Fuck Homophobia; Fuck Islamophobia

Love is love is love is love is loveThis is more like a one shot service announcement, but as a sexual libertine I wanted to put this out there, based on the Orlando tragedy:

Fuck homophobia. Fuck blaming Muslims.

As a non-American I don’t feel qualified to give more than an opinion on the subject of gun control (why do you need those? wat? whyyyy?) but as a sexual libertine who screws and plays with people anywhere on the wonderfully unrestrainable gender spectrum, and whose life is so far on the side of sexual liberal that I don’t even know what normal looks like anymore…

We don’t deserve to die, and what kills us is not our choices, it is the choice of others to hate us. And that hate is not uniquely confined to any variant of monotheism, that is a 100% optional. Let every politician who hemmed and hawed about transgender bathrooms or gay marriage know that YOU did this. Let every pastor who decided that the pulpit was their hate catapult be ashamed. Let every TERF who sneered about what a “real” woman was hang your head in fucking SHAME. Hell, even you in the back who was hoping to be the bigger man and saying that it was okay for people to be perverts as long as they hid their icky secret and never expected right, fuck you in particular. Fuck your hate the sin, not the sinner. I am my “sin” and if love is a sin, than fuck you, we love.

The killer was your textbook scene creep (you know the type, nasty messages, nasty disposition, missing stair extraordinaire), lashing out from the closet doorway. Sure he dressed himself in the raiment of whatever big name terrorists he could wind about himself, but if you are buying into this as a remotely Muslim thing… well I don’t know if the word “racist” applies to hating on such a pan-ethnic faith, but you are certainly an ignorant bigot. More than that, you’re explicitly on his side, where he loudly tried to distract everyone from the fact that this was a hate crime with a huge component of self hate. This was the UpStairs Lounge arson attack again, made possible with assault weapons. This was a horrible, abusive person abusing what he (secretly) loved as surely as he abused his wife. Fuck you for trying to make this a talking point so you could bully and harass Muslims in the name of people that, let’s be honest, a decade ago you probably barely acknowledged as human.

I love living in 2016, where Axe body spray ads feature men in heels and I can marry any one adult that will have me. But holy fuck, guys, can we not make a hate sandwich and pretend that being mean to gay people isn’t a homegrown bit of bullshit bso we can be horrid to brown people?

We clear? This blog is pro QUILTBAG and pro any damn faith that gives you peace and cultural warm and fuzzies, whether it’s all of them or none. This is just another drop in a rainstorm of people shouting about gay rights and not being a bigot. But if i have a soap box, I will at least express solidarity to the some 10K sessions you guys make here monthly.

Kink.com Excludes Femdom From Mainstream BDSM

shitIdon'tneed This shit is what I’m talking about here, when I talk about the sexism that femdoms deal with, when it comes to being taken seriously as a part of BDSM.

This is the navigation menu for kink.com, which helps you find their sub-sites, sorted by 5 options. Gay gets its own category that excludes F/f, which is sort of scattered all throughout their content offerings. And Femdom… It’s not filed under general BDSM either. Because of course it isn’t.

I understand this is going to come across like I’m looking for something to be offended about that could be a happinstance accident. There’s obviously no malicious conspiracy and I suspect a huge part is an effort to seed common search terms for SEO/page rank purposes while still creating a functional site map. But this is definitely a symptom of kink as a wholes problem with excluding femdom from the idea of normal.

I do want to say I’m glad kink.com exists. They were a big part of pushing the Overton window, champions of BDSM AND sex in the same shoot, normalizing and mainstreaming kink. They’re a scrappy self made franchise that started in a guy’s dorm room. And they’re a living example of building what you love being a key component to making good art- as well as one of the strongest influences on modern BDSM as a subculture, and have done a great deal to popularize the role of consent- with their before/after videos providing a framing that is joyful and mindful of the well being of the bottom.

But here’s where I go tumblr about things, and I’m going to use this as a leaping off place as a wider problem.. There is a logic internally why kink.com did their menu like this- the artistic direction of their femdom work is sorted under slightly different leadership. But the way it is expressed sucks, and is the problem of femdom exclusion from the rest of kink in a nutshell, something they are perpetuating as educators.

As a female dominant, one of the biggest challenges with my kink is being taken seriously and not being overshadowed by the male sub fantasy version of yourself. Kink.com makes some effort to put femdoms in charge of making stuff they put out there, but they are still the product being sold with its own special fetishes attached, like female dominance can’t exist without a strapon.  And unlike their gay stuff where the male sub is the main attraction and the treatment of the happy victim is very similar to a female sub, the dominant herself is getting the majority of the camera love and branding emphasis and the guy is depersonalized as much as he’s the victim. But even that’s not enough, for kink.com, femdom must be placed away from everything else.

