BDSM in real life

Scenes From a Femdom Marriage

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We were 3/4 of the way through an episode of Mice & Murder when I realized we were starting to procrastinate on our pre- planned play time. He is going in and out of a doze because he has already seen this episode, but he’d also put this on in the first place after we’d already watched the back half of the prior one and Saturday is definitely drawing to a lazy close with things, or rather him, left undone. That won’t do. I tell him to pause the show and strip, while I start rummaging to find my latex catsuit in the three boxes the latex is stored in. I have wanted to do this since yesterday, almost did it last afternoon of my own volition, but his work day ended early and instead we cuddled with his head against my chest and the stress of things seeping from him in an almost audible hiss. 

It wasn’t the right moment then, not just for his obvious state of stress, but because I have been a bit fragile too. While he would have been able to transition from the vagaries of tech industry imperial court nonesense into helpless little bitch mode, I knew then I would need more emotional uplift from him than he was prepared to give if I was going to hurdle into into the head state to treat him like a besotted fuck toy and not obsess over my own troubles. You can do the surprise firm pounce on a stressed person, but not when you can feel the raw edge that if something goes wrong in your bullying, on your side, you might end up in tears.

Instead, the other day I had vocalized, around previously scheduled D&D sessions and farmer’s market trips, I wanted to take time to do more than the casual default we had gotten into the pattern of doing. This weekend Something More should happen. And it was important I put it on our mental calendars, because we aren’t doing it as much these days, and that’s not what I want for us. 

It’s a hazard, in couples that live together, that kink stops being An Event. Even as you still have the sexual energy of a couple of rabbits, you can just coast on your prior exploits. It’s not a dead bedroom, or a default to vanilla, either. It’s almost that the emotion/narrative of all the elaborate nonsense that has passed between you so far wears a reliable groove where trying hard is no longer necessary. You get the couple version of how you can get so comfortable with your particular kink you don’t need to read the whole story/watch the film/finish the fantasy to come, just the idea of it. In a couple, much as you can look at eachother and toss out just the punchline to a running joke to make the other person laugh, with mutual kink dynamics of any tenure you can just hit one or two of the right spots and bam, you go from slightly in the mood to done, cozy together and discussing what veggies in the fridge need to be cooked up first before they wilt into the trash heap. 

It’s not that that’s not nice, in itself. In fact that’s sort of the ideal foundation, but if that’s all you do, over time it starts feeling like just how easy it is comes is at the expense of the potential highs of putting in a smigen more effort. I’d even told him maybe after an episode of Dimension20 we should play, but now I can feel the inertia of the cozy bed and when I start hearing the little whistle of his semi unconscious breath I know, very starkly that if I don’t say something now, all that is going to happen is some makeouts, and edging session and then I will make myself come and there’s nothing left of the day but dinner.

And honestly I am not tracking this episode either, just surfing erotica on my phone intermittently. I can almost perfectly visualize the episode ending in another 10 minutes, be kissing, and the way that just immediately goes to me coming and then  him making roast chicken and the peach cobbler I also planned. So I take control. The TV goes off. I tell him he is going to help me suit up. We are going to do this. 

Of course there’s another delay. He makes a trip to the bathroom and I need to pee before this suit is going on, so I sort of wait around in anticipation unable to do much else. I am both psyching myself out and being cross enough with my own brain that I am in a simmer of horny and cranky. I remind myself that I trust him and if things don’t actually click this late afternoon it isn’t the end of our kink life. Now he is chilled out enough I can be insecure without is just being a buzz kill.

So, dressing, we talk about how I am worried the suit won’t fit (I am learning to deal with a healthier, but fatter body) and navigate around how I messed up my shoulder last month in a way that compresses my ulnar nerve. That’s been the other major damper on our play. It’s hard to feel attractive when extending your right arm causes immediate 7/10 pain. But the injury is better and the suit fits fine. Kink Engineering does good work and while there is a lingering stiffness on my injured side I can feel from the latex full body squeeze, it’s trivial. 

I remind myself of the same thing I did after our first play time and he drove me 4 hours home. I trust he wants to be here and knows how not to offer what he doesn’t actually want to give. I trust him to be an adult, not a martyr, and a veteran kinkster who long since discarded unreasonable kink expectations. There’s like 5 minutes of polishing and sort of trying to get into the groove. I am still so jangly it feels like he isn’t there, in that mindless lust state, but I am also aware even if he was, my brain is enough of a scumbag to lie he isn’t. So I tell him to choose the position I am going to fuck him in, and snatch the harness from where it hangs in the closet.

Of *course* the dildo I want is missing, and he has to get up to help me find the box of cocks. We go through and “um, pick one of these three” moment with some other reluables, but I find the general, a more implausible toy. There’s my hair and fluff stuck to it and I am distracted by cleaning it. If I was more organized, I would have had my chosen cock in hand before I suited up, but that’s not who I am. I tend to play by inspiration, not a script, even my own. I walk tiptoe to the kitchen sink so as not to lubricate our floor worse from any silicone that drips off me. Silver, out of the three, picks the bumpy white one he usually prefers.

That one is kind of meh for strapon play because it has a hollow core at the base you are supposed to lodge a bullet vibe. I think this is an unfortunate choice, and it makes it worse for thrusting, but I am not going to nitpick after asking, because that’s a bedroom confidence killing move and I did offer. And, in fairness it’s a visually pretty toy with ridges just where they need to be. If the designer hadn’t given it a vibe pocket it would be my number 1 too.

However, at the lubing him stage I determine that his ass, usually drum tight, is pretty loose today. This is incredibly variable, with some days it being a bit tender, too. Not today, perhaps due to the on his back spread V he chose. My fingers just shloop in, as my gloved hand works him over. I can get four to the knuckle easy, his absolute limit on his best days. 

