This one is a technically well constructed partial trope reversal of the “Mars Needs Women” concept. It wasn’t exactly to my personal tastes as far as the dynamic between the leads, but there is an enjoyable inventiveness. While it has its problems, the flaws are really more of a symptom of the trope the story is built on than a failure in technical execution.
This is a smart book about a dumb idea.
Of course, going into this, I feel though, that you, the reader are presumably and adult and are able to understand that tagging and discussing a particular construction in fiction is not supposing that fantasies owe us to be tidy. Take the criticism here in that sense.
For whatever reason, space faring SciFi romance is inordinately obsessed with sexy savage and/or slavery plots. When things get horny this is particularly so, giving a very golden age of pulp novel approach to the exploration of the universe. The Other either is rough and beastiel, ready to throw you on the furs and take you; or decadently promiscuous, and have codified sex to a reliable art, the “ways of pleasure”. Sometimes this is combined together, sometimes each piece is separate. Either way, most of the time one hero, the audience character, is a stranger to these lands or assumes the reader is and narrates through it as if you are here to be shocked and titillated such things are possible.
In these stories what you get, even in space and bright blue, is a dual trope at least as old as the Roman Empire or perhaps even before that. That’s the idea you have the big dumb raiding ones impervious to normal pain who live over there; and then in this other place you have the wiley tricky perverts who are rich but soft.
[Silver observes that the reverse gender version that “Venus needs men” also reflects that fantasy of an Other who is much less reserved about sex and can be relied on to throw you into it. Like the majority rape fantasies from the perspective of the “victim”, the paradox is the violation of one person is seen as symbolic of the reassuring sincerity of the violator. Mars Needs Women usually justifies itself through the lense of ultra-patriarchy, while the Amazons of the distaff version provide the reassurance of patriarchy’s absence.]
While these tend to be the underpinning of colonial and imperial endeavors, what also makes them interesting is the near universality of projection. Virtually any modern Domme has the experience of someone from the other side of the globe addressing them like they come from a mysterious pervert culture, even in so much as they are aware there’s a pile of fiction making the opposite inference. And, as time has passed the genres of fantasy and scifi have become a new holding ground. Perhaps precisely because we can be familiar enough with virtually any other culture of humans that we can no longer project our wishful thinking, now these fantasies move into elfland and the borders of space.
Nevertheless “Sign Here For Horns” is consistent with the tropes generally lean towards “Mars Needs Women” where something makes your brutal warrior type crave humans or the Jabba the Hutt esque pillow lounging where people wear sexy little outfits and dance for you and human women are somehow preturnaturally hot. If you are the sort of person whose hackles are going to get raised by such setting justification, fair warning. The gloves are mostly off here.
This is likewise not the story many people reading femdom are looking for, powerful women with a consistent upper hand, cleverer, smarter women or even women who get to enjoy being evil. It’s not a healthy BDSM relationship, either.
You have to take this as a story about two stupendous dumbasses in an overblown pulpy universe. It’s not written as serious or to have a moral argument that slavery is a good system. It’s one that’s decided that the best way to deal with that story rattling around in ones psyche is that you project it onto the imaginary rather than the real human.
Thus Lily, our female protagonist, joins the ranks of other characters who would normally never do this, but must own a slave. Only her purchase, Jax, turns out to be a professional concubine from a species of polyandry practicing misandric gynarchs. She wanted a farmhand, she gets true love from a guy who has made it his desperate life’s purpose to find a woman to please.
Which brings me to caveat number 2, that the sex they have is nothing what one would traditionally describe as femdom. It’s not gentle vanilla either. It’s the rough, raw, taken in the furs kind, with her getting choked and reduced to a squirming mess. It’s one where he is armed with a sex pollen style growl that causes immediately horny in any listening women, regardless of its ambiguously implied it won’t turn you into a list crazed zombie unless you are actually attracted to the person doing it and secretly want to bang them.
Ordinarily this would be disappointing through to insulting, but I just found the juxtaposition of context so interesting that while I wasn’t finding the sex parts a turn on, it was a fascinatingly unselfconscious effort to deliver what having all the power might actually look like.
