Bonus Interview

I have another interview that I really want to share with you all. This one is with The Sugar Monster, who really is quite sweet, and as you will shortly see for yourself, is also quite insightful and interesting. So much of the great stuff she said pertains to bottoming as much, if not more, than topping but I think there are a lot of thought-provoking ideas and discussion points here so I wanted to give you all a chance to read what Heidi has to say.

Here she is!

• How would you describe yourself, your sexual tastes, and your power exchange preference?

I’m a pansexual, fat-positive, sex-positive feminist who is working to accept her body and find absolute joy in it!  And I’m a pain slut, through and through.

For a lot of years I identified as a submissive.  But then I realized all of my bdsm experience involved physical submission and not emotional.  Thinking that through, I realized that what I liked was the pain.  My scenes were silly and fun, filled with laughter and shrieks and me screaming swear words and talking back while having my body destroyed.  Now I identify as a bottom.  I’m 33 and can say that I’ve never psychologically submitted to someone and I’ve never experienced subspace.  I have to admit, that makes me a bit envious of others.  I’d love to feel that absolute surrender; that ability to float away.  But, alas, I’ve never reached that point.  Maybe I’ve never been pushed far enough.  Or maybe I’ve just never found the person to bring that out in me.

In terms of my sexual tastes/kinks…  Clearly I love pain.  I love being flogged and whipped.  Biting and scratching.  I love needles and cutting.  And I LOVE barehanded spanking.  While I can take a lot of pain on my ass and back, I can take even more on my tits.  I like them slapped and punched, clothespins and alligator clamps, pain sticks and single tails.  I love to bleed.  I love seeing how much pain I can take.  I love having my boundaries found and then pushed.  I love
screaming at the top of my lungs while taking more than I thought possible.  I’m not doing it to please my top, I’m doing it to please me.  I’m doing it to see how strong I’m capable of being.

I’ve been asked why I like being hurt; if it’s an emotional need.  To some degree it is.  But, honestly, I just love the way it feels. Wanting the pain is like wanting sex.  Like wanting to be kissed and touched and fucked.  I crave it.  I ache for it.  I need it.  I know that’s hard for people to understand.  I try to explain that pleasure is a continuum.  If finding pleasure from a swat on the ass is acceptable and understandable, why isn’t being slapped in the face?

In terms of power exchange, I do greatly enjoy incest and age play.  I love calling men “daddy” and having a sister to play with.  To me, daddy/daughter is the ultimate exchange of power; the ultimate power relationship.  And I love the pure obscenity of it.  Sometimes something is hot simply because of how “wrong” it is.

When I’m in control, I love spanking and slapping.  Since I don’t have much upper body strength I like to focus on spots that are a bit more tender than the ass or back.  I love slapping inner thighs and breasts/nipples.  And I love slapping pussy.  God, I love the shrieks that come from that!  I love digging my nails and teeth in deep. Marking someone up turns me on so much.  It’s like I’m claiming my property.  I love biting nipples and pulling hair.  When I’m being gone down on, I love to grab handfuls of hair and pull their face harder against me.

In terms of things I’d love to try…  Being the rapist of both girls and boys.  I have this long standing fantasy of dressing like a guy, wearing a strap on, and fucking the shit out a boy dressed in a little skirt and pretty panties.  Playing mommy in real life (all my experience has been online/the phone), cotopping (teaming up with someone else to dominate and hurt a pretty little thing), tying one partner to a chair and making them watch while I fuck someone else, choking someone with both hands or a belt/rope, making someone bleed. I want to spit in someone’s face and in their mouth.  I want to control someone’s masturbation/orgasms.  I want to be fucking worshiped.  While I’ve fucked girls and boys  with my fingers and toys, I’ve fantasized for many years about using a harness/strap on or a double headed dildo.

I want to hurt a boy.  I want to destroy him with my teeth and nails. I want him to beg for mommy.  I want to slam my cock down his throat until he chokes and cries.  I want to see tears pour down his cheeks and spit down his chin.  The idea of forcing someone to their knees and shoving my cock down their throat just turns me on so incredibly much.  I want to rip open his ass and make him moan louder than he ever has before.  I want to flog and paddle and whip his soft,
unblemished skin.  I want to make him bleed.  I do also fantasize about doing these things to women but, for whatever reason, my topping fantasies more often focus on men.

• Could you explain the difference between physical and emotional submitting, for you?

For me, personally, I differentiate between bottoming and submitting. I view bottoming as a purely physical act.  When I bottom to someone, I’m still in control and I’m fully conscious of that control.  I may be getting the shit beaten out of me, being cut, being whipped, being made to bleed but I’m always aware that I can stop it and walk away. That these things are happening because I want them to be.

Whereas, submission, I view as much more psychological.  (Keep in mind, I’ve never submitted to anyone so this is purely theoretical!) Submission is about giving up that control.  About feeling truly free of decision and authority.  Feeling that your actions are no longer yours to determine or decide.  It’s possible I’m not capable of that and, currently, I don’t really feel much desire to try.  I just don’t really feel it’s what I need or want.  But I’m always open to the possibility that I just haven’t met the person who has brought that out in me.

• How did you discover your interest in topping and bottoming?

I remember tying my Barbies up and having Ken spank them.  I used their little robe sashes to tie their hands behind their backs and their ankles together.  I bent them over Ken’s knees and had him slap their asses.  I never saw porn, I was never exposed to kink at that age.  I have no idea where it came from but it was always there.

When I was a teen I would use rope and candle wax on myself when I masturbated.  I scratched and bit the places I could reach.  This was long before I had a partner.  As I grew older and became involved in the kink community and was topped, I realized how very much into pain I was.

As much of a dirty little pain slut as I am, I absolutely do fantasize about topping.   Frequently.  I’ve had some topping experience.  Mild, by my definition.  Tying up my partner, some hot wax, spanking, pegging, feminization, forcing him to suck my dildos, ice cubes… Some mommy/little boy fantasy exchange via IM.  Nothing that I’d consider major domination.  But my fantasies?  Oh man.

While the desire to be hurt has always been part of me, the desire to top and cause pain has really only revealed itself in the last few years.

The more I accept myself and my body, the more varied my desires become.  The more I accept my own power, the more I want to bring that into my sex life.  As I realize how strong I am, the more I want to top someone else.  Not saying that submissives/bottoms are powerless; tthey’re absolutely not.  I just think that as I accept who I am and discover my voice and power, my desires and needs are making themselves better known.

• Compare your first experiences to sex now. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?

I used to take what I could get.  Sex that left me unfulfilled and pissed off because I didn’t know how to ask for more.  I wanted to be gone down on but was frozen and couldn’t bring myself to ask.  I couldn’t even tell my partners to rub my clit.  I had been a sex educator for Planned Parenthood but couldn’t bring myself to say, “Rub my clit and make me come!”  I was the queen of filthy phone sex but couldn’t tell a flesh and blood partner to eat my cunt.  And it was all because I didn’t think I deserved it.  It was all because I thought that my body was so unappealing that I should just keep my mouth shut and take what people were willing to give.

And that?  Is BULLSHIT.

As I realized that I deserved orgasms and happiness and unbelievably hot sex, the more vocal and demanding I became.  I’ve learned to speak up and make my desires clear…even in person!

Kink has taught me that my body is desirable and fun.  It’s taught me about communication and boundaries.  It’s taught me that I’m allowed to have limits and to say no.  Kink has taught me to be a stronger and more assertive person, even when I’m bottoming and having the shit beaten out of me.

• Describe your ideal partner, and your ideal relationship?

My ideal relationship would be with someone who is as open to giving pain as they are receiving.  I want rough, angry sex where we both bite and claw and leave marks and bruises.  I’m a huge proponent for communication – both sexually and not.  Laughter and adventures.  A partner in crime!  Someone who appreciates my quirks and loves kissing.  Someone who can’t keep their hands off me and can match my sex drive.  A person to watch MST3K with and who eats my pussy without being asked.  Is that too much to ask for!?

• Would you say your kink is something that you do, or part of who you are?

I think of kink as a part of who I am.  I think our sexuality and fantasies and desires change and evolve as we ourselves do.  As I change, so do my sexual needs and expressions.

• How have you handled being kinkier than your partner?

My last boyfriend was vanilla.  He was in his 40s and had never so much as spanked someone.  But he loved me and wanted to please me.  I taught him to hurt me.  I taught him to choke and slap me.  I begged daddy to fuck me and he growled what a dirty little whore I was.  It was wonderful.  He loved me so much that he was willing to explore with me and try new things.

I know it confused him.  He said, “I love you…why would I hurt you?”  Happily, he took really well to it and ended up loving it.  I know it was a struggle for him but he wanted to make me happy.  And he did.

• Do you think there is a connection between feminism and femdom? If so, how would you characterize it?

I think there’s a connection between feminism and ALL aspects of sexuality.  We’re taught that if we’re raped, we’re asking for it.  If we say no, we’re prudes.  If we say yes, we’re whores.  You can’t win.  And since we can’t win, we need to play a new game.  One that allows all women to express their sexuality in any damn way they please.

Feminism empowers women to discover and accept what brings them happiness, empowerment, and joy.  Don’t ever doubt that what turns you on is acceptable.  There’s so much slut-shaming in this society that any woman who owns her sexuality and her body is a feminist.  Even if she’s on her knees, bowing before her owner.

Being who you are and fucking how you want makes you a revolutionary.

• Are you involved in a community of like-minded people [locally, online, etc]?  If so, how is that experience for you? If not, have you avoided it purposefully?

I am!  Up until a year and a half ago I was completely uninvolved.  I’d done a lot with sexual partners but wasn’t involved in the community at all.

It’s had a HUGE impact on my life.  In addition to experiencing all kinds of new things (needles, cutting, violet wands, TENS units, whips, etc.) I was suddenly surrounded by people who cared about me and my safety.

At my first play party, I got naked.  I got naked in front of a roomful of people I’d never met before.  I likened it to jumping into a cold pool – shocking myself into something I was terrified of.  And an amazing thing happened.  People told me I was beautiful.  People watched me and oohed and aahed at the pain I took.  They admired my extensive bruising and asked to touch.  They told me my 350 pound body was beautiful, that my ass was so spankable, that my tits marked so
amazingly.  The body acceptance I found in my kink community changed my life.  I got naked without hesitation in front of strangers at parties and lived by the motto: if they don’t like it, they don’t have to look.  But they did look, with no judgment or mockery.

Then something bad happen.  I had a horrible experience with someone I trusted.  Someone I played with privately decided to use me to show off; to prove he was a “real” dominant.  So we played at a party and he hurt me.  He hit me harder with toys he knew I didn’t like he.  He hit me so hard I had trouble walking for several days.  He was sloppy and kept hitting me in the face when he was aiming for my back.  He ignored my body language, even though we had played often enough for him to know something was different.  And it was terrifying.  I didn’t use my safeword.  I froze.  I was confused and scared and didn’t know what to do other than curl up and try to get away from him.  I blamed myself for not stopping him.  I was wrong, it was my fault, all of it.

But something surprising happened.  Four people – completely independent of one another – approached me to tell me what he did was wrong.  That they could see I was scared and that something wasn’t right.  That, based on his display, they would never let him touch their property.
And they told me it wasn’t my fault.  That a true dominant reads body language.  That a true dominant would have seen what every single person in that room saw: a scared girl being hurt in an unacceptable way, trying to get away.  Ultimately I confronted him.  And, of course, he blamed me and everyone else in the room.  Though I completely take responsibility for not speaking up as it was happening, I also know he holds fault as well.  And he’s someone I will never allow to touch me again.

This, eventually, led to a good friend of mine (a dominant woman) taking on the role of my protector.  She approved who I could play with and what they could do to me.  She did it because she cared for me.  She took care of me because I wasn’t yet able to take care of myself.  She loved me more than I could love myself.

With the help of her and other people in the community I learned how to say “no.”  I learned that I deserved boundaries and that I could, in fact, get what I wanted without compromising myself or my health.

The community helped me in another extremely important way.  For a long time I viewed my desires and needs as inappropriate.  That they were the result of my childhood abuse.  That they were proof of how very broken I was.  But, suddenly, I was surrounded by normal, kind, amazing people who just happened to like beating and being beaten.  I was normal.  I was acceptable.  I was fine just the way I was.

Kink taught me how to respect myself and love myself in a way I never had before.

• Do you have any advice about what to watch out for regarding people (like the dom you mentioned) who are not safe?

The most important thing I’d want people to realize is: you’re a submissive/bottom, not a doormat.  You’re allowed to say “no.”  You’re allowed to have boundaries.  You’re allowed to be incapable of things and that doesn’t make you bad at this.  You’re allowed to stop a scene if it feels wrong or painful in a bad way.

Sadly, I think it can be a bit easier for shitty and abusive people to cover their awful selves under the title of “dom.”  My biggest suggestion is to talk to others about people you’re considering playing with.  I’m very insistent on pointing out that this isn’t gossip, this is you protecting yourself.  And you are ALLOWED to protect yourself.  I found out, after the fact, that the top who hurt me had ignored the safe word of two submissives before me.  People didn’t tell me because they thought I already knew or that it wasn’t their place.  Which I completely understand.  If I were in their positions, I can’t say I’d have done any differently.  But I learned that I REALLY should have asked around more before trusting someone with my body and my physical safety.