Butt stuff is always a delicate process, emotionally, because even cleaned out you may find something. I can’t even call them “surprises”. That’s like opening your fridge and being surprised it has food in it. Pretty universally, the one getting filled is in a much more emotionally vulnerable place because they are worried about being an object of disgust. But, today he is clean, not even notable santorum. An idea, already planted from my rummage of the cock-box forms.

He is already edging away while I work, as it’s the other trick to open someone up- and every stab of crooked fingers into his prostate is getting significant reactions. Reader, lest you doubt there is anything going on other than this sort of physical mechanics there is significant dialogue being exchanged by way of psychological stimulation, but up until this point things aren’t quite feeling they click for me. When I am jamming him into proper groans I start feeling the connection I want, but it’s still taking a while to warm up.

Chronic pain, body changes, all that bullshit really get in the way. Yet it’s the most pain free day I have had in a month and I am still pushing through the sort of bad feeling hangover. I do end up giving him a few thrusts with the strap-on loaded with his ridgey pick, but this isn’t quite it. I make a judgment call.

The ruddy, plump headed general had already been thrust into his mouth after it’s impromptu rinse. I’d left it lying on the bed next to his hip, and I scoop it up, announcing that he is going to take this for me, too. I am pretty sure he’s limber enough for some moderately advanced anal invasion.

Fucking men in the ass in your terns is not the universal apex of dominance, but the knowledge of his body combined with my fetish for larger insertions is making things lubricate on my side as much as he is opening up on his. I don’t force it, nudging, with many groans and whimpers on his side.

It’s actually hard not to stop here because the noise he makes in pain and the noise of not really pain at all but just hitting the spot just so are pretty similar. That’s where my experience with him matters. After pulling the literal plug well before his limit numerous times, I know that if I stop now I will be over cautious. I can, as it’s after all as much my prerogative to stop at my limit as much as everything must stop at his. But precisely because of the number of times I have stopped sooner than he’d have liked, in this moment I know just how much further I can go.

We have never discussed this as an official safeword, but I know now the moment it turns into a harsh, “Fuck!” is actually the stop point. We aren’t there yet, but it’s a nudge forward/nudge back kind of thing where one step away to ease up only means two steps deeper, after.

I drop into soothing encouragement. He is so focused on the challenge at hand that he won’t have more than mono syllables or little head twitches to work with. That’s more than enough and the general is several inches lodged, exactly where I want it.

At this point it’s not about depth but travel. In, out, never entirely popping free. His hand is still pumping his cock up and down in a way that’s basically instinct to him. The toy is gliding nice and easy. There’s a definite sensation of finite space and resistance on my end, gripping the flared base and leaning into it, but it’s neither a hard block nor rough scrape. I couldn’t tell you in minutes how long this goes on. Honestly the whole thing feels pretty brief, in hindsight. In the moment it’s enough, the way pleasurable sensation lingers, like a mouthful of something delicious making things seem to extend past the gulp, chew, linger, mmm, and swallow.

But, Silver is particularly quickly undone to size… if I can get it in. A whole sideline exploration into inflatable plugs has taught me that he’s a combo of a tight ring, but weak to a firm jam up against the underside of his cock. The general, and probably my encouraging but persistent running patter about how he is taking it, he is going to take it, this is for me, etc… have got him to the point where he yanks that hand away from his cock, now, with a great deal of urgency. He utters something about being close.

I wasn’t going to make him come, I planned, prior when I first started thinking about slithering into the catsuit, to leave him wanting. This always happens, every time things get prolonged. I tell him he may.

Well, precisely I tell him if my cock and only my cock forces him to come that was meant to happen. And it does. It’s like pushing him off a precipice all that manual edging placed him on, but it’s also a sensation like the invader in his ass is forcibly displacing the semen out of him. After he is done he stays in position looking utterly drained, even as I ease the dildo out of him and post it into the sink as well.

Check ins do not end where I expect, however. He stays put and spread, but as sandbagged as he is acting there’s and insistent second wind. I chase that to see where it goes, with his hand back on his cock and another, fresh dildo wedged into his mouth.

Crooning more nonesense mantra about holes and their utility quickly shows he has a rare second go in him. I am on my period, and what I want, to engulf him, feels a bit too much. I slick my thighs with more lube and get him to fuck those instead. That isn’t quite right, though it feels good.

The catsuit has an access zip, but it’s in the way and I am too slippery to come now with this on. I make another decision in the moment and send him to get a fresh towel. The tampon gets posted into the bathroom trash.

When he is back, there’s a bit of a decline in turgidity and I can see things sliding into performance frustration because at first it’s not wanting to couple up they way he hopes. I take charge again and essentially grab him by the brain, commanding with firm confidence it doesn’t matter. I wrap my legs tight around him. His job is to rut. He will obey. Doing that and even losing a small lake of cum earlier isn’t enough to stop him going the rest of the way hard. Then he is mine, completely engaged. I croon that he will fuck to exhaustion or until he breaks and falls. 

Still unusual for us, it’s the latter, intense, even more so than the first time. He is limp on top of me and I am holding him, reminding him he did a good job. Only when he recovers do I turn firm again. This catsuit is coming off because I want an orgasm and it is now in the way.

He helps me slither out, careful of the fragile material. I am on my back and he is helping, at my direction, with how I want my breasts touched. My orgasm is not long after that, finally, long awaited. 

I don’t recall much of the rest of the evening other than the chicken and potatoes, and that we both cleaned off somehow. I do remember two sets of cozy pajamas, and holding him with many uttered affectionate statements of love, but the rest blurs into the many nights that have been and will be just like this one, in bed until we are asleep. 

Kinky? You May Be On The Asexual Spectrum.

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Kinky? You may be on the asexual spectrum.

This is not the first time I have written about this, nor do I expect it to be the last. This time the trigger was participating in a podcast about sexuality and realizing that though I had written about the kink/asexual spectrum connection a bunch, I haven’t really explained why the two are complimentary in a rigorous enough sense. I also wanted to do some sort of typed up summary of another phenomena, where after talking about asexuality or how it works I find a lot of folks, kinksters in particular, find the definition surprisingly resonates with them.

