kink theory

A Reminder the Theory of a “Femdom Ratio” Is Still Garbage

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The “Femdom Ratio” Is Still A Garbage Discussion

Not all sub men. Not all single, lonely sub men. But sure as the seasons shift through the front end of summer into the sultry, soup-warm of August, some chucklefuck is back at it in an online kink space whining we don’t give the Ratio of Dommes to Subs enough attention because it has specifically ruined his life. There are not enough dommes to go around. Someone has failed to bring enough for the class. Lamentations ensue.

Of course, I am aware of giving some dude on the internet too much credit. Rebutting can also be a sort of endorsement, and platforming the lunatic fringe even to mock them can be a form of amplification. But inversely, the fact that I remember even if the last couple of years the discourse has shifted and I can trust folks to push back on this line of thinking, and we got that way by questioning the resulting assumptions, so I am using a random post on a forum to remind you that Femdom Ratio is incel logic for sub men and bad for men, women and everyone else.

Ratio theory, about the distribution of dommes always goes awful places really fast.

For example, this particular guy’s spin on “The Ratio” is that femdom is inherently abusive because male subs cannot meaningfully consent when having boundaries could get them eliminated from Having A Domme. Any domme. According to him, a sub must concede to whatever,  or it’s a lifetime of loneliness, because no matter how atrocious a given woman is, a man needs a woman who will play out an approximation of his kinks. Were there one domme for every sub man who wants one, he reasons, his desire for one would not be at odds with what is available to him he would not consent to stuff he thought was terrible and bad for him just to try it.

If you are a long term blog reader you can already smell the self harming sexism from here. But, I reiterate:

The “Ratio” is bullshit because men (and it always seems to be straight men, queer discourse on top shortage tends to listen to the switches and blame the objectification of tops for pushing them to hide) who fixate on it don’t see women as people, but a means to provide a service they desperately want. They define a domme as any woman who will, for whatever reason, tolerate being fetishized and doing what they crave to them. They do not define dominance on our terms (as dommes), or imagine that we exist for any reason other than to be matched with a man. If they can find women who do that, the complaint escalates to either that said dominant women are not hot enough and this isn’t fair because if they weren’t kinky they could get a hot chick, and not pander to us stuck up hags. Or they get mad sexwork exists. Just exists, as if that alone were a crime against them they were forced to engage with.

It’s never about anything other than his belief he is entitled to a partner on his terms alone.

After 10+ years of terminally online discussion, when someone drags in “Ratio” as an argument, it isn’t going to be a nuanced take on the double barreled stigmatization of male weakness and female sexual exploration, it’s going to be hot torrents of incel garbage. No ratio-cel comes into this talking about what a pity it is that women don’t get to know such pleasure as domination because of broader social forces, they fixate on that they are lonely. Then they imagine that somehow they are a surplus, but that women are easily paired up with whatever it is they imagine they want, often also bringing gender reductive bullshit about how we just aren’t wired to be dominant, boohoo isn’t that hard on subs. 

If a Ratio was real in the sense these men imagine, since the genders seem to be approximate parity, this would mean a percentage of women were also mismatched. However, since Ratio Theory is built on sexism, these women aren’t discussed or imagined to suffer to an equal degree. If it were true that women were either more inherently submissive (or vanilla) there would be a similar ratio of unmatched women condemned to similar singleness and thus equally pitiable. Ratio-cels have no such solidarity. 

And, adding insult to injury, ratio-cels also imagine the torrent of sexual harassment women deal with is “plenty of subs will do anything to have you”, a tone deaf piece of sexism on par to if we told subs there was always the Kik scammers ready to blackmail them, so really they were rolling in opportunity. Likewise, there’s a nuanced discussion on how the male gaze pandering in being able to buy services and content isn’t always a blessing because the market still makes blanket assumptions about men that can feel very pigeonholing, but no… to a ratio-cel the biggest problem is they want the porn-but-make-it-free.

Further, as others have pointed out repeatedly, other populations deal with ostensible ratios, like the limited percentage of folks who are sapphic versus straight, and don’t turn this into a neo-Marxist argument about how women secretly own the means of male sub orgasm production. The Ratio (TM) as its proponents describe it is where they decide any woman who will embody their fetish has disproportionate power over them because… Reasons. Where the reasons are always that they are desperately trying to reap the usual incel style idea that you will get one Devoted Wife for showing up while meeting the minimum threshold, and that something has broken in society failing to give that to you. 

