Under most circumstances, I’m no fan of dress codes at kinky events. Back when secrecy was more important they had their uses in telling real kinky people from tourists, but these days little serious harm is likely to come of a vanilla person accidentally wandering into a kinky party. If a play party had a dress code, I think it would be entirely reasonable to question the point of requiring people to dress up when they’re supposed to be there to play.

However, if a party is all about dressing up and is clearly advertised as such, then it’s reasonable, even necessary, to have a dress code. Have you ever gone to what you thought was going to be a costume party, only to discover you were the only one who actually dressed up? Or completely misjudged how formal an event was and shown up dressed completely inappropriately? Feeling stupid and out of place is the exact opposite of fun. Obviously, fetish parties are much more fun if everyone is required to ‘fetish up’ if they want in. These parties are also supposed to be safe places for people to indulge their clothing fetishes (latex or leather, for example). That’s why they’re called fetish parties. Without a dress code, people tend to tone down their costumes for fear of ending up as the one latex catsuit in a sea of slackers who couldn’t be bothered to dress up. That’s hardly a safe place for a fetishist, now is it?

Fetish parties are also collaborative in a way I really enjoy. A fetish party isn’t something you just show up to, it’s something all the attendees create together. Without everyone pulling their weight, the party falls flat. Going to a fetish party without even attempting to dress up is like showing up at a potluck without so much as a token store-bought veggie tray and expecting people to be happy to see you.

But! What if you just don’t like dressing up? What if your friends want to go,  and you want to hang out with them, but you don’t care for fetish wear? I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know I have a very simple answer for you: STAY HOME.

It really is that simple. The world will not end if you miss one (1) party. Your friends will still be your friends if you take the drastic and unprecedented step of saying ‘Fetish parties aren’t really my thing. Have fun, we’ll get together later.’ Is your desire to go to this party and see your friends really more important than everyone else’s desire to have a safe space to wear their fetish gear? Is the effort the organizers and other attendees put in worth so little to you that you’d rather shit all over it than deal with the minor inconvenience of missing a single party?

Of course, if you’re worried that there may be someone in the local scene who isn’t aware that you’re a whiny little princess, then by all means argue that you should be given an exception to the clearly stated rules. For extra princess points, bitch and whine about the dress code when there is one and only one public party in the local scene that has ever so much as suggested a dress code.

I am no way exaggerating with that statement. The Kink Underground Fetish Revue is the only party in Victoria that I know of to ever have a dress code of any sort. Other kink events in Victoria include:

Sagacity play parties: these have no dress code and never will.

Sagacity munches: these have the absolutely draconian dress code of regular, everyday street wear. Because munches are casual get-togethers, fetish wear is actually discouraged.

Sagacity workshops: regular everyday street wear, comfortable clothing you can move in encouraged.

Other workshops(TellMia, SPARC, etc): regular everyday street wear, workshops with hands-on sections may recommend wearing something that’s easy to move in.

Rope nights of various sorts (Rope Dojo Without The Ego, Kinktastic Enterprises rope nights, Victoria Ropettes Women’s Bondage Experiment, etc): Again, comfortable clothing that’s easy to move in is recommended.

It’s almost like there are lots and lots of things you can do in Victoria without ever changing out of your tshirt and jeans. Kink Underground was also very clear about the dress code and the intention of the party. They even offered fetish makeovers to people who weren’t sure what to wear or who didn’t have any fetish wear. I don’t know what they could have done to be more inclusive while still having a fetish party.

Even with all that, people still whined and cried about the dress code. Apparently most fetish wear for men looks submissive, dominant men prefer to just wear black street clothes, for the purpose of getting into a fetish party submissive women are fashion accessories, and people who have been involved in the scene for a while should be given exceptions from the clearly stated rules. Let me count the ways all of those statements are complete and utter bullshit.

1. Supposedly, most male fetish wear looks ‘submissive’. FAIL. No, no it does not. And even if it did, so fucking what? Will the sky fall in if (gasp) you leave the house in anything less than a complete leather police uniform?

2. So, what you’re saying is that dominant men are lazy little shits? I hope you cleared that statement with all the dominant men who are either fetishists themselves or aren’t complete fucking slackers. FAIL.

3. In what parallel universe does the dress code for a party apply to groups, not individuals? Even ignoring the fact that submissive women are people and not fashion accessories, it simply makes no sense whatsoever that you should be allowed into a party with a dress code because you brought a woman who meets the dress code. Would you invite someone to a post-move thank you party because their friend helped you move? No? FAIL.

4. This is where I get really angry. Supposedly people who have been involved in the scene for a while shouldn’t have to follow the rules. Specifically, if one of the reasons to have a dress code is to keep people out who might not know how to behave at a party full of scantily clad people (that is, people who might not know that bare skin is not an invitation), and this supposed paragon of the community knows to keep his hands to himself, we should just let him in. Never mind that it’s little tough to tell at the door who has been going to parties for years and who just dropped in to see some tits, never mind that letting one person in who doesn’t meet the dress code but not another is blatant favouritism, never mind that people at the party might  not be comfortable being stared at by some jackass who couldn’t be bothered to dress up even if said jackass is familiar with the kink scene, never mind that the intent of the party is to create a feast for the eyes for everyone attending.