Needless to say, this got long.

Explaining asexuality always is posited on needing to explain how sex works in a broader, global sense. As I have written in other blog posts, most folks tend to define asexuality in a very rigid binary, imagining a person with no erotic desire or inclination. This can be part of being asexual, but it really isn’t the only part.

Attraction (that’s inspired erotic desire for another person) is not the same thing as arousal. The core of asexual identity presumes not so much whether or not you are capable of arousal, but how you experience attraction.

The problem with telling people this is that asexuality hides in plain sight. For example, homosexuality tends to stand out because the behavior associated: attempting to get into relationships or have sex with people in a way that breaks normative social barriers, not having sex is the baseline human state. Likewise, being immersed in stuff that could or could not be interpreted sexually (e.g. artistic nudes, music about really, really wanting someone else in a body responsive way) is the background radiation of human cultural existence. And, having sex with people you are in no way attracted to is so common as to not be considered remarkable. It’s generally regarded as unfortunate, but some of the most conservative societies can be very into compulsory sex done out of a sense of duty rather than inherent horniness.

So, if you go around not being into what your society (or subculture) generally identifies as ok to be sexy, as long as you are willing to perform the behaviors associated with your social role your internal thoughts on the matter are going to be treated as trivial or specific to you. The folks who absolutely won’t or can’t cooperate with the expected behaviours are treated like a pitiable minority, either eccentrics, shirkers or people with a medical issue, be it physical or psychological.

You, reader, who is probably a more sensitive soul, almost certainly adopts the position that nobody should be compelled to fuck anyone. You probably feel incredibly sympathetic – someone should help those poor people not do sex! And, you are generally able to accept these people fit the label of Asexual. Otherwise, if you think about this at all, you generally only do so in the context of biology, where some living things clone themselves.

Here’s the current assumptions around how the typical way people are sexually wired work: 

Humans are expected to default to being attracted to a fair number of whatever the gender(s) they are into. They are expected to be this way sans anything other than that person existing and them being aware of that fact, or maybe getting a good look at certain bits of them or the whole body. That’s being allosexual, the opposite of asexual. 

Then there’s anyone who fits the following: they experience attraction like this not at all, sporadically or require some additional factor. These people are all on the asexual spectrum.

AllosexualAttracted to people reliably without other modifiers other than being whatever gender(s) matter to you and some influence of taste.
AsexualAttraction to others is absent, sporadic, rare or requires some other factor, such as an intimate connection.

When you say that, a large number of people cross their eyes and look bewildered. 

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On Having Porn For Dommes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Unspoken Hazards of Kinky Sex in a Domestic Setting (Or a Latex Kink Cautionary Tale)

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A Latex Kink Cautionary Tale

To outsiders we are a typical sort of couple in the Pacific Northwest: a gymnast bodied Midwestern blond built on compact, slim lines and a penchant for short sleeved polos as casual wear, and a long limbed heavy hipped pile of curves in black and jewel toned low effort alt fashion. We live in still mildly mortifying comfort (to me): nice gym with Cross Fit (for him) and Pilates (for me). I am learning to crochet at a Stitch and Bitch. We go to the Farmers Market biweekly and there’s fresh berries with most breakfasts. Once a month or so, we take his practical little car into Seattle proper from our exurb situation and do something cultural with an art show or music.

You would assume correctly our politics are progressive and our hobbies involve things like tabletop RPGs or board games. There’s thousands of versions of us walking about, drawn here by climate, employment and the privilege of not having your values and aesthetics be the lunatic fringe.

Unlike many people, we are latex fetishists. Other than being hard on the pocket book, this presents its own risks.

Rubber, in its natural state, is neither shiny nor inclined to slide easily over the contours of the body. Latex clothing is hard to get into. It sticks to you and it’s not particularly resilient, tearing under too much rough handling. If you want in to your wardrobe you are going to need to make yourself slippery, and ideally you will want something that buffs what you are wearing to a gloss. 

Those who are familiar know this means copious amounts of silicone lube, a clear, oily feeling substance that’s insoluble in water and largely inert.

Oil (as any person with good sex ed knows) will cause the material to start to break down. That’s why you don’t use oil based lubes with traditional condoms. Talcum was the old timey solution and is now known to regularly contain asbestos – so much as baby powder has switched to corn starch, so is this used as an alternative, though as you might imagine it does nothing if your goal is shine. I also find powder based lubricants gum everything up while adding more of an abrasive than a shiner. A fancy process (chlorination) gives pieces a permanent slightly duller  gloss, but takes away some of the stretch and gives it a papery feel.

The solution is the aforementioned silicone lubricant. Made (elementally) of the same stuff as the sand on a beach and the glass in your windows, it’s a modern miracle of science that gives us much more rugged baby bottle nipples, a caulking agent, easy demolding bakeware, hair defrizzer, bendy yet body safe dildos you can sterilize by boiling, and this. You get it for a bit of extra money online or through specialty (sex) shops, because even the good pharmacies in Canada tend to only stock water and occasionally oil based options.

Maybe we will discover, years from now, that we’ve made a huge mistake with this magical material, but for now we have bottles of this all over our home. Guests over means a quick whip round to retrieve them lest they require explaining. Sure it’s a bit odd to have it everywhere, but it’s handy. We use it for edging Silver, several times a day if that can be managed; for sex where it plays nice with my flora; and of course for the rubber escapades I mentioned, which compliment the whole BDSM femdom thing we have going on. 

Getting dressed in rubber is about like the cliche corset yanking scenes in bad historical films combined with trying to haul a pair of mid aughts skinny jeans up to your shoulders. That is, if the garment in question cost more than most of your wardrobe and sometimes as much as a wedding dress, of course, and also needed silk stocking level careful handling. To do so you slick yourself up and the inside of it up. That’s palmfuls of silicone on your limbs, but also any expanse of you that you want the garment to go over AND squirting liberal dollops of silicone into the garment and then smoothing it all over. 

