A cursed nymph living a life of violent retribution comes to love and be loved by a gentle, shipwrecked fisherman. She’s been hurt badly before, but through the power of his endless patience, a strong fawn response from his own prior trauma and the power of forced proximity, love is found (as well as general deference to her authority).
It’s a Greek myth retelling and monster romance, between Scylla, the sea monster, and a man who is like not like the other terrible men she has met before. He is patient enough with her prickly side to let her come to trust him, and he is devoid of the dominating masculinity of all her prior suitors. There’s lots of overtly coded, unapologetic femdom and a lot of feelings.
If you like your ladies strong and your men soft, and you want to watch the most bitter woman in the world be loved anyway, you may find this was just what you were looking for. There’s lots of action, tentacles and high drama, and pretty reasonable pacing. It’s even the first book of the series, rather than sticking the femdom in the ass end of the book list when all the creative juice is wearing thin. Unfortunately I didn’t personally find it worked for me, but I can see why people do, and what in it was done very well.
For positives, you get a heroine who is allowed to be physically monstrous, biblically accurate style. Scylla has tentacles aplenty and vicious dog heads at her waist, and rips several people in half. She is a Gothic villain in the style usually only permitted to male characters, the brooding brute. The plot is also constructed into a coherent narrative by someone who clearly knows their myths. A barren island’s cave system makes for a novel and occasionally oddly comfy setting. I liked the slice of life parts.
Unfortunately, for me, all this is held back by a chronically weak male lead (in more than the physical sense) and a cartoonish level of simplicity to its approach to the bad guys. And, as a modern retelling, for all it tries to tweak itself to a more feminist framing, with its emphasis on female rage, the rewards of being true to yourself while opening up a little to love are a bit dubious.
I also found it couldn’t seem to commit to how unlikeable the heroine is supposed to be. That’s not something I would call a fatal flaw. It’s well understood that female characters are held to higher standards to sweetness and thematically this is about not having to be nice. Nonetheless, there’s a bit of awkwardness in how much we the reader are supposed to buy her self justification. Retellings of the villain figure stories often struggle with this, explaining away what modern audiences might particularly take issue with to the point of dilution or failing to address them satisfactorily. While the Greeks themselves gave most popular characters in their stories different interpretations that could be completely contradictory, I found Surrendering to Scylla a bit tonally indecisive in how bad it wanted her to be read as. Greeks often elided around that problem with tragedy, of which this would otherwise stand well as, but Romances have to give you a Happily Ever After. Unfortunately, this one tried to do so without deciding if the characters needed to resolve or soften most of their flaws, or lean into them.
So, we linger on Scylla’s suffering to make her understandable, first her objectification as a nymph, her status as collateral damage to a deluded Circe, and so on. Usually this sort of framing is done to make a character’s behavior understandable and sympathetic. Inversely, she has an awful lot of self pity for a serial killer and very little self reflection about her own prejudices around other monsters. The story also acknowledges that she is actively luring people to their death for the crime of being in the same zipcode and not as discriminating a killer as she puts herself to be. Morris isn’t going for the me-or-them completely misunderstood monster. I actually liked this part, but her unchanging embrace of that came at the expense of Ophelo’s likeability in a way that I don’t think was intended. It also ends up highlighting how simplified all the other characters are in their uncritically described awfulness, which can be confusing.
Because additional characters are left in very reductive shapes, it’s very undecided about what I would describe as how much we should take seriously the leads’ trauma goggles. Narrative seesaws between hints of complexity and hard binaries, where people are all good or all bad. It therefore feels a bit like we are getting things through the perspective of our two leads, but not given space to acknowledge they are unreliable narrators.
For example, in the setting “Sailors” are officially distinct from the male lead, a “Fisherman”. The former is a sort of long voyaging traveller, the latter, we are led to understand, is a skilled trade everyone spits on. Why do Sailors sail? Scylla would say they are greedy, but stops short of saying they are all raiders. They have treasures on their boats sometimes. That’s about the level of motivation we get here, so we can only infer most of them are traders. Regardless, Sailors are all characterized as absurdly awful, murderous jerks. Some of this is being played for laughs, with how ridiculous the characters are. But at the same time we are supposed to see them as a real danger to Ophelos, including implications (off page) he has been repeatedly sexually assaulted. Thus, the book struggles with the nuance it wants to insert.
Scylla has a massive blind spot where her interactions with the world essentially amount to avoiding Gods and being exasperated strange horrid Greek men want to fuck her. She’s clearly never thought about any mortal who wasn’t cut in the heroic measure, and while those that do have nothing to recommend them, those that don’t are largely outside of her interests.
For example, she is hard done by and alone thanks to the curse. But she also keeps mentioning off hand there’s another monster in line of sight from her own home that she has clearly made zero effort to contact. We never learn why, but she is also offended to be compared to other monsters without a lot of caveats on Ophelos’s part. This isn’t one of those “monster is our word, you can’t use it” either. She just blithely assumes that her neighbour isn’t worth talking to.
Ophelos, on the other hand, is comically bullied. He is so bullied, the story makes it clear that even his father was bullied. Everyone bullies him so hard and so mean, but he kills and catches fish so good that the Sailors brought him along in the boat. The rest of his character is basically one giant trauma fawn response. When he isn’t fawning he is clinging. The clinging is framed as the courage of his love, but given the other thing we know is the only people who didn’t bully him were older women he helped in the past, there’s a streak of self preservation here that never gets addressed. And nonetheless, his actual backstory is life in a small village followed by travel with horrid louts. For all his time on boats he has never seen the world without bringing a gang of assholes with him wherever he goes.
While Sylla is permitted to do things female characters usually don’t get to, Ophelos’s most positive trait is his complete inability to pose any meaningful threat to Scylla. This makes her feel safe, but ultimately that’s all he can offer. It feels like in an effort to emphasize the distinction between them it ends up giving Scylla depressingly low standards.
Ophelos embodies that observation that if you are the sort of person who waxes at length that dogs are better that people, what you mean is you prefer beings you have all the power over who depend on you completely. It’s not wrong to fantasize about making someone into your literal emotional support pet. It just made it hard for me to feel Scylla was actually getting a good deal.
I think my “come the fuck on” moment with this book was probably the relationship’s third real conflict. After an interlude of innocent-in-a-Gothic-castle style standard warming to each other, a gang of Sailors show up and attempt to fight Scylla. Ophelos wanders into this, and, after the Sailors’ offer of rescue is rejected by him, turns on Ophelos as well. As is a traditional trope, Scylla takes a mild injury defending him, but when she is snuggling him in the aftermath he is also not comfortable with the carnage he just witnessed and blurts out he forgot she was a monster. Scylla reacts by storming off, rejection sensitivity dysphoria personified. When they both cool off, Scylla apologizes for not realizing gore could be off-putting… and Ophelos apologizes for letting his empathy get in the way of her murder and making her feel bad that he was openly upset. Even though, he says, he can’t help noting those dudes she ripped asunder could have easily been him, he knows she needs to do this as a part of herself.
Not “you were only protecting yourself and me!” Not “you couldn’t help it, you lost control” or even “yes, it’s bad but your monster part needs to feed”. Just that this is important to her, so who is he to get in her way or question that? We see that Ophelos fully acknowledges that Scylla is a monster in the behavior sense not the physical sense. It’s this point that we realize just how cooked this young man’s brain is. Supposedly soft, gentle and almost cloyingly sweet Ophelos is very bought into his role as a barnacle on bad people.
Scylla can kill a thousand other Ophelos, in his mind, as long as he gets to stay by her side. He doesn’t even characterize the victims as bad people, they just aren’t him so it is not his business. His thought process is that he believes he has to be with a monster anyway and at least this one loves him and confines the violence to others. Ditto, we are supposed to take Ophelos’s repeatedly refusing to be sent away as a strength of his devotion and character. He is just more scared of being alone and losing Scylla’s angry defensive energy. Ophelos isn’t nice, he is a Nice Guy.
I think why this galled me is that I spend a lot of time around people with a lot of overt female rage, and have had a fair bit of it myself. I am often spikey and bristle easily. And one thing you have to be mindful of is that there’s a category of Not Like Other Boys that will sort of remora onto women they see as having more fight than them. And notably they tend to conflate ability to be mildly helpful to people and a lack of their own ability to express agency as being inherently more good and thus above reproach (and more worthy of you). Ophelos gave up trying to be meaningfully good a long time ago, and his frightened reaction is supposed to be a momentary lapse he will try hard to get over.
There’s a bit in the last third of the book where she’s temporarily restored to a nymph and they maintain their D/s dynamic. Normally I would find that refreshing, as often resolving the plot’s source of conflict in a femdom story ends the dynamic. Unfortunately Ophelos’s unaddressed trauma and perpetual identity of victimhood dilute its impact. Scylla the nymph is still stronger than Ophelos, because his level of ability to stand up to her begins and ends with requesting that she only call him Pet during play (and not leave him alone). You get the clear impression that even subtracted from her physical augmentation, if she wanted to she could still take him to the tideline and hold him under water until the bubbles stopped. The part of her that made her a monster is also still there, even if the tentacles are temporarily back to legs. And, ultimately, they are basically living in a rental owned by her divine dad at this point. He might have insisted this is where he wanted to be but the alternatives have been clearly spelled out as death or more Sailor based abuse.
I also think the other point of hesitation for me is that in femdom circles there’s a tendency to be uncritical about the motivation for doing sadomasochistic hijinks is only just retribution for the pain of living under patriarchy. As a fantasy flavour it is no worse than say, pretending to be a pirate. As a thing to wade through though from people being serious, it’s basically the constant message that femdom is just another trauma induced personality disorder. Not that the drama of trauma can lead to accidental fetish material, but there’s a slice of the larger community who are doing this because they sincerely see it as a compromise needed to deal with the hazards of heterosexuality.
If Scylla, given choice, is still the monster, I would have also liked to have seen how Ophelos handled choice more meaningful than “noooo, I want to be with yooooooou” when confronted by separation others chose for him. Morris was probably being true to the myth here, in so much that there wasn’t any material to build out from, but at least once it would be nice to see him choose her when the alternatives weren’t objectively and unambiguously more crap.
Nevertheless, being fair, this is a fantasy not a relationship guide. If Ophelos is little more than the rescue dog that encourages a traumatized woman to finally leave the house, that’s still an interesting story. And sometimes the best a real happy ending can offer us is living in a different, better house, and still with the good dog. Sometimes we don’t get over our bullshit or address our internal contradictions. And, I mean, come on, there’s graphic alien physiology monster sex. And captivity based femdom that stays femdom post captivity. And a happy ending that pleases the characters, even if it might not be perfect.
After a scandal between the families puts Anne Pym and her sisters in a socially precarious position, Simon Rushford, Earl of Underwood aims to resolve this reputational damage by making her his Countess. A whole bunch of light, entirely consensual femdom ensues while Anne adjusts to this marriage and comes into her own, with the rest of the plot conflict being driven by Anne attempting to live up to her own expectations as much as those of others, and Simon being a bit dumb.
This is one of those 3.5 star situations, where its good parts were somewhat smothered by its problems. That’s not to say I hated the book, even if I was exasperated with it (and the characters) at times. Its main flaw is that it’s under done, but in the sense that it desperately needed more book to fill out what it was trying to do. Waite can write, with a particular knack for sex scenes, but the flow of individual pieces is very choppy. However, as far as erotica and hand under the covers reading, it executes what it is trying to do sincerely and with enough story and commitment to physical realism to underline it’s trying to take its own material seriously.
Other than that, though, the conflict here is probably the book’s weakest part. There’s plenty of problems for the heroine to solve, such as finding her feet in society, managing various scandals, and reconciling herself to things she can’t have, but we take until the last third of the book before there’s any real challenge. Capital R Romance (as a genre) has a beat structure and theme that isn’t being hewed to very hard here. Particularly germaine to abandoning forumula, the hero is a kind of gormless easy going individual who seems to exist to be agreeable and reassuring, but also cause most of the fuck ups. He is certainly very earnest, but also very stupid in a way that’s never particularly explored, essentially leaving the other half of the potential plot conflict entirely unaddressed.
Particularly notable is that he is an utter dumb-dumb about sex, to the extent that a first major point of drama in the relationship is that he is flabbergasted to discover that a change in costume is enough to render his wife attractive. Nevertheless, his Madonna/Whore complex causes no further dysfunction in their love life and does nothing to change his opinion of her when he discovers she likes fucking him. This is a bit of a head scratcher that he is very bought into the idea of duty, proprietary and the fragility of women of his social class, but has none of the drawbacks this is usually packaged with in real life.
