Fantasies are great. They’re hot and fun and what drew many of us into kink in the first place. But they’re not reality. Clinging to a fantasy in the face of real life evidence to the contrary requires ignoring that evidence. Lack of evidence makes it just a little bit difficult to figure out what’s going wrong, let alone how to fix it.

For example, years ago on fetlife in the submissive men and the women who love them group, a man started a thread asking for guidance on being the best submissive he could be. All well and good, but he posted in all caps and replaced ‘E’s with ‘3’s. Person after person replied asking him to post in a more readable format, but he insisted they were all out to deny his self expression and eventually left in a huff because no one would tell him how to be a better submissive. I sincerely wish I was exaggerating, but he was actually that deluded.

This guy was clearly living in a fantasy land, and it worked out badly for him. If he had been willing to put aside his fantasy that he was such a special and unique snowflake that everyone would rush to do him favours no matter how poorly he expressed himself, he might have been able to learn something.

As annoying as that particular person was, he really only hurt himself. None of the people he so thoroughly alienated were actually harmed by trying to read a few badly formatted posts. Other types of fantasies, however, can be much more harmful.

There are three main categories of fantasies I see in the scene. ‘It would be hot if…’, ‘It would be convenient for me if…’, and ‘My kink would be okay if…’.

‘It would be hot if…’ fantasies are the all too common ‘this protocol turns my crank, so I’m going to use it everywhere, even if S/slashy speak on a simple message board makes people want to claw their eyes out’, or ‘all the female doms in porn like verbal humiliation, so you should you like it too’. If you willfully ignore other people’s complaints about how hard your posts are to read, you’ll be left scratching your head and wondering why you can’t seem to make friends with anyone. If no-one you approach will give you the time of day, there may be a reason for it.

‘It would be convenient for me if…’ is that much more irritating. I put ‘I declared myself dominant, so you must all bow down and address me as Sir Lord Emperor Black Dragon Wolf’ in that category. It would be great if simply calling yourself a dom/top/master made you effortlessly confident in all situations – believe me, I wish it had worked that way for me. I think ‘my way is the one true way and the rest of you are all wrong’ belongs in this category too. It would be awfully convenient if there were one true way to do things that was clearly best for everyone. If there were, we could all stop screwing around and just do the stuff that works. In the real world, insisting there is one right way causes people to laugh at you either behind your back or right to your face. It’s also a bit of a setback when you inevitably encounter a situation where your ‘one true way’ doesn’t work.

‘My kink would be okay if…’ fantasies probably irritate me the most, although all of them are abundantly annoying. This is where I place fantasies like ‘all women are naturally submissive, so it’s okay for me to be dominant’, and ‘I follow the ancient Japanese tradition of rope masters, handed down generation by generation in a secret ceremony, so it’s okay for me to like tying people up’. It’s okay to be kinky, dammit! A lack of permanent damage and your partner’s informed consent makes your kink okay.

What’s not okay is hurting other people while you try to convince yourself your kink is okay. I don’t feel safe in a scene where asshats can go around insisting that women are all naturally submissive without anyone calling them on their shit. Your need to put a band-aid on your insecurity about your kink does not outrank my need to be able to participate in the kink community without getting attacked just for being who I am.

Feeling insecure about whether it’s okay to be kinky is perfectly natural, and not what I’m complaining about. What I can’t stand is people deciding that because they feel insecure, everyone should act in a way that lets them avoid dealing with their insecurities. The scene is based on consent, and I do not consent to denying who I am so that you don’t have to worry about whether you’re ‘doing it right’.

Submissive men, this is your periodic reminder that the bar to impress a dominant woman has been set so low that you should be worried about tripping over it, not failing to reach it. Don’t believe me? Here’s an except from an email I sent last year:

When I asked if you could tell me anything about yourself as a person, I wanted some information about who you are outside of your kinks (which you did not need to list for me again. I’m not stupid, I can scroll down to your first message and see the list there).

