First, the backstory. Maymay created a tool to help people who use OKCupid to keep themselves safer. For those who may not know, OKCupid is a dating site where you can answer all kinds of questions (and add new ones), which allows the site to compare your answers to other user’s answers and give you a match score. What maymay’s predator alert tool does is flags (here’s an example) people who’ve answered certain questions in potentially concerning ways. Sadly, those questions don’t even have to be subtle. It turns out that rapists will straight out tell you they’re rapists if you just avoid using the word “rape”. The predator alert tool is a super awesome idea and if you use OKCupid you should absolutely install it (there’s a slightly different version for Fetlife, too).

You wouldn’t think there’d be much to complain about there. It’s your choice to answer a question like “Do you feel there are any circumstances in which a person is obligated to have sex with you?” with “Yes”, so there’s not a lot of room for whining about false accusations or having your answers taken out of context.

Sadly, some people have such terrible tunnel vision that they’ve been whining and crying about some of the questions the predator alert tool will warn you about, specifically this one “Have you ever choked someone who you were in some kind of intimate relationship with (e.g., you wrapped your hands or some object around their throat)?“. Apparently it’s a terrible injustice to flag consensual and non-consensual chokers the same way. Unquietpirate has already posted a response to that pointless fucking whining, but I think the whole conversation needs more rage.

First of all, as I understand it the tool doesn’t block red-flagged users, all it does is display a list of the questions and answers you may want to be concerned about. Kinky people who want to be choked aren’t going to skip red-flagged profiles entirely. They’re going to have a look, see the explanation the user gave for answering yes to the choking question (if you didn’t add an explanation about how you would never ever choke a person without their enthusiastic consent, stop fucking whining and fix that shit), and go “sweet, nothing to worry about”. People who are freaked out by the idea of even perfectly consensual choking are going to be a bad match for you, so why would you even bother whining about those people skipping over your profile? This is a non-issue, you stupid fucks.

Second, by saying that not flagging a consensual kinkster as a potential predator matters more than getting as much information as possible into the hands of people who need it, you’re really saying that your poor, delicate ego is more important than other people’s physical safety. Their physical fucking safety! If you really believe that, you haven’t been mis-flagged. You are dangerously self-absorbed, if not outright predatory, and people are absolutely right to fear and avoid you.

Finally, it is in no way unjust to flag kinky people as potential abusers. According to a survey the NCSF did, 30% of respondents had their consent violated in some way. 30 fucking percent! That’s actually worse than the already dismal statistic of nearly 1 in 5 women experiencing rape at some point in their lives. When people stop getting abused in the kink scene, you can complain about how it’s not fair to lump us in with vanilla abusers. Until then, shut the fuck up.

Over and over I see submissive men say things like “a sub’s only purpose is to obey his dom”, and “my feelings don’t matter as long as my dom is happy”, “if I had a dom I’d do exactly as she said, no matter what”, “she’s the dom, it’s her right to do whatever she wants”.

No! Stop that! If I wanted a robot, I’d fucking build one. I want submission that’s about me, not about your own self-loathing. Nobody with any sense of self-worth truly believes their feelings don’t matter as long as someone else if happy. I understand making sacrifices for people you care about, but choosing to put someone else’s happiness first sometimes is very different from going through life believing your feelings don’t matter at all.

Not only is that unhealthy, it’s also useless. There’s a reason the safety announcements they do on airplanes always say to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping anyone else put theirs on – you can’t help anyone else if you don’t have anything to give. I’d much prefer a man who takes care of himself so he can give me his best to someone who ignores his own needs until he collapses. Or more likely, until his simmering resentment finally boils over. You can only kid yourself that you don’t have needs for so long. I’d really rather have a sub who will tell me when problems come up and give me a chance to fix them than one who will stuff it down and stuff it down until one day he explodes, we have a screaming fight, and he never speaks to me again.