Especially, never mind that people who have been in the scene for years should fucking know better! If we can’t expect people who have gone to kink parties before to understand and respect the rules, who can we expect to follow the rules? If anyone gets a pass, it should be people new to the scene who couldn’t have known better. People who have been around for a while should be held to higher standards, not lower ones. After all, they’ve had plenty of time to learn what’s appropriate and what’s not. Who’s to say that someone who thinks they’re above following a simple dress code doesn’t also think they’re above keeping their hands to themselves unless specifically invited? Why should I trust someone who believes that his desire to attend a party is more important than the other attendees feeling safe and comfortable at that party?

Finally, why should I have the least bit of respect for someone who whines and cries about a dress code? If the rules of an event are a minor inconvenience for you by all means state your case, but please shut the fuck up after you do so. Incessant whining about how you should get an exception because you’re such a special snowflake impresses precisely no one. Next time,skip the whining and just wear a tiara, princess.

I just created a formspring account. If you happen to have a burning desire to ask me questions anonymously, now’s your chance!

I just added some blogs (I’d like to say they’re new blogs, but they’re not. I’ve just been extremely lazy about updating) to my blogroll.

The first two are personal friends of mine, Kadri and Weezie. Kadri posts pretty regularly about a variety of interesting kink-related topics. Between his niceness and my recreational assholery, we make one decent human being 🙂

Weezie doesn’t post nearly often enough, you should go and nag  him 🙂  He got his start doing guest posts at my blog and Dishevelled Domina’s, then he branched out into his own blog.

Peroxide’s blog is a great in-depth read about what makes this submissive man tick. Ever since his very first foray into blogging, an interview on Dishevelled Domina’s blog, he’s been full of fascinating insights.

Finally, I can’t say enough good things about Dumb Domme. How can you not love a woman who has the guts to freely admit that sometimes she does dumb things, and who openly mocks the stereotypes that female doms are expected to conform to?

If for some reason you haven’t already subscribed to DD’s blog, you should go there now and read my interview. I also highly recommend the rest of the interview series, DD asks a lot of interesting questions.

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Sadly, DD’s blog is gone now but I had a copy of my interview in my email. Enjoy!

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

To riff on your post about personality, thinking styles and kink, I’m an INTP and abstract sequential thinker. Friends have also described me as an angry little hermit J As for my sexual tastes, I like a lot of things that are often considered ‘submissive’ acts by the tragically misinformed. For example, I like the missionary position with me on the bottom, and giving blowjobs. I also like tying men up and pegging them, so my Official Dominant^TM card should be safe for now. My power exchange preference is dominant, but a very low key, low protocol sort of dominant.

How and when did you discover your power exchange preference?

I discovered my interest in topping seven or eight years ago thanks to the glory of the internet, but didn’t discover my interest on domination as opposed to just topping until much more recently. The novelty of getting to hit people with things and having them thank me for it was all I was interested in at first, but after a few years the novelty wore off. Eventually, I figured out that the nebulous something I was searching for was power exchange. My current relationship also helped me figure that out. I’m convinced we get along as well as we do because my boyfriend is willing to give me my way practically all of the time, which does tend to point toward me being dominant.

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

Very different.  Believe it or not, I used to be almost totally unable to initiate sex. I didn’t do anything ‘kinky’ until long after my first relationship ended. The most important thing I’ve learned is that kink isn’t just a crazy impossible thing that only happens in porn, regular everyday people like me have just as much a right to get their freak on as the most physically perfect porn star.

How did you come to understand you were dominant?

Actually, it was a long and gradual process. I used to read a lot of written femdom porn, but even though I was fascinated by those stories I just couldn’t make the connection to actually wanting to do something like that. I think part of that was that I’m not an especially severe sadist, so I assumed that because I didn’t want to enact those exact fantasies in real life just the way they were written, no one else actually did that stuff either and it was all just make-believe.

Eventually I stumbled across some femdom forum sites (now defunct or I’d have some links. I miss those sites), and started reading what people had to say about kink when they weren’t writing porn. I found that a lot easier to identify with, and a little seed of an idea started to sprout. Maybe I wasn’t that different from the people who seemed to actually be doing kinky things. That was a bit of an adjustment for me, since I spent my whole childhood as the weird, quiet kid with no friends. Clearly I couldn’t possibly be anything like the impossibly perfect dominatrixes in the porn I was watching.

In a weird way, the wankers of the world actually really helped me when I was finding my feet as a dom. No doubt my first profile on a kink dating site was just awful, but fortunately the sad, desperate hordes didn’t care how bad my profile was as long as there might possibly be a woman behind it. The attention I got was really encouraging, and through chatting with people on bondage.com and collarme.com, I started to figure out what I really wanted (shockingly enough,  not body worship from random strangers). After I moved to Victoria and finished college, I started going to events in the local scene (which was just terrifying at first, I really don’t do well with large groups of strangers). I met and played with a few people, who luckily were nothing but perfectly sweet to me, and actually started playing in public at parties.

