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:
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.
Heterosexual femdom is weird.It’s not colouring between the cis straight lines, but it’s going to get you even more side eye if you call yourself queer than a bisexual woman with a boyfriend does. I tend to settle on the lukewarm “queer adjacent” to avoid some traumatized wee LGBTQ+ getting verbally abusive at me because they aren’t comfortable with spectrums, only binaries. Nevertheless, because our understanding of “normal” heterosexuality has certain gendered power expectations built into it, if you lean F/m, you are going to travel to where your behaviour relative to your gender expectations are not in alignment. That’s even if both of you are the most cisgender folks on the planet. This disconnect is a frustrating, orphaned space. These days, how we perceive the progressive and “safe” is a kind of hierarchical tightness that doesn’t know what to do with things that don’t fit into what is mainstream, but also don’t have a perfectly overlapping experience. No wonder we had to carve out our own “femdom” niche! For its many cultural faults, there is a reason why we are our own distinct identity, and I often feel like the aesthetics of gay men are the only other place you are allowed to consider male bodies as more than a vaguely threatening symbol of potency.
Submissive men offer the opportunity to flip the subject/object nature of typical straight relationships
Sexual perfomance expectations for women are like that old metaphor of the swan, gliding serenely on the surface and paddling like mad underneath. An infinite amount of work, primping and positioning goes into performing femme for fucking, but then there’s a demand for aloofness that borders on disassociative. You become the prize he is then expected to pursue, the elegantly prepared feast to be devoured. Though I don’t doubt submissive women have their own canny inversions, if you are anywhere femme of centre, femdom has the best possible route to flipping that on its head without switching to a same gender partner. Not by default, mind you, as transgressively centring him, his looks and his beauty are hardly the default of mainstream BDSM porn. Nonetheless, big titty anime mommies and needy idiot fanboys or not, there’s a reason gentle femdom tends to be a land of painful yearning. And when you talk to dommes, outside of marketing copy; the people who don’t like submissive men; and the naive morons who think an actual personality like cat piss is a symbol of power, there is a visceral, all quenching immersion in him. He is there for us.
So, even if you have a complex asexual thing going on where it’s the sadomasochism not the aesthetics that matters to you, it also flips how we can interact with the bodies of eachother. One of the most depressing parts of the male default identity is how they are taught to relate to their bodies: penis, penis and yet more penis. Dudes learn this pretty early: Don’t touch anything else, not your nipples, not your lips and for gods sake, not your ass or the puckered hole between your cheeks. It’s no wonder so much straight porn treats its male actors like a life support system for an erection! For a shocking number of men, they live in an inversion of the previous century. Sex positive feminism taught women to look at their vulvas in mirrors, touch themselves down there, and see their genitals as something other than a dirty shame. But for men, almost a century from when your metaphorical (and my literal) granny squatted over a mirror, guys are worrying if proper hygiene makes them gaaaaay.
So, if straight men are putting their prostates off limits out of shame, forget nibbling the inside of his wrist, fingers, sensitive pulse points, etc! By now, our collective sex lore says these are all things that you have to teach men to explore on women. It’s expected it’s not intuitive to him, but agreed on as required, much how millennial dudes and younger now all osmotically learn cunnilingus is the new chivalry. Him though? No dude needs that! Just be hot and grudgingly consenting, ladies!
Of course that’s nonsense. Human bodies are so much more like each other than not. While the individual always varies, the layouts of most things anatomical are lazy, even putting nipples on every dude, and folding a structure that is shockingly analogous to a penis into the groins of cis women. Nerves are nerves, and we are not so sexually varied that a man lacks the physical capacity to enjoy all those erotic sensory things, from finger sucking to a hand pressed to the throat.
Whether you are hurting him or just exploring him, femdom unshackles you from his dick.
So don’t get me wrong, the end argument is not just to lock up all the penises. I agree that men vastly over state how much cock cages and chastity are a universal benefit to women. Men are not actually ruled by their libidos like it was a life sustaining drive akin to hunger or breathing. But what we don’t talk about in so-called chastity is how much it breaks everyone of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, including giving him permission not to receive it. The whole rest of the boy is on the table.
And whether your kink is inadequacy or display, you also get to really look at him. Just as my body is socially considered to be open to public commentary too much, men blunder around uncomplemented even by their loved ones. Stick that guy in the s type role and you center a female gaze that may or may not be pleased, but at least it’s pretty much universally there. Ditto the tentative exploration of lingerie for men, both to humiliate as emasculation via consensually weaponized dysphoria, and my personal preference, to decorate and emphasize. Though dommes grumble that our more shallow needs stay uncatered to, if you are here to oggle a pretty man, whatever your tastes, the options have only been getting better, gradually and grudgingly, over time.
I mentioned GentleFemdom, and while it’s drifted past interest for me into a fandom sausage fest, you have guys pressing in the other direction for a different idea they might be pursued and desired. And while the stock characters might not be my cup of tea, again, the manga influence heavy illustrated boys are most likely to be treated with dialogue that assumes he’s cute.
And likewise, just as his appearance becomes worthy of opinion, physical sadomasochism also needs a bigger canvas. Sure, you can hurt a cock and balls. I do, and enjoy it, but it’s a touch monomaniacal if that’s all you ever do. While you could glide through vanilla on kissing, hugs and touching his dick with bits of you, sadism means you need to get intimate with the sensory possabilities of everything. To stay in the sweet spot of permanent harm free, extended ouchies means more square inches than whatever is between his legs.
Male masturbation toys enjoy more use in femdom
BDSM in general favours a more hands off approach. Be it a flogger, a dildo on a pole, or a bog standard magic wand to give someone a forced orgams, we like our gear. It’s a sexually permissive society that’s has less emphasis, even in femsub land, that you should insist that a vibrator is competition to a man hoping a woman will have an orgasm.
There’s no weird hang ups about it being a cop out to use your belt, not your hand, on the pert behind of whom you are topping. Toys *on* tops are still a bridge too far in most content, and people can normalize for play, regardless of whatever gender combo is featured. However, male subs are the vanguard gradually dragging everyone to admit you can put a vibe on him as much as her. Through our purchasing needs, the plethora of strokers, milkers, butt plugs in various bulbous shapes from the Aneros to the usual blunt christmas tree style stopper are ever so gradually being dragged out of the “gay men only” silo they are stuck in.
Toxic masculinity ruins everything. While I can buy vibrators at Sephora, and female intended sex toys are now aggressively marketed assuming I am the primary consumer, male recreational appliances have a ways to go. And it’s generally part and parcel of femdom subculture for me to be able to talk about using something on Silver without people acting like it’s weird.
I’m enjoying it. One of the most common things I get asked to review, these days, has been the burgeoning male market, and it’s clear it’s a whole new ball game (snrk), with established manufacturers and new brands popping up every day. Between the new toys, and old toys getting more availability, the increasing presence of lingerie and more space to put his body in one’s metaphorical cross hairs, everyone’s sex lives will be better for it. Now to convince more dominants that they can use butt plugs or be masochists. 😛
To tell the story of Pearl, it’s a bit more than just saying I am a dominant sadomasochist.
At this point it’s probably clear that the whole femdom thing is indelibly stamped into the core function of my sexuality, enough that I have been talking about it a LOT lately, or at least my place on the asexual spectrum. But, part of who I am is influenced by something a bit adjacent todemisexuality, and that has been further effected by the factthat I fall in love easily. I don’t use the word “love” lightly, like I pop off crushes on lots of people. I mean the sort of heart soaring heavy nonsense. Getting there, for me, is incredibly easy.
After many years of having this part of my makeup, I also have determined not everyone falls that hard. Insights into the spectrum of human possible really does involve a lot of guessing, like discovering some people are ear rumblers or cilantro tasters. But, much like the latter case, if people don’t have the capacity themselves, they may suspect you are somehow exaggerating. Which, I suppose is just the part of the human condition that finds it comforting to suggest one is making things up, or that the severity will reduce with the right mindset, like comforting a child with a scraped knee.