I want the opportunity to do something nice for my sub. Romantic relationship or not, either way I still want it to be an exchange, not a one-sided drain on the sub. I want to feel needed, not spend my time wondering why this guy puts up with me and when he’s going to wise up and ditch me. Until I finally develop psychic powers, I can only do that if my sub opens up to me and lets me know what would make him happy.

Even if I found someone deluded enough to believe that I have the right to take from him without giving anything back, actually doing that would still make me a complete and utter douchebag. If I did that I wouldn’t be able to respect myself, and why on earth would you want to submit to someone who knows she’s doing the wrong thing and does it anyway?

For that matter, why on earth would I want to dominate a complete doormat? Giving orders to someone who will obey them as mindlessly as a robot isn’t any more exciting than ordering a pizza. Well, maybe it’s a little bit more exciting if your local pizza place is terrible and they always screw up your order.

Finally, acting like there’s a submission olympics you can win by being the subbliest of them all is just sad and stupid. There’s no magical kink council that’s going to award you a dom of your very own for getting into enough internet pissing matches about who’s more submissive. People who say they have no needs are either lying or deluded, and neither one of those things is attractive. Not to mention, you’re helping scare off nice, thoughtful submissive guys by making it look like this ridiculous performance of self-loathing is just the way you do male submission. For fuck’s sake, cut that shit out.

Guys, anyone who tells you that your only purpose is to please her, that your feelings don’t matter, and that she has the right to behave however she likes no matter how much that hurts you, is a complete asshole. Run! There will be other doms.

This post was inspired by Cliff Pervocracy’s post titled “How can you be a feminist and do BDSM?”, and some particularly interesting comments on it (purely as an aside, Pervocracy is one of the few places on the internet where you can read the comments and not immediately smack yourself in the face and say “Goddammit. I knew I shouldn’t have read the comments”), which you should go read. Some interesting issues come up in the comments, and one of them is:

Given that there are kinks that resemble real-world oppression, how can we pursue those kinks ethically? I think we can do that by acknowledging the resemblance to real-world oppression, explicitly stating what we’re doing to make sure our playacted “oppression” doesn’t become real oppression, and doing as much as we can to reduce real-world oppression.

Let’s take forced feminization as example. This is an inherently misogynistic kink. Without the belief that women are lesser and therefore it’s wrong for men to dress in women’s clothing, forced feminization loses much of its erotic charge. It’s still possible to be turned on by your partner controlling the way you present yourself, or to feel off-balance and therefore vulnerable when wearing a strange costume you wouldn’t normally wear, but most of the comments I’ve read by men who are turned on by forced feminization talk about how humiliated and slutty they feel while wearing women’s clothing.

However, feeling humiliated and turned on by wearing panties doesn’t mean the man wearing them is a bad person or a hopeless misogynist. It just means (assuming I understand how fetishes work) that it’s not unlikely that when he was a child he tried on a woman’s clothes, was shamed for it, and eroticized that shame. Or maybe he was never actually caught but was aware enough of social norms to fear getting caught. In a society that didn’t devalue women he probably wouldn’t have developed a humiliation-focused fetish for being forced to wear women’s clothing (he might still have a fetish for wearing particular styles and fabrics, but he wouldn’t feel humiliated by wearing those things), but that doesn’t mean that growing up in this one makes him a bad person.

All I think our hypothetical forced feminization fetishist needs to do is a few simple things. First of all, just fucking admit that forced feminization is misogynistic. You’re not fooling anyone when you try to tell me that using the same clothes I wear every day to humiliate you is somehow magically empowering to women, so knock it the fuck off. Next, make really fucking sure any woman who consents to dress you up and call you a sissy little bitch knows that you don’t believe she deserves to be mistreated because she had the poor taste to be female instead of male. Don’t assume that when the two of you disagree, you get your way because you have the almighty penis. Don’t act like your orgasm is the one that really matters, don’t act like your kinks are the ones that really matter, don’t insist on having your kink indulged every single time you see each other, don’t, in general, be a dick. Finally, stand up for women whenever you can. Don’t vote for woman-hating shitbags, call people out when they spout misogynistic bullshit, don’t support companies that use sexist advertisements, and for fuck’s sake listen when women tell you you’re acting like a misogynist.