This makes sense from a financial perspective, much like their (to me) excessive focus on anal.  Men buy porn, so porn aims at a male lowest common denominator, so men buy porn. It’s a generally accepted truism that straight men don’t wanna look at guys except peripherally and if they do it’s going to fit into a very specific idea of what femdom is that is nothing like male dom. I don’t like it, but that’s a separate rant.

Where this sorting is irksome, and the point I’m making here, is where the website has also stepped into the role of kink educators- a worthy goal, but on that carries their porn based bias into what they are teaching. Note that Kink University is neatly sorted in amongst all the “BDSM” branded porn, where for a reasonable fee you can watch bad things happen to enthusiastically consenting women. And then when the victim is NOT a woman (or the dom is interesting subject at all really)- whoops it’s not normal, off to the Gay or Femdom box! We don’t want some wanking man to have his erection spoiled.

Think, for a moment, how this comes across if you’re into femdom and you’re trying to access this as an educational resource. Much of the advice, from safewords to bondage and hitting, is unsexed unless you are torturing or tying a sex specific body part. The psychology of it is fairly universal and they have female dominants teaching in their workshop. But there’s still this idea that both male homosexuality and female dominance must be sequestered.

And you deal with this in the BDSM community too, online and off.

It comes up in the endless whining about how the ratios of femdoms to male subs are fucked because, as these complaints boil down to, the person whining that they can’t find a person will tell you that being a femdom isn’t normal. You find it in the every day assumptions that when you mean a BDSM couple you mean M/f, whether on reddit or fetlife or out doing your thing. Even at my munches, people tell me how they don’t like femdom, because all they see is this ghetto-ized Femdom-as-a-Fetish for men or come to me and tell me they don’t think I am a femdom because I don’t fit this narrow version of what they think it looks like.

And I’m not asking for something unreasonable. Major kink toy retailer, “The Stockroom” went through this with their dual catalogs- one that featured a mixture of mostly female models and the other one that was focused on displaying their products on male bodies. And you know what? Someone pointed out to them that sorting Gay/Straight based on model was weird and they knocked it off. And it didn’t hurt anything to change up the lables.

So its not impossible to do the same thing for femdom. It doesn’t have to be a special extra thing that’s ancillary to the regular kink, like some sort of separate flavour. We can acknowledge that male and female dominants have more similarities. When i comes to porn aimed at men I can see why you would pander, but when it comes to education, we should expect better.

Get your shit together kink.com. As a kink educator, in this aspect, you suck at making femdom accessible as something other than a male fantasy and this is leaving  femdom identifying or exploring women in the cold.

Not All Femdoms Are Sex Workers

Once again, an innocent question from a redditor reminds me of one of the problems that comes with being a non-professional dominant. Or really any conversation about femdom. I get messages from people in my inbox (I guess I seem authoritative) of various sites and this is not an unusual occurrence. Sometimes it’s a guy trying to book a session. In this case, he was neither impolite nor unpleasant, but it’s my daily reminder that the thing that I do is not perceived as functioning the way I do it – to the larger world, femdoms are sex workers by default.

Random Reddit Dude:

Hi, I stumbled upon your reddit domme post and Im abt to go to my first domme in a few weeks and am really excited I have a couple questions on how to tell if its a legitimate dome or not. [ad from back pages] This is the domme im going to and so far so good been emailing her a couple days she requires a screening process in which i have to refer to two dommes before but since this is my first time I couldn’t do that so instead her other request for new subs is for 100$ gift card (which is the cost for half the session) be sent in advance and I give her the other 100$ in cash. We talked a few days and I think she is legit but what are your opinions?

Me:

Okay…

You know not all female doms are sex workers? I couldn’t possibly tell you about this because I don’t sell sexual services. Sorry, I could no more advise on this than a vanilla woman knows how to choose escorts.

Random Reddit Dude:

its not a sex worker, shes a domme though? Its not an escort I was just asking since you are a domme.

Me:

If you are paying her, she is a “sex worker”. Although the laws of your region may vary about what is and isn’t considered prostitution, and she may only sell beatings, lifestyle dominants do not charge any money, not gift cards, not Paypal, not cash in hand.

And thus went the conversation, with me patiently explaining that indeed *anyone* you found out of the “backpages” was going to be selling a service, and that sex work includes a broader range of activities than explicitly getting to come. I’m very pro-sex worker’s rights. I want complete legalization, and training for law enforcement to protect them, and supportive social programs that affirm their choices while keeping them safe, as they are a commonly exploited and endangered population. But I can only be an ally- shilling erotica, while next door to sex work, carries none of the stigmas and risk so I’m not going to define myself as a spokes person for people who take on this challenging profession.

But as a female dominant I am SO FUCKING FRUSTRATED. Both at the assumption that I don’t really exist and that professionals are the norm, and that my relationship with my partners, even as a non-pro, follows the guidelines of a professional- a session in which a male partner provides some sort of compensation in exchange for the parts of my dominance he actually wants. If it’s not cash, he’s cleaning my floor. Never mind that dominance experienced is a reward in and of itself.

