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.
To outsiders we are a typical sort of couple in the Pacific Northwest: a gymnast bodied Midwestern blond built on compact, slim lines and a penchant for short sleeved polos as casual wear, and a long limbed heavy hipped pile of curves in black and jewel toned low effort alt fashion. We live in still mildly mortifying comfort (to me): nice gym with Cross Fit (for him) and Pilates (for me). I am learning to crochet at a Stitch and Bitch. We go to the Farmers Market biweekly and there’s fresh berries with most breakfasts. Once a month or so, we take his practical little car into Seattle proper from our exurb situation and do something cultural with an art show or music.
You would assume correctly our politics are progressive and our hobbies involve things like tabletop RPGs or board games. There’s thousands of versions of us walking about, drawn here by climate, employment and the privilege of not having your values and aesthetics be the lunatic fringe.
Unlike many people, we are latex fetishists. Other than being hard on the pocket book, this presents its own risks.
Rubber, in its natural state, is neither shiny nor inclined to slide easily over the contours of the body. Latex clothing is hard to get into. It sticks to you and it’s not particularly resilient, tearing under too much rough handling. If you want in to your wardrobe you are going to need to make yourself slippery, and ideally you will want something that buffs what you are wearing to a gloss.
Those who are familiar know this means copious amounts of silicone lube, a clear, oily feeling substance that’s insoluble in water and largely inert.
Oil (as any person with good sex ed knows) will cause the material to start to break down. That’s why you don’t use oil based lubes with traditional condoms. Talcum was the old timey solution and is now known to regularly contain asbestos – so much as baby powder has switched to corn starch, so is this used as an alternative, though as you might imagine it does nothing if your goal is shine. I also find powder based lubricants gum everything up while adding more of an abrasive than a shiner. A fancy process (chlorination) gives pieces a permanent slightly duller gloss, but takes away some of the stretch and gives it a papery feel.
The solution is the aforementioned silicone lubricant. Made (elementally) of the same stuff as the sand on a beach and the glass in your windows, it’s a modern miracle of science that gives us much more rugged baby bottle nipples, a caulking agent, easy demolding bakeware, hair defrizzer, bendy yet body safe dildos you can sterilize by boiling, and this. You get it for a bit of extra money online or through specialty (sex) shops, because even the good pharmacies in Canada tend to only stock water and occasionally oil based options.
Maybe we will discover, years from now, that we’ve made a huge mistake with this magical material, but for now we have bottles of this all over our home. Guests over means a quick whip round to retrieve them lest they require explaining. Sure it’s a bit odd to have it everywhere, but it’s handy. We use it for edging Silver, several times a day if that can be managed; for sex where it plays nice with my flora; and of course for the rubber escapades I mentioned, which compliment the whole BDSM femdom thing we have going on.
Getting dressed in rubber is about like the cliche corset yanking scenes in bad historical films combined with trying to haul a pair of mid aughts skinny jeans up to your shoulders. That is, if the garment in question cost more than most of your wardrobe and sometimes as much as a wedding dress, of course, and also needed silk stocking level careful handling. To do so you slick yourself up and the inside of it up. That’s palmfuls of silicone on your limbs, but also any expanse of you that you want the garment to go over AND squirting liberal dollops of silicone into the garment and then smoothing it all over.
You also don’t want the garment to be too slick outside, until you have it on, lest it sproing from your grip and you pull it on. Most pieces have a zipper down the back and there’s all sorts of hacks like using a boot lace and a safety pin to pull them up, but generally you also need to hold the garment closed while you pull. A second pair of hands dressing make all the difference, and there’s a technique on top of it, in dressing. Like getting a toddler into a snow suit, firm but not too firm. If you have sharp nails you further can protect your outfit by wearing gloves.
The garment (except for fresh from whatever atelier that made it) will also already have at least some silicone residue on it. For storage, after a wash in a very gentle (unscented!) soap, you rinse in cool water with more silicone mixed into that, leaving a surface coating. Once dried you further pack it with archive friendly tissue paper, so it won’t do the other thing rubber likes to do, which is stick to itself to the point of fusing. After it’s on, something will feel misaligned and you will probably gloop a bit more silicone in through neck or arm holes.
In short, you will be wearing a skin tight rubber bag very full of lube. The process of getting it on will also be surprisingly taxing, wrestling a full body resistance band. It wants to grab and pinch fleshy bits, at least if you don’t smooth it right or it doesn’t sit on your widest points just so. Then you will do activities that make you sweat even more, mixing with the aforementioned lubrication. And maybe other fluids.
When the deed, whatever you were doing, was done, be it a fashion shoot or fornication, you will be even more damp. Getting out is usually easier, with the sweat/lube mix enough to slide everything back off into a distressing crumpled pile on the floor. The first thing you will notice, once stripped, is that you are absolutely freezing. Your body in the latex adjusted itself for what it thought was the height of summer humidity. With the gear off, all that sweat and lube is now lukewarm and chilling fast as it drips off you. You will probably immediately want a shower.
And you will discover the other magical property of silicone lube is that it lasts and lasts. You will be spectacularly moisturized. If you used it in you, your cavities will still have traces a day later. After you wash your clothes, the sink or bathtub will need a good scrub. And while if you were smart your play (or model) space was protected by drop cloths (nothing says sex appeal like draping the room in old bed sheets!), but somehow or another it will also get everywhere else.
On carpet it tends to vanish into the “try not to think about this too hard” situation the way most invisible contaminants are left to rest. On tile or linoleum, well…
Our apartment is done with that currently fashionable, grey-beige faux wood linoleum, in all the main areas. The kitchen, living area, bathroom and the long hall that connects everything else is the same glossy grey, varied enough in texture you won’t spot where the pattern repeats, smooth and easy to spot mop. It beats carpet in my kitchen, but it has its own drawbacks. Remember how I said the first thing you want after latex comes off is a shower? Thanks to the layout of the place, that’s a near half minute trek in a connecting long bit that joins kitchen/living area, bedroom, office, bath and some rather large closets. Inevitably, somehow in the most trafficked area a few drops of silicone find their way. Invisible until you step, just slippery enough to make your foot slide askew and check your balance.
Days later, every latex session is still a slip and fall hazard, but worse, a camouflaged surprise one that can materialize anywhere down that hall.
This happens every damn time. You can mop it, but you can’t see it. Finding it is caressing your hand against a smooth surface and looking for something just a bit more slippery. Soap and water helps, but it’s not a perfect solution because of that aforementioned lube’s staying power. Even bringing out the big guns of a teaspoon of dish soap on where you think the spot is, and you very well can miss just a micro drop.
Dear reader, if my debauchery someday does me in, it won’t be breath play gone wrong. It won’t be a folie à deux into increasingly deranged power exchange, nor sadomasochism loosed to run riot. It will be a mundane slip fall where I break my neck because one tenth of a gram of lube escaped the mop four days after my submissive spent fifteen minutes in a neck to toe rubber sleep sack.