Instead, Simon is written like someone who would be startled to discover carriages that aren’t painted red can still go fast. Inversely, Anne’s makeover from debutante pastels to bright colours (this being all it takes for Simon to realize she is hot) is in no way an effort to dress for his benefit, a purely happy accident. She likes fucking her husband, once he shows an interest in her, but her love for him never shifts from an increasingly appreciative check list. Additional tinkering could have taken this from Anne reacting to things and concluding it could be much worse, to her own example being a more traditional catalyst of change in her partner as well.
Still, the main conceit the book is built on is pretty refreshing. Anne is a plausible sexually dominant, including approaching the inevitable historical romance virginity loss scene with full enthusiasm instead of a rather cliche reticence. Inversely, I enjoyed her hesitancy in figuring out her new social milieu and reconciling the real fact that dominants are not magic fountains of universal confidence. The plot, had it held together a little better, had its interesting points and avoided a lot of the more irksome versions of the tropes it explored.
But I would have liked to see Simon ever have to confront the fact that he caused not only most of the problems in this book, but is largely insulated by his privilege in a way others are not. We are supposed to treat his marriage to Anne as some sort of mutual sacrifice, but in reality, he gives her a very difficult job entirely for his benefit. At no point does his terrible decision making process ever cause him real consequences, largely because Anne keeps dealing with it for him. No lessons are learned, Simon shall be Simon until he dies.
This earnest range of fuck ups even starts with the prior book in this series, where we are told he plays an accidental part in the leaking of someone’s nude painting. The scandal from that is what puts Anne in a position where marriage to her is a sort of rescue, but even so she also represents a convenient solution to his feeling of obligation to marry someone out of duty. Then, once their sex life is off and humming we discover actually he knocked up his last mistress, but once again Anne is dealing with the worst of it entirely to his advantage. I am not even asking for a comeuppance. It’s just that Simon is never significantly impacted by any of this, and always less than Anne.
Indeed Simon does not get so much as a side eye from being surprised all the unprotected sex he had with other women he wasn’t married to resulted in pregnancy and then this secret being mismanaged by him. He talks about not being as slutty as his brother, and this, by his measure, seems to have been enough in his mind and nobody confronts him about this because the book keeps very modern sensibilities. No sex, no matter how irresponsible, is to be shamed. So, instead, he is briefly flustered by the mess, then Anne solves his problem, he then wanders off to play with the new baby.
The strongest conflict, found in the last third of the book, doesn’t really concern Simon at all, just Anne putting up with a lot for her cousin (heroine from the last book) and confronting finding out something about herself that will impact their life together, rattling her confidence in the process. This, about three months into their marriage (timelines are a bit rushed, it might have been max a year), puts a bit of a damper on their sex life while she deals with her feelings about that. It’s here you see where this would be a better book if Waite had given it more time. We could have built into this better about what sudden sexual dysfunction means to Anne. Instead, problem established we lurch into a happy ending by way of a pegging scene and then a time skip.
Honestly, the pegging prose itself was well done, and so rare to find that I can forgive a lot. Nevertheless, it’s that ongoing choppiness of flow here that makes this scene nice but bewildering, rather than fantastic. What could have been an additional escalation becomes simply a dildo out of left field.
To emphasize on how bizarre this is, nothing to this point suggests anything more sexually adventurous on Simon’s part than oral sex. A bit of editing could have handled this better, dropping the more complicated kink sooner into his perspective or maybe exploring that as part of the Madonna/Whore thing we started with. Instead we are left head scratching. How does Simon know about butt stuff, a historically realtively supressed sex act even compared to oral? We never get much insight, but for plot convenience he has a porn image to share with his wife as a way of guide and the firm belief this is just what Anne needs. Is this a secret vulnerable fantasy he dwelled on, revealed only as an act of trust? Did he do this loads with those prior partners? No, it’s pretty much just Simon doing Simon things.
By his logic, if Anne is feeling depressed enough she doesn’t want to do PiV, clearly what Simon thinks will cheer her up is putting a dildo in his butt. Tahdah, no more pressure on her to be wet enough to penetrate! Luckily, as pretty much every other hare brained idea of Simon’s so far, it goes great.
About the only thing I can say to Simon’s credit is that he always does the wrong thing, but says the right thing afterwards. He offers Anne no help figuring out posh society, but cheerfully reminds her she is doing great while watching her struggle from the sidelines. He drops a surprise baby in her lap, fluffs about in a panic until Anne rescues him and then turns into instant perfect modern dad so the audience can coo over baby time. When Anne is sad because of a thing she has learned that impacts their sex life he says something supportive about centering her feelings not his. And then he offers her his butthole in this trying time.
This is probably something of a pattern with how the book treats solving problems. When Simon played a part in harming Anne and her family, his solution to marry her is treated rather like a unilaterally good thing, rather than either excessive to what had been actually asked of him (and a gift with considerable strings). When the impregnated former mistress shows up on the doorstep, Anne in turn adds her to the household with a job, purely so Simon can get more time with the baby, and we are supposed to assume that this is a lovely, gracious thing to do to the other woman and not, again, a hard job that asks her to continue to subordinate herself to both main characters for a problem largely caused by Simon. The pegging at the end is almost a rule of thirds conclusion of this pattern. The problem of being unable to feel as aroused because of a very real point of stress is treated like Anne’s problem that Simon tenderly solves. In reality, it’s Simon saying “here is a sex act we can do when you aren’t as horny that will still benefit me”.
Simon adds to Anne’s life by adding massive social prestige and wealth, but in his own self characterization, this is more like the desirable cart attached to a particularly clumsy ox. The rest of Anne’s life is not particularly a net positive by his presence in it, and at times he feels his positives are more like a sexy lamp that could be replaced by a wise mentor stock character. One can even read a darker interpretation of his marriage to Anne that he knows he’s actually offering a less than good deal and figured her desperation would make up for it.
These, incidentally, are all interesting conflicts that could have been addressed if we had about 25% more book. I credit Waite here that she’s clearly got the insight and writing ability to have ironed out these problems and made Simon either less of a bliss-ninny or have him reign in more of his worst tendencies in regards to this flaw as part of character development. I also don’t think the circumstances this was published in gave Waite the support to do so, thus one can’t complain too much.
This forms, by the way, the crux of my review dilemma. To nurture more femdom books into existence, existing works must be more widely read and shared. Nevertheless, this must be done with compassion and the knowledge that writers in this niche are operating at a severe disadvantage, most typically in the indie space.
As an indie, “At His Countess’ Pleasure” must be judged, not by the standards of the bigger budget books, but what is accomplished with less. One thus forgives much: typos, lower grade graphics on the covers, things that didn’t always land as precisely as we might hope, and so on. Often they are the byproduct of a single creator wearing many hats, and these errors really can be treated as irrelevant to the overall whole. As an example of the genre of Romance, and assuming the creator had all the tools of a big budget book, this needed to go back to the metaphorical kitchen. As an example of something put together cottage industry style with no support to speak of and profit margins that border on an entirely labour of love level, Waite pulled this off phenomenally, bringing her talent and technical skill to a part of the book market that can trend into shovel ware.
Thus my conclusion: it wasn’t a waste of time to read this and if Waite does any other femdom I’d happily give that a shot too. As an Erotic Romance, it’s a bit weak in how it assembles the R part, but if you are into firm but gentle F/m, the E is solid and could stand on its own if that was all you wanted.
Michael Robbins is not precisely bad kink representation. I can’t call him that, even as his essay, published in Harper’s Magazine (175 years of arts and culture!) makes me viscerally recoil. He themes together two things, the safe, tidy masochism as curated by his domme, G, and the anxious despair of the apocalyptic nature of climate change. And he wrote some free verse imagining Percy Shelley with a Bazooka, in that sort of liminal self indulgence that we award ourselves post play, under the banner of aftercare. I can’t begrudge that, either. We are entitled to our pleasures.
But I can unpack why my skin crawls. I suppose I can succinctly observe the biggest flag is in his essay’s title. He calls his poetry “Domme Songs”, which, sure, but these are not the songs of a Domme, they are his songs, excerpts from the inside of his head, about his experiences. His example in the essay isn’t even a song about her, she’s just conveniently adjacent. And there’s something very boiled down there about the experiences of one’s own annihilation in the summation of a submissive fantasy. You become not a person experiencing, wanting and acting upon these desires, but someone doing for, even as the fantasy uses you as the fulcrum and the engine for everything that happens.
The woman he has decided to call “G” works into his purposes because she’s ever so safe and useful. To make his point, he details a relationship (only mentioning once she was hired) based on going to her Bushwick apartment for sessions of sadism, interspersed with little mundanities about X-Men comics and Big Thoughts (or at least Big Feelings) about climate change and how he thinks his desires relate to it. And you couldn’t ask for a better, accidentally accurate snapshot of shitty sub behaviour.
Of course, I do not begrudge him his release or his catharsis. I don’t even mind that his submissive fantasies are inherently selfish. All fantasies are. What frustrates me is that I live in a world where masochists and submissives get so much more space to be considered, for people to understand them and nod about how this is an essential and valid route to transcendence and processing your feelings, practically medicinal and thus virtuous. This is also a world where sadists and dominants like myself are supposed to be midwives to the birth of another’s transformations, nothing more or less. Indeed, if anything more is asked, the fantasy of us being the bad guy becomes a real accusation.
Robbins is too good a writer not to have some glimmer of self awareness, knowing on some level what he is doing is all about him, a recursive and contained experience. Where he first falters is that he is a pretentious git who thinks he is particularly insightful in this particular zone. For example, he contrasts the high camp image of BDSM with his precious grasping at authenticity, saying “I want a woman to truly despise me”, but no buddy, you do not. You have a bog standard piece of the “enemies to lovers” trope where a million insightful romance fans pass around the unfortunately not firmly attributable quote that to be hated requires being seen, and to pass through that hate requires real acceptance by your lover. You want the emotion of the moment to work, and we can credit you need the ineffable thing generally short handed to “chemistry”, but you are a simple person thinking you are complicated.
Sure you don’t necessarily want the weird theatrical outfits breaking your immersion, but for Christ’s sake, Robbins, you still want aesthetic dominion and you think your baby like tantrum if you don’t get it is just how things work. Pouring out a PSL as capitalist trash does not make your cute little cup of machine drip from a diner more “real” coffee. But Robbins goes one step further and essentially demands everyone not remind him both are coffee in a cardboard cup someone else made at his behest. He needs the person making coffee to pretend it’s a gift.
You almost think he gets it when he describes in the most condescending women-preaching-is-dogs -walking-on-their-hind-legs that despite his domme having never read Judith Butler she implicitly gets performativity. But holy fuck, is there also no self awareness of anything but his own sucking neediness.
(G, by the way, ended the relationship when she left the city to go to grad school.)
Robbins, you utter fucking dingdong, Butler’s theories have long since duffused into common understanding. You not grasping them is a failure on your part. I’ve never read Butler either (though I have listened to some of their lectures) because I don’t have to, any more than I need to have read Lord of the Rings to orient myself in the genre of fantasy. But, Robbins wants himself to be special and profound, ground breaking and relatable while clearly having only superficial familiarity with the thing he claims to be all consumingly obsessed with.
For example, as he scoffs, people unfamiliar with BDSM describe it as “whips and chains” but he wouldn’t even know where one would get a whip. He lives in New York, by the way, with multiple excellent sex shops. And in a world with the internet, including Etsy. Instead, he facetiously speaks of how there was a riding crop involved, but it broke. Robbins is either being incredibly disingenuous or he is putting himself forward as having a relatable summation of the emotional geography of kink, when he is closer to someone who has seen that landscape in a painting in a museum on a completely different continent, and it really moved him, man.
Occam’s razor suggests he is like a million other men out there with long standing submissive fantasies, but to whom the process by which one realizes them is best left to the professionals or the wives and girlfriends acting in that capacity. He has never actually looked at how one goes about getting a whip because any iota of practicality shatters his brain into a million pieces. What happened is G was responsible for working that part out, much like she was responsible for knowing burning his penis with a hot curling iron was a bad idea.
No really, Robbins is just sort of a useless dumbass about all this, wanting someone else to take responsibility for realizing his vision. Paragraph after paragraph of useless dumbass.
And when he talks about G he still doesn’t get it, not really. In narrative, she snaps his balls with a rubber inner tube, but she bakes him cinnamon rolls. I start to hope we get to see her as a whole person, but nope. Her sadistic actions are attributed to studying hard at classes in his local BDSM community, but it would never occur to him to attend them alongside her. The essay is not an inaccurate portrait of an actual domme from the outside looking in. But, when he quotes her actual voice of talking about feeding off of his energy, the fucker than compares her to the rapacious forces of capitalism destroying the climate. Because of course he wants to imagine himself as the virgin forest being burned, and our hypocrisy around that.