I admit when I first started writing and thinking about this, I suffered from a bit of whore-phobia, not at sex workers, but to their clients. I guess I was frightened that guys who availed themselves of the services of sex workers would see every interaction as transactional. In practice, not so much, in one’s personal life the distinction tends to play out more the way a massage at home VS a massage from a therapist do. But in the global picture, non-professional (and I still chafe at calling myself ‘lifestyle’) dominants are eclipsed by the attention paid to professionals to the point that femdoms are sex workers in the default of popular imagination. You also tend to get this weird idea that selling dominance gives you different independence- the professional dominant, rather than being a person playing a character, shows up in popular media like that’s the entirety of her personality and she has figured out the secret of getting paid to do what she loves because she is just so amazing. Sherlock’s Irene Adler was a typical bad cliché of this theme, a stomping one dimensional psychopath who used people, who couldn’t actually just have real power but needed to be a professional to give her sexuality legitimacy. Other than that, female dominants who aren’t doing the thing as some sort of job (you might also get wicked lady police or bad guy characters in leather) are invisible, or it’s a punch line, or at best doesn’t extend as far as her sexuality. Unsurprising in a world where female orgasms are censored as more dirty by film boards, and one major romance publishing house historically refused to publish anything that didn’t have M/f overtones, but still a very annoying thing to experience.

It’s gotten a bit better- media is a lot more open about pandering to a broader range of female interests, but nonetheless, here we are, female dominants who have no interest in treating their partners like clients scraping around the edges of our own kink. “Just asking, since you are a domme!”

And because female dominance is laced with this stereotype, women who would otherwise be into BDSM style activities are turned off- not only do the majority of the guys who identify as submissive (or as a switch) getting their information from a world that thinks F/m is #givemoneytowomen writ large, but even among those who don’t want to pay, the attitude is that they’re still booking a session. I don’t want to follow the script of an 19th century gentleman hiring a “governess” to pretend for a couple of hours that she is his superior, I want sexuality that takes more than my need to feed myself into account. Instead I get guys who think I exist on the same continuum as people who are incredibly skilled at getting him off as a vocation.

Fuck that noise, we desperately need our own space that is not about appreciating porn stars and professionals. We need room to develop our own tropes and expectations outside of someone who charges by the hour to act disgruntled in highly specific lingerie. Yes, among our tiny minority of F/m women, some of you genuinely like acting like Mistress Whiplash as your power fantasy, but until this is more about us and less about the exchange of good, cash and serves for services, we will remain invisible and hide in the #whump communities on tumblr and other little pockets that pander to us.

On Femdom In Popular Culture

princessI guess one of the hardest parts of conventional heterosexual femdom is how damn disempowering it feels. Maybe some women get joy out of it in the porn and movie version, but in my perception, it takes the idea of female power and turns it into a grotesque parody, one propped up by a very narrow definition of attractive, garbed in clothes worn to thrill the audience but also reassure them that the boundaries of the dom’s power are entirely the time it takes them to wank to completion. I hate how angry and unhappy it makes us be, like we are uncomfortable in our own skin, that we deplore sex and men specifically.

I tried it as a teenager- I liked (and still like) the idea of getting power from my sexuality, liked the idea of men fawning all over me and certainly fit nicely into my dark sorceress fantasies. But in practice it was such a bother to get someone to play along- teenage boys aren’t, as an audience, adept and ready for consensual domination. The ones that are tend to have got there via porn made just for them. And if I’m good at anything its forming myself into other people’s perfect fantasy. But oh lordy was it a series of tedious tick boxes- no tension, no zing, so service-y.

I rejected femdom then as a fool’s game entirely for professionals and with nothing to offer for me. Given how it is presented, its no wonder there’s so few dominant women when people go looking!

On that line, people have occasionally found it remarkable that I refuse pro work. Wouldn’t it be perfect to be paid to be me? It’s not out of a rejection of sex work (I’ve made it abundantly clear I’m an ally, if often a clumsy one), but a distaste for the profession in particular because it is NOT me. I write, not to condemn the hundreds of women who pay the rent acting out a very specific and much beloved service- but precisely because it is next door to my vulnerabilities. For me, professional domination is taking an intimate part of myself and putting it to work for the needs of others. That’s the part of femaleness that makes me feel least powerful, the emotional shepherd part of the glorious indoctrination of girlhood.

And inversely, I don’t like that being a commanding woman is itself considered to be a niche fetish, with a special wardrobe that fits into no context except for that of the dominatrix- rule and people start cracking jokes about whips in the same way they’ll call you an aggressive bitch. People moan about the lack of clothing choices for dom men to be “fetish” wear, but a codified dom uniform for women doesn’t exactly scream inherently powerful either- maybe sore feet, sweaty and short of breath at best. I’m not saying you personally should give up your “mistress’ heels or whatever, but from my perspective if you have to wear a special outfit to be taken seriously, that awards the outfit more power than you.