Also, listen to your instincts.  Your gut usually knows what’s best.  The man who hurt me had raised so many red flags before that incident.  He intentionally kept his positive STI status from me until after we’d engaged in (safe) sex.  So that alone told me he didn’t respect me and couldn’t be trusted with my safety.  But I forgave him and put myself in a risky situation because I stupidly thought I had to take what I could get; that nobody else could possibly want to play with
someone who looked like me or was inexperienced like me.

Basically: realize you deserve to say “no”, talk to people about the person(s) you’re considering playing with, and trust your gut.  And forgive yourself if you make mistakes doing any of those things.

• Which of the love languages would say you prefer?

All!  But taking the quiz, Words of Affirmation seems to take the cake.  But I must say, Physical Touch is so important as well.  Even just leaning against a friend while we watch a movie makes me feel so close and connected to them.

—-

Ok, there it is!

Questions and comments welcome, and I can’t wait to see ‘em!

But…how does it work with kids?

I rather love weekends when my children go to visit family members, or when we can manage to schedule them both with a sleep-over on the same night. Opportunities to stay in hotels overnight are much enjoyed as well. Sometimes though, parents have kids in the house when urges which refuse to be deferred rise up.

On those occasions the radio/CD player we keep in our room proves itself indispensable and though we may not use the D rings he installed in a doorway, there are claws and teeth, and dark, hot fantasies whispered that are ever so much louder in our minds than they can be in the quiet stillness of a school night in an average suburban home.

Just as is true for everyone, we find ways to do what we really want to do.

Call Stuart Smalley; I’m not sure I can help.

Over the last few years I’ve received a lot of messages regarding the exquisite physiques and generously-sized phalluses which are heavily featured on my Tumblr ( I would like to point out there is also a wide variety of ages and regular body types presented). Most of this correspondence I get on my Tumblr takes the form of appreciation but sometimes the messages are from men who’ve been engaging in comparisons and they write to tell me that they feel they have no hope of ever measuring up.

If these men gives me a way to respond privately I generally offer reassurances and some reality therapy, but anonymous writers leave me with only the option of publishing their message to reply or ignoring them. I usually choose not to publish them because my Tumblr’s main purpose is to collect sexy eye candy for me (and those who share my tastes) and to be completely honest, I have a slight prejudice against hiding in anonymity. It seems a lot of body criticism comes from those hiding behind anonymous log-ins and while I don’t necessarily assume the men asking me to soothe their own body image issues are doing so between rounds of hateful comments on the photos of others who do not conform to idealized norms… it has crossed my mind to wonder.

One group which doesn’t exactly get reassurances from me are the men who have their own Tumblrs which are packed to the rafters with unrealistic female images. Instead, they usually get a couple of pointed questions and quite often that seems to render the conversation of limited interest to them. Men who specialize in posting photos of women who are probably anorexic and have invested thousands of dollars in plastic surgery don’t get a lot of sympathy from me when they get a little self-conscious about their beer belly after viewing some well-muscled men my blog. 

Just FYI,

if your specialty is posting women with a BMI of 17 and tits the size of the Titanic— then it is hard for me to feel badly for you when you tell me my images of guys with a BMI of about 21 and a six pack are responsible for flooding you with self-doubt. Sauce and geese and whatnot, ok? 

I received another of these anonymous messages this week, and its especially whiny tone annoyed me quite badly. I just deleted it it because my response would have been unkind but I have been considering the subject since then.

Women have been dealing with body image expectations (including some spectacularly unrealistic expectations) for years as well as all the associated trauma, and this continues unabated despite some efforts to try popularize healthier ways of thinking and interacting with the topic. Now we find  that men are increasingly concerned with body image these days and feeling overwhelmed by the expectations. 

It is sad that equality regarding body image doesn’t mean that both men and women get to feel good about their bodies. Ooooh no, instead the equality we’ve produced in western culture is that men who are paying attention now seem to feel as beleaguered about it as women.

So here is my solution to the problem we share. How about we stop comparing ourselves to unrealistic images? 

People who devote themselves to looking good as a full-time job (models and actors) are probably not the best means of comparison for the average Joe/Jane.

Campaigns to get more realistic images on screens, magazine covers, and billboards are great, but we can make some personal choices too regarding how we think about the images we see and how we think about ourselves. I mean, come on, when you go for a swim are you expecting your lap time to compete with Michael Phelps’?

Let’s love ourselves, dammit, and not be nasty little trolls about how other people look. Can we do that???

As for the men who look at my Tumblr and start worrying— I’ll make you a deal.

Don’t expect me to look like this and I won’t expect you to look like this.

Interview # 30

Well, you might have wondered when it would happen, and here it is. The final entry in this series of interviews, and I have saved one of my favorites for last.

This interview is with Ferns of Fetlife fame and the award winning blog Domme Chronicles. There are many awesome recurring features on her blog but one of my favorite is her collection of Happy Femdom Stories. Worth a read and if you have a story to tell, please let her know!

Here is what Ferns had to say…

•  How would you describe yourself, your sexual tastes, and your power exchange preference?

Starting with the mother of all questions here. Kudos!

I’d describe myself as complex, my sexual tastes run to the passionate and obsessive, and I want what I want when I want it.

• How did you discover your power exchange preference?

I was a pretty confident, smart, take-no-bullshit young woman, and I always attracted men who would fall over themselves to do what I wanted (even before I really figured out what I wanted).  Given my later proclivities, I should have been happy with that, right? But I found them insufferably dull because I would push at them, and they would roll over at the slightest hint of my disapproval, would become scared to even express an opinion in case it wasn’t one I liked, they were cowed. The meaner I was, the more they liked me even though that wasn’t what I wanted.

I would steamroll right over them, lose respect and then get bored. Go figure.

I didn’t like myself being that person, and I want to apologise to every man who crossed my path in those days, but I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong, nor could I figure out how to fix it. I chose men I liked and then walked all over them until there was nothing left.

I finally figured I needed a man who would stand up to me. The logic of the young me is perfectly sound, oh, young Ferns, you silly thing!! *laugh* Are you getting a picture of what that might have looked like, and a hint that maybe that didn’t work out so well? Yeah, it didn’t.

I sought out stronger and stronger willed men and finally had a truly horrible relationship (which I fondly refer to as “the relationship from hell”) with a man who never backed down. In that relationship, I discovered a capacity for rage that I had never seen in myself before and have never seen since. Had you asked me if I was capable of that kind of blind and violent rage before that relationship, I’d have laughed my head off and said “Oh hell no!” So *obviously* that didn’t work either.

I struggled with my relationships with men until I met my first vanilla submissive when I was about 26. A strong, smart, fabulous, opinionated man who laid it all down at my feet because he loved me and wanted to see me happy. I led and he blossomed under it, and he never collapsed like the men in my early relationships. Every decision was a clear choice on his part, handing me the power over and over again, with love and incredible sweetness, and every time he did, we grew closer. He was the first man I fell in love with, and the first I felt sexually free with. I used to have lists of ‘things I wanted to do in bed’, and he was wonderfully adventurous and compliant (duh!). On the kink side, I was never one who discussed my sex life with girlfriends, so I thought I was ‘normal’ until my female flatmate was all ‘eeewww’ when she saw what we had in the bedroom (*nothing* scary… it was totally kink-lite!!). It was the first time I thought that maybe I wasn’t sitting in the middle of the bell curve.

• Compare your early sexual experiences to sex now. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?

The biggest thing for me is owning my sexuality.

When I was young, my sexuality never really seemed to belong to me. I wanted to unleash this power and passion that I felt, but I very rarely felt like I could express it without attracting a lot of unwanted attention, so I stifled it a lot of the time. Instead of an owner, I felt like the gatekeeper of my own sexuality, always saying ‘no’ to unwanted advances, never being free to have what I wanted, never feeling like I could explore at my own pace because that’s not how the boy-girl thing worked.

If I ever expressed any sexual interest in any man (a glance too long, flirting, touching, *anything*), my experience was that they would then run at me like a bull at a gate, and once again, I became the sexual gatekeeper because I knew (even before I had *any* experience) that I would not get the sex that I wanted under those circumstances. It was beyond tedious and I really hated it.

I often felt like my sexuality was being hijacked by someone else’s agenda or expectations and there was no room to express myself in the way I wanted, and it took me a long time to figure out why that was. Once I figured out that it was about control, I was able to better figure out how to find my complement.

• Tell me what it is about domination that appeals to you.

I find that an odd question. Um, it makes me happy, and being happy is awesome!  *laugh* 

From a practical, unromantic point of view, I need to have harmony in my romantic relationships, and I don’t like too much compromise. Both disharmony and uber-compromise make me resentful and unhappy. Those things are both resolved if I am the dominant partner. I am actually really easy going (truly, I am!) and there are a million things I just don’t care about. Really, don’t care. I’m not a control freak, and on those things I’m not interested in, he can do what he wants, and I will often task him with taking the lead because I’m not at all interested in making decisions about things I don’t have a strong opinion about. But I hate power struggles, I find them a tedious time wasting chore, so when I *do* care about something, I don’t want to argue about it, and I don’t want to give in. Agreeing up-front that I have the final say eliminates that tedium.

From a romantic point of view, dominance is how I show love, desire, affection, tenderness. When I love him I want everything from him, I want to get inside his brain and run it like his mind is my playground, I want to see the world from there, through his eyes, I want his every breath to be mine, I want everything of him to belong to me. When I lust after him, I want to rip the skin from his bones and crawl inside him, stick my hands into his body and touch him everywhere, I want him splayed open, vulnerable, raw and messy and then I want to be the one to save him from that torment. When I show affection, I want to run him into a wall and smash his head against it and meld my mouth with his until he is struggling to breath, and then still suck the air from him and have him melt with me in it. When I am being tender with him, I want to wrap him up all safe and warm, to pet him gently and coo sweetness and feel him soft and small and trusting against me.

For me, D/s is a way to get all of that.

• Describe your ideal partner, and your ideal relationship?

What I look for in a D/s relationship is a full-on romantic-love relationship with a submissive life partner. I want a man who is endlessly fascinating to me, and who is, in turn, endlessly fascinated by me. Someone who is my emotional, intellectual, physical, sexual complement, who fits, who ‘gets’ me and wants to be the yin to my yang.

In a relationship, I want to hold hands and tell secrets and have a language that only we understand. I want to be ridiculous together and laugh so much that we can’t even breath anymore. And when I have him do something for me because I told him to, I want his heart to swell in his chest with the pleasure of it.

• Do you think there is a connection between feminism and femdom? If so, how would you characterize it?

I don’t see it specifically, and I actually loved Tess’ entire answer to this question in interview #18. This quote summarises the key point that I took from it:

“There’s a definite connection between feminism and a deep understanding of
powerplay, trust, and ones own sexual desire, and that awareness means that the display, the
roleplay of power imbalance is fully understood by everyone involved and doesn’t reflect any kind of
actual inequality.”

This is true regardless of orientation, so I don’t see it related to femdom specifically.

• The cultural image of women who prefer to take the lead sexually is rarely positive. How has that affected you?

One of the reasons I started my blog was because I wasn’t seeing the relationships of ‘women like me’ represented out there in the world. That is, dominant women in primary, monogamous, heterosexual, romantic, hot, sexy D/s relationships, experiencing the gamut of real issues and emotions that we go though in life. I’m sure they were there, but I just couldn’t find them and Ifound it frustrating that we weren’t being seen.

Socially, I think anyone who is part of a sexual minority has problems, and I think those of dominant women like me pale in comparison to many others, so I always feel a little guilty and self indulgent complaining about it when I am fully aware that I can live a happy healthy life without anyone ever bothering me about it. I’m a middle class, heterosexual, cisgendered white woman who has had relatively successful relationships, and for me personally, my level of ‘being affected’ looks something like this:

“Waaah, my pool of possible partners would be so much bigger if we didn’t scare off so many fabulous men with the hideous misconceptions and stereotyping! Stop it!!”

*kicks dirt*

I told you: self indulgent.

Having said that, I don’t want to make light of the difficulties many dominant women and submissive men (and other orientations) have, and continue to have, legally, emotionally, socially etc. We have a frighteningly pervasive culture of shaming those who don’t fit into the nice neat little boxes that the conservative majority have made for us all and that are reflected back to us in every form of media. I think it harms all of us to have our sexuality denied or marginalised, and having these social narratives that herd us down paths that we can’t possibly navigate is causing damage to all of us to varying degrees.

I sometimes get emails from new dominant women who have found my blog while searching for information about ‘femdom’, and often they are incredibly relieved to have found something that they can relate to. It makes me so delighted that they found me, but at the same time, it breaks my heart a little when they talk about how they have felt ‘wrong’ or ‘sick’ or just terribly unhappy because they couldn’t figure out where they fit and they felt so terribly alone. That’s the cost of both negative perceptions and stereotyping.

There have been many discussions in the blogosphere about how this cultural negativity impacts submissive men also, both out in the world *and* in the community, with a focus on the devaluing of submissive men *because* they are submissive. If you haven’t read any of those pieces, you can start here with Dev, then go here to read Chaos  and then here with Kitty.

• How well do you feel your tastes and your sexuality is represented in the erotica available today?

The short answer is that it’s not represented, but then, my porn taste doesn’t necessarily reflect my *own* sexuality all that well either, and there are complex reasons for that which I will not get into here.

In porn, I run to the extreme and it is almost always about attack and non-consensual helplessness: predator and prey. What I really want is out-of-control passion and sexual violence: I want to see crazy-scary desire to the point where the submissive is mostly just a thing to be used to get off.