The truly sad thing is that the message I was replying to was far from the worst I’ve seen – the content may have been terrible, but at least it was all spelled correctly. However, all the attention to spelling and grammar in the world won’t help if you refuse to treat me like a human fucking being.

Guys, the bar is so low that all you have to do to impress a dom is to treat her like she’s a person. Seriously, that’s it. You don’t have to be rich, powerful, or a combination motorcycle race champion/underwear model. All you have to do is start from the bizarre and outlandish assumption that we’re people with interests of our own, not a malfunctioning fetish vending machines. I can’t even begin to tell you how infuriating it is to be so badly disrespected so very often by people who claim to worship women like me that the most basic acknowledgement of my humanity is all it takes to get my attention, but the smart men out there should be using my frustration to their advantage. Someone might as well get something out of this mess.

Oh, and for bonus points: read your potential dom’s writing! Using myself as an example, I have an entire goddamn blog that tells you more than any profile ever could about what I care about, how I think, and who I am as a person (sure, the blog mostly shows my ragey side, but there’s still a lot of information here). If you’ve found someone on fetlife, for fucks sake read their profile and look at their posting history (scroll down a little, it’s below their websites and above their fetishes). Making a comment about something your potential dom said recently is not only a great way to start a conversation, but it shows that you were willing to make the grueling effort of clicking your mouse a couple of times and doing a little reading.

Grumpy as I very often am, I really do want to be impressed by submissive men. I know many of you have a good handle on this already, but for the guys just catching up: I want to read your messages and wonder whether I’m awesome enough for you. I want your messages to make me sad that I don’t have room in my life for another awesome submissive man and determined to find someone to set you up with. I want your writing to impress me so much that I ask if I can use it as a guest post on my blog. I want you guys to be as amazing as I know you can be. Can’t you meet me half way?

My good friend Torthal wrote this fantastic rant that was very widely shared on Fetlife, and was gracious enough to allow me to reblog it here so even more people can see it. Feel free to comment either here or on the original Fetlife post.

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Right then, let’s straighten this shit out.

If you’re a submissive man, you’re saddled with a shitton of stereotypes. Most of them damaging. I like to rage against the stereotypes. It’s like Rage Against the Machine but with less power chords.

Yes, I am a submissive man. No, I am not weak. I find your correlation of “submissive male” and “weakness” disturbing (and furthermore the association of submission in general!).

No, I am not a cuckold. No, I am not pathetic, nor am I snivelling, a worm, or any other value-decreasing adjective, and I refuse with enthusiasm the conjecture that these are requirements for male submission. The entire point of me and my submission is that I have fucking value. How else am I appealing? I have strength. I’m comfortable in my masculinity and in my submission, and boy let me tell you but society had a fun time telling me the opposite to that one!

How can you have a power exchange without the power? It’s like a paraphrase without the phrase. I want to build myself up, not build myself down, and I’m writing this as a call out to others, male or female, who feel this way. There’s something seriously wrong with the popular conceptions of all of this, and I want to help change it.

I don’t want to have to sacrifice one aspect of my personality to adhere to a certain set of expectations, a sort of “twisted” rulebook quietly set up to go about our business without forcing society to actually re-evaluate what it means to be dominant, what it means to be male and/or masculine, or any gender, really, so I’m not going to.

This is me standing up and calling out. I’m a submissive man, and I’m comfortable in that. I have strength, I enjoy that strength, and I’m looking forward to the day where I find someone who enjoys it too. Until then (and even after then), I’m just gonna be here, standing up and telling those stereotypes to fuck right off. Because they’re damaging and they need to change, and if I need to demonstrate that by example, then hell yes will I do so.

mic drop

In the Submissive men and women who love them group on Fetlife, someone recently asked an interesting question, which I’m going to paraphrase here for convenience:

…

If you enjoy it when a man submits to you, is it better if he automatically gives no resistance, or if he fights back a little bit/legitimately resists you?