The problem doesn’t stop there.

If it weren’t enough that they were just ambiently sexist, ratio-cels *also* end up pushing dommes out of any community they lodge in, since the desperate demand for a lady to metaphorically hump the leg of kills any other conversation – which actively increases the very problem they are complaining about. Dommes won’t stay in large numbers in communities where the primary focus is our ability to be found and made to gratify subs. The wall of misery posting also sets the tone for any sub joining, because their introduction to how things work becomes a wall of “Where is MOMMY??”  Anxiety about potential rejection gets stoked in a sort of socal rummunition, where any problem that might exist gets reframed as the desperate need to have a domme now.

Ironically, you get where we started, dudes being taught by other dudes to unicorn chase, to lower their standards even as they inflate what they expect a domme to be capable of adding to their life. Conversations about reciprocity or “sub skill” or sub-on-sub mentorship are deprioritized over the conflation of what is fetishized with the whole people doing it. Everyone, the subs, the dommes and the community they might interact in, becomes poorer for it.

But any discussion about this behaviour gets derailed by trying to be sympathetic to single dudes because they are suffering. Unfortunately, as per vanilla incels cloaking themselves in how vulnerable they feel to be lonely, that’s how they get a wedge that makes them seem less toxic.  In our desire to be supportive, we forget the fact that people who behave like misogynists don’t get a pass for having pain. The same goes that you have to be ruthless and at the wiff of anything arguing that “dommes have unfair power because they are rare” or men claiming their lives are ruined because they can’t get a domme-wife have to be excised immediately because the conversation gets so poisoned by bad faith possessive/controlling nonsense around dommes as panaceas and public resources that anything useful gets lost in the harm done.

Lifestyle Only Femdom Blues

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I wish I could say I am a dominant without people assuming I am a pro (or a man), but I would also like that not to be at the expense of anyone else. To be a lifestyle only domme is, for the most part, invisibility, but the conversation on the problem is poisoned by whorephobia.

In this regards, even my writing on the topic, over the last 10 years, hasn’t always been ok. Acknowledging this issue, nonetheless: for our culture at large, the general handling of my desires is to treat it like something that will make others happy or at the very least, to focus on how it will make me feel as far as how others react to me. Dominance, in women and femmes, is not allowed to just *be*.

Even in lifestyle only land, our forums are dogged by the single minded demand: where are the dommes and how do we get them? To these men, I am not a thing that might want him, to be bargained with as an equal or a suitor, I am more akin to the rib they hope to rip from themselves into the form of a helpmeet. My existence and authenticity is defined by my ability to complete someone else. 

Yes, the roots of this is heterofatalist nonsense, the same pressures demanding compulsory monogamy of vanillas. And yet, notably, my status as a thing that is presumed to meet desires doesn’t have the Domme version of warning me I’ll be a crazy cat lady spinster if I don’t settle. Likewise, no boyfriend, husband or fiancé will deter them the way that vanilla and Dom men alike imagine I could be claimed. A Domme, in her being wanted, is presumed to be there to satisfy. Hell, a Domme, existing, is presumed to be what is wanted. I’m not! I swear, I’m terrible.

This also is belayed in how Dommes are taught, formally and informally, to be.

Through workshop and book alike, femdom is packaged as a vocation or a toolkit that will empower you, not through discovery of your own pleasure, but the same old bad girl wins at hustle culture fantasy. Education is almost always gendered. Male dominants, for all their limited wardrobes, are treated as stepping into an aspect of masculinity, but for me, there’s a template and faking it until I make it.

It’s not all bad- the new topping and bottoming book are a bastion of gender neutrality and deserve their place in the canon. And yet, step out of the very performed-identity focused domme specific classes and into the BDSM scene at large, and prepare for just about everything to be built to assume you are a man topping women. And, get ready to deal with a steady train of people sure you are a less than, and if you dominate men that you are a threat and they are repulsive.

I decided, in the end, weird rapey ropetop dudes and femdom’s closer embrace to queerness and it’s transgression were enough to make me pick a side… But, as a Domme, I am (largely) not interested in being skilled, or having presence. I want a “persona” like I want another hole in my head. I don’t think nobody should want these things, but none of this is to the benefit of my orgasms and dorky power fantasies. Even as a least bad culture fit, the real me is very much an afterthought in femdom.