The Pacific Northwest is pretty and reliably temperate most months of the year. My life is taken on some comfortable aspects and some aspects of disquieting idleness, sitting in the sort of lucky it feels like impolite bragging to share.
I got married last month and elopement at a courthouse dressed and simple white broderie anglaise, quick vows and paperwork with two witnesses. I did so because I love him and this is the most reliable shot we have at together, forever. That’s staring down the gauntlet of more paperwork and a long exile from my homeland. But I can be very confident in my belief Silver is worth it. He’s worth is because he is wonderful, inspiring, makes me happy and is confidently happy to do the complex kinky things we both crave.
My writing brain hasn’t been with me for the last little while. Nonetheless, the desire and my sexuality maintains. It’s a relationship where, at a distance, we’d call thrice a day and have the energetic enthusiasm to edge him silly each time. Together, we share a bed every night in an apartment that feels much too nice and I plan a little gathering in the fall, with family, to celebrate my marriage.
I make tentative steps outside the home, to a femdom munch in Seattle, monthly, run sharper and smart than mine ever were. If you are in town you should go, and can easily find details on fetlife. I already met one reader, which is fun. Though those pesky health issues linger, I do my best to stay involved where my stamina lets me.
The kink remains foremost. We prioritized that from day 1. He is as randy as a man half his age and it fits what I want. It’s simply there, often light, a hand reach to his throat away. Likewise, I find him beautiful. He’s a Midwestern, blue eyed, built more spare in frame with a gymnast’s propensity to bending, under a relentless maintained layer of shoulder to ankle muscle. This is balanced at equilibrium that he neither wants to return to actual utility for his white collar life, nor allow into neck stiffening thickness.
My own body is softer, a little wonky, but the urges are still there under the flesh. I want and I remain hungry for this. I miss the energy I used to have, to do things as much as I used to, but I peck away where I can. I’m learning to crochet, and maintaining the health I do have by using the gifts of where I live to try to push myself to exercise as regularly as I can manage. It’s paid some dividends.
If you imagine our household s something of elaborate protocol, him constantly demeaned, you would be wrong. It is with respect my hand takes his throat. That he affectionately comes where I am curled on the couch in a nest of blankets and kisses the tops of my feet. Our vows did not reflect the ownership of my Property, true, but they carried in them the seed and scaffold under which we do what we do.
I think I have the best anyone could want or aspire to.
Most people tend to conceive of labels as tidy little jars, even if much work has gone in the other direction to point out that there’s spectrums. Enbies, bi people, even switches are no exception, with more people than not approaching this self description with an asterisk. Very few people who don’t slot into a binary actually exist in a balanced average or a half and half.
More mercilessly, these middle spaces are more often than not messy. By this I mean disclosure to others of nuance makes it difficult to refute your hermetically sealed jar without sharing things people have deemed rude, or worse some ninnyhammer will mistake the information for an invitation and shriek you are “involving them in your sexuality”.
Enbies get assigned to be a third gender that must perform androgyny and release hewing to either pole of the existing binary. Switches are talked about like watered down dominants in a three step social hierarchy. And bi people, bless, are not only all tangled up in the assumption of being a swinging door, but also an uber slut who could never be content with monogamy.
And asexuality, well…
The paradox of asexuality is a community stereotyped as something either prude or pure (sex repulsed, traumatized through to bored by the sexuality of others) and the reality is more complicated, but falls particularly strongly into somewhere you face a social penalty if you give more detail. It is also a community that in actuality is often deeply horny.
These days, as dangerous as being gay is in most of the planet, in progressive spaces if you say you are a lesbian/gay/bi people will at least get the gist, shrug and move on. They may muddle trans-ness with sexuality more than they should, but but they also may just go a little trans medical and just nidnod and congratulate you that you got your binary sorted out. (Pour one out for the gay trans people tho). But there’s this tension between the constant human spew of sexuality and the human discomfort with that.
And the asexual spectrum kind of requires you to understand how varied sexuality outside of the surface detail. It holds your head under the surface and forces people to confront that arousal and attraction aren’t universally coupled. That there’s nothing, even fucking, that’s inherently sexual or inherently not sexual.
Every bit of queerness blows up some sacred cow like that beached whale some small town explosively detonated onto themselves. Asexuality removes the tidy little veil that lets us ignore whether a given human is horny or not by sincerely believing it isn’t possible. Like early 2000s highschoolers in hysterics that a lesbian in a change room might be into them, take things off the rails and for many folks all certainty is abolished. Men aren’t men, women aren’t women and bare breasts aren’t more platonically sexual than a shapeless wool sweater. The logic of asexuality being properly understood allows that if people are able to be out of a category they are also allowed to be in.
And you still have a person screaming into the void because the norms they used to feel cozy are gone
You can take the scathing approach and tell them they are awash in sexuality – the art, the assumptions, the background radiation of existing in community. But then, all they seem to do is get more stressed. The argument helps for the already convinced to articulate why other people’s disgust isn’t automatically their problem. But the paradox of a collective bent to erotophobia in a species that averages so horny this actually interferes with our ability to reproduce is more than a cosmic joke.
Julia Serrano observed in her book Sexed Up that occupying a marginalized identity meant a higher risk of being sexualized. What she also provided was a more nuanced definition of what that means, not just the presence of potential sexuality, but imposed assumptions on how that sexuality works.
If gender critical numpkins read predation into trans women, they are paradoxically acting from the same place by imply trans men are essentially losing the traits they associate with sexuality. In both cases top surgery to add or remove breasts are an objection to losing a power relationship where they can define what breasts mean for the person who has them. The security of that power is lost to them.
In the same way, to be on the asexual spectrum and be accepted is to remove the ability of others to assume or define your sexuality. The casting of asexuals as exclusively tragic trauma woobies or blushing loveshy naïfs is a projection as strong as the assumption bisexual people, (particularly women) are here to fuck anything with a pulse.
And, when confronted with the practice of the asexual spectrum in action, which in addition to the sex repulsed or disinterested contains the biggest bunch of perverts in the world, the reaction is to leap to assuming any awareness of the habits and practices of others is to experience violence. And you can’t do anything about it because the sexualization is coming from them, not you.
What asexuals deal with is part of queerphobia
I am old enough to recall how 2008 was about people pushing for marriage equality against folks fixated on wildly over stating the risk of rectal prolapse. The same stands for things like BDSM, that in collectively acknowledging that stuff that humans have fixated on forever could be sexual, suddenly it becomes that it must be sexual. From thence comes the fantasy of harm, and the assumption that awareness must be a performance of not for their benefit, at their expense.
This is how bisexual cis women end up being the second highest group to experience violence amongst queer identities. (Trans women are the highest, and we can assume bisexual trans women must have it even worse) To have sexuality becomes to be sexualized, and from there to be assumed to be up to trickery and malice. Bisexual women are cast as temptresses, objectified by men and treated as traitors by those exclusively lesbian. Everyone invalidates their choices as performed for someone else’s entertainment, and a higher rate of assault follows.