You also don’t want the garment to be too slick outside, until you have it on, lest it sproing from your grip and you pull it on. Most pieces have a zipper down the back and there’s all sorts of hacks like using a boot lace and a safety pin to pull them up, but generally you also need to hold the garment closed while you pull. A second pair of hands dressing make all the difference, and there’s a technique on top of it, in dressing. Like getting a toddler into a snow suit, firm but not too firm. If you have sharp nails you further can protect your outfit by wearing gloves.

The garment (except for fresh from whatever atelier that made it) will also already have at least some silicone residue on it. For storage, after a wash in a very gentle (unscented!) soap, you rinse in cool water with more silicone mixed into that, leaving a surface coating. Once dried you further pack it with archive friendly tissue paper, so it won’t do the other thing rubber likes to do, which is stick to itself to the point of fusing. After it’s on, something will feel misaligned and you will probably gloop a bit more silicone in through neck or arm holes. 

In short, you will be wearing a skin tight rubber bag very full of lube. The process of getting it on will also be surprisingly taxing, wrestling a full body resistance band. It wants to grab and pinch fleshy bits, at least if you don’t smooth it right or it doesn’t sit on your widest points just so. Then you will do activities that make you sweat even more, mixing with the aforementioned lubrication. And maybe other fluids. 

When the deed, whatever you were doing, was done, be it a fashion shoot or fornication, you will be even more damp. Getting out is usually easier, with the sweat/lube mix enough to slide everything back off into a distressing crumpled pile on the floor. The first thing you will notice, once stripped, is that you are absolutely freezing. Your body in the latex adjusted itself for what it thought was the height of summer humidity. With the gear off, all that sweat and lube is now lukewarm and chilling fast as it drips off you. You will probably immediately want a shower.

And you will discover the other magical property of silicone lube is that it lasts and lasts. You will be spectacularly moisturized. If you used it in you, your cavities will still have traces a day later. After you wash your clothes, the sink or bathtub will need a good scrub. And while if you were smart your play (or model) space was protected by drop cloths (nothing says sex appeal like draping the room in old bed sheets!), but somehow or another it will also get everywhere else.

On carpet it tends to vanish into the “try not to think about this too hard” situation the way most invisible contaminants are left to rest. On tile or linoleum, well…

Our apartment is done with that currently fashionable, grey-beige faux wood linoleum, in all the main areas. The kitchen, living area, bathroom and the long hall that connects everything else is the same glossy grey, varied enough in texture you won’t spot where the pattern repeats, smooth and easy to spot mop. It beats carpet in my kitchen, but it has its own drawbacks. Remember how I said the first thing you want after latex comes off is a shower? Thanks to the layout of the place, that’s a near half minute trek in a connecting long bit that joins kitchen/living area, bedroom, office, bath and some rather large closets. Inevitably, somehow in the most trafficked area a few drops of silicone find their way. Invisible until you step, just slippery enough to make your foot slide askew and check your balance. 

Days later, every latex session is still a slip and fall hazard, but worse, a camouflaged surprise one that can materialize anywhere down that hall.

This happens every damn time. You can mop it, but you can’t see it. Finding it is caressing your hand against a smooth surface and looking for something just a bit more slippery. Soap and water helps, but it’s not a perfect solution because of that aforementioned lube’s staying power. Even bringing out the big guns of a teaspoon of dish soap on where you think the spot is, and you very well can miss just a micro drop.

Dear reader, if my debauchery someday does me in, it won’t be breath play gone wrong. It won’t be a folie à deux into increasingly deranged power exchange, nor sadomasochism loosed to run riot. It will be a mundane slip fall where I break my neck because one tenth of a gram of lube escaped the mop four days after my submissive spent fifteen minutes in a neck to toe rubber sleep sack. 

“Just do whatever the dominant wants” is a bad way to (exclusively) define femdom

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The Two Femdoms in red text, over a woman contemplating her reflection. "An Egalitarian Approach To Fetishized Power" is written below.

(Brace yourself, I am being very verbose.)

I think, as a community, we haven’t fully grappled with the fact that the roles of dominant and submissive are not always perfect puzzle pieces/mirrors of each other. When they do so, it’s typically either luck (two people are inherently compatible) or work (they arrived there via some sort of compromise). I also believe we keep trying to come up with a way of doing this that sidesteps the work *as equals* and gets hung up on the inherent properties of the roles we hope to embody.

Much effort has been put into grappling with what is or isn’t valid in kink, with some advice being bedrock to safety, like the importance of consent. Other approaches are not so helpful or actively harmful.

In the niche that is femdom (and a space like this), a lot of default advice is to lower emphasis on fetishes/things done and put more emphasis on submissive compliance. This works to a point, but it tends to be kind of assuming a collective dynamic on all of us (that dominants get to inherently define the meaning of both roles) when the practical reality benefits from the presumption of equality. 

The approach that submission is whatever the dominant says it is… Is incomplete. And yet a lot of people seem to take this for granted in lifestyle femdom discussions.

Of course, in lifestyle femdom, there’s practical reasons this approach has tenure, in so much that we tend to be the flashpoint between gender expectations and one of the primary tensions in D/s. Women (and femmes) of any orientation deal with one sided objectification that can be incredibly dehumanizing while asking extensive labor from us largely to benefit someone with more socio-economic power. None of this is news. 

And yet, the devaluation of what subs might use as framing *also* has problems. For example, it gets weaponized via whorephobia- eg the casual speculation a professional building a scene within the specifications of a client must actually be some sort of crypto-sub, secretly doing service. At the same time, this pushback makes it hard to have a conversation outside of kink roles, because there can be an overcorrection to invalidate what one doesn’t personally enjoy as “not true femdom”, rather than engaging with it as a complicated topic.  