My preferences are usually much better represented in M/f porn because it’s generally all about the dominant taking pleasure at the expense of the helpless submissive, with lots of sexual violence and selfishness and sweaty dirty tears, and the dominant using the submissive to get off. That’s what I want in my F/m porn.

I think James Deen’s films have introduced a new version of M/f porn based on pretty believable connection, including desire, passion, and kissing (and not ‘porn kissing’ which is bafflingly often about the actors sticking their tongues out as far as possible and waggling them about… what the hell *is* that?!). As a more realistic representation of BDSM encounters that includes an emotional component, I’d love to see the equivalent of *that* in F/m porn also. It’s much closer to my own D/s reality, but as porn, it’s just not extreme enough for me.

<insert further complicated thoughts about my masturbation fantasies here, the summary of which is “Holy hell, it’s scary in there…”>

• You are, in my opinion, one of the highlights of Fetlife, and I love your blog too. How do you feel about online kink communities and real life communities?

*smile* Thank you, that’s so lovely!!

When I first discovered BDSM eleventy gazillion years ago, I went out quite a bit. Munches, events, clubs etc, but after the glow of newness wore off, I realised that the community was just not for me. The people were nice enough, friendly, welcoming, but I just didn’t fit there. My BDSM is not a social activity, so I never really felt comfortable: I’m really not a joiner, I’m not into public play, I’m not a voyeur, and I never met a partner in the scene, so I just stopped going.

Online communities provide me with enough of a sense that there are ‘folks like me’ around, and I have found nearly all of my submissives online since way back when.

I’m a member of CollarMe, and met my boy-before-last there, and have made some friends there who I have had for years, so I see value in it even though complaining about it is almost an international sport.

For discussions, though, I find Fetlife suits me much better. I like the diversity of groups because it caters to a wide variety of interests and tastes. For me, it’s a low stress way to interact when I have the time and interest. I get to take part in various discussions, help other people if I can, learn new things, make some friends AND meet potential partners, so win-win-win-win. I found my last boy there, so I am hugely biased towards it. Like any community, there is a fair share of idiocy, but I choose not to engage with idiots on the internet, so I find it easy to ignore.

I think with all of these communities, you have to find what suits you (if anything), and then you have to put in the effort to get the best out of it. I think there is an expectation for some newbies that any BDSM community is a safe haven of kumbya-ers who all sing from the same song book and who will bring them into the fold like lost relatives, but that just isn’t the case. There are ‘like minded’ individuals (regardless of what your mind is like), but there are also those who make you want to stick knitting needles through your own eyes just so you don’t have to witness the utter stupidity any more. People are people, and a ‘BDSM community’ of any sort is as diverse as any group of people.

• Does being dominant in a non-sexual setting (work, etc) energize you?

Nope, I don’t think of interactions outside of my personal relationships in terms of dominance and submission.

My last job was a senior management position for a large company, and with it came the expected responsibilities of leadership. I was good at it, but it was a job. No more, no less. When I did my job well, I was pleased. When I screwed up, I felt bad. I didn’t feel like anyone was submitting to me, and got no particular feelings from being ‘dominant’.

Same with friends, I am most often the ‘yay, someone else is organising this, I’m so happy. Just tell me the plan, and I’m there…’ person. I don’t feel like the organiser is dominating me, nor that I am submitting to anyone in that scenario either.

• Which of the love languages would say you prefer?

I’ve never looked at this before, and I found the quiz profoundly irritating (oh come on! For ‘husbands’ and ‘wives’? Ugh *spit*), but I did it. Just for you!

The result: Primarily physical touch, with quality time and acts of service equal and close second.

I often refer to D/s as a language of love for me, corny as it sounds. I express my love by asserting my dominance, and seek a partner who expresses his love by submitting wholeheartedly and with pleasure. I’m not sure that fits one of the five. Maybe it’s the sixth.

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I’d like to thank Ferns for this interview and if you have any questions. ask ‘em in the comment section.

Interview # 29

This interview features the delightfully evil genius behind the blog Delving into Deviance.

 

Her post on the devaluation of male submission should probably be blamed for these interviews, as they are an offshoot of my interviews with sub guys, which happened as a direct result of Dev’s post. She also participated in a four-part discussion about  Religion and Kink I posted last year.

 

If you aren’t following her wordy blog or her tumblr— you are missing out.

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• How would you describe yourself, your sexual tastes, and your power exchange preference?

I actually consider myself to be a switch even though I’ve been a dominant for the last 5 years. Mostly I identify as a dominant and a sadomasochist. However, when I first started getting into BDSM (and had an inclination that I wanted to be a top) I had no idea where to start, lived in a very small town and happened to know a Dom who was not going to switch, so I subbed to him for awhile to see what it was like. I surprised myself by really enjoying the experience, but still felt like I would never want to be submissive all the time in a long term relationship. Since then I had one partner with whom I would switch on a scene to scene basis. When we broke up I decided I really wanted to explore how deep D/s could go, so I had a relationship (with FT) wherein we had a 24/7 dynamic. In my current relationship we’ve had a 24/7 power exchange thus far, but we’re actually in the process of switching. Both of us are feeling like we might want to let the other side of our sexuality come out to play for awhile (he’s a switch too). We’re figuring out how to do that in a satisfying way because we both really enjoy our current dynamic, and plan on returning to it eventually, but are curious about mixing things up.

To discuss a different facet of my sexuality, I am pansexual and like experimenting with gender. I enjoy crossdressing and like to make my subs crossdress. I like fucking and being fucked. I tend to go for somewhat feminine men and somewhat masculine women, and am attracted to transsexual and genderqueer people.

• How did you discover your power exchange preference?

I discovered my interest in power exchange when I was cast as a dominatrix in a play at the age of 18. I had little inklings of it before then, but that’s when I began to realise that this was something that I really liked and wanted to do more of. When we blocked the scene in which I flogged my submissive until he fell down on the ground and then I dragged him up by his collar I suddenly found myself wanting to ask my scene partner out. Unfortunately he wasn’t a sub in real life, so that didn’t work out in the end. After that I started investigating more. I had an ex-girlfriend from high school who I knew was submissive, so I talked to her about it. I was single at the time, so I began looking for people who were also kinky, but mostly found male dominants at first (again, small town without a scene). After subbing for awhile I met up with the subby ex-girlfriend when we were back home at the same time and had my first scene as a top. I loved it and wanted more. I’m still exploring, and plan on doing so for the rest of my life.

• Compare your early sexual experiences to sex now. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?

One thing I’ve learned is to listen to yourself and tell people what you want. Of course, to do that, you need to figure out what you want, and you have to get used to doing that rather quickly sometimes. As an example, I once had a threesome that ended up ruining an otherwise great relationship because it went further than I wanted it to and I didn’t stop it. I ended up feeling violated and it was my fault but I couldn’t help feeling negatively about my girlfriend for awhile, which happened to coincide with her moving an hour further away, so things just fizzled. Later I got into a threeway relationship where I told both partners exactly what I wanted out of the relationship, and got exactly that. It was a good feeling. These are just examples. I think that the idea of really listening to yourself and being honest about your emotions is important whether you’re a top or bottom, dom or sub. Everyone will be happier in the end.

• Are you currently involved with someone?

I am currently involved with my boyfriend Edward. Until recently, he’s been my 24/7 submissive. For a description of our daily routine and a bit about us in that respect go here.

We met at a munch. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was certainly lust at first sight. We met eyes across a crowded room. He was looking absolutely adorable in a corset, eyeliner and a suit. I wanted him instantly, and the feeling was mutual. I whipped him that evening with his dragon tail (we have a rather playful munch) and we exchanged numbers. FT and I were still together then and were going through a monogamous month before we were meeting up for a month (as we were in a long distance relationship), so nothing happened after that for at least 2 months. When I was back and FT and I were free to see others again, we went out and had a fantastic time. We ate oysters, drank champagne, I put him in a straightjacket, he went down on me on the roof. Just a typical date.  :p

Things progressed from there and have been pretty ideal. He loves serving me. I love being served. However, we’re both switches and recently we’ve both been feeling like we might like to experience the other side of things, so we’re trying that for a month to see how it goes.

• Do you think there is a connection between feminism and femdom? If so, how would you characterize it?

I think that embracing sexual dominance when it appeals to you can be very empowering, but I certainly don’t think you have to be a femdom to be a feminist on the scene. Embracing whatever arouses you and being sexually fulfilled is, to me, a feminist thing, but you can do that as a sub too. However, I have used female domination as a thought experiment for myself too. What if I could control another person’s entire life (finances, career, etc.)? What if I could be the breadwinner and he could be the stay-at-home dad? These thoughts appeal to me. But they’re no more feminist (or even dominant) than, “I really love kids and I’m going to stay at home and take care of mine because that’s what I want to do”.

• The cultural image of women who prefer to take the lead sexually is rarely positive. How has that affected you?

To be honest it’s made me reluctant to take the lead initially unless I know that it’s someone who will respond favorably to that. I’ve had more than one experience wherein I’ve been slut shamed for having a little initiative. Obviously that tells you that that’s someone you shouldn’t sleep with again, but it’s hurtful. I used to have overly romantic notions of even kissing where I felt like it should always just happen and not be sought out. When I was 13 I remember really wanting to drag my boyfriend into a secluded stairwell to pin him up against a wall and make out with him for ages, but I felt like that wasn’t something that good girls do. Luckily I’ve mostly grown out of that, but I can’t say that it doesn’t impact me at all even now.

• How well do you feel your tastes and your sexuality is represented in the erotica available today and does that matter to you?

I don’t feel like my tastes and sexuality are represented very well in the erotica available today. Luckily, queer porn is popping up and that is nice to see. However, mostly I have to find amateur porn in order to see anything I really like, and it tends to be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Part of this is just because commercial sex isn’t as fun to watch as sex between two people who have sex with each other often. But also I don’t like that women usually have to get all dressed up to dom while men don’t in most porn. And I’d like to see more MMF threesomes in porn with two actually bisexual men.

• Are you involved in a community of like-minded people [locally, online, etc]? If so, how is that experience for you?

I am involved in the local BDSM community and have been involved with similar communities in other locations and online communities. The experience for me is decent. I live in a conservative country at the moment, so meeting kinky people provides, if nothing else, some people as friends who are a bit more open minded. I sometimes feel like public events can be overly performative, but I appreciate having a space where what I do is normal.

• Does being dominant in a non-sexual setting (work, etc) energize you?

I wouldn’t say that being dominant per se energizes me, but I like being my own boss. I don’t necessarily relish being anyone’s superior, but I don’t like being bossed around. In teams I tend to take the lead, particularly if no one else is.

• Which of the love languages would say you prefer?

I would say quality time and physical touch is important to me. I like to have interactions where we’re giving each other our full attention, or shared activities like bike-riding and movie-watching. And then touch is very important. I’m back in a long-distance relationship once again now, and holding and being held whilst sleeping is definitely one of the things I miss most.

Interview # 28

My next interview is with Naamah. Can I just say that one of my favorite parts of doing these interviews has been meeting so many clever, passionate women finding ways to work what they want into their lives. Naamah is a perfect example and here is what she had to say…

• How would you describe yourself, your sexual tastes, and your power exchange preference?

I’m a 35-year-old geeky artist who loves bad movies and roleplaying games.  I also write erotica.  I’m deeply bipolar.

I’m primarily attracted to men, but I don’t draw lines around my sexuality based on gender, so I’d consider myself flexible.  I consider myself dominant, and prefer “dom” to “domme.”  It’s a language thing.  Get back to me on it when we spell it “domminante.”

A case could be made for “switch” under very specific, incredibly rare circumstances.  I tend not to talk about that, though, because a lot of assholes see it as an invitation.

I am married to a really great guy, he’s my best friend, but my kinky life and our sex life don’t really intersect.  He’s not into it in the same way I am, and I don’t see him that way, so I’m in an odd position compared to many other people I know who are kinky and in relationships.  We write erotica together, which we publish serially on Adventurotica.com.

• How does it work for you to have your marriage separated from your kink?

IRL, he’s more into female submission, and into girls in general; I’m very much into guys, and I’m not into being dominated.  I like pain, not submitting, but inflicting pain independent of a dominance-type context does nothing for him.  So we’re actually, in this respect, like friends with really similar interests who can’t do anything for each other in this one area because I think we are both too much alike and too little opposite for it to work that way.  The lack of that in my life is frustrating, I won’t lie, but it’s not something I . . . I don’t know . . . blame him for.  It’s not his fault.  He’s my best friend.

The thing that sucks most – and this is not something that has anything to do with my husband – is that I’m bipolar and I have social anxiety issues of some kind, and since I’m also an introvert, it’s costly for me to interact with other human beings.  If you have read up on spoon theory, it’s a good metaphor.

I already have IRL friends I see twice a week, so there’s not a social slot open.  I don’t have any more spoons to spend on relationships.  I don’t have the energy to find a partner, maintain the relationship, to fuck and provide aftercare, to be there for moral support.  I am hoping that if I can get my medication adjusted properly and get some fucking help, I might have the emotional resources to actually get what I want.

There’s a healthy scene here but it’s not very big, and we’re one of only two big cities in the state.  Once I’ve screened out bigots, boring douchebags, stupid people, people who think post-5th-grade spelling and grammar are optional, and aggressively religious boors, and selected for interesting, nerdy people, it’s a much smaller pool.  Screen out dominant guys and guys who want a kind of relationship that I don’t want (24/7, FLR, service submission, etc.), and it’s basically a puddle.  Now add in the fact that I don’t get out much . . . yeah.  It’s lonely.