Granted a lot of the other stereotypical female power things don’t help either. Step away from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS’s angry, black clad sisters and its all about The Goddess. Not any specific goddess, mind you, just middle class white folk’s idea of the primitive feminine- and that trip traps into sacred motherhood, where all I am goes from being the bedevilment of men, to the state of my womb. This is not an improvement.

Maiden, Mother, Crone… even with religions that are not some sort of cargo cult constructed to summon a hypothetical ancient tradition that’s more wishful thinking than a part of anyone’s heritage, religious history gives you shitty options. At the very best, you get a goddess who’s some sort of primal force, while the real women of the culture are getting their faces rubbed in the dirt, same as everywhere else and the religious women who get respect are paragons of self denial and chastity. Among the Christian saints, someone’s mother or someone who died a virgin are about your only options of your own personal halo. That puts the feminine-as-a-power-source as an awkward place for a barren woman to try to be. By choice, over about half my life, I’ve stopped up my womb with the best medical science can offer, with no plans to stop. The thing between my legs is strictly an organ of pleasure with an excretion mechanism piped through it. Making it so is my aberration and my actual expression of power over myself- being maiden/mother/crone by default is a profoundly anti-choice. Respecting women as the generative sex, and making that respect’s primary root, treats childbearing as the spontaneous reality for every woman.

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Lifestyle VS Pro and The Male Sub Loot Grab

So I was recently reading the advice of the blogger Cara Sutra, on the difference between professional and lifestyle dominants. And I’m sorry, she got it wrong. Cara is an experienced and award winning sex journalist and I have nothing personally against her, but this post is rife with errors and the sort of general misinformation that is not helping anyone.

As far as what she said, initially she wasn’t too bad: one of them charges by the hour and the other one doesn’t. No big deal, right? Then she got into more detail and things went tits up.

There is a world of difference between a talented Dominant who is financially recompensed for her time and talents, and a sex worker who chooses to incorporate bondage and corporal punishment into the services she offers. Too many people make the mistake of assuming that the two are one and the same.

Professional Dommes are not prostitutes. Any remuneration is for her Domination skills and expertise, not for sexual contact or sex acts. Sexual contact will not be a part of any session with any Professional Dominatrix worth her salt.

No, not really- this has a problem in that it’s trying to distance the penis touchers from the people who just do hit & bossy while not considering the broader context of the differences. There are reasons why this makes sense (much like the efforts to convey that in strip clubs, there isn’t usually sex in the champagne room) but it’s a problem, which I will explain.

Sex worker is a broad continuum of people in a diverse industry, and includes everyone from porn performers to street walkers, but prodoms are part of that club. Like all people, professional dominants have their own personal comfort points and limits, but this is one of those things that’s more on a spectrum and heavily determined by your local vice laws. While professional dominants obviously focus on D/s and generally don’t do vanilla sex acts with clients (and get fed up with being offered an extra $20 for a happy ending), many also limit themselves to specific BDSM related things, for example no strapons or otherwise sexually touching the guy based either on what the local laws allow or what they feel is okay, VS professionals who are happy to snap on a glove and edge or finger clients.

But by trying to protect professionals from being asked to do things they are not comfortable with, Cara Sutra is perpetuating the idea that mixing sexual stuff with your D/s is bad, and that this is all about dom skill, when in practice, fucking your subs doesn’t make you less dominant. This is a particular sort of snobbery born out of frustration- when it comes to the pros I feel like a lot of the women with this attitude are pulling rank because claiming you are more dominant this way sounds better than explaining that the average client doesn’t get you horny, you don’t need that kind of risk in your life or that you have enough problems with the legality of your profession as it is.

But then Cara Sutra talks about lifestyle, which is where I fall, and she hits one of my pet peeves.

That is not to say that Lifestyle Domination equals “getting it for free”. The nature of FemDom shows that submissives would do well to recognise the value of their Mistress and show their appreciation of her time once accepted into her service. Not merely through obedience and submission, but regular gifts should at least be offered. If nothing else, it’s good manners and part of BDSM scene etiquette.

No. No. No. Arrgh, Fuck no. This taken for granted male sub loot grab is a marker of what I call “grey area prodoms”. These people bill themselves as ‘lifestyle’, but it’s said with palm extended, because as the reasoning goes, doms are scarce, so they decide they are worth it. It’s kink plus extras, right?