No, you fucking numbskill. You ninny. You absolute nincompoop. She’s talking about the white hot thrill of the way the essential empathy of Sadism shoots you into the stratosphere. The way the power trip of power exchange makes you feel uplifted, when you play a person exactly right. It’s a perfect moment, like hitting exactly the correct note to harmonize on a song or choosing precisely the best possible words to convey everything you meant to say when you are writing.
What we are not not is fucking FRACKERS. The people destroying the world that way don’t thrill at the way the consequences of our greed are a shot in the balls. They desperately deny, requiring everyone to agree what morally pure people they are and at best how much the consequences can’t be helped. He acknowledges green washing and whatnot, but can’t get himself out of his weird, penitent head up ass pretzel.
Robbins also quotes as follows:
Gilles Deleuze recognized, “masochism always has a theatrical quality that is not to be found in sadism.”
And I want to yell at him that nobody lets us. That they are absolutely terrified of us, so much so that the only place sadism gets to admit it’s there is the worst of crimes, biblical infants dashed on stones; calls to punish the worst people that suspiciously affirm all our bigotry; revenge after being wronged for crimes worse than death; all circumstances where the instinct to flense your lover because you love them so are very much not invited. The best you can hope for is to be a book boyfriend or someone’s dominatrix, paid or not.
Anything G says is not to be taken seriously, or to be presumed to be in service to his needs. He never, at any point, seems to think about what he might be providing her. He doesn’t say money (even though he met her is a professional context), but if he acted like he does in this essay during their relationship I can see why she casually fantasized about cutting his tongue out. But I cannot emphasize enough how much Robbins did not and does not care about what his ostensible domme wants.
Despite this, we do get a rare moment of G’s actual voice and motivation peeking through, her clear feet on the ground, earthy understanding of the body and the mind. Likely if you were at all familiar with the New York BDSM scene you could even extract out who she actually is (or possibly if she’s a composition of a couple of people). Nonetheless, Robbins is very firm not to let her be the focus of things. This essay is about where he’s coming from, not where he is, and definitely not who she is. G, the domme has a place, and that’s to be the usual literary mother-wife, carrying yet another generation of earnest dude writers through their neurosis so they can spit out the words we laud them for.
Of course, facing even a hint of having something harder asked of him than getting off, Robbins takes time to whine about the indignity of having to articulate his needs, mewling about advice for couples trying to communicate their fantasies with each other better. Masochists, he wants us to understand, are owed not having to do the labour of even so much journaling or using indirect communication when they want something from their partner involving abstract feelings. For him, the mystery of the work involved to unscrew the emotional messes they get themselves into should be kept from a masochist with the same swan glide effortlessness appearance of a woman never letting her husband see her in curlers, or face unpainted.
It’s not on him, the professional poet, to extract and accurately describe what he is feeling! It’s laughable to him that anyone who is a masochist could. Here he inserts that stale joke about the sadist refusing to hurt the masochist, because Robbins gets to publish in prestigious literary magazines about his penis (metaphorical and literal), but he doesn’t need to be at all original about this. Heaven forefend a man not speak in cliches!
Robbins, as he describes himself, is actually just a bad submissive, the kind lifestyle dominants on kink forums see therapists about after breaking up with. He is the sort of sub that ends their marriages in cheating, because their wife isn’t doing it properly, but has the audacity to tell them this is work. These people, usually men, are legion, but though Robbins thinks he defines the soul of masochism, most masochists are not this tedious or lazy.
And yet he says (when someone essentially calls him self indulgent) that “No one has ever escaped the trap of sexual anxiety and longing and dissatisfaction”. But I wonder if he has actually thought at all about how that applies to G, or if he’s too busy worrying about his koan level contradictions over whether he is pathetic or not? Does he consider, outside of himself and his literally masturbatory ontological loop, what being pathetic might actually mean? That G could feel hurt, rejection or insecurity?
I don’t think so. I think the idea of the dominant as a whole person is something he needs to blank out from his brain before he gets hard. He can sort of play along with relationship things, a bit, but then she needs to retreat and let him take charge of how things are supposed to work. he needs her to perform like this is some sort of lifestyle set up, but ultimately have the final say.
Perhaps his seeming selfishness is actually Robbins is just being weirdly coy about admitting this was sexwork and how that’s tilting things. A lot of people who have no experience with BDSM outside of fantasy think the only dommes that could possibly exist are paid, and some of the weirdness of his behaviour might make more sense through that lense. More silliness on his part of so, though, because neglecting to mention the transactional nature of things is also very self serving.
But, in lifestyle land, by contrast I am writing this after having a conversation this morning that went like this:
“I want,” I said “to put a corset around your waist, here.”
My hands pressed on Silver’s ribs, only lightly, inhabiting the sensation of the squeeze as much as I envisage it. My minds eye makes it a heavy rubber corset, as much feeling the ribs pull in as the way the latex scent is a full on taste that sticks to your hands and climbs as much into your mouth as your tongue.
“Plugged,” I say. I can feel the way the ring of the asshole remains aware of something there. I can’t know prostates except as an outside observer, but imagine it well enough and predictably to get what I want. The rest is effortless to understand. “And maybe something for your nipples. The suction things, or maybe some clips. A hood over your head, arms bound.”
I do not describe the next “and then” that I am going to stimulate the hell out of his penis, probably until he comes. Maybe after I split lines of vivid pink over his ass and thighs with a whippy bit of bamboo. I’m casting this out to him like a fishing lure, going to hook him, going to drag him up to the bank and split into his psyche to see all the guts inside. The act of this describing is foreplay for us both. I told him another version of this fantasy last night, shared the bones of it at the start of the week. I stretch out an act that’s probably going to be over way too soon to last us longer than the moment.
The practicals of being a domme often are in the doing, and as a sadist, I sensibly chose a masochistic partner to make it plausible to have things function. But, here was another important piece in choosing Silver, a self awareness he could carry with his fantasies. Sure, like all people, he wants it to feel “real”. Our ability to furnish this immersion together, however, is an essential part.
Robbins has none of this. Faced with G’s ability to get into his head and get past his anxiety he simply says “I’m just not sure what precisely it is she’s good at.” And good lord, is that not just a summation of his opinion of her. He cannot get it through his cinnamon roll stuffed head that she’s doing anything other than magic.
Silver, my sub, knows why I am good at it, but more than that, he knows why he’s good at subbing (and bottoming). It’s an incredibly important reason why he can have me following him around our apartment, pulling his hair, harrying at him, shoving him against walls. Why Silver gets to have someone who can say the nastiest things to him is because I can do it with the absolute confidence of one who steps forward and expects if the floor won’t be there to meet her feet, his face sure as hell will.
It’s one long trust fall. Together.
But Robbins, in trying to explain BDSM to his audience, cites Venus in Furs. Specifically in his example, popping a few highlights of Sacher-Masoch’s imagined sufferings of Severin in the thrall of Wanda. But, Wanda, once upon a time was a real woman. Masoch did not invent that character in his story. She was a figment of his wife’s own fantasy, in playful letters sent to an author she was trying to relate to as another writer. Venus in Furs, by contrast, is the dogged insistence of a man to force his masochistic fantasy through in replacement of a collaboration, the end of his real world marriage. Masoch had a real domme. He was just far too controlling to keep her, too interested in even stealing Wanda herself to remake her as his own character.
Robbins, in his own pomposity, seeks freedom from his sense of victimization and guilt by passing through them at the labor of someone else’s shoving. Likewise, he tries to tie his kinks to sophisticated forces, the big canon art shit and sky tearingly great terrors of eras past. But he shows his whole ass again when he compares himself to G in relation to background and role. Everywhere in his relationship to her and his sexuality she is his ministering angel, a service provider. She’s not a fellow academic on her own intellectual journey and his peer, she’s his romantic interlude with a pretty young thing that uses surprisingly big words for… being the sort of person who is in the business of sexwork with literary weirdos?
Even his apocolyptic anxiety is oddly a bubble that includes only himself and the earth. Everything else is terror and tricks and disappointment but it’s all pointed at him. It’s the end of the world, but as he tells it, that’s something he is facing more or less alone. To Robbins, climate change is a personal insult.
I type this with a nasty pressure in my chest, a reminder. I need to pause to remember my inhaler. I grew up, mostly, directly across the bay from the largest oil refinery on the eastern seaboard. A dying, industrial town, that also boasted a pulp mill that reeked sweet, like the aftertaste of aspartame. My family was poor and bad at managing things, the house old and full of mice and dust. After Covid shredded my lungs the first time I got a diagnosis of asthma, but I know it came earlier. Now there’s forest smoke, my country burning, burning. Any shred of stopping that burning on our end has been folded away in favour of preparing to fend off a bigger, meaner, nastier country.
And the air quality, probably, will eventually be part of what kills me. It’s the same air, on the west coast, that mirrors the smokey air on the east coast that Robbins swims through while twitching with his nervous anxiety. But what strikes me, more than anything else is his firm conviction that he found a bosom he can seek comfort in particular to his masochism, a safe mean mommy to hold his hand through the dying times.
BDSM, in our world, doesn’t offer dommes that. It gives me philosophical ideas of consent and skill based classes, sure. But, there’s no economy of pro subs to whom I can reliably pay a few hundred an hour to make a little chapel to alleviate my anxiety, no infrastructure of helpful men whose job it is to understand my fantasy needs implicitly, while I act like an elitist prick about their education relative to mine. Myself, even inhabiting the authenticity of desires people will supposedly pay top dollar for, don’t get to exist outside the context of what is essentially alternative therapies and commissioned acts of art for a patron. I can be an acupuncturist, and have people argue I do real things to them. I can even not charge for it as a public good. But I cannot be someone who just wants to stick needles into people for fun. For my own reasons, such as liking them.
“And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wishing / For untimely death or demise / Or am I just wishing I could be like you? / That the people would see me too as a poet / And not just the muse”
And that, Robbins, is a heck of a lot closer to an actual Domme song.
(Note: Text has small edits reflecting numerous typos, and initially misgendering Butler.)
Femdom-As-Subculture has a problem that is is very, very hard to define what the hell femdom even is. Many have tried, from the idea that it is just regular D/s (but that the dominant happens to be female), to the inverse of what I would describe as the “Mistress Manual” approach, where performing as a domme (and by extension as a sub) is a tightly defined set of aesthetics and behaviors. This, incidentally is a larger part of a discussion over what is and isn’t BDSM, but people who identify with femdom as a way of describing what they are into do not tend to concern themselves with that overarching debate. Battle lines within the niche have, for the last decade or so, been drawn particularly fiercely around how much dominants should or should not take the pop culture idea of femdom seriously.
Neither camp has a clear agreed on name for the difference in their approach. On the more hardline of distinctions, the domme-doing-whatever-they-want people would phrase their boundary as lifestyle versus commercial. This can’t be right though, because this group *also* won’t stop complaining about the lack of romances or other content targeting them. They don’t tend to be self aware about this (if I hear one more kinky libertine calling someone else a “porn addict” unironically while curating their own fantasies, I may start slapping people), but the complaint about the alienation of lifestyle only dommes remains in itself valid. Inversely, most of the stuff that would be summarized as commercial doesn’t see itself in any conflict with anyone at all, except maybe censorship. Aggravated discussions by internet strangers about the heart and soul of lifestyle femdom do not reach or influence beyond that… except there’s the other issue of the participation of subs in stuff.
A Femdom Partnership Problem
Once we go outside the more abstracted complaints of how femdom is depicted (or marginalized within the BDSM community at large), the other major flash point is that femdom, as defined in any interpretation consistently expects that subs are going to be a part of this. People who consume works targeting them tend to turn around and try to replicate it with their partners… or seek what they imagine in fantasy in real life. This equally true regardless of whither you are a D type or an S type.
This is not so everywhere. Queer slashfic, for example, are not so concerned with attaching themselves to actual gay men as a third wheel as much as imagining the expanded dynamics of fictional ones, usually through expressing one’s own much more complicated queer identity. Readers of Romance may have romantic relationships, but it’s actually pretty rare they drag their fiction into their actual dynamics, asides from the most fringe people you hear about holding a Twilight/Court of Thorns and Roses wedding or whatever. Furthermore, this tends to be pretty self contained, a mostly female reader base consuming the works of people they presume to also be female. But, people generally agree that BDSM is first and foremost a paired sport. And everyone seems to agree that the other half of your potential duo is doing it wrong, damn it!
Again on the hardline lifestyle only side people tend to get a little silly with how stridently they reject any input from subs on defining things as valid. Recently the trend had been to take anything a given lifestyle dominant prefers not to engage with and call it “bottoming” if a sub suggests it or even, more ridiculously “dominant bottoming” if it isn’t their verbatim fantasy (instead of the other person’s). They are not entirely out to lunch, in so much that it is important to push back on aesthetic limitations, as in such low hanging fruit like the idea that dominants cannot be penetrated, but they ultimately tend to arrive at very weird places like that nobody should feel submissive from anything unless they personally approve it. Real problems like the objectification of dominants tend to be discussed not in those terms, but assuming that somewhere if it is worked for, there is a platonic ideal femdom people should actually strive for.
