Merry Christmas everyone! Seeing as it’s the holidays, I’m here to spread good will and cheer by- ha! Let’s be honest, I’m here to rain on your parade.

Guys, I hate to break it to you, but you’re probably never going to get consensually ‘gang-raped’ by a pack of hot female doms. That fantasy seems to pretty common in femdom porn, but oddly enough you don’t see many women posting on fetlife about how much they’d like to their their hot dominant friends together to co-top their subs.

Now, I’m not saying there’s absolutely no chance you’ll ever be topped by a group of women, but if you think you’re somehow entitled to the undivided attention of a group of dominant female strangers, you’re kidding yourself. The single most likely thing to happen if you show up at a party and tell all the women to do what they like to you is for all of them to completely ignore you.

I’m all for fantasies that have something in them for me (in fact, I wish more submissive men would write things that actually turn me on), but this particular fantasy does absolutely nothing for me. I really shouldn’t have to spell this out, but the less a fantasy has in it for the other party, the less likely you are ever to act it out.

So, why doesn’t this fantasy do anything for me?

First of all, I like getting my way. If I’m going to play with someone, I want to be in control. If I’m waiting my turn, I’m not in control. If I’m worrying about not taking too long so the next person can have her turn, I’m not in control. If I’m avoiding doing anything too intense  so the bottom will be in shape to play with the next person, I’m not in control. If I only have one other co-top to worry about I can still have fun, but more than that and I’d only participate as a personal favour to someone I particularly liked.

Second, if I’m going to give someone my undivided attention, the very least they can do in return is give me theirs. Being an anonymous pair of hands acting out a fantasy does nothing for me.

Third, that whole taking turns thing just doesn’t work for me. Why would I want just a few minutes of someone’s divided attention when I can have a play partner all to myself until I’m good and done with him?

Fourth, objectification/anonymous play isn’t really my thing. I’m not interested in playing with someone I haven’t gotten to know, and I have even less interest in playing with someone who’s submitting to the room in general. If I can’t feel special, I’d rather not play at all.

Finally, I don’t share particularly well. I hardly ever let my books leave my house, so why on earth would I just lend out something infinitely more precious to me?

I’m not saying anyone is a bad person just for having this fantasy, but for fuck’s sake don’t kid yourself. If you ever get to bottom to a group of women, I can pretty much guarantee you’re being indulged, not dominated.

The other day a very sweet reader (as an aside, the people who comment here and email me are so awesome) asked me if I had any fashion advice for submissive men, and I didn’t have much of anything to tell him. I’m hoping that my readers can help out with descriptions of that they like in a man and links to men’s fashion resources, because I don’t know much of anything about fashion and I can only ramble about what turns me on. Other women’s tastes are obviously going to be different.

My tastes in men’s clothing fall into two contradictory categories – clothes that show off a man’s body and clothing like suits and uniforms that tend to conceal it. By ‘clothes that show off a man’s body’ I mean things like shirts that are a little bit tight around the upper arms and shoulders (mmm, shoulders), and pants that actually hug a man’s ass instead of hiding it. Since I’m a straight woman, it should be fairly obvious why I want to see men’s bodies 🙂

On the other hand, suits and uniforms hide the body pretty thoroughly, but I still think they’re hot. Part of that is that they’re seen as masculine, which I think is hot, and part of it is that I really enjoy fantasizing about reversing the power differential a uniform implies. That is, you’d expect whoever’s wearing the uniform to be in charge, which just makes it more fun to strip a man out of said uniform, have my way with him, and leave him in a sweaty, shaking heap. Also, ties just look like leashes to me 🙂

Unfortunately I’m not sure any of that is especially helpful to submissive men hoping to attract a dominant woman. Short of wearing a collar or a tshirt that says ‘submissive’ on it, clothing (especially casual clothing) does a very bad job of signalling whether you’re dominant or submissive. All of the clothing I like could signal ‘look at how manly and dominant I am’ just as easily as ‘I wanted to look good for you’.

On the up side, pretty much any attempt to look good for my pleasure is going to do it for me. I think it’s adorable when men worry about pleasing women. They don’t even have to be especially good at it, it’s just cute that they tried.

