot sharing) or you need to be an active reader of webtoons. The vast majority of webtoons absolutely are not femdom focused, much less catering to dommes.

It’s the definition of femgaze femdom. But there’s so many what ifs to find the damn thing that it’s a miracle anyone knows it exists at all.

Ditto, as follows – Author Luna Gold has produced a sci-fi romance trilogy, starting with The Admiral’s Acquisition, about female space navy officers who are nice people who just happen to acquire a slave. There are adventures, kink and heartwarming happy endings. They are also, from what I can see, exclusively published through amazon. Again, massive bottle neck. That’s never going to make it to book stores or libraries. She’s also running 0 marketing. 

Other books, like The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes or Preferential Treatment, by Heather Guerre have better audience penetration, but these are more established authors who have done a ton of non-femdom stuff too. The audiences are much more likely to take a gamble on that than a non-established name. 

At the same time, one of the other Porn4Dommes problems is that thing I mentioned about the varying needs of the audience. And, I dance around phrasing, but the not being happy with new material problem because it can’t realize the fantasy in your head as well as you imagined audience issue.

More on the not pleasing everyone thing.

My choice to self host my own femdom stories was encouraged in one part by the blog purges at the time of content on other free platforms, but also because places like literotica fussed over what I posted far more than the equivalent M/f. Some of this is sexism (anything done by a woman is perceived as more aggressive and mean than the same thing done by a man), but also that I was aware that familiarity is often used as a comforting shorthand. When something breaks the norm, its raw edges are more likely to be noticed.

Homogeneity in the current content has a number of factors involved, but one of them is that not that the audience is only into what is depicted but that all narrative relies on simplifying tropes. For example there’s a squintillion historical romances about dukes because this provides a useful shorthand (much like billionaire romances) for a certain level of prestige and power. These stories seldom dig into the realities of this- for example often making the Dukes have problems that men of their society never would or do things that make sense to a modern audience’s idea of a rich landlord, but not to the norms of their period.

Likewise a lot of the saminess and by the numbers framing in the vast majority of femdom content isn’t because their audience demands rigidity, it’s that the more something stand out the more it has to stand for itself. That is to say if you wrote a historical romance about a journeyman shoemaker and a kitchenmaid that would be several times more realistic and probably more unique, but you would also not have your work be considered in the context of its genre, but as a stand alone thing. People who want realistic historical fiction would nitpick the inevitable mistakes. People looking for a power fantasy escapism would be annoyed they didn’t end up wealthy. Themes you could explore in a scenario where the audience goes in knowing the male lead is a Duke would suddenly be judged much more starkly because there would be no binding momentum of the pattern of the existing narrative expectations.

And you, dear reader, who probably fancies themselves a connoisseur, would most likely not like it. Not even because you have poor taste, but because creating good compelling writing is hard and it would have none of the scaffold a four book series say, with a different Duke for each season of the year, even if that author ALSO curiously makes their Autumn Duke into making and mending shoes and marries their kitchen maid!

Fandom operates similarly, with fan work providing a long history of letting people go wild with the content because, paradoxically, there’s familiar anchors for the audience. Fandom writers who say, want to create a kinky AU for their characters, have a much more forgiving audience than the one for original characters. 

Solving the real problem with getting content for dommes

Our problem is not that there is no content targeting dommes, it’s that it isn’t reaching the audience. It’s fragmented across different platforms, only has so much advertising and the market it might have doesn’t know it exists. Someone who is an honest to goodness lifestyle domme for real and a good creator, if they are being fiscally responsible, is much better off making something else.

If you want to turn that around, we have to actually make more of a project of curation and sharing out of it, and you are simply going to have to be more assertive fans. You are also going to need to develop a lot more gentleness around the content you consume. This may feel like a lot of work, but it is the single most useful next step after realizing that you think the current porn for you sucks.

And in continuation of that challenge, please use the comments section on this blog post to drop your suggested faves, but also your current “eh, close enough”. (That also includes promo-ing something you created!)