Unfortunately, femdom is a big club and everyone’s in it.
You can absolutely make a few individuals feel really shitty about their preferences, but no matter how much a small core of frustrated lifestyle dominants try to narrowly define what subs are allowed to be, they will at best only every rule over little potholes of the internet that don’t actually take into account the big tent. Inversely, no matter how much you try to coerce dominants into playing along with only someone’s fantasy version on the sub’s they will largely just leave or decide dominance is not for them. So it also goes in the other direction, that people who have a non-inclusive mode of femdom and then whine about a lack of partners have made their own misery. Meanwhile, no matter how much you think you have created a perfectly dominant pleasing idea, that’s someone’s idea of kink dispensing hell. Much of this conflict comes from submissive and dominant persisting in being thought of as a sort of genderless heterosexuality, where they are defined by their attraction to their other half.
To this line, I have tried, to no particular success, to get people to acknowledge that “feeling dominant” and “feeling submissive” don’t have to be paired. They certainly can be, as many people do find that inspiring this feeling in another person can create a delightful feedback loop. However, if all the subs disappeared tomorrow, people with dominant fantasies and preferences would still exist. If nobody was actually emotionally or erotically satisfied as a dominant, subs would still exist. All told, it’s actually a miracle we are compatible at all, but so much misery is just people assuming everyone is automatically on the same page. The subs assume what makes them feel submissive is inherently attractive to dominants, but this, and I must emphasize it here, is equally true in describing dominants telling subs they can’t use that label unless it pleases that specific dominant.
Nonetheless, we will not cease trying to find our other half, and for that we need words.
Humans are fundamentally social beings, and because it is possible to make BDSM work as a paired activity sometimes, we will not stop trying to do so. But, once you come together with another person you end up needing to communicate what, in this case more so than any other, is are very abstract emotional concepts. Power, vulnerability, a sense of intense belonging… or whatever else draws you to BDSM, these require a symbolic language. Nobody is telepathically imposing our emotional states on each other, we are going through elaborate efforts to build a feeling together.
This is where the morass of tropes, symbols and behaviors we associate with femdom come from. They are messy, tilted towards certain audiences more than others, and occasionally so insulting to one or both parts of the dyad as to decidedly kill the mood. On top of that, they aren’t even reliably consistent from person to person! Nonetheless, they are also inherently unavoidable, as they also give us a scaffold to build on. The whole concept of femdom, in itself, exists as a category to facilitate communication, and evolved under two circumstances concurrently: people trying to share what they liked to replicate it with others, and people trying to curate what they liked for their own gratification. Both are fundamentally social purposes with immense cross pollination. Then (of course) the supposedly shared language becomes a potential trap, because it is also designed to exclude and protect against.
In defining femdom as a category, we must make our peace with its dialectic. On the one hand the existing role sets we are given can be stultifying and are one of the things that discourage lifestyle dominants from exploring or self identifying with it. On the other hand, the norms are also things that sustained as an effective means to an end, or represent things that are in themselves marginalized and need space to be. And, broken as they are, they also present a place to argue and correct. By definition of having the norm you can challenge it or change it.
Take putting things in holes, for example. It is at once true that penetration is not inherently submissive, and that the social constructs around penetration usually label it so. It is true that most women come clitorially more easily than vaginally. It took a lot of work to break a norm vaginal sex was superior, a belief that just happened to benefit the frequency of orgasm for the average person with a penis, while causing people with an orifice needless pain. It is also true that having what you are allowed to do ranked in a hierarchy that discourages penetration when that works for you is not freedom, either. Are strapons allowing a liberation? Or are they creating a tyranny that you need a penis surrogate to be truly dominant? Is the psychological weight of a dildo more or less valid than its absence of nerve endings for the wielder? Is receiving cunnilingus more dominant than giving a blow job? People have feelings about this answer that are as strong as they are collectively inconsistent.
Make it a butthole, and you add an even greater layer of complexity. Not only will this conversation take you in circles forever, but it in itself creates an echo. If, as a person, you feel externally compelled to penetrate (or not not penetrate) rejecting that in itself could equally make someone feel submissive OR dominant. To put it bluntly, there are few more transgressive acts in BDSM-as-culture than a dominant of any gender putting a butt plug in or getting their partner to penetrate them anally. At the same time, you would be mighty silly if you insisted dominants must do butt stuff or they are actually not having any real power.
This blog started on the side of defining femdom as “dominant that happens to be (vaguely) female” and honestly a somewhat cringe level rejection of the pre-existing norms, and over the course of its run has seen me arrive at more-or-less the middle. Largely I blame being a contrarian, but also I could not ignore a fundamental dialectic. You have to share a space, but also have room to make the space work for you.
What is dialectic, anyway?
A dialectic is a point in which two answers to a problem conflict, but the nuance of the situation means that neither can be taken as wholly correct. In Political Science (the genre of social philosophy most concerned with power) they teach you this example with the story of the visiting, dirty soviet peasant and the public urban baths. So the metaphor runs, bathing the peasant will make the bath dirtier for everyone, but also the peasant will be cleaner. It’s told as a humorous story, of the local soviet counsel endlessly debating how the baths should be allotted, but it amounts to a great cautionary tale about looking for easy, binary certainty where humans are involved.
For femdom, the dialectic is between those norms (what femdom is presumed to be and by extension not be), versus the individual.
We are, infinitely and simultaneously, the person who needs the bath in a way that will alter its function, and the existing status quo. We are shaped by a femdom ratio, and that the ratio theory is bullshit. We are at once oppressed by a strapon and elevated by it. These discussions are simultaneously the sort of need-to-touch-grass level of misplaced emotional investment, and also navigating the fundamental human condition. And there will never be a perfectly correct answer to anything. Ever.
But you can still move towards dialectic reconciliation…
I, for once, am able to offer some sort of solution. Firstly, nuance doesn’t remove your ability to act, rather it frees you to act more. Infinite angles for criticism can feel like endless work, but it also means the status quo can never truly trap you. Another fact is that people who consider the human will remain advantaged in finding what they seek over those that do not. The last part is that there’s a measure of serendipitous compromise in where things accidentally overlap.
While the Soviet bath dialectic story is one of stress, and bad outcomes, a dialectic can also be the story of the cat grooming the rabbit. This is a real thing pet owners notice, that even two species that fundamentally should be incompatible can accidentally arrive at a best case outcome. For a cat, grooming another animal is a peaceful dominance display. For a rabbit, an animal doing grooming is a gesture of submission. Both animals believe they win, and can maintain a very aimable co-existence that way, despite having fundamentally different perspectives. A lot of making femdom work for everyone is more like that, not a zero sum game, but reaching a sort of balance. It’s not so much getting everyone on the same page, as integrated into the same story.
As I said coming in, the extreme versions you can try to approach femdom with, either a hardline tactic of entirely rejecting its existing tropes as invalid or being completely ruled by them, won’t work. In the first place the former approach just gets as ridged over time as the latter, and the limited definition version eventually gets itself left behind.
Essentially, you need to adopt a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to the practice of understanding where people are coming from and trying to define things. You have to be willing to update your definitions, without being so open minded your brains fall out. You can accept that some thing that comes externally may arrive with an assumed meaning, but also allow that it doesn’t have to be that way or that you can’t nudge back. Essentially when you accept the dialectic is there, it stop being able to mess with you.
The dividends, by the way, are a living, resilient community around what you are trying to do and better communication with the people you try to do it with. And I think (in conclusion) it would be remiss not to emphasize that these two things are the points of conflict that got us here in the first place. All our arguments about definition are either about a sense of belonging or in trying to be sure we get what we want.
No community is so elastic it can include everyone (and fractures and niches will still remain a feature not a bug), but you get a much more over arching system you can all click into if you make things more of a buffet. And simultaneously, while no amount of rigidity of definition will actually solve say, do me subs here to demand a laundry list, or egomaniac wannabe cult leaders trying to do so via calling it dominance, you get more mileage to be critical of both if you are less focused on if they are real/true and more on them being very, very stupid. And come on, do you want a partner who hangs things everything on validity or on your mutual needs and joys, as individuals in a bigger thing?
This is not a positive review of “Melt for You”, but it’s also not an un-positive one.
Ask the lifestyle dommes of the internet and one of the most reliable things we complain about is that we do not feel represented. We don’t see ourselves in popular media, except accidentally or with a Hays Code style tendency to have our stories end in punishment. We know we aren’t the target of most porn, even when it’s ostensibly about us. We also sit through a lot of things that claim to be neutral, but re-enforce our opposite as the default, not just vanilla, but femsub. To be a lifestyle dominant is to be simultaneously called a unicorn with infinite suitors and called irrelevant, a rounding error in the planning of creative people in the world.
Inversely we also have a pop culture that likes to fantasize that the dommes of the world are, if not the bad girls to be punished, the patron saints of not being impacted by all the other “-isms”. A whole cottage industry exists in teaching women to embrace their inner domme (or manufacture one) for a raise, the upper hand in their personal relationships, an end to imposter syndrome. This doesn’t work, but it doesn’t stop the first word people pair dominant with being “empowered”. Being one just doesn’t magically change the rest of the context you are trying to do it in, and most dominants feel very neglected by the collective Gaze.
We desperately, absolutely beg and plead for something more, and the market is actually starting to deliver. Unfortunately that poses another problem, that just because something exists doesn’t make it good. As part of my commitment to try to popularize and curate more domme fics, I have been reading a lot of dog awful stuff. Some good things, but there’s a few dozen books now, where I tried to get into it and had to give it the dreaded DNF.
Usually I let the crap go unremarked. I talked about this here, already, that reviews of our itty bitty niche therefore needs to be done with a bunch of forbearance. If something isn’t actively harmful (like The Control Book), if I don’t have anything nice to say it’s usually better to say nothing at all. With this book, when I initially read it, I ripped it to shreds in a series of angry blusky posts as I went, but I scrupulously didn’t share the title. I am breaking my usual rule, however, because I think even if I hated it, there’s still something of value it gave me, and it might give that to you, too.
Melt Into You: A BWWM BDSM Romance, as well as following the trend of indy published romances starting to resemble the same title traditions of lightnovels, was an attempt. It was a swing, and a miss. It was not just bad, but layers of bad, but… it’s a good thing the author tried. And the focus is still interesting.
The TL;DR is that a newly minted surgical tech and domme blogger/podcaster/educator hooks up with a wealthy doctor, with neither of them then expecting to work at the same hospital. Both characters have disabilities, and the heroine is black and the hero white. It’s part of a larger series, by a 41+ books written and counting USA Today best selling author G.L. Tomas.
Obviously we want more of all that: characters who are PoC; characters who are disabled; dommes who are acting outside of a sex work context (or if they are, stay sex workers after the HEA instead of being “rescued” by a relationship); lifestyle dommes being normal, flawed people; even subs being whole people, not automatic doormats. This review is not even a “this, but not like that!”. It’s partial credit with a bunch of caveats.
Sure, I could enumerate its faults, big and small. Globally, it has the problem of attempting to be educational while actually showcasing lots of sketchy behavior, and attempting to be woke while having some very questionable choices. It also is about 50% infodumps through the character explaining to you the reader.
But, notably, it’s a fantasy about me. Not necessarily me specifically, as in Pearl the person, but a group of only a tiny handful of women, probably less than 200, maybe even 100 depending on how you define it. A very specific kind of domme. Not a professional domme, not a girl next door, or a woman with real meat space authority who happens to be kinky. An influencer. It’s a fantasy of being Ferns, or Venus Cuckoldress, or the other tiny slice of women who make their desire to dominate in a lifestyle relationship the anchor of a vocal and vaguely respected online presence. It’s imagining what our life is like through rose coloured glasses, but hey, I am seen… even if I am all pink and kind of distorted!
What it also says is that the author, when it comes to describing femdom, turned to us as examples. They often had a touchingly naive idea of how the sausage is made (the heroine has a person who gets her sporadic paid kink related speaking gigs, there’s no Patreon mentioned, she made the hero a Tiktok star in a matter of months), but holy shit I am not going to get mad they think my life is better than it is. There’s value in me kicking over my own pedestal, but it’s not the author’s job.
Reviewing it also forces you to confront how many issues in text are actually realistic even as they are regrettable and how much of the unreality is basically a symptom of the genre of romance, not the fault of just the author. If I lay any sin at the feet of the author, it’s that they don’t seem self aware of the book’s flaws and contradictions. But it’s a lot to ask of someone to be completely critical of their own work when they were, based on my knowledge of the publishing industry, getting paid peanuts and probably wrote this in a month.