What about the rest of you, what do you like to see a man wearing? And does anyone have any fashion resources for submissive guys?

Every so often, some knuckle-dragging throwback to the stone age decides that her her sexual taste for bottoming/submitting gives her the right to speak for all women, and posts some unspeakably stupid drivel about how a ‘real man’ is supposed to act (and by extension, what a ‘real woman’ is supposed to want). Sometimes this shit gets posted on fetlife, sometimes it ends up on the good men project. Either way, it fills me with rage. Not only is it extraordinarily insulting to tell me that either I’m too stupid to know what I really want or I’m such an abject failure at being a woman that I should just go on Testosterone and get top surgery already, but it’s actually abusive to tell submissive men that they are such failures at being men that no ‘real woman’ will ever want them.

If it’s not okay to bully women for failing to perform femininity ‘correctly’, then it’s not okay to bully men for failing to perform masculinity the way you prefer. If you don’t like random strangers telling you to smile, or how pretty you’d be if you’d just put in a little effort, then kindly shut the fuck up about how men are doing it wrong when they act like they care what women want. Newsflash: men aren’t psychic, and it’s not fair to ask them to be. In the absence of a woman having the ovaries to take the bizarre and unprecedented step of asking for what she wants, the only ethical thing for a man to do is to go slowly and tentatively try things until he figures out what his partner likes. Lori Ann Lothian, your problem is NOT that men aren’t manly enough. It’s that you’re a spineless child who thinks that communicating like a grown up will ruin your fantasy.

Fuck you and fuck your bullshit about what it means to be a woman. It’s great that you know what you want in a man and what kind of sex you like. It’s fucking stupid that you can’t understand that not all women want what you want, and that *gasp* not all women are submissive. I have just as much right to ask for my kind of man as you have to ask for yours. You and your ‘real man’ can fuck right off, I want nothing to do with either one of you gender-essentialist wastes of space.

Here’s the real way to be a man. I know it’s the real way because it turns me on, and obviously what turns one woman on does it for absolutely all of us, no exceptions. I, uh, don’t know how queer and/or asexual women are supposed to fit into this stupid gender-binary straight jacket, but who cares about what people other than me want? I’m obviously the only important one. Me me me ME!

Without further ado (but with plenty more sarcasm):

Be a man and let me make the decisions. I’ll tell you if I want you to perform the service of making a particular decision for me.

Be a man and learn my preferences so that you can make good decisions for me when I ask you to. Notebooks and/or spreadsheets may come in handy. Tools are manly, right?

Be a man and lean on me when you need to. Real men admit it when they’re having a rough time.

Be a man and give me some space to initiate sex. I can’t jump you if you always jump me first.

Be a man and let me know how much I turn you on. Tease and denial isn’t any fun if you just wander off and play World of Warcraft all night.

Be a man and beg me to hurt you. I absolutely love that, and thanks to the female hive mind I can be sure all other women feel exactly the same way.

Be a man and do what you say you’re going to do. Lying is for the ladies! (thanks roo-roo)

Be a man and submit to me. Men who want to dominate women are doing it wrong and are destined to die alone, missed only by their many cats. Get over your vagina envy, learn your place, and maybe some woman will take pity on you and show you how a real woman loves a man.

I’m deliberately being a little bit ridiculous, but insisting all men should be dominant is just as stupid as insisting all men should be submissive. How about we stop letting people get away with that shit?

There are plenty of submissive men who want to know how to get their wives/girlfriends to dominate them. One sadly common piece of advice sites like Real Women Don’t Do Housework and (ugh) Elise Sutton give is to talk about how she can make him do all the housework if she’ll dominate him (by wearing uncomfortable outfits for his pleasure and doing everything he wants in bed). This is stupid and offensive on so many levels.

First of all, if you aren’t already doing your fair share of the housework you are simply a bad partner. Fix that before you try talking your partner into fulfilling your kinks, you lazy little shit. When you talk about kink, your partner should not have to ask “What’s in it for me that I shouldn’t already be getting from my partner?” As an aside, that’s a fantastic question to ask yourself no matter how you plan to ‘sell’ male submission to your partner. Whether you’re offering to rub her feet, go to events she likes, cook dinner for her, or let her choose where you go on vacation, you should be able to explain what you’re offering that she shouldn’t already be getting.