Make no mistake, compulsory sexuality can be violence, but compulsory repression as much so. Part of the harm I experienced was that there was absolutely no space to be my sexuality to the point that I had to figure it out by assuming I was doing regular sex poorly. For many, many years of feeling alienated from what I was told. At the expense of real pain and heartache. Like a lesbian raised in a culture that doesn’t realize it’s even possible, allowing space for my desires to be normal rather than vanilla or celibacy is important for my comfortable and safe existence.
But to this day, education about BDSM is suppressed. Although I was sexually active from the age of 14, a perfectly normal statistic for a Canadian, access to the idea of an asexual spectrum just wasn’t available to anyone really, yet at the time. And today, it’s a footnote in the rare places that permit queer education without much detail.
Going into any detail is back to that comment I made earlier about escaping your hermetically sealed jar causing people to act like you propositioned them personally.
This blog post, for example, would be treated like something that needed to be as mature content flagged. It is expected to be handled the same way as a picture of me having some sort of complex penetration with some other person or object. Nothing about it is particularly interested in arousing anyone, least of all myself.
But the fact that I fuck is a taboo, that my sexuality is different doubly so. Talking about how it is different as circumspectly as a person expressing the gender they are attracted to is still treated as twice as lewd.
Thus, talking about kink or BDSM isn’t tolerated to openly do in the mainstream. Not only do a bunch of folks still believe you can catch paraphilia memetically the way they think rapid onset gender dysphoria is a thing so they want to lock down any mention of BDSM, but pretty much even the kinky folk twist the concept of consent into knots that the least whisper of it is the same as pegging on a park bench.
While I like porn and want it to exist, the only real places I am permitted to be seen is incredibly marginalized barely able to escape censorship porn that definitely is trying to communicate sexuality OR fictional depictions that have all those flaws (unhealthy, trivial and covered with three layers of context obfuscation). This means that even grown ups like myself are out here causing chaos. We don’t even know what we can potentially be, so we waste years feeling shamefully broken, having dysfunctional vanilla marriage, and/or having painful and soul destroying sex that was simply unnecessary. If we are lucky we eventually figure that out. Many of us don’t.
Censorship as a byproduct of our nonconsensual sexualization causes real harm.
Thus, while the repulsed and disinterested, demi and the rarely/sporadically attracted get a grudging pass (demi with a bunch of bewildered other people going “but I thought attraction worked for everyone like that?!”… Nobody is ready for the entirety of asexuality the way that historically getting recognized as trans came at the expense of permitting being married to the gender people now acknowledged as being. Much as it turns out there are a lot of bi, gay and lesbian trans people who previously had to choose between their source of attraction and/or love and living as their gender, there’s a lot of asexual folks like myself who can’t live with authenticity because the larger society we live in doesn’t respect us as possible or moral. It’s not ok.
Note bene: someone, if I am lucky enough to get read at all, is getting real stroppy about queer to queer inter identity comparison. Yes, it’s not precisely the same, but it’s same enough we all have the common label. And part of this label is that we compliment each other in our overlap.
Asexuality permitted to be the whole of what it might be, and celebrated for it requires people to back the fuck off. Everyone would benefit. We would have a whole new toolkit facilitating coexistence and live and let live. There would be no downsides.
One of the biggest requests I get is to recommend content that’s not about dommes, but created for us. I have no idea what korea is putting in the water, but there’s a huge amount of Manwha, a korean equivalent term to Manga, with clear femdom themes. Although fan translations abound, I prefer to share the official commercial releases so that folks can vote with their dollars and encourage more content like this to be produced.
These four femdom comics are also just a tiny sampling of what I’ve been reading and tracking so far, chosen because they are also completed. That means there’s no risk that they will spontaneously undermine or worse eliminate the domme from the story (looking at you, Castlevania). However, these are adventure/romances, and none of these stories should be taken as anything other than fantasy. As long term readers may have noticed, my fantasies run the gamut from cozy femdom to downright nasty, and readers who need to stay exclusively on the gentle side should pay attention to the content notes.
The story a Domme’s self discovery and the people who obsessed with her. This comic is the one that turned me on to the sheer options out there. This is not, however, a story about flawless and wholesome relationships, but also about navigating giving up on bad stereotypes around kink… or not.
Why I like this: While the protagonist, Doona, isn’t a role model, it’s rare to see a comic that is more interested in the domme gaze and her experience than the feelings of the sub. Lush art and flawed characters grow from what looks like a much more intended to be throw away story about bossy, trashy roommate.
CN: Noncon and unsafe practices ahoy, this is a soap opera with a flawed protagonist and one of the epilogues is just dark and miserable.
After reclaiming the throne in a bloody coup, newly crowned Calliope is quick to flex her powers to recall her childhood sweetheart Ezekiel to be her royal consort. Once a young orphan in a monastery, now a noble Paladin in a neighboring land, his faith is more than willing to hand him over to curry favour. Though tied by promises in the past, many years have gone by and the brutal King has no time for excuses.
Why I like this: While often bashed by comic fans for the titular king’s cruelty, and hamstrung by being filed as romance rather than going all out in the porn, the reality is this tells a bog standard “tyrant wants to claim me” tale. And, it’s definitely catering to my desire to leer at vulnerable men.
The Emperor has died, leaving his grieving widow as dowager-regent until their son comes of age. Only, as this former ruler is reborn into the body of a member of her now sizeable harem, he is forced to confront that the meek and supposedly submissive consort he knew in life was nothing like the illusion he had of her. Intrigue ensues, as she asserts her power and he must decide if he can put aside his pride and come to support the real her in the face of challenges and perils to his son’s claim on the throne.
Why I like this: Kinky sex serves as a metacommentary on how gender roles suppress female sexual fulfillment, including exploration of dominance. I think it could have leaned a little harder into the harem part, but it does hammer home that you don’t need to end in a perfect matriarchy to arrive at healthy female dominance.
CN: Noncon, and for folks uncomfortable with switching, some scenes of the female main character not having the upper hand.
A prince of a captive nation, offered as a slave concubine. An ice hearted, brutal tyrant who treats men like disposable candy. A deep thread of intense vulnerability within that woman, waiting to be discovered. Also, werewolves.
Why I like this: It’s full out train to crazy town, but unabashedly happy to gaze flip and suggest men can be objectified.
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.
Oops! Everything old is new again, and the webring of yesteryear is back – now run courtesy of blogger Oz
You might have seen me participate in this a few times already, and honestly I really enjoy the reminder that sex blogging as a community is still at it. (Also I remembered to (re)post this in a timely fashion, this time, oops!) If you are a blogger in the sex and/or erotic space, this is one of the easiest ways to make sure you get shared since as you might notice, everything listed below covers the gamut, from tox reviews and erotica, to how to guides.
If you want to get in on it, the link to participate is here, and the first three people to remember to participate in the (re)post part (not me) are compensated with a prize.
The panty-vibe is almost a cliche like the fluffy handcuffs, everyone associates with entry level BDSM, but a Leap of Faith seems to be having a great time with hers.