Is the hero kind of a turd? Sure, but alphahole is a common descriptor of characters in a romance genre for a reason. A good part of romance is a conquest fantasy, the woman winning out against the man over the arc of the story. It’s supposed to be about her wiles and magnetism versus his power, lifting the hero up as high as possible only to make his inevitable fall (in love) more spectacular.
Is the heroine a nincompoop? Yes, but often we all are, and romance as a genre demands vulnerability to allow for the ever present rescue fantasies and a sense of growth. If she wasn’t bad with money enough to get stranded without enough twice, how could the audience justify him giving her guilt free sugaring? If she wasn’t spectacularly bad at vetting, how would we have the surprise second act where they end up at the same workplace?
Do the social justice parts undermine themselves through some very questionable behavior and as much through over-explaining like the characters were ambulatory tumblr bios given life and the audience are idiots? Sure, but would it be really better if the author didn’t try?
Are they absolutely fucking bizarre about the hero’s Greek heritage, including characters declaring him being a completely different group they find sexier? Yeah, but as someone also on the ethnically ambiguous side of white (enough to trigger “where are you from” conversations and random racists to occasionally fling slurs), boy am I used to people speculating what I am and thinking it’s a compliment to assign me a completely different background!
Interestingly, buried in the book is also a plausible, but much less happy story. It’s one where kink educators often barely know what they are doing and do creepy shit like asking out a demo bottom in the middle of the class. It’s one where trust in the idea of a safety mechanism replaces real checking; getting an STI test so you don’t read it (or know how to follow up with a past partner later), making a safe call without sharing someone’s name. It’s a world where you repeatedly get put into sketchy situations by your mentors.
It’s one where someone is kind of racist and only considers your perspective in an issue because you are fucking (while still sounding incredibly insincere to others); and where a relatively impoverished person gets sporadically bombarded with money that always has implicit strings. One where marrying well, to an older man often will beat anything you can achieve through working your whole life. One where that dude is the sort of person who will enmesh women into their life and then leverage the power they have over them in a way that fails to consider the power relationship they have while also downplaying real harm and danger.
That story is painful, and littered with fuckups and awkwardness that made me hoot incredulously, but I still read the whole thing when I could have just dismissed it to the DNF pile and never mentioned it again. It was bad, but entertainingly bad. That’s not nothing. I hated it enough I was completely entertained. Based on how much I enjoyed being annoyed at it, it would qualify as fun as any of the stuff I would give 4 stars to.
Taken as an attempt to pair BDSM education with a romance, this failed to demonstrate safe behavior, drastically undermining its goals. Taken as a symptom of the author’s heart being in the right place, while writing an otherwise bog standard Greek billionaire doctor romance I could buy at the grocery store? This is absolutely not something I would waste my breath being angry about.
And ultimately, 10 years ago, a book like this wouldn’t exist at all. It means that what I did as a small part of a larger project to make being a lifestyle only domme more visible, worked. I can’t help coming away from reading this less irked and more shaking my head indulgently.
This is PG-13 rated femdom. No, I am not kidding, someone has managed to get a three book deal from a mainstream publisher for a no sex young adult aimed romantasy series about a trio of evil witches and the subs that love them.
Lest you think I am just inferring from the setting, no, I do mean this is an intentionally kinky book. In the scenes in which the two leads (Saskia, research witch) and Fabian (aka Felix, nobleman in disguise) discuss their feelings, with each other or in their heads it is expressed in terms of his submission. The scenes of fooling around are written entirely as consensual physical domination. But, there’s no sex in page or even a fade to black and the text gives you one stark “fuck” as far as cuss words. This is explicitly appropriate for who this book is aimed for, a person aged 12-18.
The reading level, likewise, took me about three hours (including a break) to zip through it. Tonally, it lands 100% in the current trends for Cozy and Villain-Is-Actually-Hero. This is about youthful wish fulfillment and vicarious ambition, defying your wicked guardians and coming into your own power. Also getting to be goth and spooky while you do it.
And it’s neat, because it both underlines the femdom-hiding-in-plain-sight thing I keep going on about and suggests a market of increasing tolerance. With a small mountain of books (YA or otherwise) where the heroine has to struggle to understand the moody supernatural male and navigate his power they implied threat of that, it’s good that I can go into a Barnes and Noble spot a book where the heroine is maybe a little menacingly clutching the hero’s face with her hand and have it actually deliver.
Nonetheless, I think it’s worth going into this review to also point out that if there wasn’t a clear flag of potential Femdom on the cover I wouldn’t have bought the book. While it was true I read a lot of this kind of fantasy when I was the primary age this is aimed at (in my day it was Dealing with Dragons, Myth Adventures, etc…), but I am pretty old. My wish fulfillment wants are now those of middle aged marrieds. I don’t want to defy my parents anymore, I have to think about them dying and what it says for my own mortality. I don’t need to realize the power was in me all along, I have to think about how to navigate passing the things I built on and symbolic or literal parenting. Young me would have gobbled “Wooing The Witch Queen” up and added it to her head library. Older me has to go into what is ultimately a positive review with the awareness my biggest criticisms are all aspects of it that are Not Written For Me.
So, before I do my usual grumpy fussing, let’s first talk about the unequivocally good parts. Fabien/Felix, our male lead, gets to be hot and useful. He doesn’t need to be cast as some sort of weirdo that he finds our heroine Saskia fascinating. Indeed I suppose there’s one wish this book did fulfill, it’s living in a world where women can be dominant and not have the entire narrative structure say “WHAT A SHOCKING REVERSAL OF ROLES!!!”. It’s like when you are queer you get very tired of coming out stories, even if that’s part of the larger queer experience. This also isn’t a gender flip story where he has to be more feminine to permit her to dominate, it’s just one where being attracted to villain coded people or wanting someone to kneel for you is equal opportunity.
While I told you there was no on page sex, there is, what I would describe as a very well done emphasis on flirting and starting to initiate as a domme, written with a good balance of situational chemistry and emphasis on consent. A main conflict is that after the leads determine they are into each other, Fabian/Felix still needs to reveal he’s actually in disguise and not the person she assumes him to be. But there’s a lot of on page yearning, pressing up against each other and touching with the offer of domination if the other party wants to lean into that while still leaving them room to back out.
Seriously, this is what I mean when I say that BDSM is often unfairly over sexualized in a way it doesn’t need to be. Nothing lewd happens here, in the entire book. At closest, the word “aroused” is used once, but we get no specifics. It might as well be a synonym for attracted. And, in the inevitable HEA, the characters are cuddled in bed together, but the description is so scrupulously free of even the suggestion they are naked that you might as well assume the male lead was reading some more of his poetry to the heroine. That’s actually kind of refreshing. D/s is permitted to be just what some people want by default.
However, now I do need to put my caveats. The biggest one is an accidental side effect of the fact our hero spends most of his time completely swathed in fabric. When our hero flees to the titular Witch Queen’s domain seeking sanctuary, thanks to a fortuitous choice in cloak he is mistaken for a Dark Wizard and promptly hired to staff. Our heroine, for plot convenient reasons, refuses to look under his hood. Shortly after this introduction, his disguise is added to with a mask the last Dark Wizard left behind. That’s just a vocation in this world, mysterious shrouded magical figure of menace. The problem here is that the text also keeps having everyone reacting to him like he is stunningly hot. Of course when you have a character essentially wearing a niqab for three quarters of the book that doesn’t preclude communicating chemistry in other ways. You could emphasize his posture, the bits that show like his eyes, talk about scent, or pad things with sparkling dialogue. Hell, you could just describe the cape itself as intriguing.
Wooing the Witch Queen doesn’t. It’s the world’s slowest strip tease, from masked to half mask, from cape to a formal suit and bare face. But, even when the characters have a moment of being pressed together, the narrative stays perfectly coy about specifics. It tells you this is a very alluring scenario, but it doesn’t show why. One can do asexual alternatives to stereotypical attraction without completely jettisoning sensory specifics.
Additionally, there were places where the elements I will call Cozy wore a bit thin. For example, our Witch Queen, Saskia, lives in a castle full of monstrous staff. They are of course, Just Misunderstood by bigoted humans, but in addition to that, they are slavishly dedicated to serving the leads. This is unlike the other two secondary plots: Saskia navigating that her First Minister is her ex girlfriend, and her reluctant friendship with the extremely extra other two Villain Queens she is in alliance with. Both are storylines where the motivations of the characters are more complicated. The Troll housekeeper and major domo, not so much, for all they constantly demand appeasement. While I get that having surrogate parents who are endlessly giving of every domestic comfort is a fair fantasy to have, it would have been nice to let the Trolls or the Goblins have wants and needs more personlike. One more plot about the monsters wanting something more than you to eat their perfectly made scones and to get enough sleep (or maybe making the Trolls/Goblins more morally grey) would have fixed this.
And yet, for all of that, this book didn’t collapse too far into the problems that many Cozy books do, of destroying their own stakes to save their sweetness. The tension with Mirjana, the First Minister, made sense given that she both led the rebellion that put Saskia on the throne and is doing the actual day to day business of running the country. I also admit I made the mistake of thinking she was actually a sentient magic mirror until she showed up in person (I mean, her name is right there! Also she’s obsessed with Sakia’s public image!), but I found the conflict was a plausible problem and the resolution worked, even if I am sort of sympathizing with Mirjana here more than maybe the narrative wanted me to. I also likewise didn’t find the way the threat of invasion ended too was convenient. Cozy books are going to magically have a reason why you need to take the army on your border (or the villain threatening your goals) seriously, yet also not have a single person die. Without going too far into spoilers, the book did a good technical job of building to a zero bloodshed resolution that didn’t feel like it was just handed to the heroes.
And I think the best endorsement I can give is that I do plan to buy the next book in the series when it comes out. I expect pretty much more of the same, (cozy, but no sex) since Queen Lorelai of the Fairies spent a good part of her dialogue making sure we knew how much she loathed her future love interest and vamping about being a man eater without talking about precisely what she was doing, but I am absolutely here to see how Burgis pulls it off.
TL;DR: A rattling good thriller/historical romance with a violent and aggressive heroine finding peace in the unconditional love and submission of a genuinely supportive male lead.
If you are looking for femdom romance novels, one of the places they hide is the back/middle of a series that is otherwise dedicated to different kinds of BDSM pairings, usually M/f. Most frustratingly, most tagging systems do not make the distinction of who is doing what to whom, with no distinction in most blurbs or tagging. Finding femdom is about looking at a lot of stuff marketed with a “take charge heroine” and trying to determine if they mean a strong female lead with a lot of agency outside of the bedroom, but a sub in bed (or vanilla), and a domme. Even the cover, with this one a particularly well done example, can still turn out to have been a gamble. Nonetheless, sometimes you get a hit.
The Damsel is very much in the pattern of this sort of hidden gem. Looking at the cover and context, without word of mouth, it would be very hard to realize that this is pretty much what the audience asking for more femgaze femdom content is talking about. You get a sexually sadistic (without being hateful) and competent heroine, a sexy male masochist who is a value add to her life, and a plot that allows her to be vulnerable without completely defanging her. There’s adventure, peril and high drama/high chemistry sex. If I had to describe the dynamic I’d say tsundere domme with a sub who is more german shepherd than golden retriever. He’s here to devote himself to her, but the story emphasizes just as much his intelligence and ability to show teeth when she needs it.
When we meet our heroine, Cassandra, she is reclaiming her life after surviving the double trauma of a sexual assault and then the public testimony necessary to secure a conviction of her attacker. At the encouragement of a friend she decides to find a one night stand, propositioning the first man who seems attractive in the common room of an inn. That turns out to be Robert Stanley, an unusually handsome young man from her aristocratic social circle, who just happens to be there nursing being dumped by the heroine of the two prior books in the series. Luckily you don’t need to read those books to follow along here. This is a completely stand alone story with all the focus on our current characters.
And wow, what a ride! Cassandra struggles with her status as a ruined woman, a pair of horrid sisters and a mother who is more concerned that she will taint their reputation of the rest of the family than the wellbeing of her daughter. The world of good society lets her linger in a sort of twilight space, whispered about but still allowed on its fringes. Cassandra, for her part sees her victimization not as a one off experience, but an enlightenment into the violence all women have in common and has set out to do something about it. Much of the plot follows this dark mission, but even for a high drama thriller it has a lot of well depicted accuracy around the damage of sexual assault is not just in the moment, but in dealing with how people treat you afterwards.
That being said, if you need your BDSM super negotiated and clear up front, this book might give you pause. Cassandra leaps into aggressively topping Robert without any conversation about limits, getting him to agree to be tied to the bed before going to town on him. I can give this a pass, under the grounds this is a fantasy and isn’t pretending to model healthy relationships, but this can be a hot button limit for some kink readers. Likewise the thriller side of the plot eventually put the heroine in some pretty graphic danger including the risk of more sexual assault, so if that’s triggering or your comfort place is never seeing the domme character even temporarily helpless, you may find this isn’t your cup of tea. What I can reassure readers, however, is that our heroine acquits herself magnificently even at her darkest and most defenseless moments and the dynamic that slowly develops between her and Robert is one where she trusts him enough to make things more of a collaboration in all things.