While there’s a simple and obvious difference between playacted oppression (consent, it’s good for you), it’s worth talking about how we can be ethically kinky. As Boldly Go states in their blog post Kink and Power:

To use an example, if I have an acquaintance who I trust to top me in scenes, who has never disrespected a safe word or gone against my wishes, who has demonstrated a good balance as a top who will push boundaries when requested, but never overstep their bounds, that overall may be a good thing. But if the second the paddle’s put down and the rope is away, he gaslights and dismisses me when I bring up the sexual harassment I’ve faced in work situations or walking down the street or he attempts to condescendingly explain to me how wrong I am that racism is primarily a system that benefits white people at the expense of people of colour because ALL races experience racism well… does it really matter if he respects my safe words if he doesn’t respect anything else I say?

As firmly as I believe that what we like in the bedroom does not define the whole of who we are (subs can be CEOs, doms can be shy, and can we please stop acting like that’s news?), we can’t leave our whole selves outside the bedroom door, either. If you can’t be bothered to at least try to understand how power works outside of consensual, negotiated scenes, I won’t trust you with it in a scene anymore than I would trust someone with a welder if they’ve never so much as read the wikipedia article on welding.

I’ve been seeing some posts on Fetlife lately that make me wonder what people think the word “sadist” means.

Here’s the common definition in the kink community: a sadist is someone who enjoys inflicting pain. That’s it. Note that there is nothing in that definition about inflicting lots and lots of really intense pain, drawing blood, causing damage/leaving marks, making someone cry or scream, hurting someone in ways that don’t turn them on, ignoring limits, or being dominant.

What the word sadist does not mean is “scary evil person who is literally out for blood and wants to hurt you in nonconsensual ways”. There’s a handy word for that, it’s “abuser”.  Some abusers are sadists, and some may try to hide the fact that they’re abusive by saying “I’m a sadist, this is just how we are”, but that absolutely does not mean that all sadists are abusers.

Sadists aren’t all about inflicting as much pain as they can get away with. Some of us have very intense tastes, and others are much more mild. I think I’m on the more mild end of the sadist spectrum, but the people who’ve bottomed to me are better judges of that than I am. Anyway, the point is that there are lots of different types of sadists. Some of us just want to  scratch you with our nails a little and maybe do some gentle biting. Some of us think that waterboarding people with plain old water doesn’t suck enough and use ginger-ale (credit where it’s due, that’s Scott Smith’s idea,  not mine). There’s a huge range of tastes and intensities that all fall under the umbrella term of sadism.

For many people, sadism isn’t about the the amount of pain being inflicted at all. It’s quite common for people to be more interested in getting a reaction than in the particular action it takes to get that reaction. For me, if someone has a low pain tolerance, that just means it’s easier for me to get the reaction I want. That’s not to say that I never just want to bite someone really hard, but I don’t have to do that all the time or with everyone I play with.

Not all sadists have any interest in blood. For fuck’s sake, people. Where are you finding the word “blood” in the definition of  “sadist”? Breaking the skin is fun for some people, but there are plenty of painful things you can do that don’t break the skin. There are also largely painless ways to draw blood if that’s what you’re interested in – it’s called venipuncture. There is simply no correlation at all between being interested in blood and being a sadist.

Some minor physical damage is often a side effect of using particular tools to inflict pain, but there are plenty of ways to inflict pain without doing physical damage. Not all sadists are out to whip you until your back is raw and bloody, or to leave bruises that will last for a week.

Same with making people cry or scream – it’s not unusual for sadists to enjoy that, but not all of them do. Not everyone enjoys the sound of screaming (seriously, have you ever been at a play party with a particularly… ‘vocal’ bottom? it’s not a good time), and even people who do may not have anywhere they can make someone scream without anyone calling the cops. Some sadists prefer the sound of their bottom struggling to stay quiet, some like whimpering or begging, some think it’s funny when their bottom swears at them, and yes, some like screaming.