For me, sex hormones and falling in love share an entwined history. In addition to my kinks, which grew from day 1, ever since puberty hit, so did the BigFeel capacity. The hardest part is there’s not a lot of support for it. Generally, if you talk about intense feelings of yearning for another human, everyone treats it like an obsessive thing you are choosing to do. Instead, as I experience it, it’s an involuntary WHOMP of an attachment. It’s the closest brush I can get to vanilla, in so much that there’s a tiny window my sexuality will be present without a mountain of kink between me and them.
It’s like those various brain integrated glands got the instructions to lay down the pre-framework, long before I dropped my first egg, and decided to say: “Hello, Miss Pearl (aged 12)! In addition to a single orgasm this year, and some now functionally vestigial parts that will ripen up over the next half decade, your already awkward ability to bond onto others will be amped up to 11. The only saving grace is that you will be completely frustrated in realizing these wants most of the time, thus safe from a lot of dumb follow up behaviour.“
This nonsense was probably made worse by the fact that there’s a cultural assumption that pushes eros into any male/female relationship. When I was younger, I preferred the company of boys for reasons of shared nerdy interests. I liked the company of girls before that- I am lucky I never internalized the sexism of assuming girls were inherently no fun. However, I followed my interests, and the kinds of games that could be played, which meant little in the way of female companionship. As a result, at the best of times, when I was way too young for it, adults were already imposing dating expectations onto my male friendships. But, inversely, even in these erotypical scripts, I had no tools to help me navigate having an Olympic level firework display going on in the brain of a child and young adult. Indeed, most people generally denied it could be happening to me, and further romanticized it as an experience we would be lucky to have once in a lifetime.
(There’s an additional hypothesis one might have about my capacities: there is actually a deeper form of Eros I have yet to experience. If everything to this point was a “crush”, I will end up in a psyche ward when it happens, because this is already pretty all consuming.)
For the lack of support I grew up with, I blame abstinence only education, which depends very much on the idea of rare, monogamous and consistent attachments and no alternatives. It’s much easier to enforce a compulsory, marriage focused heterosexuality when you believe in abstract concepts like a single shot of “True Love” to save you purity for. And yet, when I dug further, past pop culture, much as most research on love is almost laughably primitive. Like sex, people have thought about it a bunch and made more art than a million humans could consume in one lifetime. And yet, the psychology is still in the classification stage. Limerance, the term for the intense attachment and search for connection, was a word only coined in 1979. University labs pair college students in research to see if sharing prolonged eye contact and facts about the self correlate to an increased chance of a relationship forming.
So, you have a paradox. Love, in the broad sense, is a big label. It’s been contemplated forever, and generally serious classifications start with mentioning it’s broken down into sub types to distinguish sexual passion (Eros) from friendship (Philia) or a bond with a family member (Storge), and so forth. Unfortunately, this also hints that a lot of the thinking about it hasn’t really advanced, like we were still using the Aristotelian concept of the atom to try to do physics.
Setting off to navigate the conversations around the asexual spectrum, by the way, is a further challenge of everyone having a different perception of love. All humans don’t have the same capacities or experience, but this is never discussed. So, the other half of the expectation around my experience is that it is on the one hand very rare, but on the other, universally possible. Much is said about “True Love” in art, but while you can find out the wavelength of the colour orange, try to measure dopamine and so forth in new parents, or calculate the age of the galaxy relative to its neighbours, love just seems to be. People expect it to happen, to the point that aromantic folk have to make it clear they are a distinct identity, including having to emphasize that it’s not the same as asexuality. (Though the whole Ace thing clearly has a bit of an umbrella label effect, due to the path of collective discovery).
I can’t know if you, the reader, experiences love like I do.
Moving away from the people who don’t love, or love as much, but further from the Greeks, trying to explain what is going on might be further clarified philosophical observation about love from the late 1820s, of something called Crystallization. That’s the process your entire brain gets melted and leaks out your ears, and in the process, elevates the object of your fixation. In my case, barring rare moments, I am about as attracted to the act of non-kinked sex with another human about as much as humans typically find upholstery, garden ponds, or fruit bowls erotic. If Love wanders in, then these parts actually work.
Moving through the timeline of people writing about love, in the second half of the last century you will find neologisms like limerence. The experience of the early stages, for me, is something I only semi facetiously call a “temporary manic episode”. The first burst of falling in love brings euphoria, dropped sleep needs, and a magnetic inspiration that slams whatever poor bastard I have bonded onto into a muse. It also has a regrettable history of encouraging me to be a pest, though at least my gender flipped pigtail pulling could be tempered by maturity.
But just as nature abhors a vacuum, I am not permitted to walk without attachment. A cozy monogamous(ish) relationship that meets my emotional and sexual needs is the only thing that turns it off. Elsewise, I don’t have it in me to be the bed hopping, casual sex loving slut I wished to be. I was born to burn for desire for one person at at time. More frustratingly, though this limerence allows a brief ability to have a more vanilla sex, trapped in a relationship without kink, my romantic attachment fizzles.
What dignity I have today, in love, is hard won.
I am not the hot mess I once was. I mean, I hope so, as I think I’m in the “middle aged” territory of womanhood now, pre-menopausal, but definitely not young. And yet, the insensity has never wavered. All that coudl happen is I got good at controlling my behaviour. That’s no thanks to pop culture, which excuses the theoretical actions of women in love only a little bit less than the carte blanche it gives a guy with the same thing. Fiction isn’t even really sure that dying for your passion is a bad thing, even if Romeo and Juliet has an aspect that’s a cautionary tale. Cathy might crash her immune system yearning in the moors in her nighty, but we are meant to see her passion for Heathcliff at least understandable and inevitable. Of course, luckily for me, love largely just gave me an opportunity to act like an embarrassing git. My teenage years are, lest you think otherwise, a cringe factory that I survive remembering only through accepting my own sincerity at the time.
Middle school (Junior High for Americans) passed in an unfortunate series of stupidities, to be met with an excess of eagerness in High School. While the adults assumed I was on drugs based on my general behaviour (lol, nope), and shook their heads at my sexual precocity, over 50% of the time such passions were unrequited. That is for the best, and it was only through this experience that a modicum of a clue and a shred of pattern recognition started to assert itself. I lived in an area where all the small town nonsense of the early 2000s was in full swing. It was the era of Purity Rings and second virginity, and I was a baby pervert who wanted to do BDSM. I had the internet, and bonded awkwardly on similarly aged folks there too.
I learned the triggers tended to be creating the fiction I craved together. Not every person, but outside of my first times, where mere positive attention seemed enough to turn me into a giddy idiot, it was a common denominator. I’m super lucky, by the way, that Silver’s sexuality is more primarily mapped on making “story” too. Unfortunately, I also learned a pattern that for most people I fell for, they would play out such creativity with me during a crush on me, and than put that away like some sort of courtship only thing.
Nonetheless, I eventually learned to handle it. It doesn’t force me to pursue a single goal, rather while I can’t temper the intensity, I can find appropriate outlets. It also doesn’t completely suspend my judgement. As an older teenager, I was already able to tell if something wasn’t going to work if we tried a relationship. Gradually I managed to shunt all that enthusiasm and energy away from the people and into writing projects and so forth.
Kink mismatches, and other hazards of love
This does give me a little perspective on the situation of the tale as old as time: the kinky person married (or as good as married for their socio-economic status) to someone mismatched in libido or what they want to do in their sex life.
I am generally on the side of telling people in monogamous, but kink free or dead bedroom relationships not to cheat. Divorce and seperations are economically and emotionally hard, but at least they are legally possible. However, I am a little more sympathetic in how a kinked person stumbles into a union with a vanilla person. Not only is their precious little information about kink, to help one make that self discovery, but circumstances like mine show how one might have a brief window where things could work without kink. Nonetheless, my self knowledge means I have to front load any courtship with what I am into.
