femdom romance review

When Sloane comes to stay in a small Irish village to care for her ailing grandfather, she attracts the attention of not one but two men. Liam, a local cab driver, and Darragh, a fairy king. These men may differ strongly in background, but they are united in one thing, the desperate desire to submit and serve her. The possibilities seem endless, but Sloane has to worry… can a girl maybe be a bit too lucky? (Spoilers: No, no she can’t)

I freely admit pulled this one out of the archive of my to be read pile based entirely on its thematic relevance to the month more so than anything else. And, I went into this with very low expectations as a result. St. Patrick’s Day, history of sectarian violence not withstanding, isn’t really much of a holiday. There’s green beer, green cake, and maybe some muddled imagery confusing four leaf clovers and shamrocks, alongside pots of gold and rainbows. The book has all hints of being at about the same depths. 

Nevertheless, Green And Gold  takes itself more seriously than a book about a three way femdom relationship with a Leprechaun might, and this makes it readable. It doesn’t rush the sex, and avoids describing people in terms of breasting boobily, or confining all activity to the bedroom. It’s cheesy, but the conceits like using the stoplight safeword system “green” regularly during play were more dad joke head shake worthy than tiresome. 

That being said, while it gives us some time to warm up to the protagonist, it never forgets this is a work of fetish porn. Most of the text is just a vicarious ride along of two consenting, but ultimately mundane BDSM relationships separately getting off the ground and eventually coming to mingle. Negotiations are made. Ideas are proposed. Kinky acts are done and go well. People orgasm. People are very grateful to each other. There’s a lot of mutual gratitude amidst the gratification, and a lot of declarations of affection, attraction and attachment. 

Otherwise, the protagonist, Sloane gets what she wants with minimal trouble. When challenges occur, they are always within her capacity to overcome them. The pattern follows that the heroine will identify a problem, worry a little and then the entire universe conspires with her to fix it. This might be more off-putting if it wasn’t part of the book’s larger premises, enjoying things being unfair in your favour. 

Findom, ironically, is one of the most taboo fetishes for all it enjoys a current state of popularity. There’s something about women openly and avariciously wanting things that attracts a particular social ire. This is the second romance novel I have read on the subject (review still pending), and while Preferential Treatment was about the complicated relationship poverty gives you to money, this is pages and pages of hungry receiving intermixed with more traditional femdom activities. This one doesn’t want to tug your heart strings or play on your guilt over wanting things. Green and Gold just wants your mouth to water as you imagine getting anything you could possibly buy with a credit card, while the most handsome man in the world is so happy for you he has an erection. 

Likewise, the all too convenient manifestation of unicorn poly can similarly be understood through that lens. Wanting partners who are open to sharing, but conveniently only into you is also a taboo desire. Worried boyfriend #2 will be hurt that you didn’t tell him about your financial arrangement with your boss? Nope, he is just happy for you and thinks your boss is hot too.  Worried the faerie king with infinite resources will want another lover alongside you if you have an open relationship? Nope, he cheerfully admits he doesn’t really have any other options anyway, so everything comes up you shaped. 

Of course there’s a trade off that by having few problems there’s not a lot of substance where the men are involved. One has a stressful job, the other one has… his sister’s cat to look after? But, once more the reader is being freed from a hint of tension. Two perfect boyfriends with almost no baggage! If you don’t have cat allergies and don’t mind the occasional mystical jet lagged lover needing to be put to bed, the fantasy remains that the world shall revolve around you. Even your mildest problems are merely opportunities to win and be praised, or anxiety you can release after receiving unconditional reassurance.

And in a reality where women can’t even masturbate without some bright bulb writing earnest essays that our sexual fantasies aren’t morally affirming enough, there’s something particularly transgressive about that naked display of unpunished greed. I personally tend to prefer a sharper edge to my fiction, but sometimes you want something that’s the literary equivalent of eating a jar of cake frosting. 

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Where to buy: Author site

Despite being published, hardcover and bought by me at Beguilded Books, The Sea Witch is a shameless #AUMafia #Fairytale #OlympicGods F/mf fanfic, with no pretense its leads, Zurielle, Ursa and Alaric, aren’t cribbed directly from the Disney version of themselves. It’s here to deliver up a bunch of group sex scenes and intermittent impact play, with a bonus side of virginity auction and secret kinky crime families. Nevertheless, I maintain the belief that there’s no premise too silly or formulaic that it cannot be saved by good writing. I like F/fm. My own personal tastes and expression of my asexuality end up coming out in practice as a sort of bisexuality, and sapphic, menage or not, is one of the places it is much easier to find femdom.

Unfortunately this one was a slog, leaving me skimming the sex scenes and taking not even smug schadenfreude flavoured so-bad-its-good pleasure as it shoehorns in the worst parts of Mafia romance, fairytale retellings and secret BDSM society stories. Worse than being particularly offensive, it was boring.

Of course I have no pity for Disney being borrowed from. That corporation has injected itself in virtually anything public domain shaped, and premises like Once Upon a Time and the Kingdom Hearts game series establish world building where all the bits and pieces of their version of things interact is open to reimagining. The fact that in a better world our folklore wouldn’t all be filtered through the Mouse can be balanced that stealing is important for reimagining them back into collective ownership. But, here the parts that were clearly Disney shaped were invasive as hell, a sort of smug mugging moment where almost every background character was reminding you who they were by their barely changed names. Except when they weren’t changed at all, the logic of who did or didn’t get altered itself a bit hard to follow.

