Your Pleasure Doesn’t Matter

your pleasure doesn't matter

It’s a cliché of femdom porn, but many cliches endure because they work. It is also the antithesis of how I (usually) operate and it’s been a trust fall-esque exercise since our first hookup when my train was late so he drove me 3 hours home (and 3 hours back alone). It’s so hard to let myself relax and enjoy someone’s giving.

This one is both a soft limit, and the kink that I am exploring right now: being inconsiderate.

The vulnerability of being dominant is ultimately part of being a half of a whole. In power exchange you get things back, in the meta of D/s, you put a lot of vulnerability in the ability to have expectations for someone else that, more often than not, fetishize the unreasonable.

As such, I recoil at the masochists who do it just to please you, even as my own self thrills to see pain in the face of my lover. I needed Silver to be the slutty little masochist I discovered him to be, because my dominance has always had a generative more so than a consumptive aspect.  

I told him early on his fetishes belonged to me, the control panel of his sexuality. I want to be powerfully and compellingly desired. I glow to command attention, and have to tame very petty jealousy when someone is more important or better at something than me shows up. 

I can see how, of course, the inverse is true. Silver smiles more happily than anything else every time he is reminded I also actually share his fetishes, particularly latex. I think he feels about that the way I feel such delight in his craving to hurt.  

Pretty, perfect, driven, wired boy. It’s funny to use the diminutive on someone both older and having more of his shit together in many respects than me (we are about 8 years apart in age, and I often appreciate feeling it as much as it makes me insecure). But, “boy” comes easy. Maybe it’s the big blue eyes and sandy blond hair? Maybe it’s the painting in his attic, unweathered pale skin. I couldn’t place it.

Telling him his pleasure doesn’t matter did not come easily to me, but I am using it now.

There are a few things that come forth from Silver’s sexuality, fed from his desires and quirks. The masochism. The rubber. The hypnosis. The self initiated urge to please via “surprises”, and the surprisingly hard limits around long term rules via contracts. He has, historically, pleased me by trusting that I will treasure who he is. I prefer it when he is active, not passive, to please me.

And in intimate talk, to each other, those words tripped out of him “my pleasure doesn’t matter”.

At the time I corrected him. His pleasure, like his fetishes, are tools of my control. I was feasting on his enjoyment of this as a significant platform of my sense of power but also, my sense of security. 

In every person there is this being you can dredge up in psychology as an “inner child”. You use it in thought exercises to teach yourself to shed that raiment of self loathing many of us use to gird ourselves against things that are good for us.  

My child-self saw some shit, and often fantasised about folded down into nothingness, not a burden to any adult. I craved to be needless and giving, conceived of myself as selfish. Trauma didn’t make me dominant, but it probably influences my perception of love.  

In the hindsight of adult maturity, I can realise, alongside the pile of  other abuse I experienced, I was a victim of emotional incest. We should not ask children to provide for adults as I was. 

Unfortunately, knowing why I am fucked up doesn’t fix being fucked up.

Silver is perfectly willing to be patient with that warzone aftermath, but ultimately there is a piece of me that stays alert to danger when most would melt into an embrace.  You want to know how meta this is, I am anxious to write this in case he worries he is too much of a nuisance. 

So big breath, relax: Your pleasure doesn’t matter.

When I say it, he reacts with that sort of erotic, wide eyed cringe that makes my heart sing and my core tighten. It’s the same shudder of found out desire he gave when I discovered “whore” or “slut” and even more so “bitch” are sharp yanks on the leash on his soul. The same caught breath and big eyes, but relaxed body, as when I physically pull his cock between his legs in a controlling fashion. 

Trick is, I can’t just say things to indulge him. I have never been the sort of domme who could do things I wasn’t into, just cuz. The latex I wear is my fetish. The pain I give him, my desire first. To work for me (and for him), I had to take that phrase, understand it and use it as it means to me rather than just wave it about ineptly. I have to believe it, not put it on like an ill fitted costume.

In the spirit of the phrase, it’s been a defining thread in our relationship, to trust his giving. The first time I leaned in, it was a dark and rainy night, much like the Pacific North West weather of the last 2 months. He offered a big favour, and I stepped out into uncertain ground and said yes. I knew, over a year ago now, that letting him drive me back to Canada was a huge imposition. But that he offered because he meant it. So big breath, trust, say yes. And it worked. Every extension, every tentative query that my whole self might be wanted, has received an affirmation. Now I try it more consciously, with that phrase.

Let his pleasure not matter. Let myself enjoy. Let me trust to use him and be sure this is as it is supposed to be.

Do Dominants Have All the Power in BDSM?

hailthequeenOne of the most common questions in kink, particularly when you are trying to convey the concepts to newbies or people outside of kink, is who really has the power in a D/s relationship.