Second, and I realize this may be shocking to hear, women actually do have interests that have nothing to do with how tidy their homes are. Using housework as the main selling point for male submission implies that housework is so extraordinarily important to women that they’ll cheerfully act out all of your most extreme fantasies if only you wash a few dishes for them. Not only is that insulting, but it sets up a dynamic in which the man purchases sex from his partner by doing chores. I can’t imagine why feeling obligated to perform a sex act she may have no interest in because her partner mopped the floor wouldn’t turn a woman on.

Third, it ignores everything that’s hot and sexy and amazing about male submission and reduces it to a fucking maid service. How can you look at images like these and decide that housecleaning is the way to sell male submission? Do you assholes not believe that women have any sexual desires, or do you just not care what they might be?

Or is that talking about what might turn any given woman on forces you to acknowledge the fact that not every woman is in fact turned on by male submission? The idea that women can be molded into whatever men want them to be might just be the most offensive part of this whole clusterfuck. While I firmly believe that many more women would identify as dominant if the scene wasn’t so unfriendly to them, it’s simply not true that every woman can become dominant. For starters, some of them are submissive. Deciding that a woman isn’t allowed to be submissive is just as offensive as deciding that she has to be submissive.  Some women just aren’t interested in power exchange. Even women who are dominant aren’t magically compatible with all submissive men. There are as many styles of dominance and submission as there are people in the scene, and many of them do not mesh at all well.

If you’re a submissive man in a relationship with a vanilla woman, I sympathize. That’s a tough situation to be in, and it makes sense that you would want to find a way to convince partner to top or dominate you. However, talking about how much housework you’d do for her is not it. Just shut the fuck up about what a great maid you’d be, okay?

Many of my rants are about stupid shit that supposedly submissive men do, which especially annoys me because I tend to take it personally. However, there’s plenty of stupid shit dominants do too.

It drives me crazy when dominant people post personal ads in groups that clearly say ‘no personal ads’ in the rules. By blatantly ignoring the rules, they’re showing that they’re either too fucking stupid to read the text they scrolled past to join the group, or that they think they’re above the rules. Neither one of those things is remotely attractive to a submissive with any sense of self-worth or self-preservation. Think about it for five seconds – there is simply no insane parallel universe in which allowing someone with a history of disregarding rules to tie you up is a good idea. If a submissive is willing to put themselves in that position, they’re either stupid or self-destructive. Neither one of those things is sexy! Why on earth would you post a personal ad with absolutely no hope of bringing you anyone a reasonable person would ever want to play with?

Female supremacists also irritate the hell out of me. Yes, it’s a personal belief, but it’s a fucking stupid personal belief with absolutely no basis in reality. If you spout that kind of bullshit, you are no better than the misogynistic douchebags you hate so much. I firmly believe that people who insist that their race or gender makes them special cling to that belief because on some level they know there is absolutely nothing else worthwhile about them. Instead of talking about how great you are because of the way you were born, take up a fucking hobby. Build up your self-esteem by being good at something, not by talking out your ass.

Men who believe in female supremacy also annoy me, but mostly I just think they’re pitiful. You must really hate yourself if you believe that even the most shallow and self-centered woman is somehow better than you, and that’s just sad.

Speaking of self-centeredness, it’s a pretty common failing of dominant people. I’ve personally seen far too many dominants who simply don’t care about anyone else’s well being. Back when the debate about bringing back birthday spankings at the munches was going on in my local scene, a few local dominants made it painfully clear that they were interested only in their own enjoyment of public spankings, and everyone who was uncomfortable with involving bystanders in a group scene or felt pressured to take part could go eat a bag of dicks. Labeling yourself dominant does not magically make you more important than everyone else. Believing that it does makes you deluded and unspeakably stupid in addition to being horribly self-centered.