•  You mentioned incorporating verbal roleplaying, as an offshoot of tabletop RPG-ing, in exploring sexual interests. Tell me more?

Apart from our regular tabletop group, my husband and I run heavily character-driven and plot-driven one on one games.  Aside from being just a generally awesome way to spend part of an evening, it allows us to explore fantasies and scenarios that would otherwise be impossible or just flat-out wrong or unsafe.  We get a chance to experiment with any kind of character we want, any kind of relationship we want, in a fictional setting.

So I can say, for instance, “This video game is totally making me want to play an incredibly hot assassin with a tragic past.  Can we can we pleeeease?“  And he’ll be all “FUCK YEAH get the soundtrack and we’ll LOAD THAT SHIT UP!”  And this is why I love him.  Or he can be like “Oh! I know! I know! Noble Lady falls into the clutches of Captain Dreadful, and there’s ravishing, intrigue, infidelity, and bondage!” and I’ll be like “I HOPE YOU LIKE PIRATES BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT IS ON THE MENU.  BOOBS FOR DESSERT.”  It’s fantabulawesome.  And most of the time it’s incredibly silly, and yet it’s meaningful, and I love it more than almost anything.  More than hairless cats.

Writing is one of the ways I explore what turns me on.  One thing your own writing can’t do, though, is surprise you.  You know everything about everyone, all the time. During roleplaying, you are navigating the story that someone else is telling, so you don’t always know what’s coming.  It’s wonderful!

It also gives me a chance to explore roles and identities that I physically cannot explore in the real world.  I can be any gender, any age, any orientation, I can be from any time and any place, real world or imaginary, I don’t even have to be human.  And I am not committed to that role for very long, or having to put strain on a real relationship.  It’s play.  It’s fun.  It’s variety.  And it is literally the only way I can achieve anything like full expression of my sexual identity, which is the most mercurial thing.  If I limited myself to real life interactions and possibilities, I think I would have chugged drain cleaner and thrown myself down a well years ago.  I am not sure if I am kidding about that.

So it’s crazy fun and we’ve learned a lot of interesting things about ourselves and each other.  It’s led me to try things IRL, which has almost always worked out to be just as excellent as I thought it would be.

Interestingly, the tabletop stuff we do doesn’t go into the bedroom.  I have nothing against roleplaying in the bedroom, it’s just not something that I am that interested in doing in this particular context.  The roleplaying is there because my physical body limits my sex life more than I would like; combining the two kind of defeats the purpose of me developing this complex inner life in the first place.

I’d be open to actual roleplaying in a kinky relationship – I’ve been thinking that I would like to explore a pet/owner relationship in a deeper-than-casual context – but those are fundamentally different things.  One is an IRL sex act, the other is a form of pornographic storytelling.

• You also mentioned writing erotica. Would you share about that and bonus points will be awarded for including a link.

My husband and I write adult adventure serials over at Adventurotica.com, and you can get at the free chapters here.

You can get access to the rest for a donation, minimum five bucks.  It is a lot of bang for your buck, since we update three times weekly, our chapters are 2,000 to 3,000 words long, and our books run about fifty chapters.

Our mission is to write erotica that we would want to read.  I try to write stuff that wouldn’t piss me off if we were reading it.  I like well-developed characters.  I enjoy characters who are emotionally tougher than they appear to be, who are resilient, resourceful, playful, lusty, who can be vulnerable yet aren’t foolish.  I want the author to treat female characters like people, not plot devices, allegories, or motivating factors for the male characters.  So that’s what I try to write.

I also have an extremely dorky sense of what is cool and a short attention span, so we are way less serious than I am probably making us sound.  We have ludicrously over-the-top action sequences (naked, tiger-striped cowgirls riding dinosaurs, y’all, lemme hear a fuck yeah!) and things exploding and sword fights and all kinds of witty banter and holy crap the fucking, the fucking is epic.  We are lighthearted, is what I’m saying, and we don’t usually take ourselves all that seriously.  (Of course, now that I’ve said that, y’all are going to notice that our current project is a really, really dark retelling of Snow White.  But I was not kidding about the tiger-striped chick and the dinosaur.  We are usually way more Spartacus: Blood and Sand than, like, I Claudius.)

We often mix kink and non-kink, straight sex and gay/lesbian/bi sex, in the same piece.  We hop genres and will do a steampunk piece, then turn around and do fantasy, then paranormal romance – we love it all, we want to do it all.  I think readers are a lot more flexible than people give them credit for.

We specialize in longer plot-heavy, character-driven pieces because those are the stories we would want to read.  They’re also more interesting to tell.  I think that makes everything so much better.  It’s like foreplay for the sex scenes.

We could be better about being inclusive of people unlike ourselves.  I want to start including more characters of color, more trans characters, in a way that is not fetishizing them, but is genuinely including them, so I’m working on understanding these issues enough to do them justice.  I have a lot to learn, I know I have failed and will fail again, and I don’t expect cookies for trying.  I just want to say that it is important to me, deeply, and I want my readers to know that.

I flat-out don’t want to write stuff that makes people feel bad about themselves.  The whole rest of the world is there to do that.  I don’t need to help.

• How did you discover your power exchange preference?

It just kind of . . . blossomed.  I’ve had sadistic/masochistic fantasies ever since I was five or six.  Once I became aware of BDSM subculture, somewhere around the age of twelve, I was intrigued by it.  By the awesome clothes, by the glamorous people, by the strong presence of female sexuality, by the way it was forbidden.

Of course, I grew up and discovered that BDSM culture is far from perfect.  And, sadly, as I explored the idea, I became aware that the female sexuality showcased in most BDSM photography and porn/erotica had little to do with my personal desires and values.  But the core of that appeal remained.  Pain, lust, beauty . . . I have always found the idea of a beautiful man suffering intensely erotic.

Flashback to the ’80s: I remember there was this one episode of Thundercats that had my favorite character, Tygra, getting strapped into this torture/execution machine called The Four Winds, which was basically designed to rip a person’s arms and legs off.  It wasn’t the drawing and quartering I found sexy – I thought that was creepy and gross – it was that Tygra was chained in it, waiting, for hours.  The anticipation was lovely.  The peril.  And the being chained up spread-eagle.

I only saw the episode once, but I had all kinds of fantasies about it; someone whipping him, someone cutting his clothes off, someone hurting him with pointy things, performing painful and humiliating experiments on him.  I acted these out with my action figures to excess.  Right in front of all my My Little Ponies, too.  I’m sorry you had to see that, Moondancer.

When I started actually having sex and experimenting with roles, I started out thinking I was submissive.  I like some kinds of pain, I find it interesting and clarifying and sometimes quite delightful, I even like being restrained on occasion because the struggling and fighting against something is deeply satisfying, but those things are physical sensations that do not equate unilaterally with submission; it was never the submission part that did it for me.

I was confused about what male submission and female dominance were really about.  I never saw any male-sub imagery that appealed to me as a younger person.  It was all really horrible crap, cold and impersonal, the women were icy and uninterested, the men were unlikeable worms who weren’t allowed to be strong, they were unattractive, it was just . . . ugh.  It was obviously porn for a kind of man I am not interested in and about a kind of woman I am not interested in being, and as such, quite understandably, it is not appealing.  The porn about submissive women was much more interesting to me, because it was more varied.

Somewhere in my twenties I just sort of realized that some guys really, really made me want to tie them down and hurt them.  I was uncomfortable with it for the longest time, not because I felt ashamed of my terrible urges (I have never been that kind of person, and was mercilessly spared the moral indoctrination that might have made me so) but because I simply was in unknown territory and had no idea what to do with these thoughts and feelings.  I couldn’t reconcile them with the fact that I like pain, that I sometimes like to be held down.  For fuck’s sake, I had problems reconciling it with the fact that I love big, hard dicks, I love fucking, that is how jaundiced my idea of female dominance was.  I thought that those things made me a switch at the very least.

And how could I be a dominant woman?  I wasn’t like any of the dominant women I had ever seen!  I didn’t like the kinds of submissive man I had seen!  It was all very confusing, and in retrospect it is embarrassing that I had as much trouble as I did figuring it all out.

Then I read Bitchy Jones’ blog, and I started reading MayMay, and I realized that there is a difference between liking pain and being submissive, and things snowballed from there.  A lot of exploratory roleplaying and fantasizing followed by a few real-life experiences cemented that for me, and I realize now that it’s much more a part of me than being submissive.  I have an incredibly varied fantasy life, an inner life, and I’d be lying if I said that I don’t have submissive fantasies, but it isn’t apparently something I am interested in doing in real life at this time.  I may find someone who strikes me that way someday, but I’m not looking for it.

• Compare your first sexual experiences to sex now. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?

Oh, gods, you have to ask for what you want.  You have to ask.  Because people don’t just know.  You have to admit when something isn’t working.  And, finally, you have to admit when something turns you on, and start making contact with that part of yourself, even if it’s scary.

I am not easy to please.  I don’t come easily.  I had to learn to be patient with that and I had to learn to ask people for what I want, without being embarrassed or apologetic or feeling like I was letting them down by not being Miss Multiple Orgasms.  You have to be able to talk in concrete terms about what you do and do not enjoy.

Don’t box in your own sexuality just to make things easier for the other person.  Don’t keep fucking in a way that doesn’t work for you just because you wish it did or think it should.  Don’t be afraid to say “Actually, I don’t enjoy this thing.”

And to tell someone what you enjoy, you have to know what you enjoy.  You have to be relentlessly honest, which means knowing yourself and being honest with yourself. That isn’t easy, but it’s a worthy goal.  And you can’t do that if you are turning desperately away from what you want because it isn’t what you want to be.

• Tell me what it is about domination that appeals to you.

Tortured beauty.  The idea that someone would willingly put themselves into my hands, allow me to hurt them, use them, is both dizzyingly sexy and deeply moving.  I love the intimacy of it, the unique sort of connection that develops between people pushing one another’s limits.  I love showing people new things, especially things they didn’t know they would or could like.

I love doing things to people that I have had done to me, knowing exactly what they are feeling at that moment; I love the connection of it, the shared experience.  It’s part of my personal philosophy, that I try not to do things to people I have not done.

I’m still relatively inexperienced in terms of real-life play time, so the act of exploration, of discovery, is a huge rush as well.  The top or the dominant can be the one with less experience, can be the one having their limits pushed, and I think that’s something that we lose sight of.  Doms aren’t formed whole and complete with 20 years of experience.  We have to grow up, too.  The difference is that the process isn’t as romanticized as it is with baby subs just learning to take their first spanks.

The typical view of the teaching dynamic frames the person with the knowledge as having power over the person without it, and fits neatly into a dominant teacher/submissive student dynamic. That’s very hot, but it’s not the only way the cookie crumbles.  I think that no matter how you frame it, the process of learning, of taking knowledge from someone else, of them giving knowledge to you and then you hurting them with it, the shifting power dynamic there, is very erotic.  It’s intimate.

• Would you say your kink is something that you do, or part of who you are?

I don’t get a chance to do it very often, so hopefully it’s a part of who I am.  It’s not a hat, and I can’t take it off or put it on at will.  It’s always there.  It’s part of my sexuality which is part of who I am.

• Do you think there is a connection between feminism and femdom? If so, how would you characterize it?

Only in the sense that any issue involving women claiming their sexual desires, especially ones forbidden by the cultural roles thrust upon them, can be framed as a feminist issue.

I am an avowed feminist, and I find the conflation of “feminist” with “thinks women are superior to men” annoying.  I do not believe that.  Interestingly, woman-as-goddess is a huge part of the fem-dom fantasy.  It’s common to see men painting women as the superior sex, especially submissive men.  I have no use for that.  It’s not any better, to my mind, than telling me that men are superior.  It’s offensive to me as a person, and I am really tired of it, and tired of people who dismiss feminism because they do not understand what it’s about.  There are legitimate bones to pick with modern feminist dialogue, it has its areas of ignorance, but one thing it is not about is putting women above men.  I’ll get off my soapbox now.

I do think that femdom is often depicted in an incredibly sexist way, and while leather-clad ice-queen porn can still be well-produced and very hot, and while I don’t fault people who like it or fantasize about it (what gets you off gets you off, have a great time and don’t be ashamed), its rampant exclusion, as a genre, of the desires of actual dominant women is a huge problem, a huge turn-off, and a huge barrier to dominant women recognizing their own dominant inclinations for what they are.  Thankfully, it’s changing, and I have hopes that we will be seeing more appealing male-sub imagery and writing.  I am trying to contribute to that by writing erotica that appeals to me personally.

I also think that for a lot of people, the femdom fantasy does derive a great deal of its power from the subversion or inversion of traditional roles, whether we are aware of that individually or not, whether that’s affected us individually or not.  I can’t honestly say whether that’s had an effect on me.  I was so young when I started having these thoughts that I am inclined to think that a desire to reverse traditional roles had nothing to do with it.  Those roles are probably what kept me from recognizing it for what it was in the first place.

• The cultural image of women who prefer to take the lead sexually is rarely positive. How has that affected you?

Admitting what you want and then going for it, taking charge of your own sexuality, is a powerful act, one which women have only been allowed to express for a comparatively short time and even now, not in all places or for all women.