Thrusting toys seem to be getting much better at it than they used to, and this one apparently hit the spot, as detailed in this review by Liz X Likes.
Today I learned, through this review, the Magic Wand (also know as a hitachi from the old brand) now comed in a wee pocket size version. But does it pack the same punch?
Buzz Vibes has some recommended products and selfcare tips for keeping your sext life going for folks, who by age or surgery, have shut down the whole uterus and hormone cycle.
Laura Boyle riffs on how to navigate the complexity of blended poly family, over a holiday period, particularly all the pitfalls that mgiht come with it.
I am such a damn fangirl for Silkenclaws. She’s a great contributor for a forum I moderate and regularly produces great, informational content. The post title is self explanatory and the detail is exactly the depth needed for the topic.
Walk All Over Me (2007): The Celluloid Dungeon A Canadian film reviewed by another Vancouver resident- where the film is set! This reviewer is a longstanding local fixture so it’s fun to cross paths like this.
This is an ad letting you know about someone’s travel tour. As long as Canada doesn’t make this illegal, I feel comfortable sharing this sort of thing. 😀
Mina Fontana wants you to know that she’s open to opening you for some (paid) kinky prostate play. Like many professionals, she wants to make sure you understand the experience.
SexworkerSear.ch sounds the alarm about a recent change to Google’s algorithm that may be deliberately burying people’s efforts to find geolocated (or really any) adult services. And believe me, this isn’t just a commercial side problem- but something that can have a major impact on lifestyle only kinksters and queer folk, as well.
This is also not from Dracula, but is vampire art from the same era, not inspired by Dracula at all.
Ah, Dracula. Published in 1897 by horror and fantasy writer, reviewer and theater manager, it occupies a space as the most well known vampire story, and also so incredibly copied and adapted that while everyone can agree it’s rather kinky, queer, and horny, the rest of the interpretations, of the author and the text that it’s also the poster child for pin-the-pathology-on-the-pervert. In consequence, Bram Stoker exists as a sort extra protagonist, in which people are forever trying to map why a person could possibly imagine such a chilling little parcel of ominous ambiguities without being moments from ending up in a padded cell next to Renfeild.
How did I come to write this essay?
Silver and I started a thing, several months back, where I read him chapters of various books I like. We both enjoy writing, and a component of this was sharing some of the influences of other authors on me, starting with Tanith Lee’s Drinking Sapphire Wine. The reading out loud part started as pushiness on my side- every time I otherwise tried to share a book I liked with other people, the vagaries of time and human flakiness meant they never read the damn things, often letting a loaned copy languish in their possession indefinitely. Knowing if he found it dreary or irritating I could abort, when I realized the first book I tried to share might similarly sit unexamined, I decided I would just do a chapter out loud and see how it went. And, in following from that, a somewhat indirect route took us to Bram Stoker’s classic, Dracula.
Somewhere along the way we discovered audio books from someone who loves you is the most relaxing thing ever. Thus, in this reading (currently ongoing) I have a secondary purpose in that every serious romantic relationship, to this point has revealed I have the power to put my partner into a somnolent nap. Not so with Silver, who rarely naps, despite some pretty chronic insomnia, but for whatever reason, three quarters of the way into a chapter of something and I can get soft sighing snores.
The choice of Dracula follows from another favourite of mine, A Night in the Lonesome October, an obscure book by Roger Zelazny; in which Jack the Ripper’s dog narrates how various characters from gothic horror come together, with their animal companions, to participate in a Lovecraftian rite. That sparked the query, that if Silver were to imagine a story from a character from that pantheon, who would he pick? And this proved to be Harker, the intrepid sort-of-protagonist of Dracula, and, unsurprisingly, subject to some pretty significant femdom themes.
These were further illuminated with a little sexted speculative erotic fanfic of Mr. And Mrs. Harker’s post Vampire defeat, following in the now storied tradition of taking one of the threads of the text and pulling until you have enough length to knit the outcome you want. However, I can’t write porn without plot. We ended up trying to piece together what precisely happened for small bits of logistics in the real narrative, and then, realizing it had been long enough since we both read it, realized it was the perfect candidate for our next read-together.
And rather than getting another paperback copy, since we both already knew we liked it, I splurged for one of those big hardcover, pretty shelf decorator editions publishers release periodically of classics. This one is grey with printed black flowers of a slightly ominous pattern, and contains a lush forward and author biography, and an enormous appendix of context, both an index to help you understand the archaic vocabulary and late Victorian pop culture, and other bits and bobs like the author’s sister’s letter recounting a cholera epidemic that eerily maps into some of the spooky bits of the middle third of the book.
Reading these essays as bookends, its starts with an attempt to paint how rational Bram Stoker was and how this story is a flight of unusual fancy, as well as set the theory that Bram Stoker’s awful boss (and celebrity actor) Henry Irving forms the inspiration for the titular vampire. We then traipse into a sort of commentary cliché of vampires, the psychosexual bits (yes, duh) but eternally mapping them onto some sort of latent fear of female sexuality/woman taming misogyny. To which I say, can’t a person have a complex set of sadomasochistic fantasies WITHOUT diagnosing them as neurotic, traumatized or worse? It is not just that readers seek to map the life and values of the author into their text, it’s that holy fuck, is Dracula a shining example of the personal peculiarities and biases of a century of media critics being projected so intensely onto a work that Marie Curie would be needed to measure the source and intensity of such radiation.
Meta-Dracula, Adaption and History Googles
In examining this work, we have two factors to consider. People have been making their own adaptations of this, willy nilly, since before it was even out of copyright (the famous silent film, Nosferatu, being case in point); and it’s absolutely demonstrable this book is horny and has queer and poly scenes out the wazoo. However, the character of Bram Stoker is also being pushed through an additional filter, the retrospective and highly ahistorical idea that Victorians were (with few exceptions) sexually repressed.
It can be simultaneously true that famous health nut of the era Dr. Kellog was advising people to pour carbolic acid on the clitoris of girls to stamp out masturbation, but also that this was a period of explosion in fetish content, of advocacy of birth control, sexual autonomy and free love, and by significant liberalization of divorce laws. It can also be true that much in modern day, a progressive position can quite lack the internal consistency and be stuffed full of both hypocrisy and nuance – much like a modern feminist might fall short in some measures, Bram Stoker was both a Suffragist and not a fan of porn enough to write an essay against literature that might encourage sin. But, in retrospective of this period, modern people have a skew that remembers Victorian satire about putting covers on piano legs, but not that fetish heels, particularly recreating the 18th century shoe, were a thing.
The same must be said that adaptions of Dracula tended to shove all the horny through their own lense, over more than a century. Much how characters are swapped or consolidated (Harker, Van Helsing, Dr. Steward, Arthur Holmswood and Quincy Morris collapsed or refolded, Mina and Lucy likewise adapted into one, switched in role, renamed, and so on), the dramatic climaxes of violence and agency are edited, rearranged and reframed. The reasons for this are manifold, and audience expectations, pragmatics, censorship of the era or honest interpretation can all play an equal factor in why something is changed.