Also, blessedly, What this book doesn’t do is conclude she’s only a dominant because she survived rape. Though the context for her initial exploration is reclaiming her agency, and the trappings of BDSM are initially justified by her as simply protecting herself from potential violence and keeping the hero at arms length, one of the main conflicts of the book is Robert helping her see that she isn’t broken, she just incidentally happens to be kinky. Inversely he is never at all self conscious about his own enjoyment of being mauled, and any trauma of his own is not related to his desire for submission. It also is very good at having the hero able to disagree with some of her methods without implying she’s wrong in how she reached her conclusion. I won’t spoil some of the twists, but the title hints at the core theme of the book, that you can still be seen as a stupendously component badass and deserve all the rescue and protection of the titular “Damsel” archetype.
I’m going to talk about an elephant in the room, or precisely speaking an elephant that, while left out of the room, still requires addressing. This particular piece, I think will also distress and disturb people, not because it talks about abuse in a standard trigger warning fashion, but because it requires me to say something flat out: minors need kink as part of a rigorous and inclusive sex ed, but how things are structured fails them.
I also drop a disclaimer:
Adults should not have sex with children or teens, and good sex ed, is not a participatory mentorship. It pains me we need to say that, but lest you think this is coming from any sort of gross mid-century style overextension of the sexual revolution, I believe sex ed should be age appropriate, and a whole life process that talks not just about STIs and birth control, but also consent. That latter belief is not controversial. I also believe that sex ed for grown ups cannot happen simultaneous to sex ed for those under 18.
Are we good? Then let’s talk about the problem!
While I do not claim to be a sex educator, I care enough about peer to peer support that I feel comfortable talking about this problem from that perspective. Many of you may know I am a volunteer moderator at r/femdomcommunity. I’m pretty proud of what we accomplished, over a decade of support focused discussion, advice and resource sharing. We make a space for everyone, from folks in multi decade elaborate power exchange dynamics to newbies still questioning what this all even means. We cover pretty much anyone who can string together enough English to navigate Reddit, and clearly are a lot of people’s first introduction to the reality of kink outside of fantasy. As a result we tackle everything from avoiding scammers and sextortion to self acceptance and busting stereotypes.
There’s one group r/femdomcommunity can’t help, however: teenagers. Or, specifically, we can’t help those below the threshold to access adult spaces. Like most spaces that touch on sexuality and intimacy, we are strictly 18+. That doesn’t make us unique, that makes us the default. Nonetheless, just based on the fact that we have to actively screen and ban people, it’s pretty clear that there is a sizeable population of teens who are trying to explore to get more information. We aren’t making these people interested in the topic or advertising to entice them, and they aren’t coming to us accidentally while trying to write a book report on Lord of the Flies or something. But, we want them safe, so out they go.
Thus, it’s a challenge that kink communities do not have the resources or structure for the 14-17 year old cohort, but a vast number of folks start exploring before 18. This is a taboo topic, with sites like fetlife and many online communities within places like Reddit cracking down on people describing anything about even their earlier attraction to their kinks. There’s a good reason, as unfortunately opening the door to true, non-horny anecdotes about one’s self discovery takes scrupulous moderation not to devolve to penthouse forum style tales. Unfortunately the side effect of this is to give the false impression kinks just suddenly pop out of the aether the minute you hit your area’s age of adulthood.
At the same time, even other kinky people tend to treat what we do as advanced and more dangerous. Unfortunately there’s a bad habit of treating this as the bonus DLC you only get to do once you have tried and mastered vanilla sex. And, the population at large struggles to grapple with a violent debate over how adults are permitted to explore and experience their sexuality, much less what those under 18 should be permitted to know. Implying that people have sexual feelings and or even curiosity before 18 will immediately get you labeled a groomer, regardless of your actual intent. The political will is pretty sure that even seeing a whiff of sexuality or even queer love is akin to violating someone, and age gating online already informally provides a significant barrier to minors getting even carefully tailored to them resources.
Where educational information is available for anyone below 18, it’s still a mess. Most sex ed barely tolerates vanilla and the abstinence only/shamey education folks are getting is doing a lot of damage. It ironically fails in the other direction, not only generally defaulting to generic heterosexuality, but compulsory sexuality, usually centering penis in vagina as the be all and end all of sex. There are more positive approaches, but even people who should know better sound identical to conservative puritanical weirdos, talking about how looking at a picture of bare breasts is an addictive substance, or if called on how silly this is, explaining they imagine there is some sort of turbo super sexier than regular porn-porn, that will psychologically warp anyone exposed to it. Pair this with a pop culture that even free of ostensible porn, immerses anyone who doesn’t live in a cave in ambiguous potentially horny randomness (even at least through trying to enforce the sort of prude that draws more attention to potential lewdness than if you didn’t do anything at all) nobody is actually materializing at age 18 with not preconceived notions or ideas.
As a result, we are knee deep in 18-26 year olds who use pathological language to describe their interest in kink, as an addiction or something they caught off porn. To someone paying attention to patterns in history, they sound like queer people escaping very religious households- deeply ashamed or at best ambivalent about an unavoidable part of their desires. That’s real harm. The problem is that you can block porn all you want, but there’s no age gate on sex negative garbage. While you can’t tell even a 16 year old sex is a potentially good, optional part of being human without significant and even violent political push back, you absolutely can tell them sex is dirty, dangerous and whatever they want, if it isn’t a squeaky clean monogamous relationship embarked on as late in life as possible, is wrong.
But, adult oriented spaces can’t just help by letting teens in
Unfortunately, 18+ spaces usually aren’t safe because we can’t vet to prevent people trying to have sex with the under 18s. This, by the way, is the bare minimum of special best practices in place you need to use, if your volunteer with minors, alongside other things like formal criminal background checks. Thus, if someone’s under 18 and you run a kink group we have a duty of care to exclude, but “bye, fuck off” is only pushing them to unscrupulous places or furthering the idea this is a morally reprehensible extra lewd vice.
Right now, the solution is to remove anyone under 18 from your adult kink space, but I don’t think you should just do that. You can do one more step. I think that a person who is curious enough to find there way to you shouldn’t just be released to the wilds, because they will probably just look for somewhere less restricted, for example a kink oriented discord that doesn’t check ID. It will also affirm the false impression of what we are doing being worse than vanilla, a dirty secret they need to be protected from because of the inherent content, not because random adults mingling with vulnerable teens even if we were say, a novel writing club, is high risk for the teens.
The two resources I suggest are the website Bish, and the long standing non-profit Scarleteen.
Specifically you can use these links: www.bishuk.com/sex/kink/ to redirect to a more static resource about vocabulary and norms that takes a harm reduction approach, and Scarleteen, which offers community interaction tailored help. The latter is particularly important because they use things like forums and a help line, in addition to just educational articles. One thing my long standing work with the kink community has taught to me is being able to talk to other people is much more effective than just passive piece of writing or a video for encouraging someone to feel welcomed. Both operate in the space of being non-profits, and unlike your 18+ forum or discord server or whatever are resourced and designed specifically to keep minors trying to get information away from random unvetted adults.
So, I am deeply grateful for Bish and Scarleteen to be doing the work to cover where we can’t. And if you use an age gate/warning, or a ban message for your community, I really advocate for linking those who are too young to be there to resources like this instead of just bouncing them. It can and will make all the difference to the next generation.
Also, please do feel free to share other teen appropriate, but sex positive resources in the comments. Those two sites I mentioned probably aren’t the only ones out there, but they are the ones to which I am most familiar.
In the aftermath of exposing a community predator, as well as the inevitable disgust and horror, it’s always possible to see how the group contributed to the perpetrator becoming a sustained problem. Nonetheless, understanding how it happens is not the stopping point for the actions you can take to fight back. It will not be easy, but everyone has at least some agency to advise or nudge the groups they are part of to be safer. What I am sharing are lessons I learned from a history of very imperfect attempts to make things better.
I also take a shotgun approach to best practices, because dealing with community predation is equally important in prevention of allowing one to be entrenched, dealing with one who has dug into your group and managing the damage afterwards (and stopping them from coming back). I also share these without assuming who you are. You might be a kink newbie, a volunteer, a lurker or a micro-celebrity. Your community might just be surfing the web, or it might be an established non-profit with an official board of directors (e.g. TES). What you can do will vary, but all of this leans towards “better”.
If you organize something, you have a duty of care
This one suuuuucks. None of us are born knowing how to run shit, much less navigating the worst possible things humans are capable of doing to each other. However, if you set out to start a project, a meetup, a play party, or even a porn site you are at risk for developing a nice cozy home for a community predator. Even worse, this person has a high odds of seeing you as their new best friend and love bombing you to hell and back, and particularly good odds of being one of your rockstar volunteers.
How much you scale depends, of course, on the level of care you can be expected to give. A ten person movie night with your regular buddies is not the same thing as arranging to host monthly screeninging for kink cult classics to anyone who applies from a Fetlife event ad. But, within your locus of control, you can make a difference.
The two things you always have in your control, is an ability to ban people and the ability to maintain documentation. You do not need to be a hero who saves your entire city, but you absolutely are not powerless.
1) Establish you are allowed to exclude people, and try to maintain a degree of due process for that. When I ran the 18-35 munch in Montreal, maintaining the age bracket and making it clear if I believed you were a hazard I had the right to say no were both things people pushed back on, but they were invaluable to getting people to understand attending. Create a code of conduct and share that with group members. Often I found people who would violate the little piddly stuff were the sort of people who violated the big stuff. Remember, community predators like it when the rules have no teeth.
2) If you hear something, investigate. Almost invariably, when someone finally comes to tell you about the problem, there probably won’t be enough information to definitively say what is going on from just that. However, if you make a modicum of effort to discreetly ask around, most of the time you start finding other victims.
3) Document in a secure place, in plain and professional language. One reason people are paranoid about taking action in community safety is the terror of libel. “I talked to X on Y date, who said A, B, and C” protects you. It also means that if you are working with others you have a standardized process that makes it harder for people to attack you for things just being political drama.
4) If someone comes to you with a problem, explain where what you can do begins and ends. Ask them what they are comfortable with, but also make sure you make it clear documentation is non-negotiable. That also means picking your battles and watching for your energy levels. Conflict is not abuse, but it is labour.
If you want to do weird sex shit, it’s fun, but be mindful of the impact of pressure to participate, even unintentional.
Who is fucking (metaphorically or literally), will unavoidably weight who we invest in and spend time with. Scrutinize your own behavior by how people who say no to you (or others) get treated, and where and how you ask. Nothing is perfect, but a culture that respects people saying no cannot do so at the cost of ostracizing them, rendering them homeless or even just left out of the cool club. For example, if you are hosting play parties, have space that has another activity people can do instead. If one room is the orgy room, another one can be the place playing movies.
If you are considering hitting on someone, think about if you are giving them adequate space to retreat and if the context of this might give the impression if they say no they miss out on a valuable resource, be it a job or mentorship, or something more abstract like being perceived as belonging. Never corner people, metaphorically or literally.
A real life example was a dance community where the conference/events had some people running secret sex parties in the attached hotels. This is absolutely normal human joy EXCEPT in this particular case where some of the participants were bringing in newbies to hang out without bothering to tell them that at some point in the party people were going to start having sex with each other. Newbies to the community at large felt if they didn’t join in they were bad sports offending their friends. The onus is on the people who want to have horny fun times to be risk aware and ensure everyone participating is doing so from a place of informed, enthusiastic consent.
If you are in a position of authority or prominence, do not fuck your fans, mentees, creative team or employees, side eye folks who do.
This can feel incredibly lonely, particularly since the stuff that makes you popular or effective is an inherent aphrodisiac. If you are a big deal, you need to acknowledge that and pull laterally not vertically. Watch out for “but they are really mature for…” and other special pleading. Even if you happen to be correct, you are making a cover for your fellow fancypants folk to point at you and either say you are just as bad as them or that if it works for you it must always be ok.
Consider it a sign you need to diversify your network if you struggle to find anyone else on your level. If all the other people with equivalent power in your group are people you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, consider that a damning indictment of whatever community you are part of and work to diversify your peer group. Kink social prestige might be relatively small and petty, but if you have it, acknowledge it.
Watch out for over dependence on white knights, wise oldbies and whisper networks as your only safety mechanism.
This one is a doozy, because everyone says they hate abuse. Even if you were running a community dedicated to the most vile shit imaginable, you probably have some lines you don’t want crossed. The problem happens when everyone’s acknowledgement of a desire for safety rests entirely with things that either don’t help or actively make the problem worse. It’s sort of like if everyone wants to stop forest fires, and their idea of prevention is a guy with a pile of old newspaper to throw on the blaze and a Smokey the Bear fibreglass animatronic.