See pegging, which is a highly polarizing kink loaded with social symbolism and a very different relationship to the sensory part, depending on the individual and their anatomy. It can be simultaneously genderqueer, transgressive and incredibly patriarchal. The strap-on is at once the phallic tool by which you cannot dismantle master’s house, and a form of liberation. All of kink is like that with every tiny facet going to have an asterisk and the note “it depends/YMMV“.

The same follows with what I describe as the “two femdoms needing to coexist problem”, but this extends behind our particular niche. 

The reality is what may make a submissive feel submissive (or turned on) doesn’t always match what makes a dominant feel dominant. If both orientations are starting as equals, neither is more valuable. That doesn’t mean a given person is required to perform the whims of another, but my whimsical fantasy nonsense as a dominant is not inherently more valid than a sub’s whimsical fantasy nonsense.

I believe, by extension, telling subs they aren’t truly submitting unless they do exclusively my personal fantasy nonesense is not going to get the results we hope it does, and it’s still objectifying the fuck out of me.

Instead, what we do need to acknowledge is that all dominants exist under imposed expectations, regardless of the gender of our partners, and that we often feel these assumptions overstep.  

However, while this is particularly noted in hetero femdom, it’s also noted in other queer kink of any gender combo (with an associated top shortage). What tends to be ignored is that it exists in M/f as well. It’s just in the latter case the way we weight gender mean that there is a paradox, both that male dominants are more catered to, but also where they might not enjoy something that breaks stereotypes about automatic power, they are given less freedom to complain. I think I have it worse than the average male dominant, but the conversation needs to include that even he is under some peculiar rules. Even if you don’t want to listen to men very much, as dominants, you are still getting their warmed over norms. 

And, at the same time we conflate gendered issues with BDSM niche specific issues- for example femdoms and femsubs spend a lot of time lecturing men to be less harassing. This exasperating reality of sexism we share, unfortunately, tends to be attributed not to a certain percentage of the population being encouraged to be abusive fuckwits, but each group respectively asking “why are subs/doms such trash?!” In my opinion the self sorting into niches is broadly helpful in many aspects (not the least of which is that mainline BDSM is hostile to female dominants), but there’s a certain dark comedy there too in the lost solidarity.

So, looping back to my title, the two versions of every D/s role are as follows:

  1. The self perception and needs of a person.
  2. The things that are projected onto us. 

Thus, as a dominant there’s both the stuff that falls into the cluster of femdom gaze (itself not universal but more likely to be closer to the mark) and stuff about someone who is ostensibly me but more about a sub gaze. However the inverse follows that subs have stuff for/about them and also stuff for people ostensibly into them.

In femdom, the stuff for us is so embarrassingly underserviced that “where is porn for me?” tends to border on opening the metaphorical drawer and finding IOU. But if you look at M/f, you can see a much more robust amount of niche pandering that assumes different priorities by D/s orientation. And, it requires emphasis that say, erotica made for femsubs is not erotica for m-dominants. People of group A might incidentally like stuff for group B and vice versa, of course, or be excluded from everything, by personal wiring. 

And thus, waving one’s hand at the stuff that caters to the presumed needs of sub men as invalid also oversimplifies. At the same time, these don’t exist in a vacuum, so a buck-stops-with-the-dominant approach still opens up all sorts of second guessing about authenticity. For example, the idea of a “Mistress” is neither a pure creation of subs and their fantasies nor dominants in their self expression. And additional tension exists that there’s a vertical loop as well, since subs and dominants find meaning within their respective identity as well. 

The problem, as I see it, is not trying to extract the wishes of subs entirely from the idea of authenticity, it’s to extract out where the relationship is unequal in who is imposing what on whom. To do otherwise ignores the role external input has on what we want.

I think the “just do what the dominant wants or GTFO” isn’t the worst defense mechanism in the context of the over weighting of the fantasies of men and subs, but I think it doesn’t solve the underlying issue. I just also think I prefer to ask my submissive identified partners, regardless of gender, to do the work to get as close to equality as possible as I feel the self abrogation approach is just asking me to be lucky enough to get a partner who coincidentally never has any conflict between my needs and theirs.

Lifestyle Only Femdom Blues

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I wish I could say I am a dominant without people assuming I am a pro (or a man), but I would also like that not to be at the expense of anyone else. To be a lifestyle only domme is, for the most part, invisibility, but the conversation on the problem is poisoned by whorephobia.

In this regards, even my writing on the topic, over the last 10 years, hasn’t always been ok. Acknowledging this issue, nonetheless: for our culture at large, the general handling of my desires is to treat it like something that will make others happy or at the very least, to focus on how it will make me feel as far as how others react to me. Dominance, in women and femmes, is not allowed to just *be*.

Even in lifestyle only land, our forums are dogged by the single minded demand: where are the dommes and how do we get them? To these men, I am not a thing that might want him, to be bargained with as an equal or a suitor, I am more akin to the rib they hope to rip from themselves into the form of a helpmeet. My existence and authenticity is defined by my ability to complete someone else. 

Yes, the roots of this is heterofatalist nonsense, the same pressures demanding compulsory monogamy of vanillas. And yet, notably, my status as a thing that is presumed to meet desires doesn’t have the Domme version of warning me I’ll be a crazy cat lady spinster if I don’t settle. Likewise, no boyfriend, husband or fiancé will deter them the way that vanilla and Dom men alike imagine I could be claimed. A Domme, in her being wanted, is presumed to be there to satisfy. Hell, a Domme, existing, is presumed to be what is wanted. I’m not! I swear, I’m terrible.

This also is belayed in how Dommes are taught, formally and informally, to be.

Through workshop and book alike, femdom is packaged as a vocation or a toolkit that will empower you, not through discovery of your own pleasure, but the same old bad girl wins at hustle culture fantasy. Education is almost always gendered. Male dominants, for all their limited wardrobes, are treated as stepping into an aspect of masculinity, but for me, there’s a template and faking it until I make it.