But all that time, I still didn’t feel comfortable calling myself dominant. I couldn’t say exactly where I picked it up, but I had this idea that an actual dom is in control of every little thing every minute of every day, never has a bad day, never just needs someone to hold her and stroke her hair, never feels unsure about what to do, never gets a little lost in the middle of a scene, etc, etc. But the more I read about power exchange, the more it sounded like the people who were actually doing it, were, uh, people. Not infallible robots, just people. One thing that really helped me was a blog post by Mistress Matisse (oh no, the heresy! I’m saying something nice about a prodom!) in which she talked about enjoying dominating people in small doses because having a full time slave was a lot of work for her. I figured that if someone who was so good at this she got paid for it was allowed to not want to be in charge of all the things all the time, I was allowed to be dominant without being superdom too.

I’m still working on that minor detail of actually finding a submissive of my own, but you know, one day.

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

I just really like getting my way 🙂 More seriously, I love the intimacy of domination and sadism. There’s nothing like showing someone this scary, dark part of yourself and having them ask you for more. Another thing I love about sadism is reactions. People make the best noises when you hurt them.

Who is kinkier, you or your partner?

Me. My partner doesn’t identify as kinky at all, even though the way he acts toward me could easily be called submissive. For example, last year my old wallet finally died, and the tyvek wallet I was interested in cost more than I wanted to pay for something essentially made out of a heavy-duty envelope. One day I came home, and sitting on top of my mouse was a tyvek wallet my boyfriend made for me. I was so excited about the wallet I almost didn’t notice he had also replaced my (half-broken) mouse with one almost exactly like the old one, except the new one works.

How do you handle being kinkier than your partner?

Conveniently, he’s fine with me playing casually with women, and is happy to come to play parties with me (and he insists on carrying my bag and fetching my drinks, it’s just adorable). What’s a little more complicated is my growing interest in exploring d/s, which would of course be much less casual than the odd bout of hitting people at parties. We haven’t figured that one out yet, but I think if we go slowly and he gets to know and trust any potential submissive of mine it’ll work out.

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

I think there is a connection in the sense that thanks to feminism’s effects on society, it’s no longer completely unthinkable that a woman might want to be in charge. I don’t think feminism made more women dominant, but it did make a little easier for us to express our dominance.

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

For starters, it made it extremely difficult to figure out I wanted to take the lead sexually. I used to think that domination was only for people far cooler than some nerd from a little town in the mountains. It’s certainly made it more difficult to find a partner, because there are a limited number of men who are both interested in a woman taking the lead sexually, and secure enough to ever admit it.

You are involved in a community of like-minded people, locally and online, how is that experience for you? What do you see as the benefits/downfall of each?

I really enjoy being with ‘my people’, online and off. Locally, there’s just something nice about going to the pub with some kinky friends and having long, meandering discussions about kinky topics like fear play, or power exchange, over drinks. It’s also pretty awesome to get to go to conferences like Sagacity’s Birthday Bash and Westward Bound. However, all local scenes (as far as I know) have their downsides. As a shy, soft-spoken dominant woman, I’ve had to deal with people assuming that I’m not dominant because I’m not loud or abrasive. There’s also the sexism in the scene, which is not in fact a magical oasis or perfect equality, no matter what people might like to think. It’s hard not to notice that the vast majority of people wearing revealing outfits at play parties are women, while the majority of men get to wear clothes that actually cover their bodies.

Being involved in the online scene gives me access to people and opinions I might never meet in real life. It’s also easier to ignore sexist expectations when I can just stay the hell out of the Gor groups on Fetlife. I particularly enjoy blogging and commenting on other people’s blogs because the medium gives me more time to sort my thoughts out than chatting with people in person does. The only downsides I can think of to being involved in the online scene are pretty minor: because text lacks the nuance of tone of voice and body language it’s easier to misunderstand people, and sometimes you just really want to hang out with kinky people in person.

I wouldn’t say either online or offline is definitely better when it comes to socialization (online play is another story, I’m just not interested in playing without getting to touch my bottom), I like both of them for different reasons.

Does being dominant in a non-sexual setting (work, etc) energize you, does it turn you on?

Theoretically I could like being dominant in non-sexual settings, but in practice I just get really nervous about whether other people think my ideas are stupid. I find it a lot easier to go along with what other people are doing.

Which of the 5 Love Languages would you say you prefer?

The love languages I need to receive to feel loved are physical touch and acts of service. Oddly enough, I hate being touched by almost everyone except my partner, who I snuggle and hold hands with constantly. It took some time for me to realize acts of service were really important to me, largely because of the pervasive idea that people (especially women) who insist on having other people do things for them are selfish jerks. In particular, I feel really loved when people make food for me. So much so that a person who refused to feed me would have a hell of a time convincing me he cared about me.

To express love, I primarily use physical touch and quality time. Being an introvert, I only have so many hours I can spend with people before I need to hide and recharge, so I have to really like someone to spend very many of those hours on them.

So that we’re all on the same page, here are some handy definitions:

Censor: an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter. For example: Government censors deleted all references to the protest.

Coward: a person who lacks courage in facing danger, difficulty,opposition, pain, etc.; a timid or easily intimidated person.