Adaption often overwrites text in popular memory, which in turn makes talking about just the text sans bias impossible.
A classic example is the tendency to depict Mina as brunette and Lucy as blonde. What if I told you, in text, that the only reference to the hair of both women refer to Mina as having light hair, and describe Lucy’s as “sunny”? Adaptions that feature both characters have reasons to do this, from the incidental of who they cast, or to try to make the characters visually distinct, but also as a modern visual shorthand for our perception of the character of women through their appearance.
Lucy, we generally understand, is flighty and pretty, beloved by many men, while Mina is staid and patient. Critics following the idea of misogyny-in-text tend to point out the Hays Code style need to punish bad women… except. Uh, nothing in text is explicitly that simple, because the morals based censorship of 1897 is not the same attitude to tropes even a few decades later. For another example of gendered virtue bias, if you had to guess, which of the two women mentions she finds fashion boring? The pretty blonde who everyone falls easily in love with, who is more effusively emotional but a bit dim, or the employed-in-a-job patient woman who does endless looking after and managing things and imagines herself a lady reporter? Yup, it’s Lucy who mentions this- and both women discuss their relationship to the ideals of womanhood of the day with nuance.
I will also remind people, at this juncture, I am not claiming there is no misogyny in the text. Victorian lit, as today, frames gender through biases. What I am saying is that we tend to retrospectively add both the modern assumptions about gender and sexuality we do in fiction and that our retrospection in the past, likewise, summons ghosts less of the actual period we bring them than jowly disapproving caricatures manufactured today.
For example, a common critical read is that Dracula, the character, is uniquely an external sexual thing, inflicting his horny corruption on chaste Englishmen and women. This common push/pull gets dragged out in Dracula, both the idea of the wicked foreigner ruining our pure women, and framing anything coded as a sexual assault as a complicated seduction that us prudes only have to retrospectively read as a rape. At its apex, in criticism, we get the old horror movie canard that Lucy was murdered for having sexuality and doesn’t that staking seem like a phallic symbol? Ok, but did Dracula get defeated by penetration too? People trying to advance a feminist argument Lucy’s destruction is a corrective gang rape never seem to bring an agender top/bottom discourse into things.
We can’t have it both ways, the men either fucked Lucy to death and thus fucked Dracula to death, or there’s nothing default phallic about the killing of Lucy.
I also nudge that the famous, much adapted Lucy killing scene tend to emphasize her flash of sexuality during it as an evil femme fatale (the Brides menacing Jonathan were definitely using his attraction to him after all), so it’s an easy assumption to make. The problem there is that being seductive is a pre-Vampire Lucy trait. It could be more accurately argued that “corrupted” Lucy, up until this point eating babies, is reminding the men of her humanity. In passing moral judgments that the text is killing her for being a slut, also be aware that kissing one of her other suitors, in text is a symptom of her emotional sincerity, while in a modern work would be “leading him on”.
Lucy, in text, is not punished for being so giddy and boy crazy she wishes she could marry all three of her suitors (again in text). That’s a feature, not a bug- her attractiveness and charm are weighted as motivating features worthy of praise. If we want to go with blood-as-sex as metaphor, when her three suitors have given her blood transfusions to try to (unsuccessfully in the end) save her life, and explicitly contemplate the feeling this marries them to her, this is a plurality of people who would be rather arguing the person they all fucked was all the more worthy of rescue, never mind the metamour context. And, if I recall correctly, Van Helsing and Mina also donated. Mina and Lucy also have kissed, by this point, the former using it to break Dracula’s hypnotism.
Which, as an aside, if we are going to underline anything here, another known factor of Bram Stoker’s life is that Oscar Wilde was also in love with the woman he married. When Florence Balcombe preferred Bram Stoker, this caused a temporary rift in friendship of a few years. While one might not want to perfectly map parallels, it’s definitely a repeating theme of Dracula to be navigating monogamy versus plural attraction.
When Harker narrates his ordeal with the Brides in his journal, he is likewise most anxious (other than the imminent risk of murder) not that he was attracted to them but that Mina might be hurt he was capable of attraction to others. When he pops up again, having been missing for a while, Mina does cite a fear he’d stopped communicating because he’d found someone else, but inversely, she displays other security to the extent that when Harker first spots Dracula in England she thinks her husband is checking out a pretty girl. Rather than finding that bizarre or offensive, she checks the girl out herself.
Bram Stoker’s “Repressed” Homosexuality, Femdom And Queerness In Text
This one pops up periodically, that the author was probably queer. The psychosexual stuff in text do lend themselves that way, for example when the Brides attempt to devour Harker, Dracula violently defends him, declaring Harker to be his, albeit only until his purpose is seen through. Ditto the cutting himself shaving and almost getting bit part, and the dance of charm-but-also-fear in the early interactions.
Likewise, based the author’s his florid fan mail to Walt Whitman, I hold this perfectly plausible. What I do nudge back on is the equally obnoxious tendency of queer-finding retrospectives to engage in a little bi-erasure. One intrepid essayist goes as far as to suppose that Florence herself was a beard, picked as she disliked men, or more conspiracy theory style, was chosen as a proxy for Wilde, himself.
Since Bram Stoker knew most of the famous gay men of his era and country, and was firmly in a milieu where queerness was much more open than many places elsewhere, I will gently suggest that it’s not fair to presume repression. If he engaged in same gender relationships in the sexual sense, given its illegality, he didn’t put it to record, but if he wanted to bang a dude or dudes, there is also no reason to assume he didn’t.
We believe he is repressed because his alleged queerness was oppressed. One may follow they other, but also we must be careful not to replicate the very expectations we are opposed to into our critique. For example have you noticed that a woman with a rape fantasy is described as uncomfortable with her own sexuality, but a man imagining a sexy femme fatale ravishing him is described as uncomfortable with the sexuality of women?
Which winds my way back to the core thing that drives me to write a 4000+ word essay on a more than a century old book, the media critic habit of assuming that one can’t write about anything dark and spooky without having something wrong with you. This tortured premise gets stretched to the point of such wild speculation that Bram Stoker took 7 years to finish the work because he was grappling with his attraction to men, a fanciful belief that homosexuality apparently… makes you bad at deadlines?
Of course, on the subject of bi erasure, as a contemporary kinky person, one of the threads its easy for me to notice is all the femdom. There’s the overt, starting with the near assault by a trio of lady vampires on Harker, but also including a pretty much not subtext cuckolding scene, where Harker is helplessly mesmerized as Dracula comes upon the couple to assault his wife. But there is also the rather endless riff of male worship of female. Men are helpless before Lucy, but also Mina sails through everything as both a significant framing character of the story and narrator in her own right, but also mentioned from the first chapter that the initial goal of Harker’s diary is to make a travelogue for her. And of all characters, across gender, she’s probably the most stalwart in her agency and resilience.