This is why I ask, in case it gives a more clear picture: I am a sub, but the way my spirit is, I cannot give control to someone who cannot prove to me that she deserves it, not just based on my desire to be dominated.

…

Like others in the thread have said, I think there are really two questions here – whether it’s reasonable to expect your dom to earn your submission, and whether any doms out there enjoy resistance play. My answer to both of those questions is yes, but stopping there would make for an awfully boring post 🙂

Personally, I have no interest in a sub who acts like his submission isn’t valuable. Self-loathing and/or the lack of any sense of self-preservation is just not attractive to me, and neither is the implication that there’s nothing special about me, that this guy is just submitting at the nearest woman who will tolerate him. I want someone who knows that he is awesome and isn’t about to throw his submission at just anyone. I want someone who will get to know me over time and submit to me because he thinks I’m awesome and knows that I can be trusted to take care of him. For me, kink only works if it’s personal, and as soon as someone submits to me because “she’ll do” it’s not personal anymore.

I think it’s absolutely reasonable for a sub to ask a potential dom tough questions when they’re getting to know each other. If you’re going to put your safety in my hands, you’re damned well entitled to ask how I’d handle it if you were dealing with sub drop and needed me when I was busy. While I don’t want to be interrogated, it’s not terribly difficult to ask questions respectfully. And honestly, if a potential dom freaks out about you having the unbelievable gall to ask her a few questions, you really haven’t lost anything by scaring her off.

However, there’s a difference between a bit of rational self-interest and an exhausting power struggle. I like a little resistance play as much as the next person, but when it comes right down to it you either want to submit to me or you don’t. If you don’t want to, what on earth would I gain by fighting you? Just like submission isn’t worth anything to me if all I have to do to ‘earn it’ is have tits and come within 10 feet of you, it’s also not worth it if you make everything into such a power struggle that my life would be easier without you in it. I have a certain amount of sympathy for people who need to push the boundaries to be sure they’re there, or who are new to submission and still struggling with it, but those people are just not right for me. This may be unfair, but you are in fact a grownup and as such you should have a basic handle on your issues with authority before you come around asking for me to dominate you.

Also, it’s not as unusual as I would like to see some jackass online talking about how tough he is and how he’s had such a terrible time finding a woman who is strong enough to make him submit, and is anyone here brave enough to take the douchebag challenge? Shockingly enough, that doesn’t generally go over well. Being a pain in the ass is not exactly a selling point when you’re looking for a dominant woman. If that’s what we wanted, we could get it from any vanilla guy who’s overly impressed with himself.

Resistance play, on the other hand, can be super hot. It involves a certain amount of play acting, given that I have the upper body strength you’d expect in a sedentary female nerd, but so does a lot of what we do. It’s something I would most likely make me drop afterwards, and I’d only do it with someone I really trusted, but that doesn’t stop it from being fun to think about.

I guess the short version is: for me resistance in play = fun, but resistance for real = come back when you’re ready to submit. What do you think about resistance, readers?

Today in ‘Things I can’t believe I haven’t already ranted about”: tops have limits too. We tend to talk a lot more about how bottoms have the right to set limits, which makes perfect sense when bottoms are the ones more likely to be physically or psychologically harmed when someone crosses their limits, but I think it’s worth talking about tops’ limits too.

First of all, there are plenty of things I just don’t have the physical skills to do. For example, I can’t throw a long (over 2 feet) whip without hitting myself on the ear, let alone being able to aim for any particular spot. I don’t feel particularly limited by that one since I don’t particularly want to be out of arms reach of my partner while we’re playing, but it is a thing I can’t do. Needles, on the other hand, I would like to try someday, but I don’t have the skills to do a needle scene on my own yet. I’d feel comfortable putting a few needles in someone if I had an experienced needle top spotting me, but I wouldn’t want to go jabbing someone all on my own. And of course my endurance is limited. If you want an hour long flogging scene where you go deep into subspace and just stay there, you’re going to need to find someone whose shoulder is up to it 🙂

There are also things I can’t do and feel good about it afterward. With verbal humiliation, I can tell someone they’re being such a good little slut, but I can’t tell them that they’re stupid, worthless, pathetic, or anything like that. I don’t mean to imply that people who enjoy being called stupid and worthless are doing kink wrong, but it’s just not something I have to offer.