Sadists’ opinions on hurting people who enjoy or hate pain differ. Some sadists can only enjoy hurting people who are very clear about enjoying the sensation of pain. Other sadists prefer the devotion shown by someone enduring pain solely to please them. Still others enjoy helping people push their own limits or using pain to get the bottom into a particular headspace. What none of them are interested in is hurting people who don’t want it on any level. That’s not kink, that’s abuse. So is ignoring people’s limits. Everyone makes mistakes, and if you play for long enough eventually something will go wrong, but responsible perverts make every effort to respect each other’s limits.

Finally, not all dominants are sadists, and not all sadists are dominant. It’s not unusual for those things to go together, but that does not mean there is no such thing as a submissive sadist, a sadistic switch, or a sadist who has no interest in power exchange. It doesn’t even mean that you can assume a dom is a sadist. There are plenty of doms who aren’t interested in pain at all, or who will only use it occasionally as a punishment that neither they nor their sub will enjoy. Not only is pain just one of the ways you can heighten a power dynamic, but it’s not even a particularly creative way to do that. Rules about clothing, eye-contact, or use of furniture (just to give a few examples of the many many things you can play with) work just as well to remind everyone who’s in charge.

If you’re bright enough to use a computer, you’re bright enough to stop making stupid fucking assumptions about sadists and dominants.

One question I see pretty frequently on kink sites is “how do I tell my partner I’m kinky?”

Here’s what I did:

I knew I was kinky well before I met the ridiculously adorable boyfriend. I’ve also read entirely too many discussions started by kinky people who ended up feeling trapped in relationships with non-kinky people, and didn’t want to end up like them. So clearly I needed to figure out if the boyfriend was kinky or at least kink-friendly sooner rather than later. Conveniently enough, there happened to be a munch a few days after I started seeing him, so I invited him to come with me. By texting him “Do you want to come hang out at the gay bar with me and my kinky friends tonight?”. Subtle I am not 🙂

While I don’t necessarily recommend doing things exactly the way I did, I firmly believe that sooner is better when it comes to telling a potential partner you’re kinky. Not only is it more honest and more respectful, it’s a better use of everyone’s time.

Now, this advice isn’t for everyone. If you didn’t figure out you were kinky until after you got married, you get a pass. If kink is something you enjoy when it’s on the menu but can take or leave, then you’re probably not spending a lot of time worrying about how to tell your partner anyway. If you’re not sure yet how important kink is to you, well, it would be great if you could figure that out before getting into a committed relationship, but it’s likely to take a relationship or two to figure out just how important having kink in your life is.

When I say telling a potential partner that you’re kinky right away is a better use of everyone’s time, what I mean is that I have a limited number of hours I can spend around people before I need time alone to recharge. I want to spend those hours on people who accept me for who I am, not people who might turn out to be narrow-minded jerks. To sort out the people I want to spend time with from the people I don’t, I try to scare people off as quickly as possible. That way I don’t have to waste my time on someone who I’m not compatible with, they don’t waste their time on someone who seemed nice at first but turned out to be a total freak, and everyone wins.

That may sound cold and overly goal oriented, but with the number of really great people in the world, do you really want to waste your time hanging around with people you only like okay, and who only like you as long as they don’t know too much about the real you?

It should be pretty clear how lying by omission about something a potential partner really needs to know is dishonest, so I’m not going to beat that point to death. There is something to be said for letting a person get to know you a little before you tell them you’re a member of a subculture plagued by terrible stereotypes, but if someone is so narrow-minded that they actually believe all kinky people are serial killers or were abused as children, they’re too stupid to date. Run away from them.

Finally, I think it’s disrespectful not to let your potential partner make an informed choice about whether they want to date a perv. We are all about informed consent, right? People are allowed not to want to date a kinky person. Maybe they have good reasons for that, or maybe they just believe stupid stereotypes, but either way it’s their choice to make.