Make no mistake, this is pre-suffrage England, and she is not particularly inclined to rail against her place as a companion and aide to her husband. But, as most adaptions unfortunately lose, it’s Mina initially rescuing Lucy, it’s Mina’s needs, wants and preferences centred by her husband, and Mina managing, typing records up, and so on that drive much of what happens. We even see here physically resisting Dracula during an attack, something we see literally no other character do. When word comes of her fiancé being found in great ill health in Budapest, it’s Mina, an unmarried woman, who immediately travels without the least reservation for Exter to Hungary, claiming Jonathan on the spot with a marriage. Likewise he surrenders his journal to her at this point as he’s wracked with guilt but also amnesia. It is then a matter of her motivation to solve why he’s had a second nervous breakdown to read the journal and link up with Van Helsing, providing a crucial piece to the group that he husband most definitely did not have the capacity to do.
If the menfolk do all go off to do the violence, Mina’s staying home is prefaced that her idea to be hypnotized to use the blood link to track Dracula is essential to the operation. Inversely, for all Harker is off with the menfolk, kukuri in hand, he’s an ailing, frail shell of very limited use in any prior altercation, defended by crucifix rather than trying to match Dracula with physical strength. While not all strong female characters are femdom, nor weak ones subs, taken as a whole, this is hardly to be read as a meek, passive person but rather an idealization of a woman taking charge of things, not just helpmeet, but amazon.
Did I mention that the book passes the Bechdel test, depicting a warm, intimate relationship between two women who talk about more than just the men in their lives?
Unfortunately, at least as far a remembering this, modern adaptions like to add a forbidden romance element, supposing a sort of love triangle, between boy next door Harker and sexy Dracula. These adaptations suppose being possessed by the latter is a state Mina might want or find alluring, were it not for her sexless obligation to be a Good Girl. This is emphasized by the tendency to turn Mina and Lucy into one character, and amp up that conversion to vampire makes all women horny. While I am not here to yuck anyone’s yum as far as contemporary femsub fantasies of being consort-princess to a powerful monster, neither can I say this is anything book Mina displays.
All that’s to say, I don’t think Bram Stoker was scared of women having agency, sexual or otherwise, just that later adaptions were actually less kind to women and more obsessed with “she secretly wants it though” tropes. We know from notes by the author himself everything of the text was seeded by a vivid dream of the lady vampires attacking him and having an old, powerful man intercede. The author himself, cites the witches in Macbeth for their inspiration. Can we perhaps extend the grace that what he finds titillating doesn’t need to have an inner conflict, and then add an additional lense?
Horny Asexuality and Dracula
Aha, reader, you read this far and I sprung a trap on you, I have my own queer soap box I am about to stand on. You see every reading to date of Dracula and its sexuality tends to emphasize whatever is horny is a metaphor. It means something more, every stake a penis, every voluptuous mouth a hermaphrodite cock-snatch, penetrating as it engulfs. Maybe so, but the queer lense none of the essayists seem to want to bring to bear is the possibility that sexuality in text doesn’t need to be re-simplified into its parts, as if one needed to only do math with the smallest factors a large number could be refined to.
Human sexuality is as much social as it is the mechanical business of heaving and rubbing. It wouldn’t be so easy to extrapolate the vampire into the sexual if it wasn’t. Likewise neither are all these other queer themes and tells, of the author’s life and his text, needing to sit on a hard binary. Just as Bram Stoker doesn’t actually need to blow Oscar Wilde to be queer, neither is he repressing his queerness if he didn’t. The act of writing Dracula can be enough.
I stress that adaptions are perfectly valid to sex things up in different or more exaggerated way than the text did, because there’s nothing wrong with putting your spin on an out-of-copyright work, or indeed fanfiction that deviates from the text so intensely it is practically a new work with old names. However, I do think, at this point I have done a good job of demonstrating how adaptions routinely add things that were not originally intended to be there, which then accidentally replace our understanding of the original.
Does, as one of Bram Stoker’s descendants wrote in a sequel, Mina need to have also been literally raped and impregnated by Dracula? No, absolutely not. It’s no less a sexual assault that the titular vampire was described as doing weird shit with blood after tearing open his own shirt, than if it were his fly gaping. The text, as written, assumes something very modern: Rape is a crime of power more so than anything as simple as mere desire.
Perhaps that’s one of the charms of the book, being about power and sexual abuse. Harker’s plight is made all the worse by a degree of innocence about the patterns of missing stairs (that old horrifying “everyone knows, but also puts it on you to avoid”), while Mina in particular has more agency in intervention because she has a frame of reference that allows her to understand sexual assault. Far from Lucy being punished for her sexy frivolity or Mina being seduced into having some, we see two (idealized) women and an author insert male lead deal, all with predation applied to them in a way that profoundly damages them. And, if you missed the power part of this being most important in text with sex as a tool, off to the side, Renfeild tries to replicate these power hierarchies: spiders to flies, flies to sparrows, sparrows to cats…
If you might read the actions of the suitors, Harker and Van Helsing as male outrage in defence of “their” women, what they are defending is the agency of the women. These women are not “traditional”, inherently passive characters by the standards of their era. What is outraged by Dracula’s attack is Lucy’s choice in only one of the men (or none). She retains her value to all of them even if she is not to be possessed by them, in contrast to Dracula, hoarding his harem of prior victims. This can be contrasted by how the men handle a woman’s agency when they don’t get what they want earlier in the story. We know from Lucy’s account, Steward and Morris want to stay friends, and then also in text, friends with their rival Holmswood because it’s her choice. Likewise, to Harker and indeed the other male characters, Mina is someone to be deferred to in her area of expertise, but to Dracula, Mina to be possessed, controlled as he does the female vampires already introduced as his victims, and punished for thwarting him.
I digress of course, to the other matter of asexuality. Much as other parts of queerness have taken a dreadfully long time to be understood, so also should I speak of asexuality not of sexual repulsion or, in practice, the absence of all libido. This is hard for a lot of folks to grasp, but probably because it’s such a fundamental part of so many folks’ actual wiring that it hides in plain sight: most people don’t just want to rub genitals into orgasm, and if they want sexuality in fiction they generally don’t leave happy if you limit yourself to literally “A person touched the other person with the usual bits of their body one might, until they both achieved orgasm in due course, the end”. To you, the reader, that sentence is satire, because you understand that sex is more than that. Thus, for the erotic most folks want nuance, narrative, even elaborate socioeconomically symbolic foreplay. At minimum, they want characters to have at least traits of a stereotype they can hang context on.
It’s actually pretty rare for someone to have uncomplex sexuality, even the ostensibly allosexual folks.
Because of this, sometimes things are more interesting and arousing if they do not lose the nuance. As a creator, while you can write a squintillion dick go-in-hole scenes, you aren’t just grasping for metaphor and other vocabulary as a matter of self-censorship and euphemism to tidy things, but also to convey a mood and experience that humans often describe as practically metaphysical and transcendent.