Greek myth was universally under their original names. Hades, Megara and Hercules are in another triad (though Hades having any opinion at all on Hercules being an another artifact of Disney). Aurora, we are informed, has hair shifting between pink and blue (Disney again), but she has a thing with the crime boss Malone. For some reason Jamine and Jafar get to keep their original names (even though they don’t get names in the original Aladdin), and are of course an item and also doing crime boss things, but we also needed to know about Gaeton, Beast and Isabelle off doing a sex show in a way that was really more like blatant ads for another book. That’s what most of the fac fic parts read like, characters doing cameos in the most ham handed sort of way. You know when an actor gets too successful in a particular role and you can’t help that intruding into their later parts? That’s what’s happening here. 

But sure, whatever, Robert needs to get paid and endless overlapping series are the order of the day. As I said, maybe this book might have been rescued on the strength of its kink or the strength of its plot. Ideally both.

Kept in perfect isolated innocence by her crime boss father, honeypot Alaric has lured her from shining Olympus to the dangerous Carver City, under the pretext that he’s trapped in debt bondage to Hades. To raise the money to free him she immediately goes to her father’s enemy, Ursa, for a solution to raise the money. That solution is to auction her virginity. The result is that she somehow ends up in Ursa’s penthouse alternately sulking and orgasming. As it turns out this is a set up. Alaric and Ursa are an item, and this is really just part of Ursa’s revenge scheme against Zurielle’s father.

As far as the femdom elements, most of this is focused on Zurielle having a four day sexual awakening as a sub. The b-plot is the titular Sea Witch using this foray into unicorn poly to bridge a trust gap between herself and her more longer term sub partner, Alaric, but ultimately this is also about her coming to decide that Zurielle is indispensable as well. Ursa dominates everyone, Alaric alternates between light dominance of Zurielle and being treated as a sex toy Ursa uses on Zurielle. I should be able to enjoy this, and there are moments of Alaric’s submission to Ursa, both directly to her or when he is being wielded on Zurielle where I thought this had promise.

I think where things went wrong is an inconsistent handling of the darker parts of the story. It’s one of the most obnoxious habits of BDSM romances, when it comes to consent versus conflict, to try to have their cake and eat it too. Plots must set up a scenario where the characters are in peril, use the symbolism of BDSM to further add a sense of danger, and then every three pages have the characters confirm they are consenting even when nothing about the setup wants that to be implied. The result is much like the habit of barely legal porn to have the lead shriek, every so often “I am only 18!” This is largely for the benefit of the censors. 

I like non-con. I think these are fictional characters, and eternally link back to that tumblr essay about diagetic versus non-diagetic BDSM. But I do not live in a world that’s friendly to this sort of approach. 

Historically, you cannot openly sell non-con BDSM as non-con BDSM. At best it needs to be erotic horror or erotic thrillers, providing a Hays Code style figleaf like True Crime does that lets you wallow in darkness as long as the text provides not one whiff of a happy ending. Or, in romance it needs to be passed off with a sort of surreptitious don’t ask don’t tell where you absolutely refuse to acknowledge anyone is getting raped or this is being done for audience titillation. Flagging it as BDSM is a no-no, because you can rip a bodice, tie up a character, or kidnap them, but heaven forfend anyone admit they get off about that part. You can’t even just tag it with the nonos and assume the reader will understand fiction, because even that level of admission can be enough to get you in trouble. You at best have to host trigger warnings on an author site.

As a result, everything that gets sold is done so under the Eye of Sauron level terror of either the credit card processors or some country’s only vaguely dormant obscenity laws will lash out and not only drag that work into the bowels of hell, but the author, publisher, retailer and the other authors too. Along with their bank accounts. 

The result is that Zurielle needs to remind us she’s participating with the ability to say no. Scenes open with the ritual repeat of safewords. Worldbuilding is used to show how safety mechanisms have been put in place. Everything should be fine, since after all everyone’s an adult and had been interviewed and their ability to change their mind discussed.

…Except everyone involved in the facilitation of Zurielle’s adventures is a murderous crime boss, or related to one. Ursa’s called The Sea Witch because she drowns people. Hades, who sets up an elaborate escrow system that is supposed to preserve Zurielle’s ability to opt out, is also holding Alaric in plausible enough debt bondage he can’t simply leave his job as a pro-sub. When someone actually spirits a clearly consenting Zurielle away from the people who bought her, that person is understood to face a dire (if horny) punishment. The stakes of everyone’s hijinks are a risk of at least nameless side characters dying in gang war.

Efforts to make a distinction about the Real Bad Guys falls flat too. By book end, everyone agrees that Carver City is not as bad as Olympus because *they* don’t do human trafficking. In the middle of their human trafficking operation. Thus Zurielle’s father’s business is enough to be considered a bridge too far for Zurielle, but at the same time Ursa’s vengeance is being sought because she was edged out of that business. A bit of fussing is done by Zurielle about still being okay with all these crimes, but her conclusion is that her actual moral qualms can be satisfied by knowing that Ursa says she’s not that bad.

This is somewhat of a tragedy because rather than talking about consent in any sort of nuanced way you get this sort of outcome. It’s consent theatre, rather than good consent practice, but it is being passed off as the real thing enough to pass the censorship of bodies who neither understand nor care about actual consent. Of course combating that’s a lot to expect from an unassuming Disney menage BDSM romance. If you are looking just for that aforementioned femdom threeway where she bosses a male and female sub to fuck at her direction or you really, really needed an Ursula/Eric tentacle dildo pegging scenario you will get what you are looking for. For anything more than that, the best I can say is that this book getting not 1 but 2 updated, increasingly professional covers and a fancy hardcover at least means people are buying enough femdom for the author to think it’s worth it.

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Where to Buy: Author’s Website