I also have a hangup about no-win situations. While I can intellectually understand how giving someone an impossible task to carry out, then punishing them when they inevitably fail can be a fun way to play with power, I would feel like an asshole if I did that. The idea of putting someone in a no-win situation just reminds me too much of times I’ve been stuck in a situation like that (for example, an ex of mine always used to complain that I wouldn’t open up and talk to him, but every goddamn time I tried to talk with him about anything, everything I had to say was always stupid and wrong), which fills me with rage and is the opposite of fun for me.

Speaking of anger, I am not at all comfortable with the idea of playing while angry, or using play, no matter how well negotiated, to vent anger about anything. Unlike verbal humiliation and impossible tasks, I would advise other people not to do this either. Even if you don’t have the hangups I do around anger, it’s just too easy for a scene based on anger to get out of control. For myself in particular, I have a vicious temper (right here people who really know me are nodding along, and people who only know me a little bit are going “Aw, that’s cute that she thinks she has a temper”) which means I can’t ethically put anyone in a position where I could really hurt them if I lose my temper. I also firmly believe that if I’m going to hit someone in anger, I need to have a much better reason than “I was angry and they were there.” My kinky rule of thumb is that I do things joyfully or not at all.

Finally, I don’t play very hard with people I don’t know well. If I’ve just met someone at a party I’m willing to give them a relatively light flogging, but I’m not going to do anything that leaves much of any bruising. Once I have a better idea of  how much someone can take and how clearly they can communicate mid-scene, I’m willing to go harder, but that always takes a little while.

The point I’m trying to make with all of this is that it’s normal for tops to have limits too. We are not in fact all knowing, all powerful beings who never feel uncertain or squicked out by a certain activity, and it’s unfair to expect us to be. Especially if you’re new to topping, there are going to be all kinds of things you’re just freaked out by, or are interested in but not ready for, or are waiting for just the right person to explore that particular kink with. You get to have limits too, so don’t forget to discuss them too when you’re asking about your bottom’s limits.

I was reading an interesting blog post this morning about why stealth submission doesn’t work, and wanted to expand on one of the points AlphaDomme made. To quote from the post, regarding suddenly doing much more housework than usual in hopes that your partner will magically become dominant in response:

After a few weeks of this, you are starting to get tired of doing this work with no “benefit”. Your partner is not even thanking you for what you do around the house yet. And she is not at all turning into the domme of your dreams.

It’s possible there are a few completely selfless people out there who serve their partners out of the kindness of their hearts with no need for anything in return, but the vast majority of submissive people need to have their service acknowledged and to feel appreciated. Without that acknowledgement, the symbiotic exchange that makes kink so awesome can’t happen, and without that exchange, stealth submission is just free maid service.

I think one of the fallacies the idea of stealth submission rests on is the belief that simply being useful is enough to make a submissive person feel satisfied, and that if you want anything in return for your service, even just a pat on the head and a “good boy”, then you must not really be submissive. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Having needs doesn’t make you a bad submissive, it makes you a human being I can connect with. For me, and I suspect for many submissives, kink is about intimacy. If the person on the other end of the dynamic represses all of his needs in the name of being a “good” sub, what he’s really doing is shutting me out. The “perfect” submissive with no needs of his own would be a terrible submissive for me. I get nothing out of feeling like I’m interchangeable, like there’s nothing special about me that inspires his submission.