In your group, does the buck stop with any of the following or tend to default to these?
A champion (and maybe their crew) will step up! Often they promise they will do literal violence against these bad, bad people. This might be a mama bear or a band of bros.
A wise person with a long tenure but no official standing says if you are abused to come to them (or their friends) and they will sort it all out for you. They do not say any specifics.
Safety begins and ends with you finding and hearing about who the problem is through gossip and tips.
I will reiterate that nothing is perfect, but each is terrible in their own way because they provide the idea of a solution, but ultimately operate on a mindset that simultaneously tends to treat abuse more like stranger danger/rare than a community wide problem and works against accountability and anything approaching due process.
The white knight approach is bad, in the obvious first place because most community predation is not a tidy situation of stumbling on say, an unconscious person being assaulted and you and your righteous band laying the boots in. More realistically it’s an imperfect or ambivalent-due-to-the-trauma victim who isn’t immediately seeking a posse to throw hands. It’s also bad because most people who posture, don’t back it up. And in the event you do, the power of a white knight concentrates authority with them, creating an environment where the chest beating promise to Uncle Phil toss a bad guy ultimately is a wonderful lure to community predators to dig in with Sir Safetypunch/the Amazon (or be them) and twist the implied threat of retribution to their own end.
Similarly, the unofficial tenured oldbie guardian probably only has a whisper network at their disposal, a massive blind spot around one of their buddies and being a listening ear becomes a place where problems go to disappear. This is also the zone where someone will promise to “have a word with” the predator and shake their head sadly at your behest. Tenured Oldbies are only really useful if someone uses them as part of an investigation of say, who to also speak to when you get a single complaint about someone and you start looking for the other metaphorical bodies.
From this, you might guess that I think whisper networks beat the alternatives only if the alternative is nothing. They are the safety equivalent of falling out of an aeroplane sans parachute into a forest canopy rather than onto jagged rocks. The problem with them is threefold, first of all their informal nature means the most vulnerable people can be left out, secondly, they almost immediately get weaponized with additional noise and counter accounts. A community predator gets very versed with seeding stories of their crazy exes and the human love of sensation (and our innate biases) encourage certain kinds of sensational to get passed along with any real warnings. Finally, a whisper network also serves to normalize the presence of a community predator. It tells you everyone accepts this risk cannot be changed. That’s great if your goal is to tell people to wear bear bells to deter the endangered grizzly in your national park from mutual destruction. It is not good if you are, say, a person deciding if they will pay for a ticket to a professional development conference, or the person organizing that conference.
Have a proper process in place for safety issues that is not just a hand wave and good feelings. If not at the highest level, at least at the level of individual events or projects.
Do not allow your group to hold one standard of conduct while working on the shared project and a different standard for “offsite”.
Another common form of missing stair is the person who seems scrupulous at official events, in a professional context, etc… but with a nightmare personal life. Or, whom has a pattern of victimizing people they meet at or because of the group, but never *officially* at a sanctioned event. The thrive in both a community’s distaste for trying to involve itself outside its immediate events and the fact that any bad behaviour on their part generally happens out of site of anyone with authority, official or otherwise. Nonetheless, community predators who use this two faced trick depend on the larger community to empower them to abuse and to hunt for victims.
For example, imagine a community that has an extremely on point monthly rave at a barn. The on-site volunteers are perfect, maintaining 0 tolerance on the dance floor, sober people lifeguarding the intoxicated, even a fund for some paramedics, and really, every other thing you can imagine is well run from the door line to the minute you exit. However, the larger infrastructure of a rave includes travel to and from, crash space after you are partied out, word of mouth to even know about the rave, and so on. A possible risk vector here might be that someone with a van or a crash pad nearby is picking people off after they leave or demanding surprise payment in sex at a rest stop on the way there. Over time the community becomes aware “D” is maybe mistreating some of the folks in transit, but D isn’t official staff and all reports of abuse are coming in third hand- they might be messy break ups, right? Our rave barn group may decide this is simply out of scope and decide not to look into it further.
The problem is that D is empowered to do this entirely because the rave exists. D would normally not impress a group of people purely because they own a van or can rent a motel 6 once a month. However, because they are the open transport/crash space person they suddenly matter and have power. This impacts the group in a number of ways. People at the group become shy about calling D out openly to not lose this resource. D gains prestige in the group for all their unofficial volunteering, which means if they misbehave at the rave itself they are more likely to get the benefit of the doubt. And, it’s only a matter of time before they get known as van-D and people in your rave community start feeding people to them in good faith. Oops, Molly was just so trashed on Molly they need to leave early, what a good person D is to take Molly from the official (vetted) volunteer and leave early! You can imagine what happens to our non-binary pal Molly next.
And of course D positions themselves as the safest party bus in the world, so anyone else who might step up for transportation or crash space is not incentivized to also driving or hosting. When D finally does get caught, they are a load bearing volunteer and nothing to replace them is immediately available. They also probably have an army of enablers and friends who will bring this fight to your event even if you say it isn’t your problem. Not dealing with D may even allow them to stack your event with their people, eventually letting them get power over you!
Groups are porous and what people do elsewhere absolutely comes to your events.
Your choice of association, sharing (and alliance) is a type of power.
If you are in a typical BDSM community, art scene or whatever, it probably feel like because there is no central authority it’s basically the wild west. You can try to keep your event secure, but there’s 11ty billion other things going on, some specifically out of spite/after a conflict with another sub-group. The reality is that you actually exist in an overlap. Sure, there’s no central Monarch of the Scene that everyone bows to, but there’s probably a loose, interlocking set of people doing the moving and shaking or volunteering. Likely you also do things to touch base on scheduling to make sure you don’t all plan things on the same night, or inversely stick a spotlight for another thing in your community when a new project is launched. The 80/20 rule also applies, both 20% of folks are doing 80% of the work, and 20% of folks are participating in 80% of the overall activities or shared aspects. Nothing is an island.
If you are planning events or projects, absolutely lean on the existing networks you use to coordinate to formally share things like your code of conduct, ban lists, and policies that work. When deciding who to cross promote, ask the people involved about their policy and who is also involved. You don’t need to be snooty about it- even just some gentle questions can help groups that don’t realize they could be more safe adopt best practices.
If you are just some person with no authority, you are still not as powerless as you think. Use the same mindset for your own protection. Ask those running events what their policy is, how they resolve conflict and what their attitude to safety is. Ask people at events about other things going on in your community what their impression is. If you have the time or energy to volunteer, value yourself and do not give your time to things that fly by the seat of their pants or to whom the attitude to safety amounts to “we care!” without anything more concrete than a vague promise they won’t let it happen.
Choosing who you associate with can give you fomo, but fomo is always better than discovering the thing you invested in is now abusive to you or others. Your presence and endorsement, no matter who you are, is power.
Do not let your group depend on one or a few hero-volunteers, resource, venue/site, celebrity, whatever.
Everyone likes having stuff (a piece of media, an event, an ephemeral moment), but not everyone has the time, budget and skill to make it happen. Likewise, the perfect space is as much a part of the experience of the group as the people. And, some people are just born with a sparkle and ignite anything they invest in. As such, these things all end up being the biggest avenue of risk for both community predation or exploitation.
Community predators thrive by locking down all of these and either positioning themselves as the gateway to it, or capturing the positive regard of the people who make things happen. Not only does the act of being co-opted into being an enabler form a secondary kind of abuse in itself (it is traumatic and isolating to realize you were duped into helping do harm AND the abuser usually will feed you to the mob if enough ever becomes enough), but community predators love when there’s a bunch of starry eyed folks burning themselves out to make a thing function or happen. It’s win-win for them, they normalize exploitation and their modus operandi is to eventually make themselves inseparable from the thing people love, so all that sacrifice ends up feeding them.
This risk vector is usually accidental. It can be very easy to depend on one person to host and plan things or be the creative director. Likewise, it’s very easy to just turn your brain off and know a specific person can always be counted on to do a thing and mentally decide they and the thing are now inseparable. Finally, we live in a time of scarcity, of time, money and attention so whatever group dreams we have are usually expected to be on shoestring. As a result, those who can tend to take a bit more of the load than they should.
Sometimes you have to be ruthless. A community that will not let you pass the torch, share the load or take a break doesn’t love you the way you deserve to be loved. A single funder may fail at any time. An inability to share the spotlight is always a bad sign, even if it’s because it seems like everyone is too tired, poor, uninspiring or disabled to succeed. Unfortunately, giving into this urge to carry on indefinitely breeds martyrdom.
An environment that expects people to carry on to this point also creates vulnerability to community predation. Burnout is real, and after tackling one or two problems your social battery and reputation may need a break. You have less energy for “drama”, and the invariable ability of a community predator to love bomb the beleaguered makes you ripe for recruitment. Ditto, watch out for when a venue is the only space a thing can happen in. Whether virtual or literal, this mindset makes you accept more potential harm just in belief that demanding change is attacking the group rather than helping it.
Try not to establish yourself in a “for life” role, or find yourself depending on one or two of the same people over and over again. At the very least, those people being deployed to work constantly may not have time to train replacements up to their standards. Also, be mindful that if you get extremely entrenched you may give people the impression that rather than you being down to your last shred of patience with the work, that replacing you would be an act of disrespect.
This can also mean that if you accidentally find yourself enabling a community predator, not only will people assume you knew due to your awesomeness, but that you are in fact in need of being taken out alongside them. And lastly, being too long on one chair can also make people take you for granted in a way that stunts your own development.
If you are a person joining a scene as just a member, do everything you can to prevent stagnation. For example, if your venues are limited to an unsafe space, consider if the super low door price that’s supposed to be inclusive to people of limited means are simply putting vulnerable people into a firetrap. If “M” is always the door person, ask “M” about spelling them for even an hour. Encourage, with love, hero volunteers to step down and take a break. If you have a few group “celebrity”, try to add other voices, and if you have a super funder or donor, lock that shit down into some sort of safety mechanism like an independent-to-them board of directors, or approach any gifts of space, time or money like it’s supposed to be impermanent.
It won’t be easy to make room for more people to pay, contribute and do the work, but long term survival of groups also depend on this even if they don’t get a community predator, so this investment is win-win.
Be up front about high risk behaviors (eg sketchy shit), don’t let it become a free-for-all, and if your community has any sort of charter or guidelines, encode that.
Going back to those 6 risk factors I mentioned in my last post, you may have noticed that they involve a whole bunch of things that are very hard to avoid. If you have raves, for example, chemically altered states are a feature not a bug. Poor, scrappy queer people can’t afford all the resources of your local country club. Joyful open promiscuity in a play oriented part of the BDSM scene exposes you to new partners you might not have the time to get to know. Add that pesky stigma (did you know that sadomasochism is actually in a grey area of legality in most countries, or on the books illegal?) and exploring things can feel like clog dancing in a minefield
The challenge to get past is the idea that if something has some risk you need to throw all other safety practices out the window. It’s a sort of fallacy that if some things are permitted it’s accepting the possibility of virtually anything happening. There’s also an additional excessive weighting people do of presuming personal responsibility is the beginning and end of anything related to risk. You want to travel to a kink conference in another city and share a hotel room with virtual strangers, only one of whom is paying the majority of expenses? People are quick to say that it’s the fault of the victim if something happens to them. Regrettable? Sure, but what were they expecting?
This is a stupid mindset, which ignores the whole reason we do things in groups. Groups have a powerful ability to normalize certain behaviours, both for good and in service to a community predator. It also runs counter to how humans function. We are not a hive mind, but rather individuals bringing our own often imperfect baseline assumptions of what to expect.
If you are playing with a new person as a BDSM thing, you do not just leap into it with both fists, you talk about limits and even after that you take your time to slowly explore together. There’s nothing you could potentially do that’s automatic, and while there’s space to experiment, anything that could be a novel surprise they consented to must be back stopped by giving people a chance to affirm they are cool with it before it is irrevocable. Similarly, in playing with new people, anyone who is not an idiot knows that people fuck up and freeze, misunderstand and most importantly, communicate subtle signs they are not ok a little differently depending on the person.
Likewise, many things that are less safe already have very well developed practices for doing them. Humans are absolutely wizards at coming up with harm reduction schemes. Some of these are even turned into real laws, for example the rules in many geographic areas on serving alcohol or the fire code limiting guests and requiring multiple means of egress. An orgy run by smart people has bowls of condoms and single server lube everywhere, a gay bar used for cruising probably has not only free condoms, but public health posters about services for testing and PrEP up in the bathroom and foyer.