Nonetheless, I have had variable luck. In the first place, one of the harder lessons in being kinky is that just because they technically have your fetish doesn’t mean you share it compatibility. Nowhere is this illustrated than among balloon fetishists, where popping/not popping is a deep schism. but even in BDSM and further sub divided into femdom, you can come from two wildly different places. It’s been the end of more than one relationship for me, and painful, at that.
I cannot, however, have much spite for the incompatibility. I did have one party claim to be more kinky than they were, but the delusion there seemed to be wishful thinking. Nonetheless, when things are kink-functioning, I am a very sexual person. That’s an irony for me, lacking all the typical attractions, but unable to sustain the head-load of romantic attachments if we aren’t regularly doing some sort of intercourse. I worry , these days, as menopause is about a decade or two at most away, if my libido will sputter out, changing the picture entirely. But, past evidence shows that even when brain meds tanked things, there was some sort of connection still there.
Silver linings
I think, however, there is one blessing. I have, more often than not, found adult me’s passions reciprocated. Even in my youth, I turned down one budding relationship because I knew were wouldn’t be kink compatible, but the poor person, at least, matched me for the gooey-glue of our wants. And I suspect I owe that to the fact that I love openly and well.
Silver, for example, says he likes the surety and openness of my feelings. I was many months ahead of him for the “I love you”. For him, it was a much more cautious conclusion. But I cannot help feeling that my quick heart probably helped me signal to solidify the relationship that makes me very happy. And, I also noticed, though my looks are often remarked on, I have never been courted because of them. My personality, my creativity and so forth have always been someone’s motive- even as I find my aesthetics are a bonus. That too, I think is related to my loving openess.
I think it is easier to fall for the “personality” of a person when they unspool themselves like I do. I might love immensely, deeply, but it does seem I have been loved deeply, a lot, as well.
Allergies boil my head, but his body is an aesthetic dream. My twitter feed’s a minutiae of trying to clear my head of goo, unerotic except to that one person with a histamine fetish (I mean there must be?).
Silver has the gift of most smaller men, proportion easy, then honed with dedication at a gym. He refused to admit he is muscular, calling it into question because his shoulders and arms don’t stay swollen like frozen hams when they are not flexed. He was also incredulous when I pointed out we should probably size up in condoms, because I had to fight to get the standard size down his dick at the last inch.
Even now, the Magnums, with their bold branding, actually the middle not the extreme, from the drug store’s offerings, create a sort of self conscious cringe. Neither he, nor I find much pleasure in harping on imaginary inadequacy. We never developed a taste for the male sub standard of claiming your partner doesn’t do it for you and attaches a certain self defeating aura to the dominant. No knock to your own kinks, but if I am going to own someone I want to think they aren’t a sexual imposition.
I began the weekend by offering him the chance to come, right then, or be denied on my terms as per usual. He picked the latter, of course, for fun in teasing. My god, he’s pretty and I’m horny. My botched IUD install and its correction is wearing off and I get wet easy. But, it’s not his tight little body I adore, by itself. Aesthetically, yes, it’s nice, but subtract my love and the possibility of control and certain tensions and I would have an immunity.
I skim the sex scenes in novels, not repulsed, but bored, often preferring “fade to black”. The intensity *to* bed can do it for me. And yet, now, with him, even writing this, the texture of his flesh when I squeeze it is an alluring sense memory.
All my pain games with my partners, my denial, teasing and so forth are pursuing a very particular outcome. Because it turns me on and makes me feel deeply connected to my so called victim. It is not a script- the means and confirmation of the goal is subjective; psychologically intimate; and physically impossible to clone beyond that creative moment, together. For me, my sadism is an intersection with my empathy with their suffering, and that sense of lost of will and control I perceive from them.
My biggest challenge in partners is that I need them to be aroused by what I am doing. I cannot do pain just as a power trip, no matter the consent offered. The desire can be after, or in a complex way, but broader experience has taught me that there is a scope of sensation and framing here I need to have echoed back.
As a submissive, Silver answers with joy to being called a “slutty little masochist”. I could not have it any other way, but if I thought about anything in sincere terms of being blessed, his welcome and obvious lust at my sadistic femdom cravings would go high up on that list. Torment him and I am riding a buzz. And, hilariously, we always end with being surprised to be getting a thank you from each other after. Each thinks the acts of the other are a gift.
Hurting Silver, last night
The rubber band snaps and he gives a yelp that is closer to a sob. Silver is in latex, transparent gloves and corseted leggings. We have explored with the potential of the tens unit I got him for his birthday last year, and of rope. A Lithuanian supplied, Soviet army surplus rubber gas mask gives him an oddly cute look, the old fashioned metal circles of the goggles amplifying the size of his pretty eyes. It was a a Christmas gift for him this year and I am very pleased with it.
When I want, I can put my hand over the air flow, instant easy breath play. The shape is snouted, adding an unexpected stubby cuteness. For fun I put him on all fours and reach forward to put my finger over the air intake while I slide his cock down my throat. It’s intense for me, and I feel him brush against my teeth, playing the game, no air for you, no air for me. When he is settled in place, it’s a rare moment where he doesn’t essentially freeze up in obedient attention, his cock begins to pump in and out in my throat. Yes. Fuck me. No concern for himself and being proper, mindless thrusting into that still unfamiliar wetness with the threatening edges of the possible sharp bites I could give.
I am in black latex, cat suit, neck to toes. The sweat pools at my hip level, mingling with the wetness of my arousal. I feel squeezed but not restrained, after a struggle to get it settled just so. I under lubricate my latex, I don’t like slime on my skin. And, even if it hurts a bit I like that rubber grip tugging where it touches.
The rubber bands for his cock and balls started for my hair to help it stick out the ports of my own latex hood. That garment is now discarded, and when the tens unit got its tour, after brief session wrenching his traps, I went after his cock. The pads weren’t interested in sticking- it didn’t like his skin very much in general, but I m a clumsy improviser, the drunken boxer of kinky sex. Elastics made the pads into proper contacts for the prickles of the electricity, to tease his erection.
Only a tease, though.
It was an interesting sensation, but even on high it didn’t hurt him significantly. I needed him to suffer, this wouldn’t do! When it forced the big muscles on his back to shudder and twitch that was, at least a delight as far as the look of disquiet and pressure on his face and the aesthetic forced flexing. So, this toy was put aside for other games.
And yet in my check a single black rubber band was left on the mid length of his cock. There are the thin kind, designed to be invisible in my dark hair, not thread or cloth wrapped. It looked like it was meant to be there, with all the latex.
I played at bondage, earlier, capping the tops of his opera length gloves in a way that let me pull his arms behind his back. I put him in a web, with that grey rope, to admire the warm swell of skin. Now he’s free of ties, except for that thin black line. I go to take it off, and then playfully pull and let it snap back.
It hurts. Its sharp, even against the mid length of him. SNAP. Again and again, alternating targets and sides. I move it about, finding misery in the thin band just below the head. And of course his balls. SNAP.
Those are even worse. Some cosmic jester decided, in protection of the species that cocks were made to take a beating, dumb things that they are, for all the hold nerve rich promise of an orgasm. But, break your balls, and all bets are off. SNAP.
I can’t do serious harm with a cheap elastic. After four or five pulls it is starting to permanently stretch out, losing bite. I smile, drawn in by his whimpers. He does not like this. Like virtually everyone I have played with, Silver prefers thud over sting. Masochists are descriptive connoisseurs, communicating their feelings in a million ways. I think that’s how they know they need to seduce us, if we can’t feel what they feel secondhand, what are we dominants to do?
I fetch two more elastics and make free with him. I am being intentionally nasty, putting on the bully voice. It’s a bit meta, acknowledging the ridiculousness of all this. If a cat could speak while it made a game of the mouse, this is how I imagine it would sound. Predatory violence, not reactive, joyful not terrified.