There’s differing opinions on that. The default people tend to go to is “The dom, duh, that’s their job!” but it’s matched by a now classic argument that the sub usually has all the power because they can withdraw consent at any time. One safeword or a serious no, and the dom is back to being Ms. Normalpants, right?

Some male subs argue femdoms have all the power by virtue of scarcity. On the other hand other, (clever) writers have pointed out a collective tendency to domism in kink society at large and in popular perception uninvolved vanillas, the idea that the more dominant you are the more weight and value your experience and opinions have. To a degree this is true- I have shiny dominant privilege that people tend to treat me like what makes me wriggle in me seat somehow comes with an extra helping of smart in my head. People generally believe that dominant sexuality is like an automatic mantle of leadership, or paradoxically expect that leader traits must match dominant leanings. This is something I can’t help bringing with me into all my relationships.

On the other hand, as I’ve complained about at length, femdom as a genre of porn is particularly weighted towards getting straight dudes off. There is very little stuff out there for femdoms, but a giant buffet of wank for male subs. It’s true that femdom is in such demand you can charge for it, but paradoxically professional dominants work hard for their money. If you are at all into identity politics, you can point out the big awkward sausage fingers of the patriarchy jammed up in my archetype expectations- indeed a lot of classic male sub requests are to hold up a twisted mirror of sexism- asking to be hurt by denying them or humiliating them with reminders of a code of conduct that penalizes femininity or failures to be conventionally masculine. And as Dee pointed out, there is a tendency to treat all dominants like our consent is set to “Yes”. Certainly stealth submission is offered more freely than anyone would suggest a dom should stealth take charge to get their jollies.

(At this point the non-gender equality obsessed persons eyeballs kinda crossed, while some MRA type is now posed with fingers over their keyboard to make sure I get told what I said wrong. Have at it- there’s a comment section for a reason. Oh yeah and if you just came here for the sexy femdom stories… sorry.)

We female dominants cope with it in different ways. Some, particularly the feminist professionals, point out they are doing what they want, and is probably pretty sexist to say there’s a right way to be female.  Others, like me, devote our scowly faces to being treated as a category niche fetish as opposed to being just a dominant, regardless of the contents of my pants. Meanwhile male subs often get all sad that a poor distinction is made between marketing copy of professional femdoms and the fact that male subs are just people like everyone else.

So nobody gets to go into their relationships without baggage, personal or otherwise. But what about power exchange?

The reality of asking who has the power is that you’re going to hit that age old frustrator of every duality ever, which is that it depends. While it’s true that subs can withdraw consent at any time, so can doms, who are just as capable of having limits. BDSM relationships don’t exist in a vacuum- as much as we like to imagine we all have sooper sekret chateaux where we host the most sophisticated sex parties, nobody stops being themselves just because they twig for something collectively presumed to fall under the kink umbrella.

Whatever power is the amount you bring into the relationship with you. It never really goes away- it just gets moved around. Doms, femdom or otherwise, are not all just filling the fantasy of the sub, but neither, to the protests of some, is submission diminished by considering the desires of the submissive. The power is just as much with the dom to indulge or not.

When Kink Limits Change & More Caretaking Challenges

I encountered a really tough problem recently on reddit:

My sub’s ingratitude is destroying our relationship. I took him under my wing. When I met him, he was another college drop-out with no body to speak of. Thanks to my guidance, he now has a good job, goes to gym regularly and looks his best.

Now life’s going well, suddenly I’m too controlling? He wants to challenge my rules? Rules we both agreed on BTW.

He was always shy about his fantasies. I kept at him until he opened up. He didn’t know how to apply them. As usual, I took over. I taught him how to service me. I tied him up and played with him until he was a quivering pile of ecstasy. I taught him all about the prostate and gave him the best orgasms possible. And he loved every minute.

So how does he repay me? He starts safe-wording nearly every time we play. He suddenly wants to renegotiate scenes. He says he doesn’t like some of the stuff we do. He says used to go along with it because he was scared of disappointing me. That’s crap. He loved it – he wouldn’t get off if he didn’t.

Why is he testing me like this? And how do I remind this boy exactly which of us is in charge?

lictenstein
“Why won’t he submit the way he used to?”

Ouch, that’s one sad femdom! This one resonated with me, because it’s close to a bunch of problems I had to tackle. I don’t think the problem is precisely ingratitude, but nevertheless, it’s a nasty situation to find yourself in as a dom.

Reddit mostly attacked her attitude as not taking her sub’s limits seriously enough, but it’s really hard to deal with someone whose kink limits evolve within a relationship or someone who is not consistently on board with what you want. It’s also very frustrating as a dominant, to have the urge for control stifled by someone being more interested in their fetishes and the parameters they want them expressed under, than in supporting your sense of control, while trying to balance that with your own need to meet and respect whatever limits a person asks for.

And it can be hard when you a have an expectation to push through and reach someone and do the hard work of making judgement calls for both of you, and then sometimes they need you to do that and sometimes they don’t. However…

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