This weekend, I looked into the website “Femdomme Society” to find out just precisely was their operating motives. According to their marketing copy, they offer themselves as a femdom community for doms and subs seeking to build a better world. In practice they are a “ladies get in free” style dating site that tries to get you to run cam shows while charging male members a monthly fee.
But, as part of their mission they offer a “University”, as a BDSM101. Sounds great, right? Just to make their audience feel extra special, there’s a doms only section of supposed secrets for helping them discover their feet. And as talked about here and here already, it’s bullshit, and harmful bullshit at that. But, since you stuck with me so far… onwards!
We wander into a list of suggested punishments and reminders that it is your responsibility to set up elaborate, enforced rules for the sub, and a blatant grab to get you to buy one of their supposedly highly effective “purge boxes”. As usual the distinction between punishment and funishment is left ambiguous, with the idea that doms always have a duty to punish.
Of course a website like that wouldn’t be complete without pushing feminization and chastity play down everyone’s throats. Neither of these are bad, but one of the problems with contemporary femdom’s image is that these fetishes are treated like must haves or everyone.
With the latter, as usual, wrapped in reassurances that the cunnilingus will be worth it, and the former making no effort to deal with the fact that we just read several pages emphasizing how being more feminine would get to the heart of male submissive desires- so there’s an inherent disconnect that me wearing panties makes me powerful and him wearing panties makes him powerless. There’s a brief stop on watersports and other things like that, with the inaccurate statement that urine is “sterile”, which is a gross exaggeration that pee is less likely to make you sick than our taboos about bodily waste.
But, Femdomme society is also ready to speculate about why the femdom stereotype shtick is important:
Remember Men create the majority of FemDom stories, pictures and images to express how powerful Women are in their eyes and how weak they feel in a Woman’s presence. These images represent what men are really feeling inside. The poet and the song writer use words and the artist uses visual images to express their inner feelings. So when a Woman displays that “image” by donning a fetish outfit, or saying a term, or using Her voice in a certain manner, She touches the male submissive nature and triggers his feelings and desires, thus he becomes weak and helpless. Then the Woman can interact with the man with all barriers and defense mechanisms down. Now She is free to interact with the man in a more meaningful way. Now true intimacy and bonding can take place between the Woman and the man because She now can see Herself as he does.
See, the problem here is that we’re back to man-pleasing in the name of dominance. Now I don’t doubt it’s nice to make each other happy, but this just isn’t something that gets inflicted on maledoms. Which is why no matter how many corsets you lace yourself into, you’re not going to bring about a world revolution by making people desire your body, and you will be doing it at expense of your own sexuality, supplanting it with the desire-to-be-desired.
We’ve reached the end of the “Uniersity” so now they take the time to speak directly as website owners. Someone in the comments already compared this to Scientology, but the comparison to a cult really stands out when they explain the website rankings. Just joining gets you to “dame”. Finish reading their bogus educational pages and you can call yourself…”Madame”. If you agree to an interview with them to go on their website, you get promoted to “Baroness”. The title are of course meaningless, but create an artificial ranking system that of course goes back to making you sound like you wandered out of an exploitation flick.
But I suppose you were wondering where all this was going… The grand finale:
Once you achieve the rank of Baroness you will qualify for our affiliate program. What is it? It is a way for you to share in the profits of the Society. How does it work? First all Women on the site have a free membership, providing them full access, but men do not, they must upgrade to either a monthly membership of $28 or to a life time member of a single payment of $125 to gain full access, otherwise they have limited access as a silver member. Please keep in mind the cost of operating the Society, retreat and website is hefty. But we operate on a profit sharing basis, because the purpose of the Society is not to generate revenue, but rather to ensure that anyone who wishes to explore this life style has a safe place to do it. OK back to profit sharing. Once you are a Baroness you will qualify for our Affiliate Program, by setting up your affiliate application you will get your own admin section that allows you to keep track of any submissive that upgrade and enter your ID number as their sponsoring Domme. You will earn $14.95 for each monthly member! Every month that he continues with his membership, so it is always good to follow up with them and keep them active. To put this in perspective, if you have 50 guys who have upgraded to a Gold , monthly membership and they entered your ID number when first upgraded then you will earn. $747 each month. If a submissive upgrades to a Platinum, life time membership, you will get a one time payment of $50. The best way to have the website work for you, is to visit your myaccount section. On the right hand side you will see banners, These banner are specifically coded to your profile. Copy and paste the code in the white box, and place it on other websites, facebook, myspace or your blog and that banner will appear there. Anytime someone clicks on the banner, we track them, and if they upgrade to paying they earn you money.
Look, I have nothing against needing money, but this is practically next door to a pyramid scheme. It’s essentially telling you that you should be actively recruiting men and encouraging them to spend money… for what? To build a female led world based on being conventionally feminine to trick men into dressing in a conventionally feminine fashion?
Instead we have a scheme that encourages female members to recruit male members for money, offering and unhealthy, male pleasing idea of femdom to line the pockets of the “Baronesses”, or more to the point, the website owners.