Look, I don’t care if you, in your own personal dynamic, give gifts to your lover- there are many ways to express affection. And yes, findom is a valid fetish. However, just being dominant and a woman in no way means I deserve to be compensated for my interactions with the opposite sex. Seriously, nobody tells lesbian subs to get out their wallets if they really want to show their appreciation. A male dom asking for prezzies would probably get laughed out of the dungeon. But somehow having tits and a desire to dominate means that male subs should presume gratitude by default. This is a problem because:

  1. It’s rife with exploitation, with newbie subs getting fleeced for trying to explore their kinks.
  2. It perpetuates the idea that a femdom is a service provider filling the male sub’s fantasy, rather than two or more equals coming together to do power exchange and kink for mutual satisfaction.
  3. It teaches malesubs they are worthless and opens them up to all sorts of abuse.

In discussion about this, a couple of times, the conversation has turned to the subject of how if he’s not gifting me, he’s exchanging something else, right? Like service! Like how femdom also assumes in a way that femsub doesn’t, that the sub has to bribe me for being willing to play along somehow.

Talk about being alienated from your own sexuality! While some of us are only doing it for the warm and fuzzies emotionally, I do this because it makes my cunt feel good, and I am in the majority of kinksters, not the minority. Look, seriously, this is not a rare gift I was given to play out on an audience of deserving men, this is what the fetish fairy handed me when the kinks were being given out.

When I spank Wildcard, it’s not because Wildcard drapes me in diamonds or folded all my laundry – the only compensation is his upturned ass, his willing and enthusiastic consent and his arousal. When I beat the shit out of my friend at a play party and he’s in tears, he doesn’t buy me dinner for the grace of getting a unicorn to kick him in the balls- getting to do that to him is as much a privilege as a dominant as it is a privilege as a sub to be doubled over clutching his candy. Because you know what? Without a partner, my dominance is just me, my hand and my fantasies in ForeverAloneVille. Just like a partnerless sub.

You could argue that if Wildcard walked under a bus (god forbid), the demand for femdoms is such that I could find a male sub, but the reality is that while there are certainly more men apparently identifying as male subs, he’s kinda irreplaceable. Much like how Dee over at Dumb Domme wouldn’t be so ripped up about her boy having to move, or Ferns of Domme Chronicles would not be on such a lengthy search if a good partner was something female dominants really could take for granted.

Cara Sutra is selling the idea that rather than being an inherently good match, you should expect to jump through thirty kinds of hoops, backwards with a wad of cash in your mouth. But really, this sort of blurring of lifestyle VS pro also pops up again in her advice to femdoms on how to decide which role suits you.

A good answer to the question of lifestyle VS pro is that the latter are sex workers, so you shouldn’t do it unless you are prepared to be a small business owner/independent contractor in a marginalized industry. Easy, right? Let’s see what Cara Sutra says:

Knowing whether you are a Professional or Lifestyle Mistress, or a submissive drawn to Professional or Lifestyle Domination, comes down to a number of factors. These include your understanding of and attitude to your own kink as well as your personal life circumstances.

For instance, you may be a woman with no desire to manage a submissive outside of a set session, or a submissive who cannot commit time beyond a session to serve a Mistress on a more day to day basis. Professional Domination would suit both of these cases.

Dafuq?Hmm… uh, I guess people who aren’t 24/7 don’t exist? I’m really surprised someone with Cara Sutra’s background appears to literally not know what the fuck she is talking about. If you don’t want to do D/s outside of defined ‘scenes’ you should go pro? Reeeeally. How did we go from “pro doms are skilled professionals” to this being the better option for women doing short haul D/s?

I really hope this is a typo, but again, it’s not really good advice to male subs that if they are not into round the clock D/s (eg bedroom only) a prodom is a better choice for them either.

Then she talks about some of the challenges of trying to figure out your orientation and spits out this gem:

In order to reduce the chance of psychological, emotional and sometimes even physical hurt, it is important to determine your orientation and Domination needs as early in your kink journey as possible. Investing time and emotion into a Dominant/submissive bond which does not combine the right facets for one or both people involved is a painful event which can potentially take years to heal.

Thoughtlessly experimenting with D/s relationships is no less hurtful than toying with a person’s emotions in vanilla relationships. Ensuring you are both on the same page will mean you’re doing your best to guard against any loss of interest, feeling neglected, getting hurt or hurting someone who is investing time and emotion in you.

I’m not entirely sure what this had to do with deciding if sex work is for you, but it’s still silly. it sounds nice and considerate- after all, relationship failures suck! It’s even the subject of my last blog post, where a couple discovered they had to renegotiate their relationship after it was already established. But you know what? That’s not the same thing as being a shitty partner, that’s a normal part of human sexuality.

I don’t know how you could get physically hurt by, in effect, breaking up with someone, but if you do, you are doing something wrong. Realistically, you generally need to try stuff to confirm you like it, and claiming testing this stuff and being wrong is the equivalent of being intentionally emotionally manipulative is unreasonable.

Assuming you are a new male sub or female dom reading this, or just someone curious about some kink ideas they have, Cara Sutra’s blog post is going to actively spread misinformation. Not only does it encourage taking up being a prodom without any sort of realistic look into what that involves, but it gives a very skewwed idea of what is okay behaviour in a non-professional relationship, as well as putting way, way too much weight on getting your feelings hurt.