When someone deletes a troll’s comments, it’s not at all unusual for the troll to complain that the owner/moderation of the blog/forum/discussion group is a censor and/or a coward. Not only is that not true, but it’s so stupid it inspired me to write an entire post about it.

When you censor someone’s writing, you are preventing it from reaching a significant number of people.  Here in Canada, our customs agents can censor shipments of books by refusing to allow them across the border. According to the Canada Border Services Agency’s Policy on the Classification of Obscene Material:

2. One category of goods (tariff item 9899.00.00) differs
from all others however, and involves material that is
suspected of constituting obscenity under subsection 163(8)
of the Criminal Code. The Customs Tariff prohibits the
importation of such material into Canada, including written,
visual and audio materials. (emphasis mine)

Because Canada customs is a government agency, they actually do have the power to censor people. Refusing to allow material into the country is a fairly effective way of controlling what all the residents of Canada can and cannot read.

A publishing company, however, is physically unable to publish every book submitted to them. Picking and choosing which books to publish doesn’t make them censors, it makes them rational. By definition, a single blogger’s refusal to approve any particular comment, or to edit a comment until it meets their approval is not censorship. Nothing I do on my blog prevents anyone from commenting elsewhere, starting their own blog, making pamphlets and handing them out on the street, or just yelling about their ideas on a street corner.

Because FetLife is an overwhelmingly popular kinky social network, it could be argued that its refusal to post a given comment anywhere on the site would be censorship. Deleting a post from someone’s own writings section would likely be a dick move, but it wouldn’t necessarily be censorship. They can always comment on other sites, after all. Insisting that someone follow the rules that they agreed to follow when they joined the group is definitely not censorship. Again, having to edit yourself to meet a group’s standards, or even being banned from that group in no way prevents you from joining another group and commenting there, starting your own group and commenting there, commenting on your ‘wall’ or your friends walls, posting in your ‘writings’ section, adding your comment to your profile, joining another discussion site entirely and commenting there, commenting on another blog, or starting your own blog. That sounds like an awful lot of options to me.

As for group rules, not only do you have to read them (or at least scroll past them) to join the group in the first place, but nothing is forcing anyone to join a group with rules they don’t like. Also, group rules, at least the ones that I’ve seen tend not to be very restrictive. Disagreeing civilly and refraining from outright bashing other group members is simply not that great a hardship. And if you really feel the need to ridicule people for being idiots, there are always personal blogs 🙂

Speaking of ridiculing idiots, it has finally become necessary to have a comment policy on my blog. Namely, idiots will be ridiculed and, after at most one warning, banned. My blog is not a democracy.

Now, let’s get to the ridiculing. Someone going by the name rjkj attempted to post the following comment on my post about ‘forced’ feminization:

i think that forced fem is a monstrosity and it should be wiped from the face of the earth like the crap it is. And im an athiest so gone preach bible nonsence but i do belive that women should sumit to to men and deal with i mean if thier abusive then thats diferent but it doesnt justify this crap nothing does.

For starters, that’s a truly impressive number of misspellings and grammatical errors for a two sentence comment. Hardly the worst thing about it, but it’s a particular pet peeve of mine. I feel that at least trying to spell correctly and use reasonable sentence structure is a sign of respect for the owner of the blog you’re commenting on. Rjkj’s comment might as well be graffiti for all the thought they put into stating their thoughts clearly.

The meat of my problem with this comment is the idea that women should submit to men. Only a worthless troll would come to a dominant woman’s blog and say that women are meant to submit. Don’t feed the trolls, you say? To quote Greta Christina:

“Don’t feed the trolls” is bull. Ignoring Internet misogyny is exactly how the trolls get fed. Speaking up destroys them.

If I ignore this troll, they might think that their comment was just eaten by a glitch. Quietly deleting comments from the moderation queue fails to send the message that being an asshole is not cool. Trolls, and more importantly every else reading, need to hear that what they’re doing is unacceptable. This is not censorship, it’s simply having standards. Rjkj is completely free to post their drivel anywhere but on my blog.

And it really is drivel. The second sentence is so poorly constructed I’m not entirely sure what they’re getting at. “im an athiest so gone preach bible nonsence”? Really? I’m afraid that calling yourself an atheist doesn’t magically make your opinions stop being nonsense. If you’re ‘not going to preach bible nonsense’ (my best guess at what rjkj meant), then what justification do you have for saying that women are meant to submit?

I have to say, I’m disappointed in the quality of troll I’ve gotten. Kitty Stryker’s trolls on her post about candid pornography put far more effort into being complete assholes. People, if you’re going to troll me, do it whole-assedly, okay? Half-assed trolling is just sad.

Now for the accusations of cowardice. Trying to hide a problem is certainly cowardly, and deleting unflattering comments is certainly one way of hiding a problem. Deleting comments that add nothing to the discussion, as in Kitty’s case, is not cowardice. It’s boredom. Aside from a flash of irritation, there’s nothing to trolls. They’re not making a point, they’re not thought-provoking, they’re not furthering discussion, they’re just being dicks.

In rjkj’s particular case, I can’t very well be accused of cowardice for singling out their comment for ridicule. However, any further stupidity from the same person will never make it out of the moderation queue. Why? Because rjkj is boring, and on the basis of their spelling and sentence structure, too stupid to argue with. I no more owe them space on my blog than a business owner owes vandals graffiti space on their building.