Its already a mind fuck to grapple that he can barely stand a rubber band or two popping him in the balls. Little pinpoint, plum bruises make stars where I have snapped. And I keep asking, “oh, what’s wrong, does it hurt?”
Edge play now.
I keep asking him if he thinks he wants to stop. Every so often he needs a break and then says he can continue. His erection hasn’t left us, maybe because of the beautiful trap of his latex fetish and my clear enjoyment. If he went soft I would stop. I wonder if he knows that. I know he can take more, its abrupt and awful, but not like being burned or similar past human sensibility ways to make a point.
Oh my goodness, we are already one month into 2022, and it feels like time has started to fly again. Happy Year of the Tiger to all people who celebrate this particular holiday- and to me, because I am a Fire Tiger. Mow!
I already told you Silver and I were looking into the gradual merging of households process. Because of that pesky two nationalities problem this is a slightly more complex process, but ironically achieving that is stepping up my writing and content game. Thanks to being able to travel by car now, January had not one but two chances to see my submissive!
Covid willing, I will see Silver around Valentine’s day. I got to see him in person in January twice, so that’s nice. My Pisces is having a birthday, and I am trying to come up with the best gift for a man who has everything other than making him a carrot cake, which I am excited to do, but is just the start. No spoilers of what I got him for Valentine’s day, but I already had it arrive from Europe and wrapped it. You never can tell with shipping.
I am having a bad couple of migraine months, but seasonal transitions do that. Don’t worry, collectively that disability scenario I mentioned is sloooowly getting better.
Vote My Book For An Award For Taboo Erotica
I got nominated for a 2021 Golden Pigtail Award for CORPORATE CONDITIONING (over 10x!), andyou should vote for it here in the semi-finals. This part of the competition is going to run until February 14th, 2022 and I really, really want to win entirely for ego reasons. Also because with all the real life US political hellscape business, taboo erotica like mind control are under siege. I had a literal dream I won, and I really appreciate Alexa Sommers giving me a reason to feel competitive and excited.
More Femdom Writing for Everyone
My Patrons have decided on the topic for the next Friday Femdom Fiction, and it’s going to be “Sacrifice“. I am excited, and in the mood to write something about psychological dominance. I would like to at least release two short stories for the general readers, so we’ll see where my brain is at for the other one.
Someone got me a copy of “Yes, Roya” via my Throne Wishlist, and it’s a love letter to midcentury fetish art. It’s next on my review docket, although I have a couple of other books like “Enough to Make You Blush” and “Femdom For Nice Girls” also on my shelf waiting for their own posts. If you think a work deserves to be put on there for review, feel free to suggest it.
I am WAY overdue to write something about all the Korean female gaze femdom comics. I will be focusing primarily on Tapas and Tappytoon. Titles like Sadistic Beauty, I Fell Into A Reverse Harem Game, Roxana, A Harem for My Empress, the King and the Paladin, etc… all provide a refreshing alternative source of contemporary things for dommes.
My fun writing project is 14504 words and counting of romantic femdom fantasy. It’s whimsical, very cottage core/dark academia and probably can be released as a straight romance because while the femdom is VERY present and smutty, the tale of a sorceress on her rabbit familiar is putting as much emphasis on the service as it is the sex. This pleases me.
(Other Places to Find Miss Pearl)
As you can probably tell by the sidebar if you are visiting this site by browser, I have been way more active on Femdom Instagram, so go ahead and give that a follow. I get asked this repeatedly, no I am not switching over into modelling or having an OnlyFans, etc… as the effort/risk to reward just isn’t there.
I do have a kink youtube and am hoping to go back to livestreaming soon. Check out back issued videos, and you know, like, comment and subscribe because if I am putting amateur hour full face vids out there this is my consolation. I do not have a Tiktok because I am old and don’t think I am a good comedic actress … intentionally.
Kink Twitter is probably open on my phone too much. That’s probably where you will see the most stream of consciousness rambling and arguing with other people. Do follow!
I am extremely happy to say the site, with the help of a technically skilled person, has been returned to functionality with a full, clean re-install. After 10 years, it was apparently full of ghosts and accidental messes, as well as bits and pieces that were leftover from past projects. The theme is readable and responsive, enough to serve you the femdom stories that remain the primary draw, without tying you to a particular device.
I am writing this as I delay making gingerbread cookies (to sit in the fridge overnight). Tomorrow Silver is going to drive up to haul me off to Washington, the theory being that if we are going to weather a complete holiday shut down, doing so in each other’s company is less unpleasant than apart. Although they haven’t hurt the borders yet, its been threatened, and I’d hate to do another 6 months, not knowing when we might be reunited. Behind me, a muffled YouTube playlist of vintage Christmas carols, artfully distorted to sound played on a record player in the next room adds a degree of festive feeling to a pretty grey time. It’s not so bleak, I suppose, as it might have been same time last year, when I cancelled seeing Silver, as covid rates inevitably spiked. That year, flying was the only option and going through air travel seemed a high risk activity on top of border hopping.
We are also coming in on our two year anniversary, if you back date things, or a year and a half if you count from formal negotiation of “dating”, which came after D/s. That’s us, backwards from lust into something deepening out. It feels odd, because it fits so perfectly well, that moment when you look at something on the rack “nah nice, but an impulse buy! Never going to fit me!” But try it on anyway and you don’t need to think of even tailoring it. Occasionally I wonder at how well he suits, in that way where I pay a therapist $150 an hour to convince me I deserve nice things.
More or less at this time, I went to an event in the social orbit of Seattle so I could hook up with him. And I did, and after, I told myself that if I wasn’t going to accept his extended kindness, what was the point even? So I did, and fell in love with him.
Today Silver dealt with various fuss around car maintenance, winding up into an increasing frazzle as he tried to make pieces fit to pick me up. He doesn’t like me having to take an Uber to the border, and doesn’t like me having to pay the expense of the ride and have me walk over. He will swab himself and wait 24 hours for his test results, to shuttle me up and back, three to four hours drive. My scumbag brain tries to come up with a reason this is an inadequacy on my part, because apparently it doesn’t want to admit someone can just care about me that much. Enough to spare me $60 and a 40 minute car ride and 20 minutes of ridiculous security theatre.
An old friend, one of those humans you find is relentlessly good to you, helped me fix the gnarled up back end of my website. Every step of the way she apologized for giving me good advice. For imposing with her help. The site is now clean and crisp and no longer fighting against posting things or going down every thirty minutes. Then she trusted me to give her a name for a project she is working on, and my scumbag brain told me asking me was a favour to me.
Silver just about apologized for not being better at the back end of websites. As if it were his job to be all thing to me, as if it were a lack on his part. I understand that urge powerfully, I don’t think it is submissive thing. I think it is the complex tangle of how humans love.
If his apartment wasn’t so small as to probably drive us crazy, if I didn’t need $600 of Botox stabbed into my head every three months, and business with OTs and so forth, it would be tempting to just weather the current spike of plague nestled up in his home.
There, this stream of consciousness is written and I have taken a tranquillizer to prevent the excitement of tomorrow and a thread of anxiety from throwing me off my sleep. There’s disks of gingerbread dough in the fridge and when I made it I felt a little bit of Christmas, a pure bit of joy it would be ok. Tomorrow I have a handful of must do errands before I go, filling a prescription, rolling, cutting and baking cookies, and finishing a gift. I must settle on the things for my suitcase. There may be a family to meet: “Hi Mom, this is my domme!”
Ok, no, it’s that mutual thing where the leather fetish stories fall short as I make a presentation of myself that is not fake, it’s translated. And like any good translation, the meaning will not be lost though the context and language will adapt to the audience. I pack bright kelly green tights and a red plaid dress, and consider I have 12 days to fill otherwise. Latex, in crinkly paper. Twangy body harnesses, lingerie. Plain black cotton panties with lace edges to match. Black tights, opaque, worn in this style since high school, skirts. I seldom wear pants. Shoes must be picked carefully as even with a bigger bag they make bulk.