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to have a sub and know my way enough around what I am doing to do so safely. And I am lucky that there’s plenty of humans extant to which a domme can complement rather than complete. Likewise, I don’t have a strong opinion on “pyjamas vs corsets”, I like both of them, but I like them from a position of being certified trash who doesn’t want to be compelled to wear either. I am writing this in an ugly beige t-shirt dress that I threw on because my stamina fell out the moment my work day ended. This isn’t a mark of my authenticity, it means I have given up on life for the next 3 to 6 hours. 

Someone might find that hot, but I don’t care and I don’t want to care.

That part is the problem. It’s where the gaze is turned, all the damn time, unrelenting. On me, never from me. And yet, despite having the worst temperament, flabbergastingly people keep kindly trying to nudge me to hang out a shingle. Some extremely well meaning people in the field have even encouraged me as if I lacked confidence. Me, the don’t wanna be touched, don’t wanna be vulnerable train wreck, was told I could definitely make it work, because my dominance could push through pretty much anything. No, being a pro is a hard, people focused job. I am a pervert, not an entrepreneur.

I don’t want to be paid to dominate, I want to be pandered to by creative professionals who want to take my money to sell me my fantasies, usually via prose and illustration. Just like the femsubs and dudes of any orientation. They enjoy an ocean of porn. Seriously, in the case of the femsubs, they are so omnipresent that in any given romance novel the odds some lady’s do me sub fantasies are getting tickled is about 50/50.

Instead, I am told for money purposes I don’t exist. I am as elusive a market to care about, as I am to the dudes who seek me to complete them. And boy howdy is that an incredibly alienating place to be.

The No-Needs True Sub Is A Nonsense Concept

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If you spend any length of time in the femdom side of the internet, you are going to encounter some version of this idea:

“Femdom is about female power. If you were truly submissive, all those other things you want would be less important than whatever a dominant you submitted to wanted.”

(Paraphrased from a squintillion posts, tweets and nudges)

They mean well, unfortunately. Femdom-as-a-culture is currently over-saturated with things that cater to the fantasies of male subs more so than female doms. To be a domme is to be perennially assumed that your primary interest is performing in a way that meets the needs of subs. An additional pressure is applied that not only is your authenticity measured by how well you meet another person’s fantasy, it is idealized that you just happen to do so by being who you are. A push/pull forms around you, where you being powerful is fetishized, but that power is put on very tight rails.

For a dominant, being told you are all powerful while being confined to a rigid script can feel like a cruel joke. As such, the last 10+ years have been one long push back, against the ubiquitous uniform, against the idea you can’t do certain sex acts, against dehumanizing stereotypes that you are (only) a selfish monster or selfless mommy. Likewise, the matter of courtship became a debate on methods – with a fixation on changing (male) sub behaviour. We endlessly hashed over developing magic bullet first messages and dating profiles; on service resumes to trade labour for kink; on the entitlement of all dommes to expect some nominal payment; and how best to broach having a kink with your wife/girlfriend so she would either do it or agree to give you a hall pass. And, every step of the way, matters were made much harder because however you changed stuff around, somebody fetishized it.

Gentlefemdom and the idea of the domme in fuzzy slippers started to fight the idea that there was one rigid, dungeon bound way to kink, and looped back into absolutes and people wanking about how much hotter the domme next door was. The service resume trend led to the people into service being treated as the true femdom, and a bunch of people who thought it was a trade being bewildered now the service focused dominant wasn’t reciprocating. That’s not even opening the can of worms that is gray-area sexwork and findom! Not all changes were bad, of course, for example the discouragement of people randomly subbing at any dominant they met willy-nilly is a huge relief. However, through every new solution, once nuance vanished, so did

So Why Not Encourage Subs To Be Completely Selfless?

The problem, however, is that an effort to make the needs of sub dudes less overwhelming has come with the nuance-free version that deals with it by chucking his needs out the window. At the extreme end, back in the day when a wife said no or he feared her reaction to broaching the subject, we used to tell men in vanilla relationships to embark on “stealth submission”. This pretty quickly got called out for being dubious consent, particularly where the party being submitted to already said femdom made her wildly uncomfortable. However, I will go one step further and say that it’s a dumb idea because it doesn’t even meet the human need of the sub to be wanted for who they are. 

