Ten years ago, today, I registered a domain name and created a space to host my erotica. It wasn’t my first time blogging, but a femdom blog, itself, was a new focus for me. I had started on Fetlife, but I preferred more control, and in hindsight self hosting was the right call. Other sex blogs have come and gone, to permanent hiatus and censorship as their hosts, wordpress.com, tumblr, and blogger, slashed their archives from the web. This place has endured, quietly, not the best or most popular, but constant.
I became a creator because there was a lack of other spaces for me, and most pressingly, no porn for me. It’s always been in my makeup to write, my best skill. If I were a better visual artist I would do that instead. But, instead, it’s a million upon a million words to make myself a place where I and what I love might be found.
For me, this was a journey that started with someone’s metafilter question asking for porn for femdoms, https://ask.metafilter.com/96448/Porno-for-Femme-Domme, and bounced to a now long hiatus’d blog, https://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/. Until that point I knew I was kinky, but imagined my masochism and the point of least resistance of my gender presentation was the best way to seek what I needed. Most commercial femdom porn doesn’t do it for me, so until I found there were others like myself I was unaware I was dominant. This caused a sort of gradual realization that whatever was going on, my prior conclusion I wasn’t a dominant was an issue of lack of things that might appeal to me.
As well as Fetlife, and then, looking for an audience, tried Literotica, only to be rebuffed by the strong non-con lean in my work, and a significant dose of sexism. I may have mentioned it before, but the M/f bias in how we depict heterosexuality, and our tendency to rate acts of leadership and assertiveness by women as more violent, cruel and selfish mean that when you are already fetishizing these aspects you can find a medical modification scene labled “snuff” and a mixed bag of feedback that emphasizes the evil of your character far more than if the dynamic were flipped.
This, plus a post college job doing general online marketing, gave me the encouragement to try setting up a blog and practicing what I learned regarding SEO and other promotions. If I was going to do it for my employer’s clients, I reasoned, I might as well work on making myself be good at getting really heard too.
(My domain name was a compromise, when the handle I use was taken by a still running site someone made dedicated to their Pekinese. Oh well!)
In some ways I predicted this was going to be a long haul, in other ways, not so much. And I do not think if you asked me to map out where this went, I would predict it, even I think pay