I am packing a jar of mincemeat. I expect to co-opt flour and butter and two knives to slice vigorously. This particular recipe takes forever to bake and makes my diners convert to pie. I don’t expect him to like the rich taste of peel, raisins and alcohol. But it is my Christmas to eat them. In our last video call before bed, a habit that’s turned into 3 or 4 calls a day, he showed me he picked me up some shortbread. He has put a box for me in his bathroom I can stash those things one makes a habit of- shampoo and conditioner and so forth. We are at the drawer-at-your-place stage in our relationship.
The orgasm denial is making him into a mess. Every time I see his cock, hard and erect I immediately get his with the scent memory of sex. We’ve passed pleasantly aroused and into needy, unable to shut down the drive to pursue and touch. Tomorrow he will be unable to stop touching me. I am sadistically winding him up until he can tell me he needs me. I am pushing his limits, my unstintingly giving man.
And perhaps I will let him come before New Years. It is, after all, Christmas.
The class was the live version of “On Top: Exploring Your Dominant Persona”, taught by Justine Cross, variously touted as the most popular Dominatrix in LA, participant in extensive public outreach experiences and significant mover/shaker in her community. She owns two dungeons, which host an important part of the larger local lifestyle community. It’s a dedication of her life to advancing acceptance of BDSM and being a domme a find deeply praiseworthy. She’s very much a role model for others to aspire to.
People familiar with my presence on the internet probably know that I take every option to attend classes that show you how to be or realise your dominant self. Moderating r/femdomcommunity not one week passes without at least one newbie asking “how do I?” Meanwhile this blog exists as an anchor of sorts, dedicated to the subject of being a lifestyle domme for your own delight. Reviewing classes is a nice mix of learning things for myself and knowing where to send other people to learn.
The target market of this particular class is novice dommes. It’s important to reach them directly because femdom is a culturally distinct entity within the BDSM community at large, and although much of it is still dedicated to the interests of male subs and their most psychologically resonant fetishes, it’s also a space that is often much less hostile to female power than the mainline BDSM community can be.
However… Any domme class review I do is fussy.
If you are upset by having someone’s very affordable public contribution pulled apart with a magnifying glass, I might not be the writer for you. If you happen to BE Justine Cross reading this, message me to send you the cost of a stiff drink, as I am tearing into things with all the concern and sensitivity of a pack of velociraptors on an unattended BBQ buffet. Caveat lector.
And, I’m pretty biased going into this, because I think way too much emphasis is already put on teaching women to embody personas already, and every other domme lesson out there seems still stuck on the archetypes of “The Mistress Manual“, a book I am not whelmed by. On the other hand, all the dommes that teach these classes aren’t stupid, and the queries I get from would be dommes often phrase their need in a pursuit of finding a particular self presentation. This naturally makes a “Persona” class seem more attractive in marketing, so I tried to go into it with an open mind.
Besides, I have an endless desire to know what is out there, because when someone is on the top of their game, as Justine Cross is, even if I disagree on something, they clearly have something I can learn from. I am hardly an indomitable authority, and I would be deeply uncomfortable if there was nowhere else to send folks than me for good information. Safe sources that are different in theory than me should be nurtured, because this pocket of identity is pretty marginalized already.
So, would I recommend Justine Cross’s Domme Persona class?
Justine Cross has both organizer bonafides and a lengthy teacher and presenter resume. They are very good at communicating. I would say it’s an excellent intro class with up to date reminders that dominants can have limits, but little direct emphasis on female pleasure. Most dominant classes for any gender seem more responsibility focused, developing a framework to safely hold authority, but I think domme oriented instructional stuff needs to center this a bit more.
You do not need any part of this class to be a domme. If you want to be better at embodying what people expect of a domme, it’s a much better place to learn than most resourced. There’s value here, but having asked her dead on why this (outside of the self evident safety part she taught) was necessary, I feel the bridge between the dominant self and the external performance is not explored enough by the class.
Additionally, although her Lifestyle bonafides are without question, there’s a few bits in the content that are continuing to hold all dominants to standards only useful to professionals or at best a narrow stripe of kinky folks in a public community. Most advice in her class is good and well taught, but it’s decidedly about embodying a dominatrix externally in a way that needs the dungeon to work. That standard looms a bit too much into her class, though make no mistake, her own communicated joy in her life in no way make dominating seem like a duty or a chore.
First, delving into what she did particularly right:
Without her class I would not have found her wonderful free(!) scene negotiation sheet. She offers it for on Gumroad, crediting its first version originator, Pervocracy. Being properly plugged into the spectrum of kink communities for info is key for any educator, and Justine Cross has that down perfectly.
(Only one caveat on the attribution: I don’t know if Cliff prefers to reference his dead name professionally, for works predating his shift to going exclusively by that name. This sheet still credits that way. I definitely don’t think Justine Cross is doing anything wrong)
I also really appreciated that the class took the time to talk about dominant limits and explained it in a very accessible way. They did not do off the rack domme characters like I feared she might, the persona in the class title was more of a self selected thing to nurture and construct within the self.
The bones of the Mistress Manual seem to be still there in the very deep background, but the distance from it has included more of the self. I at no point felt like it was a class exclusively on mastering the thing hubby asked one to do, as most domme guides do.
Particular to that point, Justine Cross was very much in her element when she talked about the limits of the old saw, to sub before you dom. Little touches of her personal interest in the cnc messy “abuse” inspired scenarios were a little window into desire that are missing in a lot of conversations, though she is impeccable consistent in flagging real danger.
Her safety discussion was flawless. That I can’t say more about it is due to it’s constancey, and did not veer into over corrections nor neglect the dominant’s comforts. She managed this without being full of safety myths. And I liked she touched on a preference for darker things that outside of care and enthusiastic consent, would be explicitly abuse.
Now the criticisms, because I am a miserable pedant:
There was only one big oof. And not a potentially fatal one, just a misdirection, if you are exclusively lifestyle. Other things I noted would be smaller, for all go into them in detail. I remind you to read my review in the context of nitpicking, and my own agenda, and that I am still recommending her.
The biggest issue is I think she wasn’t able to effectively distinguish lifestyle and pro. Some of this is that it’s not a hard binary. And yet, I feel that because of the validity of sex work and the format of kink as delivered only in dungeons, parts of the whole spectrum and quirks of lifestyle only femdom culture were missing. The problem went as far as her intro querstions, asking us to define “dominatrix or dominant” even as she told us this was a lifestyle rather than sex work focused class. Notably she just asks one to define “submissive” in her class.
(Of course some lifestyle only women do call themselves Dominatrices or draw all their inspiration from there, but most do not. This didn’t put the contemporary idea of a dominatrix into it’s larger context of ways to be a domme.)
Nitpick 1: A missed opportunity to befriend an awkward elephant
The low hanging fruit (which I am trying to knock down and discard), one might levy at her, is that her work with clients somehow taints her. That’s sexism, nobody tells all the male pro-riggers that if they aren’t completely attracted to their models, their work is less valid. But the question “are you a real domme tho?” is an elephant in the room. Not because I am asking, but because she is self aware of the context of her audience’s thoughts to be stuck having to build a self justification into the curriculum.
Make no mistake, Justine Cross’s professional work experience in no way makes her lifestyle “authenticity” lose its loud self evidence in everything she does. Part of the fun of her class is her use of tone and expression where you can see how uplifted and comfortable she is in her kink. I found myself admiring her- she deserves the prestige she has. I don’t cringe to know she puts herself forward to the media to represent what femdom is. If people think I am like her, by pop culture exposure, that’s a compliment to me.
It really sucks that lifestyle and professional have to be put at odds. Most pro dommes are both. Even if they were not, it wouldn’t matter- that a person wants to dominate is personally enough for me. I want them to be fulfilled doing it, but being lifestyle only also never stopped someone from trading in harmful info either.