Or, Stabbity’s pet peeves, part 1 of 43,002.

On discussion sites like FetLife, it’s not at all unusual to see posts along the lines of ‘why won’t dominant women give me a chance?’, or ‘what does it take to get a reply to an email?’.

The answer to these questions is very simple: stop fucking whining!

When someone asks ‘why won’t dominant women give me a chance?’ I hear ‘you owe me’. No, actually, I don’t owe you shit. Acting like you’re entitled to my time is one of the least sexy things you could possibly do. Also, whining about how it isn’t fair that you can’t get a date reeks of self-pity. On top of being painfully unsexy, that’s just boring. Posting about feeling lonely and discouraged gives people an opportunity to empathize with you. Posting about how the world owes you a hot, dominant girlfriend just makes people want to smack you.

If you’re having trouble making a connection with a dominant woman, if you send email after email and you never manage to meet up with anyone, I have news for you. The common denominator is you, jackass. If you can’t get a reply to an email, there is something wrong with either your emails, your profile, or your choice of of person to email. Or you just haven’t emailed enough people yet.  If you can get a reply to an email but correspondence always peters out before you actually meet anyone, there’s a problem with your approach. Or you just haven’t corresponded with enough people yet. If you can get a first date but never a second one, there’s a problem with how you act on dates. Or you just haven’t been on enough of them yet. Or you take every rejection as proof that you’re a pathetic shell of a human being who is destined to die alone, not to be discovered until your neighbours complain about the mysterious and awful smell coming from your apartment.

On to the good news. If you look at the potential problems I’ve listed, you’ll notice one thing they all have in common: you can change absolutely every one of them. Even that last one – more about that in a bit. You are not a helpless victim of fate. You can learn to write better emails, you can learn to do a better job of choosing people to email, you can be patient and simply email more people, you can adjust your approach, you can try different things on dates, you can just keep going on first dates until you meet someone you really click with. I’m not saying it will be easy. In fact, it’s likely to be both painful and time-consuming. But it’s certainly more productive than whining about how life isn’t fair.

Another great thing about the issues I listed is that you can actually ask for help with those things. ‘Why won’t anyone give me a chance?’ doesn’t invite any answer besides ‘Because you suck. Now get lost’. ‘Do you have any suggestions to help me improve my profile?’ on the other hand, is a question with a multitude of potentially useful answers. You might not like the answers you get, but you’re much more likely to get useful information with that sort of question. If you have a look at the sticky threads in fem dom related fetlife groups such as Submissive men and women who love them, or Dominant Women and subs/slaves who adore them, you’ll find plenty of advice on how to find a partner. It’s like we dominant women want you all to start getting it right.

In some cases, the problem is that you just haven’t contacted enough people. Sometimes people don’t respond to well-written, interesting emails or schedule a date because work is crazy and they just don’t have time, or a personal crisis or health issue is taking up all of their energy, or they’re on vacation, or they’re in the middle of moving, or that one interesting email got buried under a pile of crap and they just missed it, etc, etc. The vast majority of things people do actually have nothing to do with you, shocking as that may seem.

Which leads me back to that last issue I mentioned, the one about how each and every rejection is proof that you’re going to die alone and unloved. That’s completely and utterly wrong, but it’s easy to forget that in the moment. So what do you do about it? It’s actually very simple (not necessarily easy, but simple). Here it is: have a life.

HAVE A LIFE.

Have things going on in your life besides the joyless grind of hunting for a partner. Pursue hobbies, spend time with your friends, learn things, work on your career, travel, explore, read books and look at art and have interesting discussions with people and for fuck’s sake do not let the search for a partner consume your entire life. When you have nothing else that matters in your life, rejection really is the worst thing ever. Rejection will always sting, I’m not saying it won’t, but having ways to distract yourself can only do you good. It will also help you if you can say to yourself, sure <some girl> rejected me, but I’m fantastic at <one of those hobbies you’ve been pursuing>, and my friends rock, and I’m doing <some cool thing> next weekend.

Here’s another upside of doing things besides looking for a partner – it makes you more likely to both find one and keep one. Think about it, would you really want to date someone who did nothing with her life besides look for a boyfriend? Wouldn’t it be more fun to spend time with someone who had hobbies she wanted to tell you about, favourite books and movies she wanted to share, funny stories about adventures she had with her friends? And if you want an interesting partner, it just might be possible that women want the same thing.

Of course, whining about women not giving you a chance is a lot easier than improving yourself. But tell me, how’s that working out for you?

If you’ve ever complained about the near complete lack of porn for dominant women (or the lack of porn for discriminating submissive men), you’ve probably been told ‘you should make some yourself’. If you’re like me, that phrase makes you want to set things on fire, but it’s hard to articulate exactly why it fills you with arsony rage. Conveniently enough, there’s a new post on Adventurotica explaing why ‘just do it yourself!’ is a pathetic fucking cop out.