It’s shit like this that lowers the quality expectations for women trying to make a living doing this, while discouraging women who are personally into it from indulging their curiosity and for male subs to lead with a huge pile of promises and presents that get in the way of getting to know the guy, while reflecting the deep shame he feels for being saddled with a kink that gets treated like a burden. It’s also stuff like this why I wrote things like “why I make a big deal out of not being a pro femdom“, and part of why it took me until my early twenties before I was confident enough to call myself a dominant.

More Gems From Femdom Society (Part 1)

So I thought that before I deleted my account at Femdom Society I’d check out their much vaunted “University”. Because hey, they might charge you almost eight bucks a month, but that part’s free! Let’s take a peek at Freshman class #1 for doms….

Before We start, We want You to know Our system is complex in structure. Submissive’s do not have access to this section of the website. It is exclusive to Dominant Women. Use the information in these classes to Your advantage. As a Superior Woman, however, You do have access to both sub and sissy Universities.

Ooooookay…

Let us get started! This Lesson covers some basic facts that may surprise You. Facts which prove not only that Women are superior to men, but that Our current society is in the midst of a rapid power exchange. In the next few years We will see a complete turn around in Women’s and men’s roles.

Huh? Okay. Then they get into a history of modern progress towards gender equality dressed as proof of female superiority. And then we get to the meat of this wank fest that wishes it were a conspiracy:

The power exchange between dominant Women and submissive men is not founded solely on sexual basis. In reality, it is grounded on the dynamics of who holds the power. The purpose of this Society is to help educate Women on how to overcome the misconceptions, how to over-step the long looks from those in society who do not embrace these changes, and to help You blossom within that which is the natural order of events. Those who embrace this Society are dedicated to the development of a complete Society in which men are merely servants to the every need and desire of Women. The level at which You embrace this is entirely up to You, but from those of Us further down the path, please know the more You learn, the more dynamic and exciting Your life will become. The more You implement these practices into Your relationship, the deeper the bond between You and Your man will be, and there will be a day when You look back and realize that Your relationship is a great deal more secure, a great deal more satisfying, and a great deal more honest than it ever used to be.

Shut up. Are you fucking kidding me? World domination through cam shows and shitty profile beauty pageant competitions. Well, nobody would suspect! Just an innocent front of female sexual objectification in the name of the movement!

And then, onto the next freshman class, with a list of helpful terms. We learn things like:

Branding: A higher level of domination, it usually revolves around a ceremony in which a slave is branded with the mark of a Domme.

Feminization: Taking a cross dressing desire to a new level by forcing a slave to accept Female traits. This can include anything from eyebrow plucking to breast implants. Very common in long term relationships.

Whoever wrote this has no fucking clue what they’re doing. There’s no particular logic in what they do and don’t list, and while I do from personal experience it’s hard to be completely inclusive, the general idea that things are part of a natural order and not more of a buffet pervades the rest of the list.

Although Hollywood tends to feed off the sexual aspects of Female Domination […]

Not that this website is doing any differently now… It’s a confused mess. They follow with a bunch of old news articles about an increase of stay at home husbands, an article about a couple who like animal training and something about female leadership. Keep in mind that up until this point they’ve been banging a drum about female power and supremacy coming from the feminine.

A man wants to worship his Woman not just as an individual, but also for the Feminine power that She has to create life in Her body. That alone makes every Woman worthy of respect.

Urrrrrgh, because reducing women to their reproductive organs isn’t sexist…

If You want to succeed at this lifestyle, there is something extremely important to keep in mind: Your man WANTS You to be in charge. That means You have the power to create the rules and guidelines that he so craves for You to set. That means You can include the things You are comfortable with and exclude everything else, no matter what he says he wants.

Oh Sweet Jesus. People are paying money for this shit. Who wrote this… let’s see…

We want to thank Ms. Elise Sutton for Her input. A great deal of the information You have just read is from the ongoing wisdom of Ms. Sutton. 

AAAAAAAAUGH!!!

Femdom Society you are a fucking cancer on female dominance.

If You’re Not Into It’s Really Fucking Annoying

But honestly even if I were a femsub, some people’s approach would still make me a very angry woman.

I take dominants hitting on me really, really personally. I don’t know why, but it’s one of the fastest ways to get under my skin in the scene.

For example, at the last play party I was more than a little pissed to be asked repeatedly if I wanted to be spanked by a guy in a clown suit. The comedy of the situation does not escape me, but nonetheless, I wanted to scream at the guy. But, it’s also something I can’t really figure out if I’m too sensitive about or not. After all, dominants are dominant. I’m a dom. It’s not like there’s anything inherently wrong with it, right?

Argh, argh, argh!