I do not think we got a bridge built, and about the only point she looked self conscious was in reference to professional work she does when it gives the client most of the say in the script of his scene. She mentioned him being happy was enough. I sort of think that was a missed opportunity to talk about the unique permission women get to express power through nurturing, giving and empathy.
I think that the standard we hold dominants, particularly sex workers to, harms dommes. As much as I dislike advice that teaches dominance like a purely giving thing, it’s a worse burden to place on female dommes that if we overtly acknowledge we might focus on the sub we lose respect and power. Femdom, in the name, has permission to be gendered and thus the other. Where it is most in alignment with feminism is when it rejects that power has to look like by a very male standard.
And I think we need to have a stronger foundation, collectively, that traditionally feminine associated things, from homemaking to penetration, do not have to be submissive.
Nitpick #2: The direct female pleasure problem
All that being said on being giving not being inherently submissive, we are also still struggling with having pleasure or being selfish at all.
My biggest criticism of most of the intro/general het femdom classes I have attended is that they focus on getting it right as a vocation and not on pleasing yourself. There may be a lot of focus on projecting authority through symbols, technique, and body exercises, but none about achieving and outcome other than “you are happy because you feel you are recognized as a dominant, including by yourself” and “he is happy because he got what he wanted”.
It’s like if an intro to sex class covered lingerie, dirty talk, anal and deep throating, and neglected to talk about her orgasm. Some of this is coyness inherent in our sex taboos about women. At the best of times, it’s framed as a nurturing, generative performance. But even so, these classes never seem to touch on things like the stealth-domme parts the novice might realise she was doing all along. Or ask her to think about her needs directly and how she might get this met.
And all these personas seem less like permission to be a part of yourself you suppress and instead creating a new part of the self who is allowed to do things the you, to this point, can’t. Notably while Justine Cross asked us to look to our own examples of fictional dommes to build that persona, she didn’t linger there.
I think the why do all this was missing
Maybe it’s the brevity of the class, but the most interesting part of examining your fantasies and fixations is seeing how they might embody what you personally want. Sometimes it’s a means to an end, sometimes the moment itself is the goal. In Justine Cross’s framing, dominance seems more like a means to an end in itself. The argument was present: Be like fictional domme or real dominatrix to be domme.
She doesn’t ask why you might want to be a domme or what emotional or sexual fulfillment this might bring you. In Justine Cross’s class, being perceived as a domme by yourself and others is enough in itself. Am I doing this to create a safe space to be sadistic? What kind of buzz does having power give me, or am I more focused on the reactions of a sub? Am I strengthening my ego in just knowing I have admirable topping skills or do I want the outcomes for me?
Mistress Shahrazad, teaching at The Ritual Chamber, is the only domme class teacher I have found, to date, who suggested you might have to struggle to even identify, much less vocalize one’s needs as a woman. I think because her class was FLR focused things could get away from the constant performance part dommes in particular get asked to do. I find it odd, given how much mainline feminism is exploring the perils and pitfalls of asserting oneself that femdom lessons for women don’t touch on that psychological side more.
For Justine Cross, her style section for dommes is a fashion shoot of her different looks. This is in sharp contrast with her sub class (reviewed later, below), where sub style is the permutations of kink preferences. It’s a very external presentation. It’s true that women have more permission to express themselves via outwards adornment and affect. Nonetheless, it’s another missed opportunity to talk about how style leads to her feelings.
(I often wonder if I might just be weird?)
My sadist self needs no mask, she uncoils out of my core into occupation of the entire room. I don’t take her to the grocery store and the DMV, but she is indelibly there in my sexuality. Flirt and her teeth are what smile back. Fuck, and it’s your mind I try to unpick to control the interaction. Reciprocal horny loops occur when someone I want subs to me.
In the larger world, when a woman wants to be sexually or romantically dominant, the matter is presented very differently than to a man. We still drag her into caricature flavours of dominatrix: governess, goddess, amazon, and so on. These aren’t even what real life dominatrices are like! That’s (based on my current sample) usually warm, empathetic, creative, cynical and queer. But, the archetypes we are given as baby dommes aren’t even the power fantasies that move reams of women’s fiction. If someone is a governess or a teacher in a story that’s typically sold to women, the former is about independence in a historical setting and the latter about her dedication to a traditional but essential job. Neither give her permission for cruelty in a way that powers sadism.
Being a Dominatrix can be one kind of permission, but we need more!
Sure, plenty of women look at the capital M “Mistress” and want to embody that, but meanwhile the male dominants are getting to be heroes and vampires and corporate bosses. Or in real life, allowed to be middle aged alt/nerd guys playing make believe patriarch. He’s getting his dick sucked by someone he is calling “little one”, and we dommes are all over here trying to not be collectively scraped off the internet by social media female body bans and credit card providers.
Maybe it’s because hard power, and unapologetically self focused power are usually denied to women, without severe social penalties? A world where the female orgasm is more obscene than the male one on film will necessarily put female pleasure aside unless abstracted, euphemized or channeled into approved outlets. But, as much as women have permission to wield certain kinds of embodying and giving power men do not, the experience of being dominant that keeps the domme as purer, more limited thing than male doms are way more shades of the “The Female Eunuch” than I would want, given what a disappointing TERF Germaine Greer turned out to be.
Shows like Billions and Bonding, the latter of which Justine Cross cited as a good example, subtract female sexual pleasure from their scenes. Instead it’s the admiration of other women for your topping skills, and strict distance from one’s more vulnerable desires, an aloof power. You have something your partner wants, done well, ideally naturally.
I do think women regularly fantasize about being a dominatrix, along with other sexual vocations. So, classes to do this make sense. The dominatrix is a transgressive and yet very traditionally feminine place to be, a forbidden deviance that promises a power trip. However, I think men do not use those same self imagining filter tools to enjoy their dominance.
Dommes are not asked what they want in the context of their lifestyle-only relationships. The presumption at best is that you can put on a persona as a tool, but nothing about one’s own fetishes. Empowerment is mentioned, but never “horny”.
All of this is more like a context of the domme class’s absent female pleasure problem.
That Justine Cross doesn’t address this context head on is not an endorsement. In practice she does more to make kink accepted in the mainstream than I do. But I think in swelling our numbers I must stay like Nidhogg in the roots of Yggdrasil, that nasty dragon gnawing the base of the world tree. My place in all this is about a certain sort of self assured self advocacy. I have to stand firm that what a femdom is must be expanded without eliminating any of the current forms.
Male subs are *extremely* good at collectively saying what they want. There is an ocean of porn in every permutation imaginable. There is virtually none for lifestyle dommes, to the point our male partners routinely either think we don’t exist or their porn is for us. For an industry that acknowledges that women can make up a third of the customer base, we are still stuck in “but women don’t like this” for commercial content.
So, it’s a situation of scarcity that puts that problem. Maybe in the end I am naught but the lunatic fringe, but content for us needs to be more inclusive of ways of being. Elsewise we will have more eras of “not like other femdoms” in lifestyle only land and continue with the ongoing rejection of gendered labels by otherwise cis women (or femme folks) who feel excluded by the lean of contemporary femdom culture.
Nitpick 3#: A poly/pro approach is not acknowledging a monogamous majority
This was the heaviest structural issue I noticed. She defaulted to putting dommes in contrast to eachother, way more than subs are placed apart. I think it makes sense for a public living marketing power house like Justine Cross, but it will not necessarily make her lessons accessible to couples or the vast majority of serial monogamists and monogamish folks.
For example, when we talked domme limits, she suggested if something is a limit to you, you could refer your sub elsewhere for that. Great advice for pros, who have a healthy and supportive culture that is naturally more stringless poly, and uses referrals to strengthen the whole community, terrible for the average monogamous woman. That’s what the majority of dommes are, and there are other ways to navigate your limits than opening your relationship. I would be careful to go as far as saying it will have the opposite effect of encouraging dommes to push through their limits for fear of having to share. But it left a hole in this particular issue that needs patching.