The current advice, that as a (male) sub you should just front load all the whims and needs of the dominant, doesn’t solve this problem, either. You end up with one of the following:

  1. The sub in question didn’t have much more than a service/obedience fetish, to the extent that if their partner decided anything from a vanilla to an M/f dynamic was what they wanted they would be gung ho. Any quick look around at people who identify as subs and dominants would show this population is a tiny minority, and to be honest even they tend to have some pretty significant caveats.
  1. The dominant just happens to luck into meeting the sub’s other needs because she wants to. But a conversation about *why* they might want to gets ignored, including that some dominants are motivated by understanding the desires of their subs and meeting them while others are not. One cookie-cutter domme template has been imposed over another, but we are still stuck with a very rigid default for everyone.
  1. The sub creates a one sided dynamic for themselves that is not sustainable. Everything carries on for a while, until the weight of not getting what they want causes things to fall apart anyway. Then nobody is happy, and the dominant can’t trust the sub to know their limits.

Ultimately, the idealization of the “no needs” sub is an effort to side step the inherent equality any kink dynamic should be built on. It’s either still fap (shoving anything an ostensible dominant could do on a pedestal while the sub gets the thrill of self abrogation) or a bargaining tool to avoid rejection. In the very best case it’s a temporary pause to try to undo the damage that being too pushy or to help a person ease into kink when they are uncomfortable with parts of it.

While I am all for not being excessively pushy, and I recognize that your average ostensibly vanilla partner may be alarmed if you front load the more uh… dark and complicated kink activities one might get up to, I suggest that inversely, the thrill of “femdom is whatever she says it is” is overwriting “femdom is whatever we make it to be”.

Who Am I to Tell People They Are Doing It Wrong?

I caveat I am speaking about general approach, not your personal relationship. There is a whole rainbow of ways people might construct a functional dynamic. If a given couple likes to make the needs of the dominant their primary focus, cool. Where it becomes a problem is when that fetish is imposed as a one size fits all solution or held up as a purer/better way to do kink. My criticism is in the assumptions it requires as general advice and the problem is when completely back burner-ing your needs is presented as a universal solution and starting place, not when it is your personal fetish.

When I say power exchange needs to come from a place of equality, I mean that. You cannot exchange power until you both have it. You can pursue your equality in an intersectional fashion, building in a foundation that is as once robust and elastic as it navigates the many aspects of our identities However, if your starting premise is “because I am a sub, all my needs are less important than the whims of the dominant” you need to add another layer before that: “My needs have the same inherent worth as those of a person who happens to be dominant”. This can still flow to “I feel fulfilled when I prioritize the needs of someone I perceive as dominant to me, more so than any other activity.” But if you start from devaluing what you want, you are over valuing the other party before you have agreed to a mutual hiearchy.

Finally, one of the reasons why I find this particular piece of advice needs countering is the fact that it keeps being imposed at dommes without acknowledging that it’s just as fetishistic as the guy with the elaborate fantasy of being transformed into a coat rack, whether I need a coat rack or not. While the intent is trying to come from a good place, the reality is a lot more like announcing you know what we need – a blank canvas, so perfectly smooth and unresistant. And yet… it remains a wild overcorrection, both unsustainable for most people, and just as dehumanizing to dominants as treating us like fetish dispensers.

Confessions of a Sadistic Femdom

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sadistic femdom sex graph

All my pain games with my partners, my denial, teasing and so forth are pursuing a very particular outcome. Because it turns me on and makes me feel deeply connected to my so called victim. It is not a script- the means and confirmation of the goal is subjective; psychologically intimate; and physically impossible to clone beyond that creative moment, together. For me, my sadism is an intersection with my empathy with their suffering, and that sense of lost of will and control I perceive from them.

My biggest challenge in partners is that I need them to be aroused by what I am doing. I cannot do pain just as a power trip, no matter the consent offered. The desire can be after, or in a complex way, but broader experience has taught me that there is a scope of sensation and framing here I need to have echoed back.

As a submissive, Silver answers with joy to being called a “slutty little masochist”. I could not have it any other way, but if I thought about anything in sincere terms of being blessed, his welcome and obvious lust at my sadistic femdom cravings would go high up on that list. Torment him and I am riding a buzz. And, hilariously, we always end with being surprised to be getting a thank you from each other after. Each thinks the acts of the other are a gift.

Hurting Silver, last night

The rubber band snaps and he gives a yelp that is closer to a sob. Silver is in latex, transparent gloves and corseted leggings. We have explored with the potential of the tens unit I got him for his birthday last year, and of rope. A Lithuanian supplied, Soviet army surplus rubber gas mask gives him an oddly cute look, the old fashioned metal circles of the goggles amplifying the size of his pretty eyes. It was a a Christmas gift for him this year and I am very pleased with it.