While it’s unfair to expect the dom to do all of the work of inspiring someone to submit to me, it’s just as unfair to expect the submissive to do all of the work of keeping a power exchange dynamic going. As much as some s-types enjoy feeling “taken advantage of” in a negotiated and mutually satisfying way, a truly one-sided dynamic can only last for so long before the submissive realizes they really are being taken advantage of and leaves. Again, without the dom holding up their end of the dynamic, there’s no connection, no symbiosis.

That’s not to say that the poor woman being submitted at (who is probably wondering if her husband is being so nice all of a sudden because he cheated and feels guilty) can in any way be blamed for not holding up her end of the dynamic, just that it’s impossible for one person to make a dynamic work. Which is exactly why advice to “stealth submit” is a cruel joke – by skipping the all important “talk to your partner” step, it guarantees that the stealth submitter will not get the acknowledgement and appreciation that make submission satisfying.

The sooner we drop the idiotic idea that submissive people shouldn’t have needs, the better off we’ll be.

Nerd that I am, I like games. I also like interactive things that people argue are/aren’t games (which is a discussion I’d like to avoid in the comments because it’s fucking boring). Here are some interesting things, some kink related, some not.

Consensual Torture Simulator by Merritt Kopas. This game costs $2, but it’s well worth it. To quote Merritt, it’s “a game about hurting someone who wants it.” You can read more about it in this article on Kotaku. Whether you see it as a comment on violence in video games or strictly as a simulated scene, it’s interesting to play and you don’t have to have spent the last 10 years playing games to understand it. The writing in this one is lovely and there’s a strong feeling of intimacy and affection between the characters.

encyclopedia fuckme and the case of the vanishing entree by Anna Anthropy. This is a pornographic lesbian dating sim sort of thing, and it’s super fun to play. Like Consesual Torture Simulator, it’s a text game that you don’t have to be a gamer to enjoy. There is some non-graphic violence in this one that could be taken to imply that kinky people are damaged/evil, but as Anna’s kinky herself, I feel pretty comfortable saying it’s just in there to add to motivate the player to escape and add drama to the game.

Dys4ia, also by Anna Anthropy. This game is about Anna’s experience with hormone replacement therapy and gender transition. It’s the single most interesting thing I’ve ever seen done in a game.

Candy box! by aniwey. This one is hard to describe without spoiling it, so I’ll just say that if you’re patient and keep fiddling with it, you will be rewarded. This game has a sense of discovery and wonder that I think is missing from most big budget games.

A Dark Room by Doublespeak Games. To quote the developer, this one is a “minimalist text adventure.” There are some similarities to Candy box!, and this one will probably be most interesting to people who have been gaming for a while.

Depression Quest by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler. This game is meant to show depressed people that they aren’t alone, and to try to explain what depression is like to people who don’t have it. Those are pretty awesome things to try to do, and Depression Quest helps expand the range of what we can communicate with games.

Unfortunately, Depression Quest, or more precisely Zoe’s efforts to get the game onto Steam (for non-gamers, Steam is a game distribution platform with massive reach. Getting the game onto Steam would get it into far more people’s hands), are kind of a lightning rod for assholes. There’s a small but vocal minority of gamers who are terribly threatened both by the idea of games that don’t specifically cater to male power fantasies, and (I’m guessing) the idea that women have feelings that have nothing to do with men. If you have a Steam account, you can help greenlight Depression Quest.

don’t take it personally babe, it just ain’t your story by Christine Love. In Christine’s words, this is “A full length visual novel about the erosion of privacy, gay drama, young sexuality, and the perils of modern online life for a high school literature class.” As serious as that makes the game sound (and there are serious parts), most of the game is straightforward voyeuristic juicy gossip fun. There is some content I feel I should add a trigger warning for (select the text to reveal it, it spoils a major plot point) [ a minor character appears to commit suicide, but is later revealed to be perfectly fine. When she moved away, she and her classmates took the opportunity to play a trick on their teacher], but apart from that the game is pretty light-hearted.