Obviously insecure dominants also do all sorts of stupid shit. Here’s a tip: if you were really all that dominant, you wouldn’t have to tell everyone about it. If you think loudly telling everyone how very very domly you are will make them believe  you, you’re kidding yourself. Trying to boss strangers around is also pathetic and a sign of insecurity. Again, if you need to prove how dominant you are, the problem is you, not other people’s failure to live up to your expectations. Acting like a douchebag impresses precisely no-one worth impressing, but by all means keep it up if you want everyone to know how insecure you are. There’s surely a ‘submissive’ out there willing to tell you what an amazing dom you are if you’ll just do everything he wants exactly the way he wants it.

What’s your least favourite stupid dom trick? I’m sure I’m missing some.

If you’re at all involved in your local scene, it’s very easy to get the idea that casual and/or public play is something every “real” kinky person does. There’s nothing inherently wrong with casual play, but it’s not right for everyone and I don’t think we talk about that enough. Emotional risks may not be as simple to handle as telling people not to flog the kidneys, but they still count.

Not everyone is fulfilled by playing with someone they’ve just met. Not everyone feels comfortable doing something so intimate with someone they don’t have some form of relationship with, whether they’re a close friend, a regular play partner, a romantic partner, or something else entirely. Not everyone can relax and enjoy a scene without the safety net of knowing, thanks to the relationship they have with their play partner, that they’ll still be friends even if the scene goes wrong.

While casual play is generally physically safe, it may or may not be emotionally safe for any given person. It’s not terribly likely that you’re going to get seriously physically harmed in a party full of people with dungeon monitors roaming the play floor (although there are certainly horror stories out there of safewords being ignored even at play parties). Physical well being is obviously important, but so is emotional well being. While some people feel great playing with someone, exchanging thanks and potentially never seeing them again, other people may feel abandoned when the person they had this incredibly intense experience with just up and leaves. Mis-matched expectations about how much on-going (next day or later) aftercare is going to happen can be terribly painful, and so can mis-matched expectations of what an enjoyable scene means. For some people, a fun scene is just a fun scene. For others, it may be more like a good first date, in that if the first date goes well, you expect there to be further dates.

Some people can play really hard with people they don’t know well, but I’m not one of them. I need to know that if I screw up and actually harm someone, they’ll believe me when I say that I didn’t intend to harm them, let me make it up to them, and not decide I’m  the worst top ever to top and hate me forever. I can play relatively gently with people I don’t know well, but I don’t feel at all comfortable doing anything especially intense with people whose limits I haven’t gotten to know over time. Also, if I was ever to really push someone, I’d have to know for an absolute certainty that they would use their safeword if they needed to. I believe very strongly that it’s my job as a top to pay attention and notice when my bottom is struggling, but I also believe no one is perfect. I see safewords as kind of a safety net that help keep me from harming people, and I don’t think I’d feel comfortable doing anything especially risky without either having that safety net in place or knowing my bottom extraordinarily well.

Kink is extremely intimate for many people, and not everyone can be or even wants to be intimate with people they don’t know well. For me, it takes ages to really open up to people. If I can’t open up to someone, I can’t connect with them deeply enough to make playing with them worth it to me. Sure, I can whap someone with a flogger without making myself emotionally vulnerable, but play without at least some connection doesn’t really do it for me.

We all understand people not wanting to have casual sex, so why wouldn’t it be seen as completely normal not to want casual kink? This probably only applies to the public scene, where it’s extremely common to play casually at parties. There are plenty of blogs written by people who only play with their romantic partners, but those writers are also often not involved in their local scenes.

Particularly if you’re interested in exploring d/s, casual play may not work for you. I imagine it does for some people, but I can’t see how someone I just met wanting to submit to me would mean anything. I want someone to submit to me, not to the nearest dominant woman.

The one message I really want to get across to people who have never wanted to play casually, or tried it and didn’t like it, is that you’re perfectly normal. You don’t have to play with half a dozen people at every party to be a “real” dom/sub/top/bottom/switch/non-specific pervert. The only wrong way to do kink is the way that harms yourself or others.

