femdom book

Femdom Review “Pawn of the Cruel Princess” by Rebecca F. Kenney

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“Pawn of the Cruel Princess” by Rebecca F. Kenney is a dark romance aiming for the trope of enemies to lovers. It’s got an ostensible femdom premise (male war captive of female royalty) but a decidedly switchy tone. Like many works trying to focus on sexual slavery while also trying to keep the characters likable, it relies heavily on external pressures pushing the couple together and forcing the female lead, Ruelle, into a more carnal dynamic with Ducayne. 

There is a plot here, as well, with shades of Gideon the Ninth. After our main characters’ introduction and torture room meet cute, we learn the flower of the youthful nobility (and their pleasure thralls) must congregate in one isolated place to party. Once at the resort, bad things must be grappled with and whodoneit mystery is presented. Ruelle brings enemy captain Ducayne to spite her Crown Princess sister, but also because she is attempting to politic her way into her own survival when her wicked sister eventually ascends the throne. Despite having virtually no time to train Ducayne, with the help of a magic tattoo and some negotiation, Ruelle secures his cooperation to at least vaguely attempt to pass as her submissive thrall.

The sister and the family dynamic here is extravagantly abusive. The society, for their part, is hypersexual with a great deal of focus on the owning and training of their thralls. This appears to be a common practice on the island shared by both Ruelle and Ducayne’s respective nations. Our framing device for why any of this needs explaining is that Ruelle is a virgin who has yet to cooperate with debauchery expected of a noble. 

Ducayne, for his part, instantly decides he doesn’t care about the side of a war he is on, but maintains an intense quantity of pride and belief in his own right to autonomy. He is also spends a lot of time thinking about the bad relationship he has with his mother. 

Both characters speculate they are kinky thanks to abuse from their parents. Much hay is made of the heroine’s inherent masochism, something that she is deeply uncomfortable with. The hero is forever pinning her against things and making threats. In this society, being aroused by bottoming is apparently shameful, and both characters grapple with discomfort that they are aroused by it, Ruelle more so than her thrall. There is something here about space for switches and lovers of primal, but if you are turned off by the sub manhandling the dominant and at least one scene of pretty much flat out non-con with another man for Ruelle, you might be annoyed.

I know this is a hot button issue for a lot of femdoms that even in fiction we don’t get to avoid being disempowered,, not to mention the external pressure that we are just feisty subs who will eventually be taught better. If anything that could even hint of that is triggering, you might want to skip this one.

On the other hand, for all of Ducayne’s bluster, his growing feelings for Ruelle quickly come to form an ongoing basis for his willing cooperation with his own subjugation, and he’s clearly aroused by being sliced up, verbally abused and manhandled by Ruelle. There’s more turbo brat here than full dominant from him, and his own violence towards Ruelle rapidly starts to resemble a sort of service topping. Ruelle is incredibly erotophobic and Ducayne’s role is to largely safely confront her with her own desire in a way that she can eventually accept. Inversely Ducayne shifts from being horny-for-his-enemy to deciding that she’s almost as much a prisoner as him and assuming a role of rescuer.

Also expect interludes with all the background characters, who are of every possible orientation. There will even be a sort of light love triangle with potential for a thruple explored, but this book isn’t aiming to be menage, just keeping most of the focus on kinky sex, more kinky sex and rather intense violence.

To its credit, when we get to the ending, while all romances must have a happily ever after (HEA), we also don’t get the sense this pair will transform to vanilla. They will probably remain stabby and primal, but ultimately the hero decides to accept something that keeps him subjugated to the heroine.

TL;DR

Domme-to-switch non-con with a brat and a very violent, gory plot. A lot of stabbing and slicing from the heroine. I found it perfectly readable, but the emphasis on the heroine’s masochism still needs flagging.

Femdom Review: Dancing Backward- An Adventure in Male Submission

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Dancing backwardDancing Backward: An Adventure in Male Submission by Thomas Lavalle

Nope, didn’t like it. Dancing Backward was a pretty good example of how not to make me happy, and really a good percent of what is wrong with femdom porn if you are trying to appeal to female readers. Or male ones who don’t get something out of self hate.

Some of this was simply it not being my way of expressing my F/m kink, but it had a lot of oopsies and pitfalls typical of the genre- as much as I hate to pillory the creative output of other people, this is precisely the sort of book that makes it hard for women think they would enjoy being a dom, and indeed represents male submission as something pathetic. On the other hand it’s one of Amazon’s more popular femdom novels, so if my review is scathing, I’m sure the author will dry his tears with a handful of the royalties he’s earned.

To briefly summarize the plot: This is a story about a control freak who marries a passive sponge, and then when he proves to be a passive sponge, turns him into a punching bag.