It’s not all bad- the new topping and bottoming book are a bastion of gender neutrality and deserve their place in the canon. And yet, step out of the very performed-identity focused domme specific classes and into the BDSM scene at large, and prepare for just about everything to be built to assume you are a man topping women. And, get ready to deal with a steady train of people sure you are a less than, and if you dominate men that you are a threat and they are repulsive.

I decided, in the end, weird rapey ropetop dudes and femdom’s closer embrace to queerness and it’s transgression were enough to make me pick a side… But, as a Domme, I am (largely) not interested in being skilled, or having presence. I want a “persona” like I want another hole in my head. I don’t think nobody should want these things, but none of this is to the benefit of my orgasms and dorky power fantasies. Even as a least bad culture fit, the real me is very much an afterthought in femdom.

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to have a sub and know my way enough around what I am doing to do so safely. And I am lucky that there’s plenty of humans extant to which a domme can complement rather than complete. Likewise, I don’t have a strong opinion on “pyjamas vs corsets”, I like both of them, but I like them from a position of being certified trash who doesn’t want to be compelled to wear either. I am writing this in an ugly beige t-shirt dress that I threw on because my stamina fell out the moment my work day ended. This isn’t a mark of my authenticity, it means I have given up on life for the next 3 to 6 hours. 

Someone might find that hot, but I don’t care and I don’t want to care.

That part is the problem. It’s where the gaze is turned, all the damn time, unrelenting. On me, never from me. And yet, despite having the worst temperament, flabbergastingly people keep kindly trying to nudge me to hang out a shingle. Some extremely well meaning people in the field have even encouraged me as if I lacked confidence. Me, the don’t wanna be touched, don’t wanna be vulnerable train wreck, was told I could definitely make it work, because my dominance could push through pretty much anything. No, being a pro is a hard, people focused job. I am a pervert, not an entrepreneur.

I don’t want to be paid to dominate, I want to be pandered to by creative professionals who want to take my money to sell me my fantasies, usually via prose and illustration. Just like the femsubs and dudes of any orientation. They enjoy an ocean of porn. Seriously, in the case of the femsubs, they are so omnipresent that in any given romance novel the odds some lady’s do me sub fantasies are getting tickled is about 50/50.

Instead, I am told for money purposes I don’t exist. I am as elusive a market to care about, as I am to the dudes who seek me to complete them. And boy howdy is that an incredibly alienating place to be.

The No-Needs True Sub Is A Nonsense Concept

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If you spend any length of time in the femdom side of the internet, you are going to encounter some version of this idea:

“Femdom is about female power. If you were truly submissive, all those other things you want would be less important than whatever a dominant you submitted to wanted.”

(Paraphrased from a squintillion posts, tweets and nudges)

They mean well, unfortunately. Femdom-as-a-culture is currently over-saturated with things that cater to the fantasies of male subs more so than female doms. To be a domme is to be perennially assumed that your primary interest is performing in a way that meets the needs of subs. An additional pressure is applied that not only is your authenticity measured by how well you meet another person’s fantasy, it is idealized that you just happen to do so by being who you are. A push/pull forms around you, where you being powerful is fetishized, but that power is put on very tight rails.

For a dominant, being told you are all powerful while being confined to a rigid script can feel like a cruel joke. As such, the last 10+ years have been one long push back, against the ubiquitous uniform, against the idea you can’t do certain sex acts, against dehumanizing stereotypes that you are (only) a selfish monster or selfless mommy. Likewise, the matter of courtship became a debate on methods – with a fixation on changing (male) sub behaviour. We endlessly hashed over developing magic bullet first messages and dating profiles; on service resumes to trade labour for kink; on the entitlement of all dommes to expect some nominal payment; and how best to broach having a kink with your wife/girlfriend so she would either do it or agree to give you a hall pass. And, every step of the way, matters were made much harder because however you changed stuff around, somebody fetishized it.

Gentlefemdom and the idea of the domme in fuzzy slippers started to fight the idea that there was one rigid, dungeon bound way to kink, and looped back into absolutes and people wanking about how much hotter the domme next door was. The service resume trend led to the people into service being treated as the true femdom, and a bunch of people who thought it was a trade being bewildered now the service focused dominant wasn’t reciprocating. That’s not even opening the can of worms that is gray-area sexwork and findom! Not all changes were bad, of course, for example the discouragement of people randomly subbing at any dominant they met willy-nilly is a huge relief. However, through every new solution, once nuance vanished, so did

So Why Not Encourage Subs To Be Completely Selfless?

The problem, however, is that an effort to make the needs of sub dudes less overwhelming has come with the nuance-free version that deals with it by chucking his needs out the window. At the extreme end, back in the day when a wife said no or he feared her reaction to broaching the subject, we used to tell men in vanilla relationships to embark on “stealth submission”. This pretty quickly got called out for being dubious consent, particularly where the party being submitted to already said femdom made her wildly uncomfortable. However, I will go one step further and say that it’s a dumb idea because it doesn’t even meet the human need of the sub to be wanted for who they are. 

The current advice, that as a (male) sub you should just front load all the whims and needs of the dominant, doesn’t solve this problem, either. You end up with one of the following:

  1. The sub in question didn’t have much more than a service/obedience fetish, to the extent that if their partner decided anything from a vanilla to an M/f dynamic was what they wanted they would be gung ho. Any quick look around at people who identify as subs and dominants would show this population is a tiny minority, and to be honest even they tend to have some pretty significant caveats.
  1. The dominant just happens to luck into meeting the sub’s other needs because she wants to. But a conversation about *why* they might want to gets ignored, including that some dominants are motivated by understanding the desires of their subs and meeting them while others are not. One cookie-cutter domme template has been imposed over another, but we are still stuck with a very rigid default for everyone.
  1. The sub creates a one sided dynamic for themselves that is not sustainable. Everything carries on for a while, until the weight of not getting what they want causes things to fall apart anyway. Then nobody is happy, and the dominant can’t trust the sub to know their limits.