Here’s an especially good snippet to tempt you to go read the whole thing:

It is a conversational shutdown tactic by people who are presumably happy that the status remain quo, when the status is not quo at all. And it is so handily disguised as a pep talk, a kind of “Well, you should just take your awesome and go make that stuff. Call us when you’re done, ‘kay?”

That’s a dick move for a host of reasons, all of which are conveniently laid out in the post. Make with the reading!

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the concept of ‘yes means yes’. For those who might have missed it, it’s an extension of ‘no means no’. It’s a very similar concept to ‘enthusiastic consent’. Basically, ‘yes means yes’ says that the absence of a no (be it a literal, verbal ‘no, I don’t want to do that’, or a no conveyed by pushing a hand away or turning away from someone) is not enough, that you should only do things that your partner has actually said yes to. Whether you know this concept by the name ‘yes means yes’, ‘enthusiastic consent’, or something else entirely, it ought to be blindingly obvious. Come on, would you rather have sex with someone who said ‘okay, fine, we can have sex if you really want to that badly’, or someone who said ‘hell yes, why aren’t you naked yet?’. One of those situations is hot, and one of them is boring and sad.

‘Yes means yes’ is extremely simple when applied to vanilla sex. Really, it is. Even if you prefer to have sex with straight women. Sure, you might not get a verbal ‘yes, I want to have sex with you right  now’, but if a woman nods when you ask if you should get a condom out, I think it’s safe to take that as a yes. If she pulls you back to her after you stand up and take your pants off, she’s probably into it. If on the other hand she isn’t making any particular effort to touch you, or isn’t reacting much but isn’t pulling away, stop and check in. Either she doesn’t really want to have sex, or you’re about to have boring and terrible sex. When bad sex is your best case scenario, just stop.

However, I can forgive people for being confused by ‘yes means yes’ as applied to filthy pervert sex, in particular resistance play/consensual non-consent/whatever you choose to call it when you want to yell ‘no’ without actually stopping the scene. If you’re trying to have a resistance scene where the bottom gets to yell no as loud as they want and struggle to get away without fear that the scene they’re enjoying will actually stop, asking ‘are you sure this is okay?’ mid-scene is a fantastic way to drag everyone involved out of the headspace they want to be in. However, it’s actually very simple to apply ‘yes means yes’ to resistance play. The yes simply comes before the fact. Clearly and completely negotiating a take-down scene is a definitive yes as far as I’m concerned. Anything that the bottom said yes to during negotiations is fine during the scene no matter how loud they yell no (as long as they don’t safeword or otherwise indicate they’re not having fun anymore). Anything the bottom did not say yes to during the negotiation process is a no. I don’t mean only things that the bottom said no to, but anything and everything that wasn’t covered during negotiation. That means if you’re having a great resistance scene, and it occurs to you it would be fun to threaten the bottom with this handy knife you have lying around, but you didn’t talk about including knife play in this particular scene, you don’t do it. Even if you really, really want to and are pretty sure it would be fine. Suck it up and negotiate for knife-play next time.

You might think ‘yes means yes’ is incompatible with d/s. That’s completely wrong. Also kind of stupid. I hate to break it to you, but signing a slave contract in front of all of your friends and pinky-swearing that you’ll both uphold it forever and ever doesn’t mean that any given scene won’t still come to a screeching halt when the slave says (to paraphrase the entirely awesome Laura Antoniou) ‘I withdraw my consent’, ‘let me out or I’ll call the police’, or ‘stop hitting me or I’ll call my lawyer’. For that matter, any variant of ‘I don’t feel so good, I think I might throw up’ will reliably end a scene no matter how many times you said you were going to play without safewords this time.

If you’re concerned that only doing things that you slave says is okay will keep you from feeling like you’re really in control, for fucks sake, negotiate for whatever would give you the feeling of control. If you want to be able to grab your bottom/submissive/slave by the hair and drag them to the bedroom for a thorough ravishing whenever you want, ask for that! If you like mindfucks, ask for that! If you want to be able to take a scene in whatever direction suits you, ask for that! Yes, you will have to get to know your bottom-type person really well before they’ll agree to let you do whatever you want if you use a ‘yes means yes’ concept of consent. Horror of horrors. Oh wait, you have to do that anyway if you play with people who have any regard for their own well-being. 24/7 total power exchange is a fantasy. It can be a fun fantasy, but it’s still a fantasy. ‘Yes means yes’ style negotiation takes place outside of that fantasy, just like, you know, the rest of your real life, the one that pays the rent and keeps the lights on.

If you’re too stupid to negotiate a scene or a relationship that works for you, that’s hardly the fault of the standard of consent you use.

A comment weezie made on my post about ‘mentoring’ and ‘protecting’ reminded me of yet another thing I wanted to rant about 🙂 Specifically, the fears that people who are new to the scene often have about how if they do something wrong at an event and accidentally offend someone, everyone will laugh at them and then throw them out. There is ONE and only ONE rule (to rule them all) you absolutely have to follow at your average kink event, be it a munch, play party, conference, or what have you.

I say ‘average kink event’ because there are specific high-protocol¹events that do have many more rules that are much more strict. However, high-protocol events are clearly advertised as such, and the hosts will generally be happy to fill you in on the specifics if you ask them. Most kink events (such as munches, play parties and conferences) are low protocol.