According to the stereotypes, my job as a dominant woman is to make men want me. I’m supposed to be so beautiful, so perfectly styled and made up, or at the very least so thoroughly encased in whatever material men have a fetish for that those men can’t help but fall on their knees before me.

Apparently, I’m just supposed to ignore the fact that worrying about whether I’m appealing to men doesn’t make me feel dominant at all. Not only do I not feel powerful when my so-called power is based on other people’s approval of my appearance, but it’s a very fragile and limited form of power. There’s a reason sexual desirability is the only power society is even the slightest bit comfortable with women wielding – it makes them replaceable and it has an expiry date. If physical beauty is all that’s important, any beautiful woman will do.

I know there are some dominant women out there who love knowing that their beauty captivates men, but I’m not one of them. In fact, I hate the idea that the only power I have is the power to make people want me. Yes, it is a form of power, but it’s not one I want to use. Worrying about whether I’m attractive enough, whether my outfit is hot enough feels fundamentally submissive to me. Being a dominant woman, that just feels wrong. It puts submissive men in control, lets them judge whether I’m doing a good enough job of catering to their fetishes.

The power of sexual desirability is a power I want submissive men to have over me. I want to do the wanting. I want them to make me double-take, and forget what I was saying, and trip over my own two feet because of how ridiculously, overpoweringly hot they are.

I want my desires to matter. I want submissive men to cater to them the way submissive women cater to dominant men’s desires. The idea of a submissive man working out in hopes of catching my eye, or hunting for the perfect pair of pants that show off his ass just so is incredibly hot to me.

It’s not that it’s terrible to have anyone consider me attractive, but I want a submissive man to want me for how I can make him feel, for how I can fulfill his need to feel owned, and desired, and useful, rather than for how hard I can make his dick. If that’s the only power I have, then I have no power at all for about half an hour after every orgasm he has.

Is there anyone else out there who is just turned off by the idea that she’s supposed to submit to submissive men’s libidos?

You would think that suggesting a local kink organization have an official anti-harassment policy/code of conduct as a friend of mine did would be uncontroversial, but sadly you’d be wrong. What I just don’t understand is how trying to stamp out harassment in the local community could be a bad thing.

Unless I’m wildly deluded, the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen if any kink group implements an official policy and gathers volunteers for their anti-harassment groups is that they would receive no complaints at all and would have wasted a few hours of their time. I realize everyone is busy, but wasting a few hours isn’t exactly going to ruin anyone’s life.

Also, harassment policies really are extremely helpful in persuading people to speak up about problems. Just knowing that a group took the time to put together a policy helps convince people that the organizers actually do care about harassment, have thought about how to prevent it, and have thought about what they would do if someone was harassed at one of their events.

Not having a policy, on the other hand, leaves people wondering whether anyone in charge cares about preventing harassment. New people are stuck thinking that maybe they should accept harassment as the price of being involved in the group, or asking themselves if they should bother reporting it when the organizers might decide it’s easier to sweep it under the rug than to come up with a plan, carry it out, and deal with the inevitable whining from people who think they should be allowed to hassle whoever they want.

When you don’t have a plan to deal with harassment, people quite reasonably assume that your plan is to hope it never comes up. Hoping that it never comes up leads naturally into ignoring and/or minimizing any problems that do come up because that’s much easier than figuring out what to do about harassment when you’re already extremely busy running events/planning future events/having a life with work/hobbies/family/friends.

Having a list of unacceptable behaviors and consequences laid out ahead of time takes a huge portion of that burden off the shoulders of the person dealing with a harassment complaint. They can just refer to the document that everyone has already agreed on instead of trying desperately to make a very important decision under pressure. That list is also extremely useful when it comes to meting out consequences for harassment. Good people have a very hard time simply kicking harassers out of a group, no matter how richly they deserve it. Having an official harassment policy makes it far easier to kick people out if it comes to that. They read the rules, after all. No one held a gun to their head and made them stalk someone all around the party and refuse to take no for an answer.

When it comes to opposition to a kink group implementing an official harassment policy, I can understand worries about how much work it might be to implement one, I can understand worries that people might make malicious and untrue claims of harassment, I can even understand fear of change, but if all you have to say is that anti-harassment policies are dumb and icky, I have to wonder what you’re scared people might tell a harassment committee about you.