When I want, I can put my hand over the air flow, instant easy breath play. The shape is snouted, adding an unexpected stubby cuteness. For fun I put him on all fours and reach forward to put my finger over the air intake while I slide his cock down my throat. It’s intense for me, and I feel him brush against my teeth, playing the game, no air for you, no air for me. When he is settled in place, it’s a rare moment where he doesn’t essentially freeze up in obedient attention, his cock begins to pump in and out in my throat. Yes. Fuck me. No concern for himself and being proper, mindless thrusting into that still unfamiliar wetness with the threatening edges of the possible sharp bites I could give.

I am in black latex, cat suit, neck to toes. The sweat pools at my hip level, mingling with the wetness of my arousal. I feel squeezed but not restrained, after a struggle to get it settled just so. I under lubricate my latex, I don’t like slime on my skin. And, even if it hurts a bit I like that rubber grip tugging where it touches.

The rubber bands for his cock and balls started for my hair to help it stick out the ports of my own latex hood. That garment is now discarded, and when the tens unit got its tour, after brief session wrenching his traps, I went after his cock. The pads weren’t interested in sticking- it didn’t like his skin very much in general, but I m a clumsy improviser, the drunken boxer of kinky sex. Elastics made the pads into proper contacts for the prickles of the electricity, to tease his erection.

Only a tease, though.

It was an interesting sensation, but even on high it didn’t hurt him significantly. I needed him to suffer, this wouldn’t do! When it forced the big muscles on his back to shudder and twitch that was, at least a delight as far as the look of disquiet and pressure on his face and the aesthetic forced flexing. So, this toy was put aside for other games.

And yet in my check a single black rubber band was left on the mid length of his cock. There are the thin kind, designed to be invisible in my dark hair, not thread or cloth wrapped. It looked like it was meant to be there, with all the latex.

I played at bondage, earlier, capping the tops of his opera length gloves in a way that let me pull his arms behind his back. I put him in a web, with that grey rope, to admire the warm swell of skin. Now he’s free of ties, except for that thin black line. I go to take it off, and then playfully pull and let it snap back.

It hurts. Its sharp, even against the mid length of him. SNAP. Again and again, alternating targets and sides. I move it about, finding misery in the thin band just below the head. And of course his balls. SNAP.

Those are even worse. Some cosmic jester decided, in protection of the species that cocks were made to take a beating, dumb things that they are, for all the hold nerve rich promise of an orgasm. But, break your balls, and all bets are off. SNAP.

I can’t do serious harm with a cheap elastic. After four or five pulls it is starting to permanently stretch out, losing bite. I smile, drawn in by his whimpers. He does not like this. Like virtually everyone I have played with, Silver prefers thud over sting. Masochists are descriptive connoisseurs, communicating their feelings in a million ways. I think that’s how they know they need to seduce us, if we can’t feel what they feel secondhand, what are we dominants to do?

I fetch two more elastics and make free with him. I am being intentionally nasty, putting on the bully voice. It’s a bit meta, acknowledging the ridiculousness of all this. If a cat could speak while it made a game of the mouse, this is how I imagine it would sound. Predatory violence, not reactive, joyful not terrified.

Its already a mind fuck to grapple that he can barely stand a rubber band or two popping him in the balls. Little pinpoint, plum bruises make stars where I have snapped. And I keep asking, “oh, what’s wrong, does it hurt?”

Edge play now.

I keep asking him if he thinks he wants to stop. Every so often he needs a break and then says he can continue. His erection hasn’t left us, maybe because of the beautiful trap of his latex fetish and my clear enjoyment. If he went soft I would stop. I wonder if he knows that. I know he can take more, its abrupt and awful, but not like being burned or similar past human sensibility ways to make a point.

Overthinking the thoughtless part

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30 Days Of Kink: The Whys, The Whats and the Maybes

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Day 13: Explain as best you can what the appeal of kink/BDSM is to you?  Why are you drawn to what you’re drawn to?

It’s my sexuality, and I find myself repeating this a lot. That being said, kink-as-a-set-of-expectations provides a codified structure to try to qualify and quantify and abstract emotional concept and a bunch of loosely connected fetishes. Human sexuality is squishy and determinded by the individual- this is a way of trying to characterize it so I can talk about what gets me off with other people.