A man who takes what he wants, names his sexual goals and sets out to achieve them, is just being a man.  A woman who does that is rattling all kinds of cages.  We’re not supposed to want things.  We’re supposed to be what other people want us to be.  Even when we are depicted as dominant, it’s too often an image of us as others want us to be, not how we see ourselves, not reflective of our actual desires.  A woman who doesn’t let other people define her, a woman who takes what she wants and refuses to take what she doesn’t want, is going to get called selfish, bossy, domineering, bitchy, cold, man-hating.  Even if she’s admired for being sexually available, she’ll get called “wild” and “out of control.”  So, yeah, you’re right, the image isn’t a positive one.

I can’t say how it’s affected me personally, since I can never know why, specifically, people do obnoxious things.  I will say it’s created an ugly atmosphere that contributes to the pressure to not talk about it, which contributes to the problem in a vicious cycle.

I also want to say that taking the lead sexually, going after what you want with both hands and a grin, that is not a trait limited to dominant people.  That’s a trait that is good for everyone to have.  I’m not talking about being pushy or any of that, not talking about doing whatever you want even if it hurts someone, just talking about how people should spend less time planning their sexuality around other people’s feelings and opinions, and start planning it around their own.

•  Are you involved in a community of like-minded people [locally, online, etc]?  If so, how is that experience for you? If not, have you avoided it purposefully?

A lot of my online friends are kinky, and while that was not deliberate, it is certainly nice to have the companionship and support.

I’ve been to our local fetish club, and I belong to their group/email list, but I live in a really conservative, Bible-thumpy area of the US, and the scene here is not as large or as varied as it could be.

That said, I have had lovely experiences with my local people, and while I can’t say I have friends among them, they have provided me with truly entertaining opportunities to research and experience things, and have been generally patient with my perpetual curiosity regarding pretty much everything under the sun.  When you are a writer, there is no such thing as an uninteresting detail.  So I don’t want to seem like I am slagging them off when I say that I don’t really feel like I fit in with the local scene.  They are good folks, eager to educate and demonstrate, and are very friendly and generous with their experience.

The reason I don’t go out more is, currently, money issues, as I cannot afford the cover charge.  And, too, health issues and obligations to other people keep me home a lot of the time.

My online friendships are much more robust, frankly.

• Does being dominant in a non-sexual setting (work, etc) energize you?

I’m an introvert, deeply.  I’m a very quiet person, and I prefer to sit and watch people.  I wouldn’t call myself shy, I’m certainly not uncomfortable talking to people, answering questions, etc., but I don’t initiate.  I am a total voyeur, really.

Once I know a group and am comfortable, I have no problem talking rings around people or taking charge of a situation, but I am the kind of person who likes to know the lay of the land before I do anything.  Dominance in a sexual setting is exciting precisely because it turns that uncertainty into a game of exploring and learning, and then the unknown becomes an exhilarating process of discovery.

I admit I am socially awkward, and very uncomfortable when I have to be assertive.  I can do it, I can do it incredibly well, but I find it quite draining.  I avoid it if I possibly can. It isn’t fun, and I don’t like to be in charge of things or responsible for things unless I have specifically chosen to do it.  Being forced into interpersonal conflict is . . . terrible.  I do not like being challenged by other people, I don’t like having my authority about my own life questioned, although I like the challenge presented by learning a new skill or trying to solve a problem.

I don’t think this makes me one whit less dominant, any more than being an assertive go-getter people person makes one less submissive.  We are variable animals, and we aren’t one way all the time.  Our social roles and our sexual roles are deeply connected, but they are not the same, and the connections between them are very deep and very complex.  What drives a person to be submissive in the bedroom may be the same thing that makes them a ferocious and excellent defense lawyer, what drives a person to be dominant in the bedroom may be the same thing that makes them a trustworthy and gentle crisis counselor.

I get something out of caring for abandoned kittens that is a lot like what I get when I’m connecting with another person through pain.  When I comfort someone going through a rough time I’m using the same set of wires I use when I am hurting someone for fun; we are possibly never more human than when we are in pain, and I am possibly never more aware of that than when I am the one soothing it . . . or giving it.  We relate to ourselves and each other in unexpected, splendid ways.

It is funny to me that I rail against how women are perceived as these saintly, tender, nurturing, gentle, inherently maternal beings, when I also like to rail about how the tender, nurturing, gentle side of domination is too often overlooked.  Both are still true, though.

• Which of the love languages would say you prefer?

Quality time.  Absolutely quality time.  Followed shortly by words of affirmation.  If I don’t have those two things – two things notably lacking in my childhood and young adulthood, though not totally absent – I am a very sad kitty.  The rest I can kind of take or leave, but I need those two things or I am a wreck.

Interview # 27

My next interview is with a blogger called Freya. She is in her mid-30s, married, and while she discovered the fun of kinky sex just a few years ago she is clearly a natural talent and passionate explorer. Here are her answer!

• How would you describe yourself, your sexual tastes, and your power exchange preference?

I am a strong-willed, confident woman with a sassy mouth and a striving passion for happiness. I’m an incurable romantic. I believe in the forever kind of love. I love to laugh – sometimes even at my own expense. My sexual tastes now run from vanilla-but-never-boring to downright deviant and piggish. I lust after men for their masculine beauty, scent, and appeal. My sex life is extremely cockcentric. At times I joke that I am a gay man trapped in the body of a straight woman. This is a far cry from where things were a few years ago. (I’ll touch on that later) My sexual appetite depends, of course, on the flavor of my mood and the willingness of my husband. My power exchange preference is that I want to be the boss. I want to call the shots, I want to get my way, I want you to know what I like, how I like it, and to give it to me often. If I make you squirm, pant, moan, grunt, beg, or cry out in the process – all the better. My current relationship status is monogamously married for the last 18 years. So far I only have experience being dominant. There is a small part of me – perhaps 15% to 20% – that is curious to experience interactions with a dominant male. I’d love to be spanked. I doubt I’m a proper submissive, even within that small percentage, but the idea of giving over control once in awhile is appealing. I know that man is not, cannot ever be, my husband – which makes me curious about where our monagamy is headed.

• How did you discover your various interests?

From 2007-2010 my marriage was completely sexless. My husband was suffering what I know now to be an untreated depression and my marriage was failing. Somewhere in the process of picking myself up from that I got a new laptop and wireless router, burrowed in the private coziness of my bedroom and discovered fan fiction to kill time. I’ll just say now that the people who write fan fiction are some of the most blessedly perverted people I’ve ever encountered. I read stuff that I needed to look up on Urban Dictionary. I was left curiously and incurably aroused. Around the same time, my husband came out of his funk, we began to repair our relationship and we resumed a somewhat rusty sex life. He didn’t bargain on the new me, but willingly came along for the journey. I suggested implementing new ideas (that I’d gotten from my reading) and thus began my intense research on the internet into anal sex, pegging, and especially D/s. Which led to the new-to-me concept of adult nursing relationships and orgasm control/denial. He countered with his own ideas about piercing and bondage. Suddenly everything I was reading became a possibility to me, having jumped down the rabbit hole and all that. My mind and sexuality burst wide open. Sex became my newest hobby. I wanted to know about everything. I’ve continued to learn through blogs, podcasts, books, and advice columns. I’ve cultivated my kink and porn interests over the last two years and I’m at a place where I believe I have a good handle on the new me. But I don’t rule out any surprises down the road.

• Compare your earlier experiences to sex now, before and after, so to speak. What’s the biggest difference and what is most important thing you’ve learned?

Although I’ve maintained an authoritative position throughout our marriage, in the bedroom I was very traditional. My husband has always been a pleaser, but because of embarrassment I failed to speak up for what I wanted or didn’t want for fear of killing the mood. Now, I’m the one stepping up, making the rules about sex, being pleased in whatever fashion tickles my fancy, and bucking whatever society tells me I “should” be doing between my legs and between my ears. He used to buy the vibrators and I got flustered while now I select and purchase the more serious sex toys and he gets red faced. Sometimes red bottomed, too! *grins evilly* More importantly, I make no apologies for having a fantastic sex life. I will not be shamed. Nor will I shame others.
The biggest lesson for me was discovering just how vital my sexual expression is to my happiness. It goes hand in hand.

• Tell me what it is about orgasm control, ANR, pegging, etc. that appeals to you.

I like the intensity of emotions and reactions that orgasm control wrings from my husband. He’s a fairly stoic guy. He doesn’t get worked up over much of anything. In contrast I’m a Leo, very passionate, and I thrive on emotions. When he’s hot and horny enough to show his desperation by way of writhing, humping, grinding, whimpering, and asking – sometimes begging – to cum, I’m about as close to purring as humanly possible. I’m also very voyeuristic. I adore watching him give in to his basic animalistic self with the easy arousal that a long bout of teasing and denial brings. I’ve come to understand that he loves the torture of edging as much as I do. What he does not love is being caged. We’re currently working on that.

For those not in the know, ANR stands for adult nursing relationship. It involves one partner sucking on or nursing from the breasts of the other on a daily basis. The oxytocin released from this action strengthens feelings of trust, intimacy, relaxation, and bonding. It can also be highly erotic. Lactation may or not be included. I accidentally discovered it while researching D/s. It took less than 24 hours for the idea to grow from “Hmm. That’s odd. Never heard of such a thing…” to “Why can’t I stop thinking about this and how can I make it happen RIGHT NOW!!!” It’s not so much a kink as a lifestyle really. For us, there’s no age play involved. I think that possible aspect is what squicks some people out. Our ANR has been absolutely the best thing we’ve tried since expanding our sexual repertoire over two years ago. He was on board from the moment I approached him with it. He’s a breast man through and through and loves the all-access pass ANR allows. I love how much firmer, fuller, and sensitive my boobs are now due to the fact that I’m lactating. My breasts are fully functioning and doing what nature intended and we have a lot of fun with it. I get to express my softer, care-taking side when I pull him close to me. There’s also a deep commitment to this sort of relationship. Bad moods, squabbling, and hurt feelings take a backseat to my body’s schedule. Once we’re finished, we’re blissed out and have forgotten our silly misunderstandings. 3 times a day we have an easy reset button that we can push. Who doesn’t need one of those? It’s like my body can perform mood altering magic tricks. Plus, ya know…..a well timed squirt of milk in the face never fails to make us laugh!!!

I love pegging my husband because I love all things to do with the ass. Mine and his. To borrow a term from a blogging friend – I’m extremely “ass erotic”. It’s the taboo as much as the sensation. I’m quite jealous of men and their prostates. I’m doing everything I possibly can to help my husband enjoy his. I love that he trusts me enough to share the act.

• Would you say your kink is something that you do, or part of who you are?

Oh. My kink is definitely part of who I am now. My daily schedule, my food intake, even our vacations take our ANR into account. Having a bad day? I fantasize about gearing up and taking my frustrations out with my husband. Feeling loving and wanting to express it? My mind wanders to restraints and sensation play. And for all the times in between I’m merely working my way back to where we can be together. If for some reason I had to give up kink there would be such a void left, I’d be standing there helpless crying out “But how Am I supposed to be, now?!?!?!?!”

• Do you think there is a connection between feminism and femdom? If so, how would you characterize it?

A small connection, yes. If that one woman interested in femdom uses the freedom of her choice to be so, then there’s a connection. But if another woman uses the power of her feminist choice to be gagged, tied up and used in a gang bang, then there’s a connection there as well. I don’t buy into the “feminists do THIS, they don’t do THAT” way of thinking. Uh, trying to tell me how I should be as a woman? No thank you. That’s not feminism. I’ll do whatever the hell I want to. Let me have all the options. Then leave me alone to do it and keep your judgement and negative repercussions to yourself.

• The cultural image of women who prefer to take the lead sexually is rarely positive. How has that affected you?

Honstly, including the word “sexually”, my life has not been affected much at all. From an early age, I was able to weed out love interests who might not go for a girl like me. This goes back to the playground when I loved to chase as much as be chased and most of my boys ended up being bruised, kicked, or handled roughly. I had no time for those who wouldn’t play along.
However…if you exclude the word sexually, then my life has been negatively affected almost to the point of a ruined marriage. There was over a decade of friction between my old-school, male chauvinistic father-in-law and I where we struggled to come to terms with exactly who had the most rights to the #1 priority spot in my husband’s life. He could not fathom the idea that his son was happy with a woman who refused to “know her place”. *sigh* Due to the severity of his negative influence in our lives we had to cut ties. Which lead to guilt and further depression for my husband. We are much, much better now.

• Are you involved in a community of like-minded people [locally, online, etc]? If so, how is that experience for you? If not, have you avoided it purposefully?

I discovered sex blogs in 2010 and forged some friendships with like minded people. All from different walks of life, but with a need to express their sexuality. It’s freeing to voice our thoughts, our desires, our complicated situations in an anonymous way without repercussions. I have learnedso much from bloggers. I cannot thank them enough. My life has been -continues to be- greatly altered and affected in such positive ways throught the well written words of others. All it takes is the turn of a phrase, and one can be changed for the better – forever. I love that.

• Does being dominant in a non-sexual setting (work, etc) energize you?

Yes!!! I like being the boss in all areas. I’ve devoted a lot of my marriage to raising kids, running the home, and I’m good at it. I can organize and manage like nobody’s business. In no way am I the kind of wife that defers to my husband, though. Quite the opposite! Now that I’ve added a part-time job into the mix, I still enjoy being a leader. (I’m a Leo afterall) For my job I find myself in front of people, teaching, guiding, and encouraging. It’s extremely rewarding.