Finally, Myst is now online and free to play. If you’ve never tried it, you need to check it out. Unlike the other games in this list, it’s not an indie game created on a tiny budget by just a few people, but it is free now, and it’s a classic for a reason. Myst is a puzzle/adventure game where you roam around an island, but you don’t have to be any good at solving the puzzles to enjoy wandering around a beautiful environment messing with stuff (I was certainly never any good at the sequel, Riven).

Nerd trivia: Because Myst was so graphics heavy (for it’s time it was absolutely gorgeous, and actually holds up pretty well today) it was just too big to be installed from 3 1/2″ floppies like other games of it’s time. People bought CD-ROM drives just to be able to play it, which helped drive adoption of the newfangled CD-ROM format. Okay, I’m probably the only one who thinks that’s interesting.

Readers, have you been playing anything interesting lately?

On my last post, about what a dick move it is to tell a partner how to feel about trying kink, Miss Pearl left such an interesting comment that I built a whole post around it.

To quote Miss Pearl:

It is a really bad habit that we tend to treat kinks as an ‘extra’ that gets put up with. It promotes the idea that kinks are something that are secondary to say vanilla. It’s the same attitude that treats gay partnerships as less valid than straight ones (for example that’s used to say it’s not worth changing laws to accommodate them because it’s a fringe thing) and it really doesn’t make allowances for the fact that for a kinked person, performing as vanilla may be just as much as a stretch.

Just as much as it’s unfair to tell your partner they have to love kink, it’s unfair to tell your kinky partner they have to love vanilla when it’s just not satisfying for them. Being kinky is not something a person can just turn off when it’s convenient for their partner. Considering what a pain in the ass it can be to find any kinky partner at all, let alone one whose kinks are compatible with yours, don’t you think most of us would turn off our kinks if we could?

Even if it were possible to turn off our kinks, what kind of person would do that to their partner? If you care about someone, you don’t ask them to cut off pieces of themselves. It’s never fun to find out you can’t give someone what they need, but the answer to that is never ever to tell them to stop having needs.

Expanding on that, Miss Pearl also said:

as much as some of the “please make my wife into my fantasy dominate” types make me want to bash heads, I’ve been on the other side of that- and have many friends who have been on the side of “you spanked me so now you owe me”..

If you’re only grudgingly trying kink so that you can hold it over your partner’s head, for fucks sake just dump them. It would be kinder. Kinky people, you do not have to put up with that kind of douchebaggery. You can do better than someone who uses your kink as a handle to jerk you around by. Again, if you care about someone, you don’t treat them like that. Making someone feel like they owe you for indulging their kinks relies on them feeling ashamed of those kinks. Being alone can definitely suck, but I’d rather be alone than in a relationship that relies on me feeling ashamed of who I am.

Where things get complicated is where, as Miss Pearl says:

Additionally, while you can’t make someone feel a particular way, it’s also largely useless to just go through the mechanical aspects of kinks for many people, myself included. If there’s no connection or chemistry through my kinks, it’s depressing and useless and I might as well just go masturbate.

This is exactly why I don’t do scenes with the ridiculously adorable boyfriend. He’s willing to try things he’s not interested in for their own sake to make me happy, and that’s awfully sweet of him, but sweetness is not enough to make a scene work for me. It doesn’t help that his absolutely unreasonable pain tolerance means I can’t get the reactions that do it for me, which makes any scene we might do kind of a waste of everyone’s time. If someone doesn’t react in a way that I can feed on, no amount of willingness to try will create the energy exchange that makes a scene satisfying for me.

While I believe it’s a dick move to tell a partner how to feel about kink I think it’s fair to say “Thank you for trying, but this just isn’t working for me. Can we find another way to get my needs met?” Some partners will be okay with playing with other people, others may need to end the relationship to find people they’re more compatible with. That’s painful for everyone involved, but I firmly believe it’s better than staying in an unfulfilling relationship while your resentment slowly burns away everything that was ever good about your relationship.