As for the whys- if I knew I’d be an award winning, possibly noble prize worthy discoveries for achievements in psychology and human motivation studies. There’s lots of theories, some of them absurd (my favourite stupid idea being that spanking is just some sort of pre-species throw back for red behinds). I still go with the idea that human sexuality depends heavily on whatever symbols and social patterns that gelled with us whether you are ostensibly vanilla or kinked, and there really isn’t a ‘normal’ that people are born with that is perverted, just infinite shades of perversion.

Day 14: How would you say real life BDSM/kink varies from fantasy BDSM/kink?  If you haven’t experienced real life BDSM/kink how do you think it might differ?

Fantasy kink tends not to take real life into consideration, while amping up the petty and awesome as high as they go. Thus in fantasy, all the doms are super competent, all the subs complacent into the role, or if unwilling, unwilling in a way that is not simply truculent. Everyone is gorgeous and wealthy- typically old money or steeped in whatever the writer considers markers of high class. Everyone does whatever the person likes best as a normal thing, say if there thing is cuckolding and latex, hotwives and body condoms are what femdom is.

This sets up unrealistic expectations of good looks and easy dynamics that I’ve never seen happen in practice, with kink parties not being stocked with model hot millionaires. Meanwhile kink activities and needs, are, as I mentioned, much more about what a bunch of individuals are trying to do in a barely functional consensus.

Beyond that, probably the biggest fantasy/reality conflict is the expectation that just being whatever you are will cause what you want to happen. The inherent vulnerability of having to ask someone to submit to you is routinely glossed over- stories giving you things like infinite amounts of money or a pre-existing position of power over the sub, or just the fictional magic dom aura sucking in subs through their desire.

Day 15: Post a BDSM/kink activity you’re curious about and would like to try.

I’d like to try a more prolonged D/s dynamic, and I’d like to explore service a bit more, the latter as a matter of personal development and exploration.

Although Strong and I did owner/property in a way that was technically 24/7, distance and practicality put limits on things. Meanwhile most of my other experience is scene only. I’ve also never found a service oriented person I clicked with- it all felt like too much and too overwhelming to my personal boundaries.

I’m not sure how realistic a prolonged power thingy is. Wildcard and I have been glommed onto each other for a bit shy of a year, and formally hooked up only since January. One of the things I learned with Strong is that it’s hard to try to run a lot of things concurrently in the same dynamic- we flamed bright, but burned out fast and it didn’t survive having to accommodate being human.

Meanwhile as far as prolonged power experiments, I can’t say it’s gone as well as I’d like- the Ex constantly attempted to delegate personal responsibility for various things onto me, for example trying to give me control over his diet so he’d stop binging unhealthily or motivating him to exercise. This would last for about a day before he’d decide he didn’t actually care or want it. I’m going to chalk Strong and I’d thing up to one of those deeply meaningful short term things that wasn’t built to last.

But, as I mentioned, in fantasy, dominance is supposed to basically work like mind control and bring about exactly the results I want to achieve, and somehow make them fit well for the sub. In real life, humans are crap at habits and rules. What I can do is always deeply effected by what my partner can consent and conceivably do, and that’s a big part of the secret vulnerability of dominance. You say ‘Do X’ and it doesn’t happen.

With Wildcard, what we do together is also strongly influenced by his self exploration. Up until recently much of this was confined to the realm of improbable fantasy for him. Like many people he’d assumed that dominant women were so scarce that meeting one was a lottery win on its own.. This has meant a very odd scenario where I am both in a position of power in so far as my position of guidance, but also restraint, since realistically it’s hard to consent to big things when you are learning your limits. So what we’ve done in the direction of more prolonged dynamics is developing rituals and habits- Tuesday “Punishment” is certainly doing a wonderful job. That sense of constancy is definitely something that works for me.

He’s been a pretty good sport for someone who spends a lot of time exploring the upper edges of their comfort zone- and I’d have to describe myself at impressed with his courage about a lot of this stuff. Especially the really hard, ego destroying stuff where you have to admit you’re not up to doing what you actually kinda want. Add a sincere desire to make me happy and I really couldn’t ask for a better person to try to muck about with.

But on the side of my limits, I don’t know when or how I’ll experiment with the service thing and that’s definitely me baggage. For example one of the biggest barriers to enjoying service is the sensation of helplessness at having other people do stuff for me. I also don’t like the controlled, free lunch approach a lot of service subs take- I think this is more me being gunshy than them necessarily being wrong- but, it occurs to me that at this juncture in my life I’m feeling a little more comfortable with ordering someone to do for me.