That may sound a little like the argument that a person would only be opposed to privacy-invading laws if they have something to hide, but is in fact entirely different. Privacy is a basic human right. Getting to harass people without fear of consequences is not. Wide-spread surveillance, for example, invades everyone’s privacy whether they’ve done something questionable or not. People only get reported for harassment when they do something that looks like harassment. If you’re that worried about someone filing a harassment complaint, YOU are the problem, not the harassment policy. Try not being an asshole and see how that works out for you.

I’ve also heard no small amount of whining along the lines of ‘why can’t we all just act like grownups and handle problems without an official policy?’ You’ll have to tell me, I’m not the one who’s too childish to admit that my preferred method of problem solving isn’t working. I don’t like the fact that we need official harassment policies. It would be awesome if we could all just not be dicks to people. There’s no good reason it should be that hard for people to just not be total assholes. But if ‘just act like a grownup’ worked, no one would be asking for an official policy now would they.

In all the time I’ve spent thinking about harassment policies and kink groups, I’ve only been able to come up with one idea that even vaguely resembles a down side. If you’re extremely attached to the illusion that your local kink group is one big happy pervy family, it would be painful to have that illusion shattered by the introduction of an official policy. However, if your illusion is more important to you than the well-being of the actual people around you, then you can fuck right off.

If you’ve never read Michael Suileabhain-Wilson’s fantastic article on Geek Social Fallacies, go do that right now. It’s extremely relevant if you spend any time with large groups of nerds, such as the in-person kink scene. The question of why the scene is so full of nerds needs it’s own separate blog post, so I’m going to skip that for now.

The social fallacy I see doing the most harm in the kink community is the first one listed – Ostracizers Are Evil. To quote the article:

GSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the transaction is repugnant to them.

In its non-pathological form, GSF1 is benign, and even commendable: it is long past time we all grew up and stopped with the junior high popularity games. However, in its pathological form, GSF1 prevents its carrier from participating in — or tolerating — the exclusion of anyone from anything, be it a party, a comic book store, or a web forum, and no matter how obnoxious, offensive, or aromatic the prospective excludee may be.

For me, one of the most frustrating things about this fallacy is that at its core it’s a good idea, it’s just been taken way too far. Of course it’s evil to ostracize harmless people who happen to be a little bit strange just for the sake of being an asshole.  However, it should be obvious that there’s a difference between excluding people just because you can, and excluding people because they make everyone else miserable.

I know it’s hard for the lonely teenaged outcast inside so many of us to accept (and to be clear, I was almost a total outcast between my inability to catch, painfully unfashionable clothes, and intense shyness), but there is such a thing as a good enough reason to tell someone not to come to any more kink events until their behavior improves. Such reasons include the inability to take no for an answer, touching people inappropriately (particularly young female-assigned people. Creeping on the demographic least likely to feel able to tell you to fuck off gets you extra asshole points), following people around when the conversation is clearly over, trying to dominate anyone who hasn’t already agreed to be submissive to them, and otherwise failing to respect people’s boundaries.

In some cases people do trample on other people’s boundaries by accident. Not all of us are terribly socially adept. However, the kink scene is not the right place to hone your basic social skills. If you don’t know not to touch without an invitation or not to follow someone who told you it was nice meeting you but she needs to go to say hi to her friend over there, you need to get that sorted out before you come to in-person events. Your desire to come hang out with other kinky people is simply not as important as my right to have my boundaries respected. In the long run I think it’s kinder to explain to someone what they’re doing wrong and tell them not to come back until they’ve fixed it than it is to grudgingly tolerate them while they wonder why everyone avoids them. Some people really do need a good excluding.

No one is asking for everyone who enters the scene to know the correct salutation to use in a letter to the Prime Minister. All I want is for people to respect each other’s boundaries and be willing to learn. I’m willing to give people a chance to improve and clear guidelines on how to do that, but I need them to meet me halfway with honest remorse for whatever they’ve done and a sincere interest in doing better next time. I do not owe people a pass because they’re lonely, or they’ve already been kicked out of every other group they’ve been a part of, or they just really, really want to be part of the local scene.