In an unapologetic act of fetishism, rather than trying to appeal to traditional ideas of who tops and who bottoms, the book essentially throws up its hands and acknowledges that submissive fantasies about dominants aren’t the same thing as a dominant having actual power. And it tells a story accordingly.
If we define woman as the average person who is reading barbarian alien fetish porn, yes, they probably do want to imagine some dude will intuit exactly the ratio of rail to glide in thrusting they personally need without ever needing to communicate more than a grudging admission they enjoy sex after the fifth orgasm. Jax, as a character, is a walking justification. They only thing he is missing is some sort of ferret like biology where he has to fuck in your terms or he expires, for the heroine to be able to use him entirely guilt free. Possibly the author thought that might still be too coercive in the wrong way, or too dark.
Jax is practically designed in a lab to allow the other protagonist to be lazy.
Ultimately, though this is a natural extrapolation of the regular angry cussing from dominants. That’s the one where we point out that providing dominance entirely on demand to meticulously cater to the sub’s pleasure doesn’t feel very powerful for the one playing that role. On the face of it, it’s still disappointing to me, who wants mean dommes being in charge and having power, but I can’t fault Ludwig for looking at stereotypes of femdom and deciding this wasn’t going to work.
After all, there’s a squintillion stories of dominants of any gender who are magically wise, brutally useful, scary but ultimately in the way a horse is scary, a several ton thing you can earn the loyal devotion of and then ride around.
And inversely, dominants, particularly female ones, are wise to the observation that the social rules of topping and bottoming are remarkably strict about who can do what to whom. When you do get to break those restrictions, there’s still a bunch of scrutiny to the extent that the same kink forums obsessed with everyone’s unshakeable validity will still default to reassuring that a penetrated dominant is still dominant by resorting to the most growly of stereotypes.
In that context, Ludwig has attempted to solve this problem by creating an alien species where the women have all the power and the men compete as domestic service submissives outside the bedroom, but in bed they give you all sorts of rough handling tempered entirely to please the receiver. I don’t know if an actual gynarchy would still have the particular cultural restraints ideal make behaviour is circumscribed by in the book. But I can say that there’s something incredibly honest about the dynamic depicted as indulgence for the average reader.
I am not the average reader, at least not by a typical writer’s perception of me, but I can hardly blame them for trying something closer to service topping, can I?
Of course, at its worst the book still struggles with the problem of wanting the female lead to be sympathetic, but also wanting her to own a slave. I have mentioned in the past the usual method of ensuring this is either the person gets gifted a slave by more terrible but powerful people she is also victim to, or she rescues them in a whim and the place where the rescuer is travelling through makes immediate manumission somehow worse than going along with it. No such figleaf is here.
Sign Here For Horns assumes the reader needs her hand held through the brutality of the system Lily is participating in. But rather than leaning on making her not know any better or forced by someone else, she just can’t afford to pay a field hand and her farm will go under. Furthermore, it’s immediately made clear that this is sheer stubbornness as her wealthy best friend offers to rescue her and she immediately turns down the money.
Of course the setting gets her halfway there by having no concept of slavery outside a sort of dating service of last resort. He is culturally inclined to not want anything else, and literally anything she can do that is not beating him and throwing him into the street is worthy of his gratitude. What the modern reader would characterize as the trad wife life is a pipe dream akin to a lottery. Lily needs to do literally nothing else other than offer monogamy and she’s first among all women.
But this puts her scruple talk in somewhat of a different light.
She dismisses the mistress/slave talk because it makes her personally uncomfortable, but keeps the parts that are convenient, like the free labour and the shock collar.
These stories always have an inevitable point they take the perfect remote control shock collar off the slave character, but even then things like “salary” or “true freedom of movement” weren’t on the table yet. The ending obviously ends with him free, devoted to her and able to negotiate, but there was a bit too much wanting to have its cake and eat it too around the “nonono I am a nice mistress” when she knew all the slaves available were flat out victims of violence.
In a lot of ways the effort to give her relatable scruples actually makes her less sympathetic.
I don’t think most readers of these reviews will like this one, but if you daydream of an FLR outside the bedroom and then getting topped roughly exactly the way you like inside it, this one’s for you.