Even when anxieties of purity and corruption, or the censorship of the latter influence a work, this becomes an active participant, and any standardized tropes to express euphemism take on the exact property they tried to figleaf. For example, the old film cliché of expressing a couple had sex by cutting to a train entering a tunnel is a pretty intense and on the nose metaphor, if you think about it. And this push/pull of navigating obfuscation may become ultimately more erotic than the thing it is covering, like someone masturbating into a pair of frilly underpants they bought for themselves to do so, or being aroused by them on a mannequin, rather than even requiring an actual woman to possess or wear them.
Thus also Dracula and “monster fucking” in general long ago escaped confinement to metaphor and has occupied space in people’s primary desires. At the point Bram Stoker would be aware of them to use it in his story, they already had transcended both being an obscure, not particularly sexual eastern European bogeyman and an American mass hysteria around tuberculous epidemics, and into a metaphor for predatory sexuality, particularly of the queer kind. We must suppose a professional literary critic with a host of queer friends, and a prior history of writing fantasy adventures understood what he was doing. Not in the sense of “Aha! This vampire is a metaphor for desire!”, but rather that the vampire as trope correctly got across the mood and feeling he wanted to capture.
Maybe Bram Stoker’s original witches dream involved his penis, not his neck. However, the text, with its sinister, unearthly giggling ladies and teasing at Harker’s throat just sounds like a known place humans get horny having kissed, licked and nibbled. And if the language in the scene at no point said “Harker did a cockstand” as porn of the era might, nobody reading the scene needs to know he was aroused. Also, bear in mind the actual porn of the era wasn’t necessarily going to use the word we might. For example, in porn they used the word “paroxysm” as a common term for a female orgasm – even when vulgar and not at all worried about censors, the language trended florid. Thus, I emphasize: I think he wrote about the metaphorical rape monsters not because he dared not talk about other sexuality, but precisely because this was his fantasy.
Yes, he might not have been as sexually open as others are today, and faced a very real risk of persecution. But the counter argument that all this has to be queer self loathing supposes in a queer utopia a person who can screw their own gender openly, without discrimination, can’t write compelling queer horror.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a fanged maw is just as inherently erotic as the thing it symbolizes. And much as trans and same gender attracted folks continue to gently and firmly remind people they don’t need a fracturing seed event to be other than cis or hetero, so also does the buffet of other human stuff that is under the umbrella of the asexual spectrum not require injury to be perverted, or a boost past a hang up to get to some sort of normal sexuality.
Thus, in conclusion, the reader of Dracula might add all the extra sexy bits they want, but they don’t need to. It’s not missing a piece, the horror and dread not evident of a fear of being vanilla, of female sexual choice, or whatever other negative judgment people tend to make of authors of non-normative spooky fiction.
Not all sub men. Not all single, lonely sub men. But sure as the seasons shift through the front end of summer into the sultry, soup-warm of August, some chucklefuck is back at it in an online kink space whining we don’t give the Ratio of Dommes to Subs enough attention because it has specifically ruined his life. There are not enough dommes to go around. Someone has failed to bring enough for the class. Lamentations ensue.
Of course, I am aware of giving some dude on the internet too much credit. Rebutting can also be a sort of endorsement, and platforming the lunatic fringe even to mock them can be a form of amplification. But inversely, the fact that I remember even if the last couple of years the discourse has shifted and I can trust folks to push back on this line of thinking, and we got that way by questioning the resulting assumptions, so I am using a random post on a forum to remind you that Femdom Ratio is incel logic for sub men and bad for men, women and everyone else.
Ratio theory, about the distribution of dommes always goes awful places really fast.
For example, this particular guy’s spin on “The Ratio” is that femdom is inherently abusive because male subs cannot meaningfully consent when having boundaries could get them eliminated from Having A Domme. Any domme. According to him, a sub must concede to whatever, or it’s a lifetime of loneliness, because no matter how atrocious a given woman is, a man needs a woman who will play out an approximation of his kinks. Were there one domme for every sub man who wants one, he reasons, his desire for one would not be at odds with what is available to him he would not consent to stuff he thought was terrible and bad for him just to try it.
If you are a long term blog reader you can already smell the self harming sexism from here. But, I reiterate:
The “Ratio” is bullshit because men (and it always seems to be straight men, queer discourse on top shortage tends to listen to the switches and blame the objectification of tops for pushing them to hide) who fixate on it don’t see women as people, but a means to provide a service they desperately want. They define a domme as any woman who will, for whatever reason, tolerate being fetishized and doing what they crave to them. They do not define dominance on our terms (as dommes), or imagine that we exist for any reason other than to be matched with a man. If they can find women who do that, the complaint escalates to either that said dominant women are not hot enough and this isn’t fair because if they weren’t kinky they could get a hot chick, and not pander to us stuck up hags. Or they get mad sexwork exists. Just exists, as if that alone were a crime against them they were forced to engage with.
It’s never about anything other than his belief he is entitled to a partner on his terms alone.
After 10+ years of terminally online discussion, when someone drags in “Ratio” as an argument, it isn’t going to be a nuanced take on the double barreled stigmatization of male weakness and female sexual exploration, it’s going to be hot torrents of incel garbage. No ratio-cel comes into this talking about what a pity it is that women don’t get to know such pleasure as domination because of broader social forces, they fixate on that they are lonely. Then they imagine that somehow they are a surplus, but that women are easily paired up with whatever it is they imagine they want, often also bringing gender reductive bullshit about how we just aren’t wired to be dominant, boohoo isn’t that hard on subs.
If a Ratio was real in the sense these men imagine, since the genders seem to be approximate parity, this would mean a percentage of women were also mismatched. However, since Ratio Theory is built on sexism, these women aren’t discussed or imagined to suffer to an equal degree. If it were true that women were either more inherently submissive (or vanilla) there would be a similar ratio of unmatched women condemned to similar singleness and thus equally pitiable. Ratio-cels have no such solidarity.
And, adding insult to injury, ratio-cels also imagine the torrent of sexual harassment women deal with is “plenty of subs will do anything to have you”, a tone deaf piece of sexism on par to if we told subs there was always the Kik scammers ready to blackmail them, so really they were rolling in opportunity. Likewise, there’s a nuanced discussion on how the male gaze pandering in being able to buy services and content isn’t always a blessing because the market still makes blanket assumptions about men that can feel very pigeonholing, but no… to a ratio-cel the biggest problem is they want the porn-but-make-it-free.
Further, as others have pointed out repeatedly, other populations deal with ostensible ratios, like the limited percentage of folks who are sapphic versus straight, and don’t turn this into a neo-Marxist argument about how women secretly own the means of male sub orgasm production. The Ratio (TM) as its proponents describe it is where they decide any woman who will embody their fetish has disproportionate power over them because… Reasons. Where the reasons are always that they are desperately trying to reap the usual incel style idea that you will get one Devoted Wife for showing up while meeting the minimum threshold, and that something has broken in society failing to give that to you.
The problem doesn’t stop there.