Ultimately, the idealization of the “no needs” sub is an effort to side step the inherent equality any kink dynamic should be built on. It’s either still fap (shoving anything an ostensible dominant could do on a pedestal while the sub gets the thrill of self abrogation) or a bargaining tool to avoid rejection. In the very best case it’s a temporary pause to try to undo the damage that being too pushy or to help a person ease into kink when they are uncomfortable with parts of it.

While I am all for not being excessively pushy, and I recognize that your average ostensibly vanilla partner may be alarmed if you front load the more uh… dark and complicated kink activities one might get up to, I suggest that inversely, the thrill of “femdom is whatever she says it is” is overwriting “femdom is whatever we make it to be”.

Who Am I to Tell People They Are Doing It Wrong?

I caveat I am speaking about general approach, not your personal relationship. There is a whole rainbow of ways people might construct a functional dynamic. If a given couple likes to make the needs of the dominant their primary focus, cool. Where it becomes a problem is when that fetish is imposed as a one size fits all solution or held up as a purer/better way to do kink. My criticism is in the assumptions it requires as general advice and the problem is when completely back burner-ing your needs is presented as a universal solution and starting place, not when it is your personal fetish.

When I say power exchange needs to come from a place of equality, I mean that. You cannot exchange power until you both have it. You can pursue your equality in an intersectional fashion, building in a foundation that is as once robust and elastic as it navigates the many aspects of our identities However, if your starting premise is “because I am a sub, all my needs are less important than the whims of the dominant” you need to add another layer before that: “My needs have the same inherent worth as those of a person who happens to be dominant”. This can still flow to “I feel fulfilled when I prioritize the needs of someone I perceive as dominant to me, more so than any other activity.” But if you start from devaluing what you want, you are over valuing the other party before you have agreed to a mutual hiearchy.

Finally, one of the reasons why I find this particular piece of advice needs countering is the fact that it keeps being imposed at dommes without acknowledging that it’s just as fetishistic as the guy with the elaborate fantasy of being transformed into a coat rack, whether I need a coat rack or not. While the intent is trying to come from a good place, the reality is a lot more like announcing you know what we need – a blank canvas, so perfectly smooth and unresistant. And yet… it remains a wild overcorrection, both unsustainable for most people, and just as dehumanizing to dominants as treating us like fetish dispensers.

Gravity and Kitchens

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I love you very much, painfully so, with the yearning of spending too much time apart. We are that couple, together, in public, but just as much with no eyes on us but each other. 

Red filter overlaying a fancy kitchen with white text "FEMDOM DESIRE | Yearning in Motion| Gravity & Kitchens | Mundane architecture and high end, self-thrusting sextoys"

I cannot recall the music, writing this now, but I remember, in late February, dancing in the kitchen with you, guarding for the slight slip of my black cotton tights on the faux wood linoleum as we shimmy-twist. Alongside the peril of losing my footing, it’s distracting how beautiful you look in motion, in a blue blazer over a light blue button down. Your body tapers sharply from your shoulders, shimmying. I’m wearing the green vintage dress you bought me for Christmas. When we pull apart and I twirl, the skirt bells out, all picturesque.

We have returned from a Pike Place Market french restaurant, where I stole half of one of your crab cakes, and you took, at my urging, half my salmon filet. I think I got the better trade, though there was nothing wrong with my fish. 

There was a window to the restaurant kitchen marked by a pile of citrus fruits, aiming to put themselves into the dining area to make things feel more casual, or maybe make the most of the space. Once upon a time, in the 70s, this was a jazz spot, but its so crowded I wonder where they used to put the musicians. Still, it’s well prepared fresh fish, bread with a $5 up charge and pleasant crab cakes. And noise, lots of it, more crush and clatter than intimacy. The hints of old music, there, are drowned out in the excess of the conversation of others. I am content, holding back my urge to nitpick this nice gift, but nevertheless we do not favour them with the opportunity to sell us dessert. You serve me icecream instead, later, after we have danced. Looking after me is just what you do.

When I arrived for the weekend, I took the train in. It’s always comfortable, but too crowded that particular night to fight the line in the dining car, so you met me with food. It’s been a bad eating week for me again, a fact that I am not proud of, but being home in my space is driving me a bit nuts when I try to cook.  

I daydream about kitchens that are not shoved into main areas. I am well sick of exposed, designed for people who don’t cook counters that push atrocious storage and a strict inability to let anything be, lest it become noxious clutter. I keep optimizing, all the endless expenses to try to make the space livable. Hooks for this and that, shelves expanding outwards and upwards. Ultimately no compensation can fix a cramped, poorly laid out space with too many things in it. And there’s no walls in spaces, anymore, a victim of the open plan trend. Sharing these spaces is even more frustrating, because there’s twice as much room to let the dishes or the mess get away from you.

If, perhaps, I lived flung out from my work by another 30 minutes, I might have my own solo shoebox, on my comfortable middle class salary. It pays more, on this coast, but rents jack up to eat one’s earnings. But, even paying more, the kitchen would still be in my bedroom, or at best, still in my living room. On the west coast, new construction is the norm. I think they are so cheap, regardless of the actual cost, they would leave the doors off bathrooms, if they could justify it.

Case in point: Tech job or not,  your kitchen, the one I danced in, is “open plan” as well. This pivot and swirl smooth space I slide about in is an island of no texture in the otherwise stucco and wall to wall carpet, an alley of linoleum fenced between appliance and an island counter. For this visit, you draped the island in a rich quilt, handmade in a medley of turquoise and blue, serving as tablecloth to display a bouquet of flowers. Pink and purple and green, stems capped by pale, fat roses that remind me of babygirl birthday cakes. Just for me, to be pretty to look at for the weekend.