• Which of the love languages would say you prefer?

Do I have to choose only one or two? Because they’re ALL sounding a bit too much like me!
I love words of affirmation, but they must be true and believable. I’m my own worst critic so I know false flattery when I hear it. And hurtful words can cause me to go into an emo tailspin sometimes. I rarely experience this but when I do, I am CRUSHED. Quality time has to be one of my 2 choices if you press me. I fought for so long to earn priority in my husband’s attention. Time spent with each other wins out over anything, anyday. We have a lot of lost time to make up for. Receiving little gifts is an extension of quality time. For me it says “you were in my thoughts”. And isn’t that just a way of being with the one you love when time and space separates you? I’d also rate physical touch as my other top choice. Sometimes I have such a strong compulsion to convey my emotions through touch, it’s unbearable. And I process a lack of touch from him as disinterest. Something also unbearable to me.

Interview # 26

My next interview is with Sarah Jameson of The Male Chastity Blog.  If you are interested at all in learning more about chastity or teasing and denial you should probably check out  her books.  Sarah has been blogging for a couple of years and some of her ideas for teasing and denial are incredibly, deliciously cruel and sexy. If a tied-up man writhing and begging happens to be something you find erotic, Sarah’s your gal.

• How would you describe yourself, your less typical sexual tastes, and your power exchange preference?

I don’t think I’m particularly atypical sexually, and beyond tease and denial I don’t go in for any kind of power-exchange. It’s really not my thing. If anything I like to be mildly and gently physically dominated in the bedroom, like most women do, I think. Outside the bedroom our relationship is, if anything, male led.

John, my husband, is the strong one, physically and mentally, too, I think. And I am an old-fashioned girl. I like men holding doors open for me, and waiting for me to be seated and served first in a restaurant. It’s nothing to do with it being my dues as a “superior female” (a particularly vile expression) but because it’s good old chivalry and manners. John is very chivalrous. And that’s all just something I like. It’s purely subjective and I know some feminists hate that kind of thing. I think they have mental problems, myself, but it’s a free country and they can be as mean-spirited and prissy as they like.

Our sexual activity must needs be a bit more exploratory and experimental than perhaps most people’s because we practice male chastity and long-term orgasm denial. In other words, we have to be more inventive because full intercourse is rarely on the cards.

Add to that the fact I’m writing about sex, chastity, denial and whatnot virtually every day and you can imagine sex occupies a large part of my consciousness.

But two things I think it’s important to stress here are first, it’s not the case John and I are having sex every waking moment; we are very sexually active, but it’s not morning, noon and night as so many people like to imagine (and pretend). Life goes on. We have bills to pay, clients to serve, invoices to raise, dogs to walk, meals to cook, and horse-shit to shovel in my garden.

And the second thing is while my life is very sexually orientated right now, what we do and what I write about isn’t exactly extreme kink or fetish.

It’s barely more than vanilla sex, really, in relation to the things we COULD get up to.

I just do a lot of thinking and writing about it.

• How did you discover chastity?

That’s easy: John “tricked” me into swapping fantasies with him on paper. His was something called “male chastity”, which I’d never heard of.

Lots of reading and emotional rollercoasters later, I agreed to give it a try. One of the problems was all the utter rubbish out there about male chastity on blogs and forums.

That’s why I started my own blog because after practicing male chastity for 2 1/2 years or so, I felt I knew enough to have the gumption to stand up and call “bullshit” on all the misinformation out there.

My first ever post, from March 2009, tells it all in a nutshell.

• If you compare your sexual experiences before chastity to your sex life now, what are the major differences?

Well, I’ve never been a prude or unadventurous, but I have to say this whole thing has opened my eyes somewhat. Because we practice very long term orgasm denial and obviously intercourse can be “dangerous”, we’ve had to learn lots of new tricks and to play with a lot of toys.

We also like mild bondage and restraint, simply because that often makes it easier for me to edge John without him finishing himself off — or, in the case of a ruined orgasm, so he can’t “unruin” it, so to speak.

I love him pleasing me, too, until I can barely move, and then cuddle up and drift off to sleep KNOWING he still desires me. That’s incredible. Intoxicating.

Also, I have to confess… with the ebooks I write, I have to do a lot of research. One challenge is to keep that fun and not let it ever become too clinical, like a job.

In that I think it’s a fortunate subject matter to study, because Tease and Denial is impossible for me to be clinical about. Even if I wasn’t feeling horny when I started, having John tied down, squirming and begging to cum is enough to get ME going, too.

• You and I sometimes engage in the same basic thing, teasing and denial, but while I characterize that as part of a D/s dynamic you view it differently. How do you see it?

If you have a glass of water and add whiskey, what do you have? You have water with whiskey in it.

But to some people, you’d have a glass of neat whiskey, because the dash of flavour apparently defines the entire substance of the thing.

Or, to quote Jon in an email he sent to his client list a while back:

I remember from my school days when my English teacher would read a passage from whatever book we were studying at the time and read into it some deep and profound meaning, “The curtains were blue”, she’d read, then raise her eyes from the book and tell us all, “the blue of the curtains is the author’s way of communicating the deep depression of the protagonist as a result of his betrothed’s infidelity”.

Really?

How did she know?

Sometimes the curtains are just fucking blue, and that’s all the author wanted to say; and unless the author tells us differently, that’s really what we have to assume.

Or, sometimes we tease and deny just because we like to tease and deny and our lovers enjoy it.

• Tell me what it is about chastity that appeals to you.

Chastity per se doesn’t particularly. It’s what chastity does for us that appeals. And with us it’s resulted in a much closer and more physically and emotionally intimate relationship than we’d have had otherwise, and, indeed, than we HAD before we started playing the game.

• Would you say chastity is something that is part of one relationship, or something that is part of you? If, in some other reality, that relationship ended, do you you see yourself in another relationship involving it?

Since John is the only man I have ever practiced it with, I suppose you’d say it was part of our relationship. It’s hard for me to imagine NOT being in a relationship with John, though. Although, if pushed, I’d say if something happened to him, then I’d probably not get into another relationship unless chastity was part of it.

It’s simply too much fun and the benefits we’ve both got from it are too numerous and profound for me to miss out on.

• The cultural image of women who prefer to set the pace sexually is rarely positive. How has that affected you?

It hasn’t.

I’m a libertarian and an atheist. I don’t ask or need anyone’s permission to engage in consensual sexual acts with any number of other adults, and I certainly don’t think there’s some all-powerful Sky Daddy watching what I do in the bedroom and keeping score.

Or, to put it another way, if my friends judged me on my sexual preferences, I’d find new friends. Society gets the same short-shrift. It’s no one else’s business. Any problem other people have with it is a problem confined between their own ears so far as I’m concerned.

I tend to think anyone interested in what’s going on in my bedroom, wound up to the point where they think they can pass judgement on me, AND thinking I am somehow supposed to care about all that, probably has very little going on in their own bedroom and they can’t stand to think of anyone else having the fun they’re missing out on.

In any case, it’s not really a matter of me setting the pace. Other than the fact John rarely orgasms and so we have to work things around that, our sex life proceeds pretty much as any other couple’s in that either one of us is as likely to initiate sex as the other.

• You’re involved in a community of like-minded people online, do you get a lot of support from that, or are you primarily there as a support for others?

Lol, I’m not really involved in a community and I have been banned from at least one popular forum for telling the truth and spoiling some silly people’s fantasies.

Because my views don’t coincide with those of a small but vocal minority, I rarely bother with forums at all and I confine my discussions to a private group of individuals — in that respect I act more of a support and a source of information.

The truth is, the state of the online chastity community, if you can even call it that, is appalling. I think it’s unlikely to get any better because the wholly unrealistic fantasy of forced and involuntary male chastity is so enticing. It’s a bit like trying to ban porn or prostitution — too many people are watering at the mouth for it.

I’m not suggesting for a moment the fantasists should not be allowed to post their trash and claim it as truth; but in the same way Freedom of Speech means they can do that, it also means I can call “bullshit” on their stupidity with impunity. They make outrageous claims and when asked for evidence, or even just sound reasoning to back it up, they get angry.

You know, the usual thing: “my wife came home with a CB3000 and put it on me while I was asleep… and she says if I take it off she’ll divorce me, and her brother’s the Judge and he’d give her everything and she’d get custody, and she has these photos”. Drives me crazy, the inanity of it all. And people actually believe this rubbish.

The fact is, you see, it’s obvious MOST men who crave chastity crave what we call “vanilla chastity” where the focus really is on orgasm control and denial for the purposes of giving pleasure to both partners, and increasing the physical and emotional intimacy between them. Of course, my audience is very much self-selecting because no one reading my work for very long is going to stick around if they swallow those dumb fantasies.

Regardless, most men I come across simply are not looking for all the domination, humiliation and abuse some people seem to think male chastity has to include.

Over and over again I have had people telling me I “must” be dominant and John “must” be submissive. They’re like religious fundamentalists in that they can’t, won’t and don’t accept anything not conforming to their world-view regardless of the evidence.

I’ve had emails from people who write as if they were some kind of “fly on the wall” telling me “when you have John on his knees, kissing your feet and begging to cum, he must feel submissive then”. But I have never, ever mentioned having anyone on their knees begging for anything.

They just get carried away with their own fantasies and, frankly, make things up and think it’s “evidence”.

Even when I tell them I am not a domme, even when John tells them he is not submissive, the reply is “well maybe you both are, but you just don’t know it”.

Faced with that kind of stupidity, there’s no real way of winning the argument.

So I rarely bother with these people any more. As Mark Twain said, “Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference”

Instead, I see my role as being a source of factual, rational, sane and safe information on male chastity and orgasm denial. That’s why I write my blog, free guides and other resources. I’m there for those who seek what I have to offer.

I am not interested in justifying my own preferences, or John’s, or in changing anyone else’s mind or winning anyone over.

• Does being in-charge in a non-sexual setting (work, etc) energize you?

No.

We run our own business from home, a small, exclusive and very successful marketing consultancy. John is definitely the one in charge, and that’s just how I like it.

When I’m doing my own projects I’m working alone and while the projects energise me, it’s more about self-determination rather than being in charge of others.

I AM a control freak, but only of myself. If I tried to be a control freak with John, he’d just laugh at me. If I pissed him off enough, he’d probably put me over his knee and spank me. He’s not a man to be pushed around by anyone, and especially not by his wife. For all that, he is a bit of a softy when it comes to dogs and puppies.

• There is a theory that we all have an innate preference for affection expressed in 1 or 2 of the following 5 ways which are called Love Languages, which would you say you prefer?

Well, it’s a nice idea and a hypothesis, but I’m not so sure it has any basis in fact. It’s very easy to use post-hoc reasoning to shoehorn us into any arbitrary set of characteristics.

I know the things John isn’t good at. So when he does them for me, it means a lot. I know it means he’s made a real effort and remembered something I know doesn’t come naturally to him. I also love how protective of me he is, without being in the least overbearing.

I don’t know if that answers the question, but none of the five choices made much sense to me. It’s all the things that go to make up my wonderful husband I love.

———–

That is what Sarah had to say!

Interview # 25

This interview features Penthesilea  Bellatrix. She was a little reluctant to do an interview but was kind enough to allow me to persuade her and I cannot even begin to express how happy I am that she not only did this interview but she answered so honestly and eloquently.  I loved reading this interview and I hope you all will too!

• How would you describe yourself, your sexual tastes, and your power exchange preference?

I’m a mid-20s grad student. One of those weird INTJ women, thinking focused and a bit obsessive. But for me, loving things and having fun with them means wanting to analyze them endlessly, so I really enjoy my life. I’m bisexual, but primarily interested in men. I identify as dominant.

• How did you discover your power exchange preference?

I didn’t know that what I liked was actually an option until a few years ago. I just knew that I liked something different. To use an ice cream metaphor, I’ve often felt like I have a craving for Butter Pecan ice cream, but the only flavors available are Spinach and Garlic, which just won’t do as a substitute. When I’ve dated men, there have always been some things that would feel good about the dynamic. But there would always be things that felt really off-putting too. The whole mainstream het courtship script reads male dominant and female submissive by default at many points — I don’t want to be pursued, for instance. I don’t want to feel obligated to pretend that I’m not as good at the handful of things I’m good at as I am. I don’t want to be condescended to; nothing turns me off quicker than mansplaining.

I’ve also felt that the men who ask me out tend to think of me as a challenge? Because I can seem kind of driven and cold (I’m not actually, it’s just that my strong preference for being analytical comes across that way). I’d get the impression that they felt all they had to do was prove they were better than me–smarter, stronger, whatever–and then I’d swoon and fall naturally into my place. My womanly heart melted, my legs obediently spread in welcome. It was often subtle enough, but it was there. They were expecting me to “act like a woman,” which meant sending certain signals I’m just not capable of sending without feeling awful. It led to disappointment and frustration for everyone. I haven’t dated for years because I just can’t stand facing that again.

