In composing lists of books with femdom in them that might appeal to women, the Black Jewels series used to be a regular recommendation on people’s top 10s, but perhaps because it’s on the older side I haven’t had it pop up recently. Nevertheless it’s been on my to-be-read list for years, even well before I started exploring my kink identity in any meaningful way. I even have distinct memories of stumbling into it in a book store as a teen and considering getting it. And there’s definitely femdom. I am told by Silver that it even used to be one of the things people would roleplay on chat rooms during his teenage years, alongside other staples like the Witches of Dathomir.
Unfortunately matriarchal witch queens with magic cock rings of control that they inflict on pretty male sex slaves cannot save something that reads like if you combined the aesthetic approach to the gothic of “My Immortal” with that scene in Dragonball Z where a character shrieks “over 9000!!!” to indicate just how much stronger a character someone is than any of the already overblown cast.
Otherwise it is very much of its era, a loosely gnostic fantasy world where hell is a revered place of power and the two male leads are named Saetan, and Daemon. The writer is very smug about that and even has one of the characters remark what a nice name one of them has incase we didn’t get the reference that he’s king of hell. Women theoretically rule by right of gemstones that mark their rank and can control similarly distinguished males up to two levels more powerful than them, but the story is inordinately preoccupied with virginity and the damage one’s first time going wrong could be to ones magic. If one is a woman, that is. For the men their magic is so phallically over the top that not only is the act of sex occasionally violently described as “spearing” but so are the channels by which they communicate telepathically with each other, even if they can also access the more feminine “webs”.
Of course I think to criticize the work written in the late 90s just for sounding like the apex of fluffy gothic paganry is unfair. There are many works that, in hindsight, are intensely of their era that still hold up. The Lost Boys and the first Matrix movie these days are unmistakably 80s and late 90s to no detriment. The parts here that do not age well are not necessarily just backwards sex politics, or the fact that it’s a bit of a fawning hagiography of a Mary Sue in heavy eyeliner. And, to its credit, it’s excessive obsession with trying to sell you on the intensity of its magic system calms down but the midpoint.
It’s just hard to get past all the paedophilia.
Daughter of the Blood is about the early years of a Chosen One (Jaenelle), destined to have the world and all the men in it fall at her feet, should she come into her true power. As a framing device we never get her perspective directly, just everyone reacting to the immense gravitational pull of a seven-to-twelve year old little girl and what their role in her life is going to be. Unfortunately, with a magic system so built on female virginity, the result involves everyone fretting that someone is going to fuck the magic child and stop this from happening. Or in the case of Daemon, deal with the fact that he can’t fuck the magic child until her late teens as a sort of fated mate. At the same time the characters are faced off against a cabal of evil paedophile men, so cartoonish in their exploits they wander from being part of the banality of evil to being part of the larger decorative lurid backdrop of eroticized cruelty. At the same time even one of the heroes, for all he talks about the idea of doing it with a child as disgusting, spends the second half of the book wrestling with her allure and their mutual chemistry. All while the character of focus is no more than twelve and the narrative also makes sure to remind us how small, delicate, innocent and childish she is. And with the vast majority of male characters agreeing that forbidden or not, nothing is more plausibly hot than the many, many underage victims. That, alone, makes it an uncomfortable read and most people will nope out on that aspect alone.
But what about the femdom? I love a good decadent world where everyone is preoccupied with hedonism and intrigues. And in theory there’s lots of frankly exciting ideas, men being held in thrall to please. Reluctance of outright defiance being broken. Mixed enjoyment, humiliation and rage to being stripped and whipped. For the late 90s it even had an unusually positive approach to the idea of male beauty and men as the object or even the victim of desire. And yet, in practice all female sadism is not only narratively condemned, but almost immediately corrected with bloody mutilations and horrible deaths. You can enjoy the non-con titillation bits, but the rape-to-revenge part is going to be pretty immediate for the male main characters.
And to get even these you are going to have sit through a lot of graphically bad things happen to bystander men in the line of castration, and to all the female characters, who are awarded much less ability to fight back. The cabal of paedophiles I mentioned is a larger symptom of a world that while technically female dominated, gives powerful men enough leeway that the average woman must fear men. Of the female rape victims, revenge is a lengthy process with a lot of victim side casualties, and the two perspective female characters, Tersa and Surreal, needing significant help to achieve anything approaching justice.
Of course the book tells us that a good enough witch will get the willing and eager submission of powerful men lesser women cannot truly force. But then on page it makes it pretty clear that what that means is going to be fluffy pillows and experienced and manly lover being experienced and manly. There’s a really cringe scene near the end where Jaenelle expresses misgivings about how living eventually means more of the bad sexual experiences she has had with men and she’s coaxed to give life another chance with the promise that she might actually enjoy it in future via showing her a literal silk sheets and cushion strewn bed. So there’s a power fantasy of women ruling here, sure, but between the gender essentialism and the undermining of anything that’s not being joyfully girlish or earnestly sweet, the femdom parts really suffer for it. It’s the very depressing idea women are potentially morally better than men, but ultimately also responsible for misogyny in the world through catty infighting .
Thus as a book, the only merit here you are going to find is a nostalgia read, a pretty good snapshot of what was cool with the spooky and alt people when I was young. But if you are under the age of 30 I somehow doubt you will be able to extract even that much value. It’s stuffed full of moments that might inspire you to run off and write your own version, but while we are starved for femdom books, I think this one can be left behind where it came from.
Where to Buy:
Author Website: Anne Bishop
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