If it weren’t enough that they were just ambiently sexist, ratio-cels *also* end up pushing dommes out of any community they lodge in, since the desperate demand for a lady to metaphorically hump the leg of kills any other conversation – which actively increases the very problem they are complaining about. Dommes won’t stay in large numbers in communities where the primary focus is our ability to be found and made to gratify subs. The wall of misery posting also sets the tone for any sub joining, because their introduction to how things work becomes a wall of “Where is MOMMY??” Anxiety about potential rejection gets stoked in a sort of socal rummunition, where any problem that might exist gets reframed as the desperate need to have a domme now.
Ironically, you get where we started, dudes being taught by other dudes to unicorn chase, to lower their standards even as they inflate what they expect a domme to be capable of adding to their life. Conversations about reciprocity or “sub skill” or sub-on-sub mentorship are deprioritized over the conflation of what is fetishized with the whole people doing it. Everyone, the subs, the dommes and the community they might interact in, becomes poorer for it.
But any discussion about this behaviour gets derailed by trying to be sympathetic to single dudes because they are suffering. Unfortunately, as per vanilla incels cloaking themselves in how vulnerable they feel to be lonely, that’s how they get a wedge that makes them seem less toxic. In our desire to be supportive, we forget the fact that people who behave like misogynists don’t get a pass for having pain. The same goes that you have to be ruthless and at the wiff of anything arguing that “dommes have unfair power because they are rare” or men claiming their lives are ruined because they can’t get a domme-wife have to be excised immediately because the conversation gets so poisoned by bad faith possessive/controlling nonsense around dommes as panaceas and public resources that anything useful gets lost in the harm done.
[“Chained” by @whump-blog. Used with permission. ]
Are you into people in distress or a state of vulnerability? Do you get complicated warm and fuzzies when your favorite fictional characters get all beat up, sick or otherwise utterly wrecked?
Do you want a fandom/fetish culture that defaults to either female gaze or gender neutral & queer friendly?
Whether you daydream about nursing people back to health, being the cause of the challenges of the victim, both, or just being an omniscient observer of the resulting drama, whump might be for you!
What is whump?
Fandom has a remarkable ability to not only create transformative works, but also provide a giant pool of folks to discuss what aspects in a creative work really appeal to them. While the marketing side of all the media we consume is well aware putting its characters through the ringer is a way to please the audience, the term whump describes a fandom who have identified these scenes hold a stronger appeal.
A better discussion on the history and resources about it can be found on the Whump page of the Fandom Wiki. However, in short introduction, the term is generally agreed to have come from the Stargate fandom. There it was initially used in reference to the mishaps of a specific character “Danny Whumping”. Since then, it’s become a focus in its own right, both in content tagging and creation prompts of fan and original work, and in lovingly archived lists of existing media.
Events for creators (and curators) of whump include the annual “Whumptober“, while sites like Ao3 (Archive Of Out Own) and tumblr are major hubs for content.
What are the dynamics of whump and how does this relate to BDSM?
Whump fans, in talking about their interest, use gender neutral language to describe three different roles that commonly pop up. The primary focus is the victim or “whumpee”, but there may also be an interest in the “whumper” who caused the injury or state of vulnerability, and potentially a “caregiver”. The cause of distress and vulnerability for the whumpee could just as easily be an accident, a disease, and so on. Whump may also focus on emotional torment or distress of the victim, as much as physical harm.
For some fans, other than the suffering of the victim, the interest might be in how the caregiver reacts and supports, while others might enjoy a dark dynamic where they focus on the whumper, often as a captor or nemesis. Some, of course, blend both whumper and caregiver, or include all three. Whump content can also swap off roles as a story about the characters progresses.
Kink aware folk may pick up on the fact that this drama replicates elements of dominance and submission, as well as sadism and masochism. While it’s not as typical to overtly label things as BDSM, framing may include non-consent scenarios that reflect fantasies of ownership and control, and regularly depict bondage, as well as occasionally using paraphernalia like leashes and collars.
Does whump have to be sexual for its fans?
To be honest, this is one of those places where things you might consider conventional sex isn’t a big focus. It might be equally or even more accurate to summarize whump as a romanticization. However, as with anything else romantic, where that shades into the erotic is deeply individual.
Whump, as an interest, also dovetails into the varied experience of the asexual spectrum. In this context, sexual desire may be present, but the sexual attraction to people is absent or requires an additional brokering factor. This is also true for other parts of BDSM.
I am a sub who likes femdom, what does whump have to do with me?
Well, my dear gentlefolk, one of the main things whump does is celebrate male vulnerability, and masc bodies in bondage and other positions of subjugation or control. For female sadists in particular, whump also provides an alternative for us that isn’t focused on our objectification.
I flag this because male subs report they struggle to connect with and understand the needs of women who might be into them. While I don’t suggest finding your nearest whump blog on tumblr and demanding the owner dominate you, if you don’t mind that it’s going to be a disproportionately female gaze friendly space, you may find a community that celebrates male vulnerability rather than shames it.
It’s also insight into the porn dommes like, which is generally a pretty good thing to have insight into as you bridge the gap between an abstract idea having a woman dominate you might be hot to connecting with individual women.
If you are reasonably literate, you are also perfectly able to participate in content creation and curation, with the fandom defaulting to gender neutral language such that you may find common ground with your fantasies. I regularly counsel sub guys that erotic writing is a great equalizer, much as text RP is often a good gateway to connecting with folks who would otherwise feel threatened by being courted.
Finally, If you like people looking at you and thinking you are hot, if you don’t mind a little SFX for bruise makeup, artful trickles of fake blood, etc… you are uniquely able to appeal to an underserved market. This is obviously a more out there suggestion, and most folks aren’t setting out to be amateur fetish models. Nonetheless, if you are trying to get people excited to look at you, you have a clear direction of imagery that has an audience.
Is whump safe?
Whump is as safe and BDSM or other “dark” content. The focus on fictional depictions of suffering provide a first layer of safety, both avoiding the use of real imagery and real accounts of violence, and a strong awareness this isn’t something one would wish on an actual person or an actual dynamic. Fans of whump don’t even seem as interested in replicating facsimiles of the scenes or dynamics they admire, rather creating fan and original works exploring the topic.
Critics of fandom also point to the problem of straight women fetishizing violence against another vulnerable group, gay men. It is absolutely accurate that a lot of whump is depicted as M/m. An immediate counterpoint might note media depictions of violence are also disproportionately male-on-male, making fetishization of them more straight forward. Further, a characterization of whump being cis straight women perving on (imaginary) cus gay men is unfair. Folks involved are disproportionately AFAB, but much more likely than the general population to identify as queer, including genderqueer and trans masculine.
Counter-criticism might also observe that female sexuality is disproportionately policed in a way that expects replication of gendered norms for goodness and softness. Further, while much visual content is male on male, pains are taken to use gender neutral language (whumper/whumpee/caregiver) in fandom discussion, indicating an awareness this is not supposed to be an act of erasure or real gay men, or an effort to depict gay relationships as inherently more violent than straight or sapphic relationships.
Nonetheless, nothing is exempt from discussion of appropriation of identity or where admiration of tropes or imagery might bleed into real life. However, as a community it’s clear members are largely aware of both intersectional concerns and the boundaries of acceptable conduct in real relationships.