The one rule is (drumroll, please):

Be polite.

Anti-climactic, huh? That’s it. That’s literally all you have to do to keep people from thinking you’re a big jerk. If you wouldn’t do something at a vanilla event with someone you didn’t know well, don’t do it at a kinky event. To be a little more specific, when I say ‘be polite’ I mean:

• Say please, thank you, and excuse me.
  • Being polite sends the message that you care what people think of you, and that you’re willing to follow social conventions to make those around you comfortable. These are very good messages to send at a kink event.
• Treat people like people.
  • ‘Hello’ is a reasonable greeting. ‘Ma’am, this one humbly begs to be allowed to kiss your boots.’ is not.
• Do NOT touch anyone or their stuff unless you’ve been given permission.
  • Kinky people are extremely particular about this one. The only reason people feel comfortable dressing up in revealing fetish wear at parties is that they know that no-one will take the sight of some skin as in invitation.
• Don’t interrupt people who are busy.
  • Don’t barge into conversations, and do NOT, under any circumstances short of a fire or blood emergency, interrupt someone’s scene.
• Don’t be a creep.
  • Creepiness is difficult to define, but in general try not to act like you are entitled to anyone’s time, attention, or personal space. Don’t get angry at someone who wants to talk with her friends more than she/he wants to spend the evening entertaining you, don’t stare fixedly at people as if they dressed up solely to titillate you, don’t physically corner people you want to talk with, don’t stalk them around the party.

On the other hand, there are a host of things you have absolutely ZERO obligation to do:

• You do not have to take orders from anyone you do not have a prior agreement with.
  • Repeated for emphasis: you do NOT, under any circumstances, have to take orders from ANYONE you do not have a prior agreement with. Not even if they’re hot, not even if they’re popular, not even if they’re super-duper-dominant. Some people think that just because a person looks submissive, they can order them around. Those people are stupid and should not be encouraged. Get a DM (dungeon master) or official volunteer (there are usually some at every party) to get them off your back if you need to.²
• You do not have to play with anyone.
  • Not even if they really, really want you to. Not even if they ask nicely. Not even if they’re friends with your friends. Again, get a DM or volunteer if you need to. It really is their job to make sure the event goes smoothly.
• You don’t have to put up with it if someone else is being rude.
  • If someone insists on talking at you all night, it’s perfectly fine to excuse yourself. If someone invites themselves to sit at your table, it’s perfectly fine to say that your friend will be back for that seat in just a minute. If someone doesn’t respect your boundaries, it’s perfectly fine to tell them to back off.

That’s pretty much it. There’s no set of arcane protocols you absolutely must follow to be accepted in the scene. All you really have to do is avoid being a jerk. If you’re not sure what you should do, it’s always fine to ask. If you’re worried about attending your first event, just send the organizers a message. They like it when new people come, and will be happy to answer any questions you have. Often they’ll offer to set you up with someone to sit with/talk to. If the group throwing the event has a forum of some sort (very often a fetlife group), by all means post there. We like it when people think to ask questions, it makes them look smart 🙂

 

1. High protocol is sort of a general term, as there are many different and often contradictory rules that can be called ‘high-protocol’. To borrow from the O&P Wiki(why yes, it was one of the first google results I found) high protocol includes such things as:

• Restrictions on speech (eg silence; speaking only when spoken to; requesting permission to speak; or specific forms of address such as “Sir, yes, sir!”)
• Deferential behaviour (eg not turning back to the dominant; keeping head below theirs; kneeling when otherwise unoccupied; requesting permission to leave the room.)
• Immediate response to commands, and concentration on the dominant and their requirements.
• Serving or waiting without drawing unnecessary attention to the submissive.

2. What if a DM or other volunteer is hassling you? Then you’re basically screwed. You can try complaining to another volunteer, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll take you seriously, and even if they do, they may not be able to get the person bothering you kicked out. I wish I had a better answer, but unfortunately kink organizations are just as prone to corruption as any other kind. Because of the way kinky people often feel attacked by the mainstream media equating BDSM with abuse, we often minimize or ignore abuse instead of rooting out the sources of it (see discussions about this on Consent Culture, and Kinky Little Girl’s blog). Also, kink organizations are almost always run by volunteers, and it can be difficult to find reliable volunteers. If someone is a reliable volunteer, the organizers of the event will be very reluctant to invite them not to come back.

Are stupid. As well as liable to go wrong in fun and exciting ways. Unfortunately, they both look like good ideas on the surface.

In theory, a mentor is someone whose judgement you trust, who helps you learn to be a better submissive/dominant/switch/fill in the blank and gives you advice. If that was actually how it worked out in real life, I’d be all for it. Sadly, ‘mentoring’ generally ends up being an excuse to pounce on the fresh meat while pretending you’re only interested in teaching them. ‘Protecting’ is generally more limited, but can also be abused in much the same way, as well as being insulting to capable adults who happen to identify as submissive.

A real mentor is NOT necessarily dominant. Dominant identified people are absolutely not the font of all knowledge in the scene. A fellow submissive is probably the best person to teach a new submissive about the kinds of crap a bad or misguided dominant might pull. It’s technically possible for a dominant to mentor a submissive, but a purely altruistic exchange of information is probably not what a person has in mind if they pounce on a new submissive and offer to ‘mentor’ them.