The most glaring problem was that I never got any sense of why the couple liked each other. An interesting premise, essentially of a gender inversion 1950s marriage, turned into odd abusive weirdness sans any sort of context- our hero Christopher is essentially an ambulatory submissive erection, while his wife, Kelly, didn’t really have any characteristics other than hawt n’ dominant- her G cup breasts had as much personality as she did, while she groped about the femdom cliches with inexplicable motive, coming across as less kinky and more that the universe had dictated this was how things worked because the author said so. Really, you know you’re going to have a bad time when the description blurb calls the femdom “spoiled” and “bossy”. About the only moment she seemed human is the vague mention she had decorative ballerina figurines- otherwise I got the impression that literally any idiot who met her minimum threshold of attractive and she could push around would do as she was just a culmination of everything the audience is supposed to find attractive crammed into one barbie doll shaped carapace. She had no beginning and no end, just ambition and a sense of self importance that came from no place other than narrative dictate. Hell, when the novel opens she doesn’t actually appear to have any close friends.

The writing honestly, is good at least as sketching out the male protagonist as a believable person (albeit a realistic waste of space or a victim, depending on your reading), but as a female dominant I found Kelly repulsive- angry and condescending, with a side order of female superiority wankery and nothing to back it up other than that she makes gobs of money. The side character, Carmen the Cuban, was actively offensive, a fetishists idea of what a Hispanic is, making sure you knew Ai AM EL SPANISH! every other sentence, in a way that made her feel like Dora the Explorer’s sociopathic cousin. None of the female doms made me want to be them or even in the same room as them. If a guy handed me this book and asked “can we do this please?” I’d probably run away.

And then there’s the whole subject of the weird abusive stuff, which was encoded into the universe such that the audience was supposed to see the aggressive mistreatment of males as not grounds to call the police, but just vaguely titillating. I’ll take the time to say this now: Mr. Lavalle, nobody this side of the ’90s says “you go girl!” unironically, and certainly not regarding CBT or how the only true way to deal with life is to dom the lesser menz. The only people who are still using that tired little phrase is the sort of persecution complex MRA who never actually interact with actual women and write eight page screeds on why women are out to get them.

As a writer of non-con who gets off on rape as a concept, you think I’d be all on board with the setting’s darker side- after all, I am quite the sadist. However, the rapey nonsense is all over the fucking place, and not even particularly empowering or just a sadistic fantasy for women- for example just incidentally in the background, Kelly worries about the impact on her career of turning down some random wealthy dude. This was forshadowed as her cuckolding partner in the next book, without examination of how creepy it is that now the guy is aggressively sending her mash notes bout how their hookup is inevitable. Of course, like any porn dom, rather than, you know, getting off on male submission, she’s written to actually want a Real Man TM, like Stalky Pants McSouthAfrican and this forceful attitude is not time to speak to HR, but a rare moment she seemed to respect a male.  Do. Not. Want.

Meanwhile Kelly, herself, also comes across as way less domly and more abusive. She isolates her husband, banning him from friends and hobbies. Even before they bring in the whips and chains side of things and she’s waffling about with a pure power exchange relationship, she mentions offhand that she rarely had to slap her husband as a sign of his goodness. This is supposed to be a normal relationship up until that point. Heterosexual dudes in relationships reading this, if your female partner slaps you and it is not part of a consenting dynamic or to get your attention while you sleep walk off off a cliff, that shit is not okay.

And then when she decides that they are going F/m full bore femdom, of course she doesn’t ask because in this universe male subs are just defective men who will go along with any nonesense as long as the woman forces them too. Half the time she’s mumbling about female superiority, the other half the time she’s debating who will actually fuck her now since a sub guy won’t do. Our hero devotes a extensive amount of whining and carrying on about how he’s sooooo emasculated, and yet as much as they started out exploring an inverted 1950s dynamic, much is said about how useless he is as a housekeeper, etc, etc…

Which is back to my point, Kelly talks about how her Christopher is ‘sweet’, but all he does is either fail to keep house (so she can punish him) or whine about how terrrrrrrible this new thing is, never showing an ounce of romantic initiative, agency or creativity. We learn that when he met Kelly in college, he dropped out of his graphic designer program a few credits shy of graduation to be her full time house husband, and never expressed himself creatively again. He does not turn around and flourish in the home. Instead, he becomes this useless lump who actually hates housework and does it for fear of punishment. He does not act remotely emotionally fulfilled by a life of service, but neither is he good enough at it to make me feel like Kelly’s getting a good deal- instead she spends much of the book pissed off that her partner is dull and clingy as wallpaper paste. Her solution, to transition from domestic D/s, to full sadomasochistic BDSM, feels like more effort than just hiring a damn maid and throwing him out on his ear.

If you are a sub guy into being treated badly (at least in fantasy) with stabs at SPH, domestic service, feeling emasculated by obedience, and the idea that nursing at big boobs are hot, you will have yourself at least one fantastic wank reading this. If, I suppose your SO lets you. Although if you have an SO, you’ll know this is pure fantasy, and one hopes your relationship is a lot more nuanced and healthy than the nonesense written in here.

If you are a dominant woman, you will come away feeling vaguely insulted and disappointed that once again, your kinks are simply not considered to matter when you can be used as a fantasy object.

Category: Erotic romance
Rating: o (1/5)
How I got it: Bought it!
TL;DR: Rising star executive Kelly turns househusband Christopher into her slave. An unsatisfying turn off, with unpleasant main characters.