To be fair, as a straight woman I have an easier time telling people I’m kinky than straight men do, particularly submissive men. However, thanks to societal misogyny I really do not have an easier time finding a man who is more interested in making me happy than in having me perform a little dominance role-play that’s ultimately all about his penis.

There are actually plenty of people out there who are open-minded enough to at least give kink a try. Stop trying to force non-kinky people into the mold you have for them and date someone who might actually accept you of their own free will.

Supposedly, women don’t like porn because we “just aren’t visual”. Clearly it’s women’s mysterious inability to get turned on by pictures that keeps us from enjoying porn like this or this or this. Or you know, maybe the vast majority of straight porn might as well be intended to turn women off, because it certainly doesn’t turn us on.

First of all, straight porn is almost universally focused on the woman (or women) in the scene. The men are treated as a necessary evil, to be kept out of the frame as much as possible. If you want to both bore and annoy me, show me pictures of women and act like that’s supposed to turn me on.

Second, straight porn, at least the porn I’ve seen, shows really terrible sex. Seriously, do you people have the slightest fucking idea what a clitoris is? You goddamn well should, since only about 1/3 of women are reliably orgasmic from penetration (to quote Emily Nagosaki, whose blog you really should be reading). How exactly am I supposed to get turned on by women having sex that would never get me off in positions that give me a leg cramp just looking at them?

Finally, straight porn tends to be all about the almighty penis. Scenes end when the man has an orgasm, not when the woman does. It treats women’s pleasure as an afterthought, something that’s supposed to just happen as a side-effect of getting the man off (and then we wonder why women “don’t like sex”, but that’s another rant entirely).

Now, let’s compare and contrast everything that’s wrong with average straight porn with the pretty pretty picture up there at the top of the post.

First, it’s a picture of a man. A man! Yes, I’m a little overly excited, but have you seen Kinky & Popular on Fetlife? It’s basically a wall of tied-up submissive women. Boring! If kinky people are so special, why can’t we show a little creativity? And he’s the the focus of the pictures, not just a prop. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to have my desire to look at pretty tied up men validated. Honestly, I’d be almost as excited even if Will Savage, the model, wasn’t my type. As it happens, I really, really like the muscular man in bondage look. If Pandora had deliberately set out to create a photoset just to mash my buttons, she couldn’t have done a better job. Which brings me to the third thing I was bitching about, the way the straight porn is so focused on what turns men on (I’m skipping point two as this set isn’t explicitly sexual, although there are some photos that invite all sorts of fantasies about what might be happening where I can’t quite see it).

I don’t know whether it’s just Pandora who makes the decisions, or whether she and the model, rigger, and/or photographer all sit down together, but whoever decided which photos were going to end up on dreamsofspanking.com has an eye for what a dominant woman wants to see in a photo. If you buy a membership (which you really should. Judging by just the Musclebound set, Pandora creates amazingly high quality content), you’ll see that in the whole set there are quite a few photos of my very favourite pose (the one up top, as it happens). In that kneeling pose, Will just looks so deliciously open and vulnerable. His gorgeous creamy skin would look amazing marked up a little, and oh I love the way muscular men look in bondage. I hate the myth that only weak, pathetic men ever submit, so it’s especially nice to see someone in bondage who looks like he could pick me up and toss me around.

Speaking of the bondage, I love that it’s so simple. I’ve seen entirely too much rope bondage done by riggers who were terribly impressed with themselves and looking to show off. It’s really nice to see bondage done by a rigger who seems to have set out just to make an already awesome model look amazing. I couldn’t honestly say that I know the first thing about photography, but someone clearly did a good job of making Will look great, and I like how uncluttered the set is.

Have I mentioned that I think Will is unreasonably hot? I would bang that boy (or at least my fantasy submissive version of him) like a screen door in a hurricane.  If there were more porn like this, no one would say that “women just aren’t visual”.