If you are running something, a site, an event, etc… as a part of your duty of care, think about the reasonable risks, and what steps you are taking to mitigate them versus what you cannot do. Accept that mitigation means not all behaviour is appropriate for every circumstance. Then, and this is a hard step, make sure people who pass through there have a place where they can see both your processes and where your limitations are. If you are an individual considering participating, one way you can test if a group has their pants on their head is to ask people about their risk plans. I believe some humans will be foolish and will deliberately still seek the absence of safety, but make people admit it.
Whatever you do, do not let people define things as “anything goes” or “entirely at your own risk” without making them publish that in a way anyone who shows up knows this environment is not concerning itself with anything other than what the individual can get away with.
Understand the dynamics of abuse in the community and the aftermath.
Reacting to, investigating and calling out abuse is made harder if you don’t know what to expect. To an extent, every generation needs to relearn the same common facts, but inversely, the last 10 years gave us a lot of data that as an elder millennial I had to learn the hard way. It includes the following:
Victims generally don’t get abused on day one, but several weeks or months in, after they are invested into the group. Their abuse will be unlikely to be the equivalent of a broad daylight leap from the bushes. Likely it worked like that metaphor of a frog being boiled, with the abuser either getting the person isolated and vulnerable or pecking away at them in a gradual escalation. When you hear about it, the community predator will have a counter story, often posited on how the victim didn’t immediately start screaming and stabbing the minute things were not ok, and how troubled the victim is, or vindictive.
Sexual violence is a crime of power, and opportunity, not desire. Most people sort of have a clue about this, but the corollary is that most community predators are also awful to people they are not attracted to. See, for example, the use of unpaid or underpaid labour in the Gaiman incidents. If you are investigating sexual abuse, other exploitation is a canary. Normalized exploitation is a big sign inviting a predator inside.
Inversely, when you look into information about a community predator, in addition to additional victims you will probably find a bunch of people the abuser did things to who were personally completely fine with it. For example if the abuser likes to randomly initiate sex by groping people without asking, there will be people who luckily for them were into it. By this, the abuser will maintain that what happened to the victim was a regrettable accident. You can’t catch every fuck up, but emphasize that playing fast and loose with things like enthusiastic consent is still an injury to everyone. Note these as a pattern of a potential abuser behaving unsafely.
In the effort to fight abusers, mud will get flung, not just at the victim, but those who helped make an accusation. Your skeletons will get dug up. If you are the amazing bone free minority, something will be invented or something you say or do in an effort to get people’s attention will be harped on as THE REAL CRIME. Most of you probably saw how, say, every single celebrity who accused Weinstien instantly had their integrity called into question, even people who simply endorsed those who came out as victims. This tactic is to make things look murky, but it’s besides the point, because it ultimately is actually trying to argue that abuse should be permitted and expected. I use the term community predation deliberately, because this kind of abuse has normalized the behaviour in the community at large. Watch out for people who think they can convince an abuser to knock it off through their personal relationship to them.When you uncover something questionable through to dreadful, there are a lot of people who will agree with you that it’s bad, but their solution is to “have a word with” the community predator or promise to keep an eye on them going forward. They are enabling a community predator. Make it clear this isn’t a solution. If they are an event organizer you want a next step spelled out (what is the threshold of banning? Where is your concern being formally recorded? Is this an ongoing investigation). If they are just this person’s buddy, partner, whatever they are not on your side. If they really cared about you or their friend they would work on removing the predator from access to victims. Community predators use sympathy of their enablers to maintain access, but these enablers don’t take the problem seriously.
Acknowledge your at risk people.
There will always be people who are more vulnerable: the poor, the disabled, the marginalized by an -ism, newbies, etc… They will, by the way, be the imperfect victims. They will behave stupidly, fawning, downplaying or explosively attacking who they think is responsible. They will not have tidy narratives. They will ask or need too much of those who help them, and this will be used to paint them as unsympathetic by those who exploited this lack. They will be too emotional or not emotionally demonstrative in the right way.
Not everyone will want you to pursue useful action, and people who come to you to help probably really don’t believe themselves. That’s both the damage the abuse they experienced caused and also part of the highest at risk group. If your group has participation of the most vulnerable within it, not only prioritize keeping an extra eye on them, including things like checking it with newbies weeks and months after the new person’s shine has started to wear off, but an extra eye on those who work and assist the more vulnerable people. Onboarding is a life long process.
Inversely, anyone can be victimized, but the other group that’s probably doing poorly is the ones closest to the community predator. Access is one of the most important factors in risk. Community predators absolutely also abuse their enablers and eventually any camouflage that becomes aware of being used. is part of how they keep their people in line. Expect the extra horror of watching say, the partner of a person who valiantly defended their community predator spouse and even brought them victims to turn out to have also been a victim. The harm an enabler did means the group might not have a place for them, too, but take their report of their experience as data and don’t get too hung up on ignoring it in retribution.
You are not infallible, make your peace with that.
Accept that your squeaky clean reputation and your finite energy for conflict will be used against you. You will mess up, say the wrong thing, not catch every person. Do not let the community decide you are the One Good Person to fight all their battles. It will hurt a lot more when you can’t. It also, once again, makes you the Most Attractive Person to a wannabe community predator, because your endorsement is their camouflage.
If you are reading this nodding along and thinking I am awesome, know that I have fucked up. I have dropped the ball. People have been harmed on my watch, despite my best intention. I almost certainly have someone orbiting my social circle who is noxious. Do not make me the authority. This is about you and what you can do, not what I did.
And in the spirit of this, I do invite using the comments to share what best practices you found.
[Content Note: talk about abuse and sexual assault with specifics and hypotheticals]
The Vulture recently published There Is No Safeword, a rigorous deconstruction of the ongoing history of predation by author Neil Gaiman, acting against multiple, vulnerable women. This, alone isn’t new information. Nor is the role by which he used BDSM to try to justify his actions. What the article did did, which other discussions didn’t tend to go into as much, was talk about the role of how the community he is part of collectively enabled his behaviour, and how this problem was not just a handful of acts occurring in a vacuum, but an ongoing problem stretching back over a considerable period of time. It was an account that was darkly familiar to me.
Gaiman, whatever else he is, is a textbook community predator or, in common slang, “missing stair”. His history of abuse operated via taking advantage of risk factors in his professional, lifestyle and creative/fan network. He did so via leveraging significant celebrity and money, but also via structuring his social relationships as a part of a larger group to compound the vulnerability of his victims and provide himself with cover. In the immediate experience of those he harmed, it’s a tragedy. In the aggregate, the summation by The Vulture is a powerful teaching tool to help stop it happening again.
For the last decade, in addition to blogging and various creative pursuits, a significant part of my life has been dedicated, with various levels of success, to community safety. I was hardly the only one to try. The groundswell of weird, creative, queer and/or horny geriatric millennials coming of age was to demand better, different and center consent. What I got out of it, other than stress related IBS and a few community hazards at least temporarily disabled, was an awareness of just how universally replicable the behaviour of serial abusers are, and what sort of groups are particularly vulnerable to making a home for them.
I found it in every group I joined or explored, from kink, to LARP and tabletop, to computer games, to dance and writing. I found it in groups I wasn’t part of, film and television, right wing news, straight to religious home schooling.
Pretty much every creative/passion community from churches to 3D open source animation is particularly vulnerable to gaining missing stairs like this and maintaining an ideal habitat for them. The BDSM community, of which you, the reader of this blog are probably part of, is absolutely incredibly vulnerable. I don’t know how much we can stop it from happening, but we can understand why, how and through that what best practices let you fight back, not just from being victimized, but becoming an enabler of someone.
Here are 6 factors that put your community at risk of creating a safe space for missing stairs:
Lots of reliance on volunteers/low paid labour to function and little or no oversight
Huge power disparity in group members due to massive differences in money, resources and popularity
An entwinement of the personal and professional where the two are functionally the same and everyone participating in the larger community must do both to stay engaged
External stigmas creating an Us VS them dynamic with any resource that might be leveraged against abuse being a hazard to everyone continuing to have the group or project (and providing a pool of people experiencing marginalization)
Recruitment, with a supply of new people coming in or joining.
Mind altering substances (drugs and/or alcohol)
Hey wait, that’s everyone!
Sharp eyed people may notice that virtually every community they could be part of is subjected to most or all of these factors, so I suggest another framing tool.
Treat predatory dynamics entrenching themselves in your community as being much like controlling for things like the spread of STIs. This might seem counter intuitive, in so much that having or spreading a disease is almost always involuntary whereas sexual predation very much involves the very human agency of the person doing it. However, missing stairs need the rest of the staircase to be dangerous.
The point of knowing risk factors is not necessarily to stop doing things, but to handle risk with the respect it deserves. You, the reader, likely inherently understand that nothing can be made perfectly free of potential harm, but taking risks means that you need to construct a structure or series of practices to mitigate them AND you need to be brutally honest about the risks involved with everyone participating. At a personal level, kinky people do things like only doing bondage if they supervise the tied person the whole time. At a community level, acknowledging risks means establishing means to reduce or remove harm collectively.
The Anatomy of a Community Predator
I will say this first, a community predator is not just limited to rock star authors. It could be a volunteer, a mentor, and oldbie or anyone who leverages their established role in a community to attack its members. The community could be as vast and prestigious as a ruling political party or as small and humble as the choir in a single senior care facility. The fact that we keep catching men doing it is not because anything about being a man makes you biologically inclined to rape, but that the social factors that favour disparity in power and status predominantly also favour men, particularly cis dudes. For the same reason that it’s easier to be a successful novelist if you are a white cis dude, it’s simply easier to be a successful predator (and go longer before you get caught). If sexism ended tomorrow we would still have community predators.
Thus, anyone could be abusive in their personal relationships, but who we hold in more scrutiny selects for who is more likely to be in that role. As such, even though the majority of abuse examples are cis men, I deliberately use gender neutral language.
Abusers are parasites. They pursue the idea that they are a great person/seminal in their field/the lifeblood of the community/the one person speaking truth to power. Their work might be real, but it will be weighted disproportionately even above whatever it was.
Their behaviour not only stacks up victims, but selects for people who they believe won’t challenge them effectively and eventually drains resources from the collective to the maintenance of themselves and the harm they do. For example, it’s often remarked how humouring the predatory behavior of certain great sci-fi and fantasy authors within their writing community discouraged more women to participate. If being letched on was the price of admission for most of the women trying to break in, of course many of them would decide the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Satisfying one person’s ego therefore comes at the expense of the potential of countless others. To add insult to injury, they often warp everything around them so when you attempt to remove or stop them they do a great deal of damage to the group itself in the process.
Abusers also benefit from grey areas, and benefit of the doubt. They suck up all the grace and good faith we extend to others, counting on us to cut our losses or forgive. Community predators depend on our desire to only speak when we think we will be believed, and when we ourselves are beyond reproach. They very much thrive in positioning their victims in a state of perceived mutually assured destruction. More frustratingly, abusers can also be victims, either sharing marginalization, a past history of trauma or existing as a catspaw on someone else’s predation.
Questionable behavior also becomes a sort of means to get power over even those they aren’t directly abusing. Getting you to participate or turn a blind eye to their behaviour makes you complicit, and of course they will blur the distinction between their abuse and fun but socially frowned on activities. If the culture at large hates consensual promiscuity or kink they will recast criticism of themselves as the voices of prudes and fuddy duddies. If they want to play with alternative “traditional” social structures, they will cast criticism as wicked and worldly. BDSM, in particular, has a distinct culture of silence and a very real fear of both outing and engaging formal law enforcement.
Importantly, in understanding the harm community predators cause, they also do not tend to confine themselves to just sexual violence, but leverage their uneven power disparity, be it star power, professional contacts, money (including being a funding guru), life saving resources and so on to make or break the experience of others. They will steal, redirect the labour of others to their benefit and ostracize those who challenge them. If there is a whisper network, they clog it with conflict and counter rumors, until it becomes unreliable. If there is a community accountability process they will become a vexatious litigant or rules lawyer their way into making complaints against them nullified.
They will pursue personal vendetta and redirect popular scorn not just on people who oppose sexual violence, but anyone who blocks them getting what they want. As in the case of Gaiman, community predators absolutely overlap with labour exploitation even as they frame themselves as a saviour, rescuer or donor. And, by blurring the personal with whatever projects they are part of, community predators will reframe conflicts according to whatever suits them. Conflict is simplified to “drama”, accusations of sexual conduct are blurred with it being a civil dispute over resources or a political squabble over control. That these may be happening simultaneous to sexual abuse essentially adds insult ot injury.
I share all this to stress that it can be tempting to dismiss a community predator as simply a personal matter. Even if you are not the preferred “type” for this person, remember that there’s a higher than average chance they will eventually harm everyone. The best time, when you detect a community predator, to remove them was yesterday, but you cannot simply let these people be and expect the matter not to escalate and spread.