The most frustrating example of this domme inter-comparison approach was the closing topic. It was titled “Honing Your Craft or specialty – What do you want to be known for?”. Nope. Please do not. Topping is skill based, being a domme is absolutely an internal desire thing, and the “craft”/ vocation part is explicitly a pitch only women seem to get.
In pursuit of this dominance-as-calling idea, Justine Cross described developing a personal style to differentiate yourself from other dommes. This is not advice lifestyle dommes need, and is actually harmful as phrased, implying that pursuit of social distinctiveness should be prioritized. Lifestyle dommes do not need to convince anyone they are specialized or have branding.
You might use a persona as a tool, but you absolutely aren’t doing it in healthy competition with other women, as an artist. Your relationships don’t work that way; you can offer a more complete picture of yourself because the world is structured to allow you to do so. Being a domme, for most women, isn’t like becoming a burlesque performer, where you take on a stage name and create an audience digestible snapshot. You definitely don’t worry your domme identity is too much like another domme- you may never do more than read/watch these other women or have interactions that are indistinguishable from vanilla.
In the kink community, on the lifestyle side, there’s definitely a possability social prestige in building a public parasocial identity even more so than just being “the funny one” in a friend circle, but this is not needed. I can say first hand as someone whose whining on the internet for nigh on a decade accidentally gave her a perceived identity, or who had people think she was an aloof badass in the in person scene in Montreal, because I was the event runner and didn’t feel comfortable seeking play in a pool I had authority over- that identity doesn’t need tweaking. You can just be yourself as most of the whole person.
Again, this segue into taking persona to mean something like a brand was a missed opportunity. It could suggest differentiation in pursuit of satisfaction, where a unique style was more about focusing on your fetishes and putting a you focused spin on it. And ironically that’s more of where her partnered to this sub class went.
Contrasting this with Justine Cross’s submissive oriented class
“On Your Knees: Power in Submission”, is aimed at subs in general, though marketed with a hooded suit sub dude picture (which she noted in her class was not optimal, but still nice to see a boy sub in central focus), and was flagged in her domme class as an alternative. As such, I couldn’t feel I was doing a review justice without looking at her recorded class for subs. It was incredibly well done, and I feel I would give it as a good class for anyone from a future person who saw themselves as a client only, to a baby sub just starting out.
Unlike the domme class, this one dedicates a whole section to sharing your needs, something conspicuously absent in advice for femdoms, both in Justine Cross’s Persona class and most educational resources. It’s woven throughout our shared culture, that the subs are not asked to distinguish themselves in the sense dommes are, or dress up in a way that exists in the interspacing between our perception of ourselves as sex and the perception of others of us as sexy.
Although the kink negotiation worksheet was provided to both classes, only in the (recorded) sub class was there any effort to review it. She asks the sub class to explicitly fill out answers to “I am, I need, I require”, which she does not do in her domme class.
It’s actually rather interesting to me that she does more to justify what she liked in the class for subs, than she does in the class for dommes. Some of this is based on curing the starfish idiots (or “hotdog sub, a term I am now stealing). These people assume dommes are telepaths or monolithic. Still, the presentation on expressing your needs includes things like “making you feel better after you have had a bad day”. I am not saying that’s not very *submissive* as you can do whatever you like in your D/s dynamic and doing that is something I personally enjoy as a dominant! I am saying that I would be shocked if the average femdom-for-femdoms class talked about communicating to your sub how to make you happy in such a nuanced way. This is missing, given how often dommes ask plaintively if they are allowed to be vulnerable or have needs too.
This class would have actually worked as a general BDSM ed class and is a lot of stuff baby dommes also need to hear
It’s a pity we don’t. In this class, there was a lot of practical advice for subs about leaning in, and working with what the dominant is putting down, as well as reminders of where the reciprocal way a scene works. I have to wonder if most dommes are expected to come into this already knowing that. Nobody tells us to approach it from a place of mutual goals. Giving to a sub is always self conscious, if mentioned, caveated with “but I am still a dominant”, while the sub is assumed to want a more whole spectrum as natural.
Dominance, like masculinity, is alas, more fragile than femininity or submission.
What makes a great sub, according to Justine Cross, also includes style/persona. And yet, these mean very different things than the domme class taught. For subs, she emphasizes the skills and self knowledge of what they are into as informing their persona. Styles are a lot more play oriented “bratty bottom” versus a super masochist, and so forth. There’s way more here about your needs as a sub, to help you with self knowledge, while the domme persona class didn’t seem to put even the play preferences of the domme central.
She also emphasizes how subs can build practical skills like massage or cooking (or specific familiarity with a flavour of kink). I am sometimes critical that this can lead to male subs feeling like they only have value in very sesexualized roles, and she might have toughed more on the subject of the female gaze, but she did a very good job of teaching how important being personable was to getting folks to play with you.
It’s part of the greater tragedy of femdom as a culture, because Justine Cross leaned, via her own examples, even way more into her own dominant pleasure in this class. Although she repeatedly emphasized she was a financial dominatrix, her broader explanations and real life anecdotes took the audience past stereotypes and better illustrated that sex work isn’t the orphan in the spectrum of what we might desire.
But, the bones of the difference I am talking about, in how we teach to dommes versus subs, is very clear in the two outlines…
Domme Class
Sub Class
– What makes a great dominant? – What makes a bad dominant? – Consent using the Kink Negotiation Worksheet – Archetypes – Style and fashion – Technique and style – Training, knowing your skills – How you identify, using a title or a name – Character or Persona – Honing Your Craft or specialty – What do you want to be known for?
Bring all of your questions and together we will explore common dominant archetypes, styles, techniques so that you know how to begin your journey into domination. Whether you are single or with a partner you will learn skills to help you enjoy this path with confidence and sexual creativity. Unleash your inner dominant in the bedroom and in life!
– What makes a great submissive or bottom? – Learning to express your kinky needs – Consent using the Kink Negotiation Worksheet – Styles of submission – Protocol and etiquette and other fancy words – for how to serve – Contracts and agreements – Boundary setting and inner work – Skill building for service
Together we’ll explore the role of the submissive, and how to safely create boundaries for healthy D/s relationships. If you are just beginning your journey this will give you the foundation to serve, as well as make a great impression on your dominant.
Class comparison taken directly from Gumroads and correct as of November 2021
Some sort of conclusion of this review
Having continued the trend of making myself completely unwelcome in any dungeon around the world with my pickiness. I should probably finish this wave of negativity with a few other caveats. I haven’t listened to her recorded class, and she was teaching live with a significant head injury the night before. Although she assured us she did not have a concussion, my own professional (snrk) background means all the symptoms she publically mentioned made be a little suspicious- I have to emphasize that what I got might have had the parts I though were missing if she hadn’t had an wrought iron bit of sex furniture bean her hard enough to give her a headache the next day.
And I actually think you SHOULD do both classes, because the recorded sub class was much more superior in conveying dominant joy and pleasure, as well as a bunch of good general advice including handling consent violations versus accidents, and a certain supportive frankness of building stuff together. And for the $20 USD the live class cost me, and $15 USD for the recorded versions, you are getting a bargain. At that cost, Justine Cross has made good information extremely accessible. She should be commended, tipped and celebrated.
And I hope I can see her interrogation work shop, because the purring enthusiasm she brought to talking about the subject in an off hand mention was a brief moment of feeling completely and entirely understood. I do want to see her speaking more narrowly than generally, as I suspect my socks may be blown off.
Whoops, this sat in drafts as the remainder of August and the first half of September into real life obligations and migraines.Here’s the yearning horny, albeit a bit belated!
My body wakes me up at 3AM for its own reasons and I seek his warmth and scent. I find him gone, and I am in my own bed, feeling his absence as a sense-ghost in my memory.