First of all, it’s not a fucking competition. Even if it were, you’d think pro-doms would be the ones pissed at lifestylers. We’re the ones who play for free while pro doms have to worry about booking enough sessions to keep their rent paid.

Pro doms and lifestyle doms have such wildly differing things to offer that the idea that we’re in competition with each other is really kind of ludicrous. That makes about as much sense as assuming that women who want husbands have to compete with prostitutes. One of them is offering lifelong (well, hopefully) companionship, and one of them is offering a no-strings-attached sexual experience tailored to your wants and needs. Gee, it’s almost like those are completely different things!

Same with lifestyle doms and pros. With a pro, you get domination more or less when you want it (I understand that the good ones are generally booked up at least a few days in advance), more or less the way you want it (if you really want a heavy impact play scene, odds are quite good you can get that from a pro) without having to take the time to build a relationship with said pro. With a lifestyle dom, you get companionship, more day to day d/s (not that pros don’t do d/s, but there’s only so much you can do with someone you may not see very often), maybe a romantic relationship (many but not all lifestyle doms want a submissive man for a life partner), maybe a family, etc, etc.

If what a guy really wants is a dominant girlfriend, he’s not likely to have a lot of interest in seeing pro doms. Not getting to build a relationship with them would be a deal breaker, not a selling point. On the other hand, someone with an extremely demanding job who just doesn’t have time for a relationship but wants to get his kink on isn’t likely to get what he wants from a lifestyle dom.

Given that we’re both so different, where does the animosity between pros and lifestyle doms com from? I think it’s caused by men who are too stupid to tell the difference between a lifestyler and a pro ruining it for everyone else. If a guy expects me to dress up in fetish wear to play with him because that’s what all the pros he’s seen have done, the problem is not the pros. The problem is a man who is too stupid to realize that people behave differently at work than they do at home. Nobody is surprised when a girlfriend, unlike a call girl, is not always perfectly groomed, wearing sexy matching lingerie, and happy to see you, so why would anyone be surprised that lifestyle doms aren’t always perfectly groomed, wearing fetish gear, and ready to play?

Not being a pro I’m guessing at the frustrations they go through, but I imagine it’s pretty irritating to offer sessions at a  simple hourly rate and have to deal with people who think that they’re your personal slave now and therefore should get hours of attention for free. Or who insist that if you were a *real* dom, you’d play with them for nothing but the joy of doing so, rent and bills be damned. Or who think that because they’re paying you, they can now script your every word and action in a session.

It’s easy to end up with a warped view of dominant women when the only place you see them is in porn, but about 15 minutes on fetlife will fix that up for you. It turns out dominant women are actually a lot like non-kinky women. We don’t roll out of bed in head-to-toe latex, we’re not here solely to fulfill your fantasies, and we actually have wants and needs of our own. I know, it’s terribly inconvenient of us.

There’s really no reason for pros and lifestylers to fight, we don’t want the same men anyway. It would be great if the idiots of the world would stop setting us against each other, though.

All you need for a happy d/s relationship is one dominant person and one submissive person, right? Silly little things like mutual interests or compatible values aren’t important, what really matters is that on the surface your kinks appear to match up.

Ridiculous, right? Sadly, I’ve gotten message after message from people who seem to think that because I’m a dominant woman, I must be interested in any submissive man who crosses my path. It would be great if that were true, but I’m afraid that real compatibility takes more than a shared interest in any given type of play. Play actually has very little to do with it, from my perspective. To paraphrase from a blog post by Andrea Zanin (go read her blog, it’s awesome), if I really like someone, odds are good we’ll be able to think of something we’d enjoy doing together. If, on the other hand, I just don’t click with someone, it really doesn’t matter how much they like biting or face-slapping (two of my favourite kinks), I’m still not going to want to get involved with them.

