Start up any kink forum, and the same standard questions come up, time and time again: “How the hell do I get a Mistress/Domme/Dom/Dominatrix?!” Sister to this plaintive cry is the equally desperate call of the dominant women “How the hell do I make these guys figure out how to approach me properly?!”

This is the awkward part: trying to give advice. As observed by Beej, there’s a lot of hand holding Mumsy advice, often downright basic things about regular baths and wearing some pants on the first date; a hell of a lot of idealistic twiddlings on the true beauty of kinky sex and the difficulty in doing it; there’s a whole suitcase full of books about starting out kinky in any particular orientation you want, many of which have been around since before absolutely everyone had the internet; and of course there’s an active scene in most communities of a certain size, where at least one person fancies themselves to be a mentor.

This is not even getting into the websites people have put together giving various shades of advice, from pornographic fantasy like the abysmal Elise Sutton to fussy little tripod and archived Geocities pages that were labours of love of some well meaning person about a decade ago, and still bear their black backgrounds and white or coloured text, (because anything about kink has to look like something I thought was cool when I was a 15 year old goth) and “under construction” GIFs. But your question is probably- Where are the fem doms at and how do I approach one without getting devoured like a male praying mantis or shunned like I was president NAMBLA?

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