Competition for the new blood in the scene can be stiff, and one way unscrupulous dominants try to give themselves an advantage is by offering to ‘mentor’ someone. This lets them appear altruistic while they use the mentoring relationship to get the submissive attached to them and to control their access to information. By controlling access to information, they can convince the submissive that the way they want her/him to submit is the one correct way. If that sounds kind of pathetic, that’s because it is in fact pathetic. If you can’t get someone to choose to submit to you on your own merits, without resorting to misleading them about what kind of relationship you’re after, what business do you have calling yourself dominant?

A real mentor does NOT, under any circumstances, play with their mentee. We already have a handy word in the scene for someone you play with: ‘play partner’. A mentor is supposed to be something entirely different. They’re also supposed to be able to offer unbiased advice, the way a trusted friend would. How can a mentee possibly get unbiased advice about something that went wrong in the scene they had the other day when they had that scene with their mentor?

Playing with someone you’re supposedly mentoring is a clear and obvious conflict of interest. Even if nothing goes horribly wrong, an ethical person would not put themselves in a situation so likely to go haywire. It’s simply too easy for a mentor to give in to the temptation to tell their mentee not to play with someone who they’re worried might steal them away, or avoid giving them information that might cause them to ask inconvenient questions about their mentor’s proficiency with their toys/protocol choices/how the scene actually works/what’s really going on. It’s also too easy for the mentee to avoid disagreeing with their mentor for fear of losing their play partner or being punished in scene.

Even in the more regulated environment of a job, a mentor is still generally someone other than the mentee’s boss. Again, that’s because of conflicts of interest. What’s best for a person’s career may be very different from what’s most convenient for their boss, making it very difficult for the mentee to get unbiased advice if their mentor and their boss are the same person.

A real mentor does NOT engage in power exchange with their mentee. Just like non-power-exchange play with the mentee, this is a conflict of interest. Once you set up a power exchange relationship with someone, you’re no longer an advisor, you’re a mistress/master/owner/etc. If you want to be someone’s mistress that’s great, but calling yourself a mentor while you act like a mistress is dishonest. Lying is a kind of a dick move, and also completely counterproductive. Misleading someone about your intentions certainly won’t make them stick around, and if they’re dumb enough to be fooled for any length of time, do you really want them around?

A real mentor points the mentee towards a wide range of resources, even ones which the mentor doesn’t necessarily agree with, and encourages them to talk with other people and gather a range of opinions. You don’t necessarily have to have an extensive library of bdsm related books to be a mentor, but you really do have to be able to give your mentee information in some form, whether that’s a list of links to read through or a list of people who are especially skilled in certain areas to talk to. If you can’t provide someone with information and help them learn to find things on their own, you have no business calling yourself a mentor. If you really need a fancy title to make yourself feel important, there are plenty of other ones to choose from.

A protector is generally even less useful than a ‘mentor’. Supposedly a protector looks out for a poor, vulnerable submissive, who is clearly too sweet and innocent (read, stupid and helpless) to a) figure out on her/his own who is safe to play with, and b) tell a top/dom/whatever who she/he doesn’t want to play with to back off.

There are very, very few situations in which I think a ‘protector’ figure has any use at all (aside from making said protector feel important).

1. A bottom-type person who is completely new to the scene and going to their very first play party might feel more comfortable with a trusted friend who is there specifically to look after them and make sure no-one tries to talk them into doing anything they’re not completely comfortable with.
2. A bottom-type person who knows their judgement of people is not always the best might choose to compensate for that by running potential play partners past a trusted friend before doing anything with them. This could also protect them from at least some predators by making it more trouble than it would be worth to either get the go ahead from their protector or persuade the person to go behind their protector’s back.
3. A bottom-type person who is in fact perfectly comfortable telling people she/he doesn’t want to play with that no, she/he’s actually not at all turned on by their grandiose titles and domlier-than-thou posturing could easily get sick of tops arguing with her/his reasons for not wanting to play with them and ask a trusted friend to pose as her/his ‘protector’ for the sake of cutting those arguments short.

Note that none of these reasons have anything to do with submissive people being fundamentally unable to look after themselves just because they’re submissive. The idea that submissive people need a dominant to look after them is stupid and insulting. Assuming that a submissive person is submissive to everyone and therefore can’t say no when they need to makes as much sense as assuming that because I’m a straight woman I’m attracted to all men and can’t say no to the ones who aren’t compatible with me.

So, all together a mentor and protector would ideally:

• Give you a sounding board for ideas
• Point you toward information you might not have found on your own
• Give you advice to help you develop in your chosen role/figure out which role works for you
• Look out for your best interests
• Help keep you safe

Does that list remind anyone of a certain relationship that doesn’t have a pompous title? Oh yes, I think it might possibly be, what’s the word…. ‘friendship‘. A good friend who has some experience in the scene would do any of the things a mentor or protector is supposed to do, without lying about their intentions. So what’s the point of ‘mentoring’ and ‘protecting’ again? Making ‘mentors’ and ‘protectors’ feel important.