On my FetLife profile, I only have two ‘fetishes’ listed: being more complex than an anonymous list of fetishes could show, causing people to have to actually converse with me, finding out if they like *me* and not just what gets me off, and smart-assed masochists. Those two things actually tell you something about me as a person. I like to the think the meaning of the first one is fairly obvious. The second one is a little more subtle. My intention there is to signal that I’m a very low protocol person who doesn’t take play too seriously. If, on the other hand, I listed more specific kinks like biting, flogging, hair-pulling, or caning, all you would know about me is that I like a few particular activities. Also, I’m actively trying to discourage people who think that if they like flogging, and I like flogging, obviously I’ll be interested in flogging *them*.

Aside from the fact that it’s dehumanizing to reduce me to a collection of kinks, that’s simply not how the world works. If you really, honestly believe that any dom who likes bondage should be compatible with any sub who likes bondage, you’re going to spend an awful lot of time being disappointed. Shared kinks are great and all, but even ignoring non-kink compatibility issues (you know, hobbies, interests, career ambitions, values, and all that) you still have to worry about whether you’re both interested in any sort of power exchange, if so how much (bedroom only, weekends only, control over only some areas, control over most areas, things that are off limits, and on and on), what style of dominance/submission you both enjoy (just for starters, doms can be strict, sensual, dispassionate, playful, affectionate, uncompromising, or patient. Subs can be meek, smart-assed, high protocol, low protocol, bratty, sweet, reserved, service-oriented, fuck-toys, and much more), how often you want to play (every night, a few times a week, weekends, a couple of times a month, once every month or two, or something else entirely), how hard you want to play (some people like to have a nice spanking and some cuddling on a weekend morning, other people like to plan intense, hours long scenes that leave everyone involved in a sweaty, crumpled heap on the floor, other people like both of those things at different times), what specific types of play you both like (bondage, for example, can be sadistic, artistic, purely functional, the focus of the scene, a small part of a larger scene, inescapable, heavy, light, and more. Saying you like bondage doesn’t actually tell me very much), whether you like to mix sex and BDSM, whether you want to be play partners only or romantic partners too, and that’s just what I could think of while trying to get this post done more or less on time.

Given how many compatibility issues there are to worry about when you’re only taking kink into account, and how obvious they become if you’ve ever actually thought about what you want in a play/partner, assuming that any dom is compatible with any sub tells me just one thing about you: you have no fucking idea how kink actually works. Here’s a hint: kinky people are still *people*.

So, Lily Lloyd wrote an awesome comment that got me thinking, particularly this part of it:

When I hear “force me to submit”, I think someone’s looking for some kind of D-type Ubermenschen who’s so completely confident and knowledgeable that it makes submitting effortless.

The idea that the fantasy of being forced to submit is really a fantasy about submission being easy makes so much sense to me. This is just guessing, since I’m not submissive, but I’d assume it would be a lot less scary to submit to someone if you could somehow be sure they’d never fuck it up. Not to mention, it’s a scary thing just to admit you want to submit – if you’re a man, well clearly you’re not a real man, if you’re a woman, you’re a traitor to the feminist cause, and if you don’t fit into the gender binary, you’re buying into heteronormative power dynamics. If someone conveniently forces you to submit, you don’t have to admit you want things that you’re not supposed to want.

So, if from the submissive side fantasies about force aren’t really about force (or at least not solely about force. Let’s be honest, force is hot), is the same true from the dominant side? I think it is.

When I fantasize about forcing someone to do whatever I want, sure, it’s partially about having the power to that. But it’s also about not worrying that I’m going to screw up. Sometimes I think the most attractive part of that fantasy is not having to worry about my partner’s happiness. Just like no-one actually wants to be forced to do things they don’t enjoy on any level (having your submissive buttons pushed by being forced to do something you don’t like, to heavily paraphrase a comment of Ferns’, counts as enjoyment on some level), I would never actually want to force someone to submit to me. If someone needs to be “forced” to submit, I’ll wish them well and find someone who can demonstrate that they really do want to submit to me. Consensual non-consent is hot for the space of a scene, but if I have to fight you to get you to submit every bloody time, I’m going to start wondering if you really want to submit to me at all.