It does get complicated when the non-kinky partner is dependent on the kinky partner, though. Everyone has a right to get their needs met, but at the same time I can’t see it as fair to put a person in a position where they either have to convincingly fake enjoyment of your kinks or end up struggling to find a living space, or health insurance, or physical care, or emotional support. It would be great if everyone made sure they were compatible with their partner before allowing them to become dependent, but I can’t see that actually happening any time soon.

There is no shortage of sad stories on fetlife and other forums where submissive men, in particular, describe how they thought they could do without kink, or didn’t realize they were kinky until long after they were married, or thought they could talk their wives into it, only to find that their wives were unwilling to go through the motions of the odd scene, and unwilling to let them play with anyone else. Unilaterally deciding your partner can’t have any kink in his life is at least as much of a dick move as telling your partner how to feel about kink. I also believe it’s as close to open permission to discreetly play with others as you can get in a relationship with those kinds of communication issues. If you don’t want to play, that’s your right. If you’re not thrilled about your partner doing something so intimate with anyone else, that’s completely understandable. But if you want a relationship where your partner doesn’t do anything kinky with you or with anyone else, well, you need to find a vanilla partner or tacitly agree not to ask too many questions when he “spends a few hours with the guys” now and then.

Kinky people’s needs don’t stop mattering just because those needs are often seen as “weird.” If you really want to tell your partner that what they want is not okay, find someone who has never wanted anything the least bit unusual in any part of their life cast the first stone.

One of my big pet peeves is when people ask their partners not to just try a particular kink (domination, for example), but to feel a certain way about it. I understand that for a lot of people it’s not satisfying to be dominated by someone who’s just going through the motions, but telling your partner how they have to feel about what they’re doing is completely unfair. 

It’s absolutely fine to ask your partner to try something, it’s fine to tell them you really really hope they enjoy it, it’s fine to tell them it’s important to you, but it is not cool to tell someone how to feel about what you’ve asked them to do. Even if it were possible to feel a particular way on command, that would be a ridiculous amount of pressure to put on someone you supposedly love.

Trying something completely new sexually is difficult and scary enough without any added pressure to feel a certain way about it. Unless you’ve spent your entire life living under a rock, you have to have noticed that women spend their whole lives being taught that nice girls don’t, that men only want to marry ‘nice girls’, that doing anything ‘freaky’ in bed means you’re a slut and your partner won’t respect you anymore, that once you’re a ‘slut’ you can’t say no ever again, and so on and so on. There’s kind of a lot of cultural programming to get past just to try anything kinky, let alone to like it. For fucks sake, let your partner get comfortable with the idea of doing some kinky stuff before you push her to be enthusiastic about it.

Speaking of enthusiasm, it’s impossible to manufacture. All you can do is make your partner feel like she has to lie convincingly, and if you do that it shouldn’t be any kind of news that you’re being an asshole. Aside from being tremendously douchebaggy, making your partner lie to you is just counter productive. If she’s busy convincing you she likes whatever it is you want her to like, how is she going to find out what she actually likes? I’m certain that at least some of the women who ‘were never able to get into kink’ could have found something they liked if they had just been allowed to explore at their own pace instead of being pressured to love it all immediately.

Guys, you can ask your girlfriend/wife/partner to try things, you can help her work through her feelings about it, you can be patient and try things until you find something you both like, but you can’t ask her to magically like something just because you like it.

In the spirit of having a really nice lazy weekend, today I’m going to talk about things that make me happy instead of things that make me want to set other things on fire.

Thing the first: Sky Pirates of the Rio Grande by Amanda Gannon and Paul B. Batteiger. Amanda and Paul write erotica, but not just any erotica. Sky Pirates is a steam-punky, wild west adventure with airships and dinosaurs and it is just as awesome as it sounds. It’s basically a gloriously ridiculous (seriously, there’s a scene where one of the characters rides a dinosaur) pulp fiction adventure where they don’t fade to black every time there’s a sex scene.