I am sick of dom guys surreptitiously approaching me and asking me that… you know if I ever wanted to try the other side, they will be my manly and trusty escort. Or guys old enough to be my dad (or not) telling me they can see the submissiveness waiting to come out. For crying out loud, motherfuckers, I don’t tell you that I can see your inner submissive, like it was some sort of imaginary bra strap.

Even the “Where’s your collar, girl?!” trolls really don’t seem to understand how they come across, although that crew is so delusionally trying to live in Gor-land that they’re hardly my problem. It’s like- nooo, it didn’t possibly occur to me to try a widely available fantasy that is in half the romance novels I can buy, even before you factor in intentional kink stories like 50shades. Golly, Mr. Dom! A girl like me is ready to shuck it all off because you can’t relate to me in any way that doesn’t indulge your fetishes!

Not to mention that I don’t think these guys understand that without my consent, what they are proposing is a lot more threatening than say, just asking a girl out to the movies. Dude, you want to quasi forcibly sexually subjugate someone. I want to forcibly sexually subjugate someone. I at least have the self awareness that I don’t presume the entire damn universe shares my kink exactly the way I like it.

Like, sub guys can be creepy in their own special way, but at least the ones that don’t understand consent are largely only a hazard to my feet being undrooled on. They are not like Mr. Grabby hands “May I play with your hair?” who then was happily pawing my surgical stitches after I said an explicit no, because he couldn’t fathom that I said anything else but okay.

I feel like most male doms are perfect angels in this regard and don’t deserve the rant cannon, but those few bastards who can’t behave are a huge part of the more domly than-thou internal competition. You want to know why Ms. New Domme is acting like you shat on her dog because you deigned to speak with her? Some of it is because she might be a jerk and has been informed by porn that she needs to act like Mistress Bitchface, but I lay even odds that at least a factor of the apparent stick rammed up her ass is the very real awareness that without loud advertising people are going to assume she’s a sub. Not vanilla. Not a “kinkster” of no affiliation or a switch.

There is zero wrong with being a femsub, of course, but trust me, anything that decreases this sort of interaction is going to seem extremely inviting.

Evo-psych? (And ranting)

Rant time, skip if you don’t wanna see my whine about internet strangers.

I’m normally pretty Pollyanna about how all the sexualties can get along, but then some earnest person posts this, on /r/bdsmcommunity, about getting the mainstream to accept kink.

Fourth, bdsm in all its many forms is base. It is primal. That is part of the appeal That is the entire appeal. Either returning to a “natural” lust where the man dominates his woman and she thanks him for it, or some subversion of that primal nature (ie: femdom). Either way it is all about power and submission. I don’t think I need to explain how base sexual power is, but perhaps most people don’t know how deep sexual submission runs in humans.

  • You’ve all heard of Stockholm Syndrome where victims start to empathize with their captors and can even get to the point of helping them. Well there is an evolutionary psychology reason for that. As it turns out, women being taken from one tribe and brought to another to be “assimilated” was a very common practice in our early society as a species. Of those women, no doubt many resisted either killing their captors, running away, or killing their new children/themselves. Those ones tended to end up dead.

  • The women that accepted their new lot and became model wives and mothers to the warriors that stole them from their homes got to pass on their genes. That passed on to us all. The psychological response from submitting to someone sexually and completely runs nearly as old as the response for forcing someone to submit to your will.

  • Because of this we don’t really have a high ground. Vanilla people will look down on us for the primal, visceral needs we have and we will look back at them in contempt for being sexually repressed. Humankind prides itself on pretending it is more than animal. We’re just a little more in touch with reality in my opinion. (Chillbro22)

Yeeeeah, that last bit of BDSM elitism is going to fly with the vanillas. Call them less in touch with reality. Yaye!

The poor OP can’t understand why this is blistering sexism “Either returning to a “natural” lust where the man dominates his woman and she thanks him for it, or some subversion of that primal nature (ie: femdom).

Of course when I called him out, leave it to someone else to come up with an inventive (implied) rape fantasy for me:

Women are biologically physically weaker than men. As a woman, I understand that, and this is why I love being a Domme. But there is an argument to be made about the genetic psychological inherency of female submissiveness. That is obviously not for everybody, and in no way should that be a norm in a modern society (forced submission). But he’s completely correct – if YOU were taken and actually forced to submit in a third-world or tribal setting, typically you would submit or die. This still happens with women around the world today. You can’t view everything through the rose colored glasses of your cushy modern life. (AnonymouseDomina)

Yuck. I need a shower now. I hate that the OP is incapable of seeing that his stance is pro-rape and is hung up on defending not being sexist. Kinda makes me grateful for /r/femdomcommunity.

Though poor Chillbro22 provides an interesting launching point about talking about evo-psych and kink. He meant it as a way to convince vanilla people that kinksters (specifically male doms and fem subs) were more in touch with “real” sexuality.