In a fantasy, on the other hand, I really enjoy not having to worry about anything but my own enjoyment. I may have to hand in my control-freak badge for this, but it’s actually kind of nice when not everything is my problem. Taking responsibility for making a scene work is deeply satisfying for me, but it’s not effortless. It’s also a vulnerable place to be. If I try something new and it falls flat, I’m going to feel pretty stupid. It’s nice to imagine dominants are all-powerful, but every time we ask for something there’s a chance we’ll be told ‘That’s just weird and I think you’re kind of a freak for wanting to do that’. Maybe not in so many words, but nobody wants to see that ‘I’ll never see you quite the same way again’ look in their partner’s eyes.

Having taken my argument this far, I just figured out that we’re pretty much all fantasizing about the same thing we fantasize about “force”. We all just want to feel safe, whether that’s safe enough to submit or safe enough to ask for anything we want.

What do you think, readers? Am I completely out to lunch here?

I’m hardly the first person to mention it, but tops need aftercare too. Quick disclaimer: not everyone, top or bottom, needs or wants aftercare. That said, needing aftercare as a top is actually really common and we should talk about it more. 

First, let’s talk about physical aftercare. Topping often involves a lot of physical effort. Hitting people with things is tiring. I’m not a rope top, but I hear that rope work can be tough on the hands. What I need physically after a scene is to sit down, have a drink of water, and a snack (in my case, something savory with protein and carbs). Once I’ve cooled down, I might also need to put on a sweater.

Emotional aftercare can be a bit more complex. From the time we’re tiny children we’re taught not to hit, not to call each other mean names, not to be bossy or rude or selfish. While violating those taboos can be super hot during a scene, they also make it easy for doubts to creep in afterwards. “What kind of person would treat someone like that?”, we ask ourselves. Or “Oh god, what if my bottom hated the scene, hates me, and never wants to speak to me again?” What I need emotionally after a scene is to cuddle with my bottom, and to check in a day or two later to make sure they’re okay. Physical touch is one of my most important love languages, it goes a long way to reassuring me that my bottom had a good time and still likes me. Checking in a day or two later helps me squash any doubts that might have crept in – I often feel great immediately after a scene, then in a day or two I start wondering if my bottom really had a good time (even when I know perfectly well that they did, I’ve played with people who are really great at giving feedback and setting boundaries) and need a little extra reassurance.

Conveniently enough, my aftercare needs get met by providing my bottom with aftercare. It would be so easy for me to pretend I don’t need aftercare at all, that I’m just giving my bottom aftercare because that’s what decent human beings do. Talking about having needs and feeling vulnerable kind of ruins the illusion that tops are effortlessly in control of all of the things all of the time, so I understand why more tops aren’t shouting from the rooftops about their aftercare needs. However, that’s a big part of why I think it’s important to talk about aftercare for tops.

I really, really hate the idea that ‘real’ doms don’t have emotional needs, never doubt themselves or need reassurance. I’m a person, not a life support system for a whip. I will not deny my own needs just because they don’t fit your fantasy. While I’m venting, I’m also not going to try to measure up to some fucked up ideal of stoic masculinity just because dominance is seen as masculine in our society.

Not only is it obviously cruel and unfair to try to shove me into a tiny, airless box like that, but letting that expectation stand puts an extra hurdle in the way of people trying to get into domination. Just trying to accept that you want to do ‘unacceptable’ things to people is hard enough without also being told that if you ever need someone to hold you and tell you they still like you, you’re a failure as a dom.

How many people have you heard of who looked at the stereotype of the icily perfect bitch-goddess and thought, “I can’t measure up to that, I guess this whole kink thing just isn’t for me.” How many more people would be willing to try adding a little kink to their lives if they knew it was not only okay, but common to need some reassurance afterward?

Readers, let’s talk about aftercare. What kind of aftercare have you or your tops needed? Did you always do aftercare or did it take some time to figure out you needed it?