Even if you took out the sex (which would be a pity, because it’s super hot), Sky Pirates would still be a good read. The characters are just so much fun, and while they’re often a little larger than life (which is exactly what you would expect in this sort of adventure story), they still feel like actual people, not cardboard cutouts being maneuvered through a series of joyless sex scenes (mainstream porn, I’m looking at you).

At the risk of straying into rant territory, another thing I absolutely love about Sky Pirates is that the protagonist is a woman, her main ally is a woman, the main villain is also a woman, and there are various and sundry supporting female characters. Holy crap, it’s possible to write an interesting story about women like we’re goddamn people or something!

While I haven’t yet read the sequel, Queen of the Sky Frontier, I’m sure it’s just as awesome.

Thing the second: the Her Jewel series by Isla Sinclair. If you’ve read much of any female dominant/male submissive erotica, this is going to blow your mind: the ‘jewel’ of the series title is a submissive man. There is actually erotica out there that treats submissive men as beautiful and valuable and desirable, and it is amazing. Aside from the awesomeness of a fictional submissive man actually being wanted, if you like m/m and voyeurism (specifically two men putting on a show for the dominant woman they both adore), you will fucking love this series. It’s both super hot and absolutely adorable how much the three of them just plain like each other.

Thing the third: the Space Queen series, also by Isla Sinclair. This series is less sweet and more dirty wrong hotness, which is exactly what you want sometimes. The space queen of the title captures two of the humans her species is at war with, and torments them in all kinds of fun ways. Well, fun for her, not so much for them. There’s kidnapping, pain, fear, shame at getting turned on in a messed up situation, and some forced bi that’s actually hot for once. Usually I find forced-bi incredibly off putting because so much of it assumes that servicing another man is fundamentally humiliating, or fundamentally feminine and therefore humiliating. In Space Queen, the problem is the terrifying sadist who captured them and having to make choices they don’t like to survive, not the fact that they’re the same gender. While this series is mostly porn, there are still some interesting hints of conflict between the Regent who captured the humans and the as yet unseen Empress. I’m terribly curious about what happens next.

Thing the fourth: the Marketplace series by Laura Antoniou. There’s a reason these are classics of BDSM fiction. Whether or not the scenes and sex in them do it for you, the world of the marketplace is absolutely fascinating and the characters ring so true you just have to know what happens to them. I started reading The Reunion (the fifth in the series) midweek, which in hindsight was a terrible idea. I ended up sleep deprived all that week because I couldn’t put it down.

One thing I really enjoy about the Marketplace series is the sheer variety of characters. There are dominant men, dominant women, submissive men, submissive women, slaves and owners of colour, trans men and women, butches and femmes, and they’re all just treated as people. Not to say that Laura Antoniou never tackles uncomfortable subjects, though. There is a part of one of the books where a trainer temporarily refuses to accept a trans male slave as a man and tries for force him to be a woman. She eventually sees how awful a thing she’s done, apologizes, and writes into his contract that he shall only be referred to and treated as a man. There is also a black male slave who struggles terribly with his slavery and his place in the world when his master and mistress’s relationship is on the rocks and he doesn’t know where he would end up if they divorce. That one doesn’t get quite as neatly resolved, but his fears and his struggles are taken absolutely seriously and he gets a lot of support from the people around him.

There’s one part of The Reunion in particular that just delights me. This is a bit of a spoiler, but it’s also quite a minor plot point and happens very early in the book. Stop reading now if you want to stay completely unspoiled.

If you’re still here, the part I’m talking about is a very straightforward, stereotypical femdom scene. You know, with the fetish wear and the small penis humiliation and the bottom being called pathetic and the woman not getting off. Only, it turns out the woman is the slave and the ‘submissive’ is her master. I just love the way Laura skewers the idea that a woman acting out a scene where everything revolves around the ‘subs’ cock is anything but her submitting to him.