The refusal to exclude anyone is bad enough in a non-kinky context like a comic book store or a gaming convention, but it’s even worse in a kinky context. When terrible, boundary-crossing behavior is tolerated by community organizers, new people naturally assume that’s normal and accepted behavior. Then they either decide that kink just isn’t for them and never come back, or they get abused and never report it to anyone because it’s already been made clear that their needs don’t really matter.

This is why abuse is such a problem in the kink community. We tolerate people ignoring other people’s boundaries, then act surprised when they pay even less attention to those boundaries when no one is looking. That’s just fucking stupid. If we want an abuse-free scene, we need to step up and create it.

I realize that it won’t be easy. No one wants to have to make the decision to exclude someone from the local scene, or to deliver the news, or to enforce the decision when the jerk shows up anyway, but if we don’t step up we’re telling everyone else that the creeper’s comfort is more important than their boundaries being respected. Is that really the kind of scene we want?

Oh really? What if I want to:

• give you a reverse Mohawk
• shave off only one of your eyebrows
• sell your car
• sell your house
• burn all of your clothes and dress you exclusively in bed-sheet togas
• donate your life savings to Pastor Bob’s totally legit ‘save the orphans’ fund
• keep you chained to the bed until noon when you have to be at work by 9 am
• forbid you to eat anything except carrots. Forever.
• tie you naked to a telephone pole in front of your workplace
• amputate one of your limbs
• castrate you
• tattoo ‘property of mistress whoever’ on your forehead in an ugly font with bad kerning
• suspend you by your left big toe, from a rickety suspension frame, over a concrete floor
• play pierce your eyeballs
• post your full legal name, home address and phone number on fetlife
• give your credit card number to scammers
• paddle and whip you every day
• never beat you at all
• regularly mummify you
• never use any bondage equipment at all
• insist that you use the title ‘Goddess Lady High Duchess Raven Wolf Silver Dark Mistress Domina Captain of the House of Dragons who Watch Over the Followers of the True Way, Protector of the Kinksters, Smiter of the Unbelievers, and Keeper of the Secret Teachings of the Ancient Masters of Kink’ in full every single time you address me, even if it’s just to ask if I want anything from the kitchen while you’re up
• …

When people say ‘I have no limits’ I hear ‘I have my head so far up my own ass that it never occurred to me you might *gasp* like things that don’t turn me on.’ In what insane parallel universe is being utterly oblivious to everyone around you attractive? I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s only in shitty porn that women have no desires of their own. Out here in the real world, women want things. Sometimes we even want things you don’t like. It’s almost like we exist independent of your sexual desires. Unless you know me extremely well, telling me you’ll do anything I want is just insulting. At least be honest and tell me it never occurred to you that I’m anything but a life-support system for a whip.

Saying ‘I’ll do anything you want’ tells me that you’re either too stupid or too ignorant to realize that people even do things that don’t turn you on. Go have a look at Fetlife’s fetish list, or this detailed BDSM checklist. Gee, did you by any chance see one or two things that you never ever want to do, EVER? Assuming that the entirety of kink is things that turn you on is a terrible lack of imagination.

Some people even have the gall to say that telling anyone their interests and limits is topping from the bottom. So not only am I not allowed to have wants of my own, but I have to guess what does it for you too? I’m going to need someone to remind who’s supposed to be in charge, because I’m getting terribly confused.

Knowing what a person likes and doesn’t like is useful. Providing me with that information lets me skip the stumbling around trying to figure out what you might like part and go straight to things we both like, or deliberately do things you don’t like, or experiment with things we’re curious about. I realize that kink is extremely context dependent, and what you love with one partner may fall completely flat with another, but it still can’t hurt to have more information. Even if you’re very new to kink and don’t have any experience, there must be something you’ve fantasized about.

I can’t be the only one who  hears ‘I have no limits’ and instantly gets turned off. How do you deal with it when you hear that? Also, has anyone out there said the dreaded words ‘I’ll do anything you want’? If you did, what on earth did you mean by that?