We’re in the approximate orbit or Valentine’s day, so we brought each other gifts to unwrap, too. Yours were piled up on the kitchen island when I got there, mine hand wrapped in sticker covered tissue paper and tied with real satin ribbon. You gave me a cape-capped coat dress with a flash red lining;  a box of fancy tea; costume brooches; and spangle-sparkly tuxedo bodysuit that tugs at your fetishes to lift the collective sense of power over you, even as the glitter roughness of the fabric repels your touch. I gave you a high end, self thrusting sextoy by lovense.

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The Martyrdom of Satanatrix

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Disclaimer:
This was written without being able to consult or personally verify the stories of the three people most affected, but where possible I aimed for a harm reduction approach. I do not link to any source that contributes to the the outing two sex workers, and put my focus primarily on Satanatrix not to diminish the agency of the two others involved, but because she has been most vocal about her personal philosophies.
I caution readers that my interpretation and recounting of the situation will, necessarily, be imperfect. However, my motive for writing this is because nobody else I can find has.  Indeed, for all the attention given, nowhere else but the sexworker and sexwork aligned femdom community has taken the part of Satanatrix and Empress Ming. I must tip my hat to the podcast, What Women Want for being the only other effort, outside of the immediate community of the victims, to try to combat the barrage of nonsense from mainstream media coverage, and as he has an own voice interview with Satanatrix, you should definitely take the time to listen.
The Martyrdom of Satanatrix: A story of Faith, Art & Old fashioned Religious Persecution

Once upon a time, in 2020, three people, Satanatrix, AKA Lady Vi; Empress Ming; and the priest of the parish decided that St. Peter and Paul’s Catholic church in New Orleans was a good place to do some spiritually themed femdom. Two years later, after the filming of an ill-fated fetish-flick-cum-ritual resulted in the arrest of the three participants, the trial part of the fiasco has finally ended. It did so in the most American way possible, a plea bargain that knocked what might have been a pair of felonies (institutional vandalism & obscenity) to a misdemeanor version of the former. And yet, lest you think that’s a slap on the wrist, it carries a fine of $8K, to be paid in 6 months; two years suspended sentence (with intrusive supervision); and a vigorous NDA that stops not only release of any video or pictures from the event, but the two Dominatrices even talking about it to the media in any capacity. Further, the church had all details of the trial sealed. 

The church was very upset by this incident, going as far as ritually burning the altar. The priest was obviously fired, and awaits his own trial, having had a falling out with the two dommes. Thus, the details of the defense now seem split between “I thought we could do it because he said it was ok” versus “that woman, she tempted me”. As it was ever so, where sexuality and social censure intersect.

And it was, in the lingering aftermath, a terrible ordeal for the three involved, particularly the relatively blameless women. Likely the fallout from that first arrest did the most damage. Even without a conviction, including if they had somehow fought it out to a not-guilty verdict, most of the worst consequences fell into place the moment they were placed in custody, head shots taken in loosely striped jail clothes, and thence released to the world. Long before any guilt was legally established, the arrest resulted in the immediate outing of both Satanatrix and her colleague via their real names. 

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Various Kinds of Desire Together, In August

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In theory this was a last longer visit before I return to work. The two body problem kicks back into gear, as my office job cannot be imported over the border, WFH or not. I am a Canadian, and though Silver is more portable in his skill set, Vancouver consistently swings below competitive in tech salaries. We make do, but for now we cram the time together before I must return from portable disability to fixed labour law compliant behaviour.

It feels like visiting another life. He emphasizes “Home”, wanting me to feel that way, and makes every pain to make it that comfortable, but my practical roots are still paying $1000 to share a two bedroom with a friend, and my brain still parks myself there at my legal address. Home isn’t where my heart is, but where my childhood teddy bear, resting on my pillow, and my mess and the clutter I am still struggling to grapple.

With him, I think we have started to escape the honeymoon extra effort period. Even as he continues to dote on me, this feels sustainable.  We have passed the first year or so where everyone is on their extra best behaviour. But, with the matter of the extreme step of moving to make this permanent, my life is an Elizabeth Barret Browning sonnet:

If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange

And be all to me? Shall I never miss

Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss

That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,

When I look up, to drop on a new range

Of walls and floors … another home than this?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese 35

I think I could be happy in this quiet domesticity. Working on writing projects on my computer. A farmer’s market in the morning, doing our laundry in that continuous cycle of always being more to do daily, and making us meatballs from scratch for dinner. He puts up with my criticisms of his bachelor kitchen patiently. It’s not the franks’n’beans and no paper towels squalour we stereotype men with. It’s the not having to answer to anyone but yourself- so there’s a kitchenaid mixer, but the grater has a crack in the plastic frame, and things I take for granted aren’t there. And yet… Sure he has less cake pans, but he owns more pots than me, in fact in many ways more things on hand than I do. Deviance in our kitchens is more personal preference than otherwise. Though my tools tend to get junked when they break, I am still getting my shit together after what amounts to 5 moves in 10 years.

The steady progress here says that in another while, there will be a move there, too. All the things I established in Vancouver, my nest, will need to be upended, those possessions that transformed money into comfort and convenience winnowed for duplicates and storage. I am a person who wants roots who has lived relatively rootlessly. I wonder now, if my nest making was foolish and I should have expected to be shaken loose from each new home in the speed I did.

There’s a bit of care there, on my part, sensitive to feeling less than in the totality of the measure of our lives. Though I apply therapy to my insecurity like an ointment, the thought is ever there with a deep penetration. Reader, if you came here to see an ice and leather goddess regiment worms under her boot, or see a woman drift guilt free on a tide of consensual exploitation, alas it’s been ten years of disappointing you and counting. here, we have naught but the neurotic and horny, a fiercely distrustful and scruffy mélange that leads me to only half facetiously say I’m certified femdom trash. 

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