Over the years I also sought out and cherished stories that touched on my desire for female dominance and male submission, even though I didn’t quite know how to articulate that. I remember latching onto Mulder and Scully so hard as a young teen because she was the rational one, the one who did her damndest to use her fierce, keen brain to force the world into a less chaotic shape. She took care of Mulder, who was always opening himself up to the world in brave, endearing, and somewhat foolhardy ways. I cannot tell you how many times I watched the episode where he gets himself into an epic mess and calls her up on the weekend. She finds him traumatized in a hotel bathtub and takes care of his naked, shivering body. That scene was fantasy material for me for years. Then he spends the rest of the episode hallucinating, swooning (literally!), and being brave in very risky ways that mean he needs Scully to take charge of him and when she does it makes him feel safe and cared for rather than resentful. And the narrative never seemed to portray him as less of a man because of his non-traditionally masculine qualities. He preferred a more intuitive and emotive style of reasoning and he would gladly follow Scully when necessary and none of that made him less of a man. That’s rare and delightful. It was also great, of course, to see in Scully a woman who preferred a more analytical approach to reasoning and knew how to take charge who was portrayed as a heroine rather than an unwomanly freak. That was so important to me as a young woman.

((laughs)) I don’t want to live out fiction. Not really. I just mention this because narratives have been the place that, over the years, I’ve consistently found tiny slivers of representation for things that move my heart. And it was through fandom that I finally put a name to my sexual preferences. I kept being fannish about pairings like Scully and Mulder, and talking about them in ways that made friends of mine who knew about kink wonder a bit. Then some of those friends mentioned sites like Bitchy Jones’ Diary and Male Submission Art and talked with me about kink some. Those sites became something of an obsession for me; I’d never read anything that moved me so much.

It’s interesting, though, for a while I didn’t recognize what my obsession meant. I felt so alienated from the larger cultural perception of female dominance that I didn’t feel like I could be part of any of it. It was like it was too good, too wonderful, and I hadn’t earned it. Specifically, I think that dommy women and subby men tend to receive the message that we have to have “perfect” gym bodies in order to deserve what we want? Vanilla people get that message as well to a certain extent, but it feels more emphasized for us because we want something we’re not supposed to want. At least for me it leads to a sense of having to be perfect in order to earn it.

As a dominant woman, there’s not only the physical requirements but there’s the behavioral ones as well. I’m a tender, romantic, monogamous sort of dominant woman. I dislike high heels and PVC. I dislike pretending to be emotionally distant. I dislike dressing in high femme clothes, shoes, and makeup. I am a larger girl–tall, with an ass and a tummy as well as tits–and I like my size as part of my dominance. I like the idea of pressing somebody into the bed as they squirm under me. But the message I struggle with is that I had to be impossibly perfect–an ultra-thin, pristinely femme ice princess Barbie dom–if I was to be worthy of domming. And then I’d have to do things I have no interest in and pretend to be emotionally distant all the while, when what I wanted more than anything was to connect emotionally.

Reading Bitchy’s blog helped with that some, but still I found myself feeling like I was looking in at something delicious I wanted but I could never, ever have. So my realization of my preferences hasn’t come all at once, but rather slow and piece by piece. It wasn’t until a friend of mine from school who was out to me as a submissive started really talking to me about the sheer variety of ways to be dominant that I realized yes, okay, this is me.

• Tell me what it is about the idea of running the show that appeals to you.

Tenderness. Intimacy. Responsibility. Holding someone in my care who I consider precious and beautiful. Taking charge of someone who feels satisfied and happy with letting me do that. I often lull myself to sleep imagining that I’m holding a man, spooned up behind him. His skin his warm against my chest and legs. His wrists are bound. I kiss the back of his neck and press my hand over his chest so I can feel his heart beating. The thought of being in control makes me feel wonderful in so many ways. Making other people feel safe and secure gives me feel a sense of peace. Since I was a kid, I’ve craved responsibility and leadership. I’ve always been told that I come across mature and steady. I love that. I long to be considered worthy of trust. I hold myself to pretty rigid standards and I’m obsessive about treating people justly. I want someone to put themselves into my hands knowing that I’ll take care of them. I long for the power to make someone feel how beautiful they are. I work very, very hard to be good at the things I’m good at and I act with supreme confidence in those areas. On the other side of the coin, I have no problem acknowledging where my expertise ends and admitting when I’m not up to something yet or if I haven’t met my own standards for being good enough. Part of my problem right now is that I feel like I need to go to Dom University and graduate with straight As (Domina Cum Laude? lol) before I can do anything.

• You have managed to figure out what you wanted before being sexually experienced. How has that worked for you?

I try to be very careful about committing myself to particular kinks in general, since it’s impossible to know for certain if a specific activity is going to work for me as well in practice as it does in theory. However, I don’t see myself as being in a position that terribly different than anyone else — situations change, and the use of specific activities is a negotiation that will be different with each partner. My general preferences are strongly for D/s over S&M in general. And I know that, for instance, specifically bondage is something specific that has a lot of appeal. I’ve felt compelled by it since my first stirrings of sexual feeling as a young person. But what form any one kink takes and the degree to which it’s used would be different depending on who I’m with. The thing that I can be certain about is my attraction to the D/s power dynamic I like.

For me, it’s all about the emotion and the power. I can, for instance, see myself doing more with pain play if that was part of what made someone feel submissive though it’s not my major interest as long as it was part of a strong D/s narrative. And I could see myself having sex that would look rather ordinary from the outside as long as my partner and I were in agreement that I was running the show. I’m willing to work out negotiate exactly what forms that takes and I don’t pretend to have enough experience to be certain of what that would look like exactly. But I know my own heart.

• Right now, how would you describe your ideal partner, and your ideal relationship?

A stable, committed relationship with someone who has their own pursuits which they’re happy to follow. I’m pretty committed to my work, so I like the idea of being with someone who has a similar passion for their own interests. Then between the two of us we would work out rules and practices that make us both happy. I really feel drawn to the idea of a web of rules uniting me with someone, both inside and outside the bedroom. There’s an image at Male Submission Art of a woman giving a man a bite to eat? They both look happy, and his head his bowed just a touch. It would be nice to have something cozy and wonderful that can look like that in public. And in private… romantic dommy girl and beloved pet enjoy bondage and kneeling and all manner of happy kinky sex with lots of petting and cuddles involved before, sometimes during, and definitely after. *grin*

• Do you think there is a connection between feminism and femdom? If so, how would you characterize it?

Feminism is about the struggle to liberate women (as well as men and people of all genders) from gender essentialism and the patriarchal social oppression it makes possible. It’s about freeing the potential of individual people to be who they are on their own terms, instead of being forced into restrictive gender boxes for the convenience of others. Inasmuch as kink is about making sexual desire about consent and personal preference, I think it meshes perfectly with feminism. In fact, I think it’s deeply indebted to feminism.

Let me give an example. Okay, in the 1940s there would be these advertisements with drawings of a man “humorously” spanking his wife. She’s flailing and helpless and he’s putting her in her place. The message is that women, by virtue of being women, have no right to bodily autonomy.  Their submission doesn’t exist as a negotiated, consensual option, but rather an obligation. And if a woman didn’t give it over, or give it over just right, a man could and should take it. He should humiliate her against her consent, inflict pain, show her who’s boss. That’s culture, but let’s talk about law.

Prior to the 1970s, it was legal for a man to rape his wife in all 50 states of the US. Perfectly. legal. Feminists started pushing to have that changed in the 1970s, but it took until the 1990s for all 50 states to decide that, hey, yeah, maybe being married to a woman doesn’t give a man absolute rights over her body. So we have a situation where cultural gender essentialism expressed through law defines women as inherently incapable of consent. It’s a world where we have no final and inalienable rights to ourselves, in law or in popular perception. And that lack of bodily rights was directly connected to our gender. A woman should be nonconsensually beaten because she’s a woman. Tits alone merit it. A wife should be fucked whether she wants it or not. That’s the glorious past. And while I’m happy for people who are turned on by vintage images of men spanking their wives or whatever, the only reason that’s fun today is because the reality of that world was torn down brick by brick with the bloody and battered hands of our foremothers.

That’s recent history. Go back further in US and European history and you have coverture, a situation where women are the legal property of their husbands. The children a woman gave birth to were the legal property of her husband, too. So she could be separated from them, could watch helplessly as they were hurt. It was a world where, during many centuries of European history, a rape case was about a woman’s father, husband, or bothers. The crime was not against her body. It was against her as the property of others. A happy fun consensual slave contract is impossible in a world where a man literally owns his wife just because he’s a man and she’s a woman. If you have no legal right to say no, no capacity to withdraw consent, consent itself does not properly exist. So feminism created the space where kink as we understand it could actually be an option for women. And kink, thanks to feminism, doesn’t say, as the law of “civilized society” said until quite recently: take it, whether you like it or not. Watch your husband beat your son and know you can do nothing about it, because he owns both of you. And not in a fun way. Kink doesn’t say, as US law until the  ’90s said:  your husband can’t rape you because you don’t have the right to say what happens to your body.

Actual oppression makes kink very difficult, if not impossible.

Kink, thanks to the centuries long work of feminism, instead says: no, asshole, you do not spank your wife whether she likes it or not. You do not fuck a woman who does not want you fucking her. You find somebody who’s hot to be spanked, someone who feels exhilarated by the sting of your palm against her ass. And then you go to it. Not because she’s a woman and inherently deserving of no bodily autonomy, but because she’s a person who likes to be spanked and she really wants it. Or whatever. There is, ideally, the implication that people of any gender might like to want to be spanked or do other things and that people of any gender might firmly not want that, and both should be equally respected. Because we’ve inherited a legacy from feminism wherein we actually believe that women have rights over their own bodies.

There’s sexism within kink and gender essentialism, too. But as a coherent ethical approach wherein consent is centered and sexual preferences are not tied directly to gender essentialism, kink is inescapably linked to feminism and the world feminism has been building in Western thought. It’s taken literally over 600 years to articulate women as people with rights over their bodies. Centuries of struggle in order for bodily autonomy and consent to exist as a social and legal concept the way we understand it. From Christine de Pizan and the querelle des femmes in Renaissance Europe to Mary Wollstonecraft saying that, hey, Enlightenment dudes? You know those natural rights you’re so hot about? Women deserves those too! Because we’re actually human too.  And then the long fight for property, labor, and voting rights of the 19th and 20th centuries. And the subsequent developments of the ’60s and ’70s.

Kink owes feminism its entire ethical foundation. Without feminism, kink has no ethical foundation. It’s indistinguishable from abuse in a world where half the human population has no real rights over their bodies. Feminism is fucking vital and things we consider natural, like the right of women to consent or not, have in recent memory been highly compromised on a legal, structural level, in addition to a wider social and cultural level. Without 600 years of feminism, you can’t have kink. At least, not kink that women are involved in freely. And without the ongoing fight for women’s rights you can’t have kink either. In our current culture and legal system it remains true that the importance of consent and women’s bodily rights, while pretty widely accepted on the surface, has some deep limitations. There are people who think it’s not really rape if a woman is passed out drunk. Or if she’s wearing the wrong outfit. There are people who wondered aloud of Rihanna deserved to be beaten because she sings about being kinky. It’s actually a question over whether women and people of all genders with vaginas should have access to contraceptives and reproductive choice. The more that women are actually oppressed, the less room there is for kink. Feminism creates the freedom and space for women to have the right to want because it has, over centuries, articulated the right for us to not want. My ability to say “yes” is constrained by whether I can safely and firmly say “no.”

True, there have been messy, unpleasant fights within modern feminism over the politics of BDSM. But focusing on that narrow sliver of feminist history while ignoring the vast intellectual tradition we’re benefiting from is deeply ignorant. The contributions of feminism over the past 600 years are kind of like an oxygen rich atmosphere — often invisible and easily overlooked until you really try to imagine breathing without it . When both kink and feminism are practiced with any kind of rigor, I believe they should dovetail. When the two seem to be in disagreement, it’s because someone is pulling some fucked up shit in either camp.

Either feminists are denying the desires and experiences of women with different sexual tastes than theirs, or kinksters are denying the long, hard fight for women’s rights that makes their fun possible.
BTW, for a really excellent article which came out of the 1980s disputes over BDSM and pornography within feminism, I recommend Joanna Russ’ “Pornography and the doubleness of sex for women.” (I’m not in total agreement with Russ. I just think that the BDSM and porn discussions within feminism have been so stereotyped unfairly that it’s good to actually listen to what a thoughtful, articulate woman was saying at the time and realize that it wasn’t the senselessly man-hating, anti-sex “hysteria” sexist narratives have painted it as in the intervening years.)

Here are links to more information about the legality of marital rape in the history of the US,   coverture & rape as an offense against a woman’s husband,  and the querelle des femmes.  I can give more sources or clarification on the points I’ve made if anyone likes.

• The cultural image of women who prefer to take the lead sexually is rarely positive. How has that affected you?

I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I will never be valued for being the kind of woman I am the way I would be valued if I were a man. In my public life, that means that people often grumble about me being a bitch/dyke/freak. Men who are obsessively rational and driven by their work are admired; women aren’t. We’re supposed to be more emotionally and socially focused. Warmer. Sweeter. Accommodating. I often feel like I am giving my very best and it’s not being read like that — instead it’s read as something that makes me difficult and unnatural. Happily, as I’ve grown as a scholar I’ve experienced positive feedback from mentors and colleagues, which is very rewarding. But I know how the wider world feels about “man-hating feminists” and “humorless bitches.” Women who work hard to be authoritative in their field. I get the message loud and clear: we’re monstrous. Expecially if we’re not very femme in our gender expression. And it does hurt.