I think about the history he told me, discovering his submission online. Of his eager acceptance of what I say when I assert this or that in my tinkering with the comforts of life. I think about one, then two fingers sliding into his ass, my tugging, pinching and hurting him, and the interplay of our desires through his pain. Of the texture of his hard cock in my mouth, just slight slicked with the oil from the flavourless silicone we use.
I think about how odd it feels to spend two weeks where my sadism can uncoil itself without ceremony, whenever, however. Limits of reason are not something I care to exceed, so I am truly free to do as I wish. It really feels like a visceral thing in my chest, stuffed away behind my breasts. Tonight, at 3 AM in the dark, these ache.
With him, cruelty happens as easily as a fresh cup of tea, his skin blooming in whatever the latest thing I do. The marks flare bright and usually fade in less than an hour.
I consider you, I consider you…
The lyrics bounce about in my head, Anges Obel’s Beast. I have run my mile like the stanzas suggest, appreciating this wholeness with him. For the first time in a long time I felt fully unfolded, imagination painting me as something monstrous that usually keeps itself shrunk down. Something with long claws, like hooks, and a flexible body.
He is so small in my arms when I wrap around him. He who is three inches taller, and who I strain to reach when we kneel together to fuck him from behind.
I slap, strike, spank. He fast colours and fast fades, my hands marking for an hour, excepting a few bruises. I bend my mind around his circumstantial masochism, understanding the pain that is good pain, and the bad pain that is very wanted. It took me a few goes to understand that gentleness with fucking his ass was not needed, unlearming the chiding “ouch” from past partners and best practices, to trade for vigorous violation.
After we play particularly hard, perhaps an hour later, when my need to know overturns my commitment to the quieter moment, I watch his eyes and almost hear a click, as he tries to make the experience of me on him into words. It doesn’t come easy, but he knows I need him to articulate the nuances. I am oddly particular about his motives, for all that I glory in my sadism’s freedom.
My mind is a strange time traveller
All the time I visited him, I struggled with a blog post that put to words the sensation of having my mind focus on what’s next, beyond my visit. Now that it is past, I find myself, instead returning to the time before. Of all things, the memory of his smell leaves the strongest means to travel back.
It’s ironic because he is not particularly pungent. He has switched, recently, to some spice and old leather soaps, but it’s not those, as nice as they are, that places him so intensely he is a taste in my tongue and sinuses.
When we fuck, the ghosts of us bloom beyond our bodies. If my sadism is something in my chest, our sex scents, older than the species, are a warmth of considerable comfort that emerge from us both to soothe. I wondered out loud at that, if others might sense him on me and react, if, in the way of humans it would turn men away or drive them more intrigued.
Perhaps nobody could tell, but where we fucked and laid together, we became overlapped, and myself wearing his scent like his arms about me.
The morning when I left, I didn’t shower, nor the night before, jealously keeping him on my body. But, by the afternoon, settling back into Vancouver, hot water and an engulfing robe gave me comfort. And still it is like I remember the scent now and that becomes enough.
Grey morning,
It’s now morning as I write this, and the city is ghost calm, the only noise the compressor of the fridge and the hum of the furnace. His bedroom is quite noisy. You wouldn’t think thus, for he would swear to you he prefers suburban calm, but the condos of the area have pushed the density considerably. Things whine and woosh on the road, mumbles travel up from below and yells make their way from outside.
I want to hear his voice: the rumble hinting the bottom depths of it, the slight lisp when he is tired or the plastic braces that keep his teeth straight while he sleeps are snapped in place. The way he finally became less self conscious and let himself sing along a bit to music. The working from home professional voice, listened to while I poke at my laptop and appropriate the sex wedge as a back rest.
Just before I left, I asked a bit about his past, the before me. He was precisely honest in a way that brought out details from memory, but also sparse in some things. I am not the first woman he has submitted to, taking on the mutual self discovery with a long term online friend.
He is careful, understandably, as any man would be when their partner says “tell me about your ex”, but for me it is more a comforting sequence of knowing not precisely the erotic details, but how he made his way into understanding what we do. I am fishing, not for comparison, but to find what part might be submerged, mapping out a depth.
I think that I am largely open about myself. Too open, by most standards: sex blogger, sharer of feelings and criticisms, quick to say what I think. I want to be recorded, understood, and, I guess, accepted. I know the latter two are unlikely, but I am shockingly good at getting myself heard. Silver? I watch him manage to make small talk that is warm, friendly and doesn’t even reveal an opinion on a sports team, much less politics, even casual hobbies. He’s as hard to grasp as a breeze.
Strangers on the internet know I still suck my thumb in my sleep sometimes, and that I repeatedly miss shaving a few of the hairs on my ankles until I start to resemble a clydesdale. Silver, meanwhile, is the first person I met to whom “still waters run deep” is actually true. I used to think a core part of loving someone completely was knowing them with the same thoroughness, now I come to discover it’s more like a compulsive need to explore until I do.
I could dig for a long time before I’ve mapped (mined?) all of Silver.
This is also the first relationship I have been in that I put myself utterly first. This sounds luxurious, but actually it’s painful and often very bruising to my ego. You see that means a lot of addressing my self protective crazy. It makes my critical of past loves, as something I am unsure about is at what point did perfectionism in muffling my distress become dishonesty and at what point was it a boundary?
There now, reader, I have contradicted myself. An open book who somehow always shocked her exes with the depth of her dissatisfaction with tthem. An honest speaker of her thoughts who uses the needs of others to not think too hard about what she wants.
With Silver, from day one, I placed my standards higher. I extended my desires, and treated my wants like needs. He meets them. Oh my goodness does he meet them.
I am all aflutter with terror because I want him so very badly. This in turn makes an insecurity that the needy anchor seeker in me will terrorize him into trying to protect me by pulling back. I am trusting he won’t, thus far he isn’t.
I am cared for.
He drives me back to Vancouver, so I can walk the park length left to the border and cross back. On the way, he thoughtfully pulls into the little lighthouse Starbucks of a small town just before things shade from the poverty sprawl of Northern Washington to the wealth of south eastern suburban Greater Vancouver.
Although most of what we just drove through was industrial boxes, here it’s a picturesque core of a small town. Autumn is hinting, a stroke of orange or a bloom of the first hint of red in some of the leaves, and a grey, chilly mist whispering that maybe the angry scourge of summer heat is done. Autumn is a weakness that turns me into romantic mush.
Masts from a marina peeping below the parking lot. I don’t want to leave him. I imagine a half dozen perfect maybe somedays as I steal what kisses I can. We reach the parking lot of the peace arch and he walks me to the border, where I will cross.
He likes a long, lips pressed kiss best. His kisses fascinate me, like nobody else. His cock settles in my body more easily than any other. He has the darkest blue eyes I have ever seen.
I am full to bursting with “what’s next, now!?”
What’s next? Here I am in Canada, first day back, I am considering my balcony garden and what parts survived my absence. Inexplicably the tender first zucchini that died in the heat wave came back robust, maybe there will be a crop. I regret only the goth cherry tomatoes, tenderly nurtured into bushy green from scant seeds from etsy.
Life will continue. Delta will do its thing, in theory at some point in September he will make an expensive trip to see me. But, we will be apart, for now and wait to see what will come next.
Oh whoopsies, broke a few things on the site there, didn’t I? Hopefully the new template tweaks are working nice and smooth in your browser. Feel free to leave a comment if they are not! Otherwise, it’s been busy these last few weeks, but up until last week, maybe not so exciting.
What have I been up to this summer?
No sooner did I get into doing live streams, but an amazingly awful blanket of heat waves hit my province, turning my possible filming space into a sauna. I do not like it when my gloomy, damp home turns into a place where the weather is literally “firestorm”. Still, all wasn’t bleak, despite having to resort to covering my windows in tinfoil like I was a conspiracy theorist doing interior design. During the truly medically terrifying heat wave, Silver gifted me with a few nights in hotel, coming to the rescue with his very typical eagerness. He is good to me that way. This was also a pretty major milestone for me to trust someone enough to let them give me something at that cost.