They’re talking about this sort of scenario:

Allegedly the first Romans got wives by abducting a bunch of Sabine women. The story, and legends like it, informs popular culture, to this day.

It’s a popular idea for the M/f set, that D/s is simply returning to some sort of natural order. Gor fans tend to be particularly enamoured with this, and the books make a big deal about how the female slaves learn to be true women, and finally get emotional satisfaction now that all choice is stripped from them.

But this sort of hindsight harkening back type thinking tends to be highly reductionist. As well as the PR harm of going around telling people that BDSM practitioners are simply primal rapists and telling people their sexuality is unnatural unless they do M/f, it very much I don’t know… blue washes the past. Never mind that individual societies are highly variable in the roles they allow for women, from out right exclusive to completely inclusive,  it erases when women have been involved in society and ignore the legion of historically subjugated men.

First off, in real life, real bridal abduction (not the highly ritualized kind) is a traumatic event that doesn’t cause a woman to go into happy sub space. Case in point: in Ethiopia.

Of course you can point to the fact that the woman interviewed says she now loves her husband. On the other hand she is saying it is related to the fact that he doesn’t beat her anymore, and her marriage was painful. She didn’t go into some sort of subby trance. The ability for people to make the best of being raped and basically enslaved is not a good justification for BDSM.

The primal cave man walloping woman fantasy, outside of wanking, is shitty for a social model.

It presents a two pronged problem. In the first place it really confuses both social dominance, rape and BDSM. Additionally it assumes that what people do now is somehow un-natural and that humans have not, historically, included some kinky buggers among their ranks since time immemorial.

For example we know that throughout humanity’s history, and among other species, non-procreative sex occurs. In humans it occurs more than procreative sex. Even in a straight people fucking scenario, we take nine months to gestate, and lactation gives partial ovulation suppression. Most conceptions miscarry, or fail to implant, and humans fuck twelve months a year, every hour of the day, whether they are ovulating or not.

Even cultures that don’t generally go in for oral and anal, still masturbate. We know that sadomasochism as part of porn, though it wasn’t bound up in the trappings of ‘leather’. Even the kamasutra talks about how nice coupling induced marks are, and Georgian era porn (Fanny Hill) has an erotic flogging scene and an erotic fetishism scene in its bulging pages, while many of the BDSM tropes we enjoy today were pioneered by the Victorians. Meanwhile Saint Sebastian writhes all sexy like with arrows sticking out of him from Renaissance paintings, Japanese people were doing fun things with rope, and so on and so forth.

It might be perfectly possible the human propensity towards rape influences our kinks. I have no issue with that. But reductionist arguments glorifying a sort of problem that is ongoing today (ie the abduction of girls to be bush wives) to justify male-dom and the claim that the past was some sort of M/f buffet is fucking bullshit.

History is not a simple narrative of warrior kings and simpering princesses being passed about as property. This particular problem with historical narratives is that it in no way reflects the rich range of human expression and how we can order our hierarchies in many ways. I’m not, incidentally, even talking about societal matriarchies. Even in some of the most ghastly, sexist times, women have had power and done shit. Humans are a bit more complicated than Man 1st, woman 2nd. For example the initial European colonization of Canada was funded as a religious charity project by French noblewomen. Very tribal/family oriented cultures are infamous for putting women in positions of power before they will give the role to an outsider. Some theorists point to the “all men are equal” thinking of the Enlightenment as a period that actually took some rights away from women as they moved away from hereditary power. “Men in charge” is not a perfect rule.

But that’s neither here, nor there, as the problem with the “natural past” hypothesis is that it presupposes that we are not natural now or that we were instant Savannah transplants who went from chasing down herbivores with pointy sticks to suburban commutes. Panties are not something that occurs in nature, but plenty of people fetishize the shit out of panties. If people fetishize rape, it is just as likely they are doing it because people are being raped today, than because people were raped in the past.

Using historical sexism to label femdom aberrational is also problematic.  Obviously being treated like a weird mutant and occasional curiosity is in itself inherently harmful but…

BDSM, again, is not real power. A lot of harm is done in the community, especially towards male subs, by assigning unearned real rank to anyone who can call themselves a dom. Women holding power is not aberrant,  as when the society we live in allows us to do it, we seem to have the same natural aptitudes for leadership as men. Perpetuating, as AnonymouseDomina did, that me being happily silenced is only not happening because I live in a rare bubble… well, again, bullshit.

I wouldn’t “submit” in the D/s sense, because I’m not a sub. Sure any damn fool can beat and torture compliance, but any bully can bully a man too. Hell, I have it in me to be a domestic abuser. And if you think for one minute I have lived in a world free of sexualized violence, you have not opened your eyes to what modern life is like.

As demonstrated in the Ethopia article- women are perfectly capable of organizing against the behaviour. The ability to make the best of a miserable situation (one where you are beaten for complaining) is not really the same thing as D/s, nor are we kinky because “Grrr, caveman!”