It pains me to know that the things I want in my private life are certain to make the majority of people disgusted if they found out. Even many of the people who give me validation for being the kind of woman I am in my work would reject me. My career could be at risk if someone I’m out to talked to the wrong person. I really worry about gossip in regards to dating. I recently read a story about an accomplished lawyer who was a female dominant; she was summarily shamed and fired when someone exposed her sexual practices. I feel very torn over that. The message of being monstrous is even more inescapable in this area. There is, again, something tormenting about knowing how badly my best is perceived by the wider world. I’m shown over and over again that the honest best of my heart, my love, is twisted and worthless. I struggle with feelings of shame and a fundamental sense of despair about romantic relationships because of that.

• I met you through Tumblr, so I want to know how well you feel your tastes and your sexuality is represented in the erotica available today?

There’s not enough body positivity and representation for men and women of various sizes. I like a wider range of male bodies than we get to see. And, in fact, uber-buff is more of a bug than a feature to me. Men who look like they’re composed entirely of rock hard muscle don’t seem very touchable. I like touchable! I like it when we get to see slender men. But more larger men would be wonderful. Depictions of the sexiness of larger men are vanishingly rare. I wish there was more racial diversity as well. And as a larger woman, I can’t express how happy it would make me to see more representation for women like me. I don’t need images to tell me I’m sexy. I feel sexy. I fucking love my body and my mind. I love how desire and pleasure moves through me. Part of my dominance is liking the opportunity to let my own desire build inside of me and playing with it, reigning it in and directing it and letting it soar. I love my height and my size. But again this is a case where the wider world repeatedly tells me that what I think of as my best is worthless. Inside I feel like a fucking pagan image of a voluptuous goddess who’s on the lookout to ravish somebody ever so sweetly and fiercely. Or one of those larger women from art history who’s decided, you know what? I’m going to stop lying here passively and go pin somebody pretty to a bed and make ‘em moan.*g* But then society is very clear that I should not feel good. I should feel very, very bad. And buy products x, y, and z to fix a problem I don’t actually have. Even though beauty standards change so often within cultures–not to mention the vast differences between cultures!–that forcing human bodies into an ever tighter box is ridiculous. People are not meant to be judged on terms of mass production, you know? Only office furniture is supposed to all look exactly the same. Organic things grow and change and reflect their life and no two are exactly the same. And that’s what makes them so beautiful. But that POV doesn’t support a billion dollar diet industry that actually makes people more unhealthy than not, does it?

It would be nice to look out into the world and see my own feelings about the erotic potential of being a big, loving, dommy girl validated more often. We’re fucking gorgeous. Women of all sizes and shapes are fucking gorgeous when we’re feeling hot and happy. Loving and thrilled. It takes an awful lot of careful brainwashing to convince us we’re not okay. And so many women feel that way regardless of their body type. This is not a game any of us is meant to win. As far as the mood of content — I’m pleased for the romantic/tender stuff we get. More of it would be wonderful, though. Not that I don’t enjoy the idea of more strenuous things, it’s just personally not very satisfying without tenderness. I’ve made a fanvid for the femdom film Verfolgt that is the kind of thing I really enjoy. There’s tenderness and some body positivity. It was a lot of fun choosing a song and being able to play with those clips. I wish there were more media sources I could draw upon so I could contribute my own erotica!

• Are you at all involved in a community of like-minded people [locally, online, etc]? If so, how is that experience for you? If not, have you avoided it purposefully?

I have several friends I can talk about things with. They’ve helped a lot. When I first came out to myself, I had a friend who wanted to introduce me to the scene in the area where I was living — that didn’t go as well. I was a bit overwhelmed by my academic work at the time and intimidated by my perception of the scene, as well. The specific club seemed very… performance oriented? Feats of pyrotechnic derring-do. Kink as an extreme sport almost? Which I am not disapproving of, it just doesn’t fit with my own needs. I’m an introvert, so I prefer forming strong bonds with a small group of people; the idea of being in a crowd makes me very uncomfortable, whether the crowd is vanilla or kinky. I’m also pretty monogamous and kink is inseparable from deepening intimacy with a specific person for me. So club culture is difficult for me. I’m in an awkward position right now, honestly. It’s good to be able to put a name to my feelings and engage with them in conversation and blogging, but the question of where to go from here is very intimidating.

• Which of the love languages would you say you prefer?

I took the test and scored highest on Physical Touch (10), which makes sense. I’ve always been an inveterate cuddlebug. I’m not a hands-y person with the people I know, however. I have a very strong sense of other peoples’ boundaries, and I’ve known enough people who struggle with abuse triggers and sensory issues to realize that casual touch can be tough for a lot of people. As a result, I go around starved for contact most of the time. When I went away to college, I learned to come right out and ask close friends for a hug when I really needed one. But it was never really enough. You want to talk about ideal partners and ideal relationships? Give me someone whose warm skin is mine to touch whenever I want. Someone who’s agreed to it in a negotiated context, so I always know where I stand and I can safely be as demanding about it as I wanted to be. So I can walk up behind them casually and just touch, press myself against them, kiss the patch of skin just behind their earlobe, stroke my fingers over their waist and up to their chest, rest my chin on their shoulder.
This is one of those reasons why I recall being quite confused by the fantasy some folks have about a woman in spiky heels using a man as her footstool when I first came across it. I’m thinking: but… all that warm skin, tantalizingly out of reach! I’m not judging the fantasy, just… saying that sitting there trying to appear indifferent would be torture for me. I want to touch. I want to have a fucking bacchanalia of stroking and petting and kissing the nape of his neck. More direct sex acts, too. But I want all kinds of touch! I want his head in my lap. I want to stroke him like a cat while I read a book. I… um, yeah, well. What I’m saying is that the test was very accurate.
My next highest scores on the test were in Quality Time (8) and Acts of Service (6). Those make sense, too. I really like things I’ve been researching about service submission. But the Physical Touch one really spoke to me.

———–
Many thanks to Bellatrix. There is so much of value in her answer about feminism that I hope everyone will take the time to appreciate. She wanted to edit that for length but I not only refused, I practically insisted she discuss it further.

If you have any questions or want to discuss any of these ideas further please do so in the comment section!

Trigger Warning: comments contain discussion of domestic violence

Interview #24

Stabbity is our guest interviewer for this one and here is her intro.

The next interview is with DD, who I had the pleasure of meeting recently. She is just as charming and friendly in person as she appears on her blog, and she knows where all the best bookstores are (yay nerds!).

• How would you describe yourself, your sexual tastes, and your power exchange preference?

I’m a borderline  INTP/ENTP  personality-wise and as for appearances—  I’ve got red, curly hair, greenish-blue eyes, and I’m 5’5. I’ve been married 21 ½ years and have two teenage sons.

Sexual tastes… um, I’m heterosexual, I like smart, sexy men (which is why I married one), and I prefer to run the show.

• How and when did you discover your power exchange preference?

I was 19 and it was right around the time I got married and started having sex. As with many of my best revelations, it came from reading a book, in this case  The Joy of Sex.

At the time, I don’t think I knew the term power-exchange, and the word dominatrix was right out. We were playing; enjoying ourselves, exploring, trying new things, and generally having fun in bed. Over time it became clear that our consistent preference was for me to be the one running the fuck. We both quite liked it when I tied him up and had my way. Sensation play and impact play soon made their way onto our list as well. We did experiment with him topping but it’s not really our thing.

• What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?

Icy Hot and mucus membranes are an incredibly volatile combination.

• If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

I am going to assume we mean sexual advice, because otherwise I am totally going for the stocks tips. In terms of sex I’d go with;

It’s ok to be selfish, and maybe even a little “mean.” He doesn’t mind, and in fact, he thinks it’s pretty hot. Mutuality doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to him as it does to you (Ex. Deny me an orgasm and I will cut your heart out with a spoon, deny him an orgasm and he gets all melty on the inside and drippy on the outside).

• Wow, 21 ½ years, how has your relationship evolved over time? And how do you keep the d/s and kinky play parts of your relationship from getting stale over the very long term?

Our relationship has changed a lot. In some key ways we are not exactly the same people we were all those years ago, so obviously our marriage is different, and not just sexually. In some ways though… we are much as we ever were.

We’ve always enjoyed experimenting. For a vanilla example, one time very early on, we covered our bed in a drop cloth and used about half a bottle of baby oil massaging each other, slipping and sliding, and generally having a really good time. It was fun, but damn was it hard to get rid of later! We spent very nearly as long cleaning up the room and ourselves as we had enjoying ourselves (getting it out of my hair was quite time consuming). We decided we liked oil, but we opt for a different mode of employment and a different oil these days.

For a while, when I wanted to try new things with which I was not entirely comfortable I called on a persona we invented, my evil twin. It was never a formal role-playing thing per se, but it was a tool to enable to me to work outside my comfort zone. It’s been a very long time though since my evil twin had to take the blame for anything. In my surfing and reading I still sometimes find new and interesting things and if I want to try them— I usually do! My husband is pretty open to trying anything once so I have the confidence that comes from knowing I have a safe place to explore.

As for keeping things fresh, I recommend vitamin E.

• Tell me what it is about domination/sadism that appeals to you.

For me, the appeal is how domination and sadism interplay with the surrender and trust of submission. Without yin, what is yang? Within the dynamic we create I demand, hurt, consume— and he wants that, needs it, and embraces it. It is the ultimate safe place to unleash wild parts of myself.

• Who is kinkier, you or your partner, and how do you handle that?

I don’t think either of us is kinkier per se, but we each have our areas of non-convergence.
How do we handle it? We accommodate, collaborate, compromise, and negotiate. If you mapped our kinky interests out as a Venn diagram there would be more overlapping than not, so it all works out.

• Do you think there is a connection between feminism and femdom? If so, how would you characterize it?

Without the progress of feminism we’d not be having these interviews, for one thing. The official acknowledgement of the existence of female orgasm isn’t exactly distant history and the idea that women ought to have control of their own sexuality is accepted today (as much as it is) because of feminism.   I think the connection between that and femdom is that feminism helps create a windbreak so some women can have the chance to nurse little sparks of dominant fire into flames.

• The cultural image of women who prefer to take the lead sexually is rarely positive. How has that affected you?

I haven’t ever fit neatly into any role I’ve been presented and I am difficult and stubborn enough that I’ve mostly refused to try. Additionally, I grew up  without the influence of TV, magazines, and movies so I missed a lot of cultural messages most women my age internalized. I was instead presented with an insanely archaic version of the role of women which was much easier to identify as completely ridiculous and ignore.
After I was married the enthusiasm in my own bedroom was sufficient to drown out any negative cultural messages about women with high sexual drives and dominant tendencies.

• Why did you decide to start a kink blog?

In 2005, while researching something kinky I ran into Bitchy Jones. Until reading that blog I would never have described myself as a sexually dominant woman. My husband and I both knew we liked it when I ran the show and we had a collection of bdsm toys (whips, nipple clamps, cuffs, floggers, etc.) that I used on him but our vocabulary didn’t include noun forms of the words dominant and submissive (we still don’t use those when we talk about our sex life). I would have claimed the term kinky but that was about as far as I was willing to go.

I was accustomed to massively retooling bdsm information to make it suit us but reading Bitchy Jones was a revelation. As I read her posts I experienced this empowering sense of resonation with what she wrote.
I’d been over in the corner working with my own adaptations of what I’d thought of as “other people’s stuff” ie. bdsm. I’d toss out the bits I didn’t like (humiliation, sexless ice-queen dominatrix stuff, public play, cuckolding, cross-dressing, etc.), put together the stuff I did like (sensation play, orgasm control and denial, bondage, impact play, wax, etc.), and we would have a great time discussing new ideas and figuring out how to adapt them to our interests and our situation. It worked for us, we enjoyed ourselves, and we were happy with what we were doing but our thing was clearly NOT what people were thinking of when bdsm was discussed.

After all, we were not wearing leather and latex to sex clubs on the weekends, we were monogamous, and I was not only not interested in being a professional dominatrix I actually found most of the associated narratives a complete turn off. We were just quietly kinky in our own sex lives and really enjoying it.

Bitchy though, it felt like what she did was… she walked around the room, reclaimed all the good stuff from the purveyors of bdsm expectations, then handed it to me saying, “I believe this is yours.” She then yelled at the others for fucking it up by adding the stuff I’d hated.

It was the first time I realized that I wasn’t the only one that felt as I did. It marks the start of me thinking of bdsm as something that didn’t belong to  her, but something that belonged to me.

Sooo, I started a Tumblr in June 2010 and before long I was blogging too. I have no illusions or aspiration about being Bitchy Jones but if I can help other women; point them to resources, share good porn, give a place to figure out what they want and how to get it, or offer the comfort of community, then I will feel like I’ve paid it forward.

• Does being dominant in a non-sexual setting (work, etc) energize you?

Nah, I really only want enough power to accomplish what I believe needs done but I hate dealing with all the bullshit responsibilities involved with being in charge. I equally hate being micromanaged or ordered about though. Second in command usually suits me well for work— enough authority to get things done and a great deal of autonomy.
Socially, I am way more into collaboration and consensus rather than being in charge and I choose friends who play well with others. I tend to enjoy people who are confident enough to have their own ideas and know what they want without always having to insist on their own way. I value the ability to persuade and influence and I typically see insistence on social dominance as a weakness.

• Which of the love languages would say you prefer?

I look the test on the website and here are my scores:
Words of Affirmation- 6
Quality Time- 5
Receiving Gifts- 6
Acts of Service- 6
Physical Touch- 7

I would say that is pretty accurate. I am open to all those expressions but physical touch does work the best. Limited time doing things together can be more than accommodated for by making it snuggle and cuddle time.