In the interests of fairness, after my ragey blog post last week, I want to talk about the perception that dominant women who are interested only in what they can get submissive men to do for them and treat play like an afterthought or a necessary evil.

If you don’t care about the guy or the dynamic at all and you just want your house clean, hire a fucking maid. Not that I really need to say that, because if housecleaning is all you’re looking for, kink is probably the worst way to get it. Seriously, you’d have better luck getting your house actually clean if you find a broke college student willing to do it for sandwiches. There absolutely are service submissives out there who will actually show up and make themselves useful, but I’m pretty sure they’re massively outnumbered by ignorant and self-absorbed manchildren who think “service” means “hand-washing her panties in a maid outfit while she verbally humiliates me.”

With that out of the way, I think what’s much more common is acting like submissive men are inherently undesirable and are only tolerated because they’re sometimes useful. I’ve seen way too many discussion threads about what submissive men should be able to offer a dominant woman that talk about pointless bullshit like being able to do a manicure or knowing how to properly shine boots or being able to cook a certain kind of meal.

That’s all incredibly stupid. A dominant woman looking for a partner is looking for a PARTNER, not hiring a fucking assistant. If you don’t like someone as a person, how could it possibly matter whether he gives the best manicures ever? Not to mention, it’s a lot easier to ask somebody to take a course to learn the thing you want them to do than it is to find someone you really like. A d/s relationship is about personal connection, not being able to drop yard work from your budget.

Acting like what skills a guy comes into a relationship with actually matters (beyond, you know, basic life skills) just makes it sound like there’s nothing inherently likable about submissive guys and they have to bribe dominant women to put up with them using service. Even if some guys really don’t have anything to offer besides doing chores, I think it’s totally counterproductive to let all submissive guys get the impression that that being submissive (which is actually awesome) is a terrible flaw that they have to make up for by making themselves useful.

Okay fine, it’s not terrible if a guy goes out and learns skills that might make a potential dom’s life easier. Self improvement = generally a good thing. The problem is that assuming you know what a woman you haven’t even met yet wants is kind of stupid. You know how I keep leaning on the manicure example? I actually hate getting them. I did it once as an experiment, discovered I really hate the feeling of having my cuticles pushed back, and haven’t gotten another one. Picking the skills you want to learn off a list thought up by random strangers is kind of dehumanizing when you think about it. If you do that, you’re assuming women are enough of a hive mind that whatever skill you pick is something your eventual partner will actually want.

You know what actually would be universally useful to any dom you ever get involved with? Self awareness! Communication skills! Knowing what you want and being able to describe it! Knowing what you don’t know! (never been spanked and don’t know if you like it? say so!)

And for the love of god, learn that women are people. Like Captain Awkward frequently recommends, read books by women, watch shows by women, listen to music by women, play games by women, etc, etc. No, I’m not going to tell you which ones. If you actually care, you will google it. If you read/watch/listen to enough stuff by women you may eventually come to understand that we are people who have needs, wants, dreams, hopes, and ambitions that have NOTHING to do with you.

If you don’t understand that, nobody will fucking care if you’re the best housecleaner who ever lived.

The idea that submissive guys are the only ones who have to tempt a dom to be interested in them is also fucked up. They have just as much right to say no as any dom, and really ought to if the dom in question thinks being the dom doesn’t mean she has any responsibilities to her sub. Yes, subs have to hold up their end of the deal and I rant about that a lot, but that doesn’t mean doms don’t need to do their part either.

If you want to have a d/s relationship, you need to make your s feel appreciated. Why the hell should he stick around if you take him for granted? And honestly, why would you even bother having someone as a sub if you don’t like him enough to make sure his needs get met too? I mean, you do realize that identifying as submissive doesn’t mean submissive guys magically stop having needs, right?

If you just want your house cleaned, hire a fucking maid. If you want a submissive of your own, act like you want a submissive, not free maid service.

 

BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE TO MAKE IT A KINK TO GET A WOMAN TO PULL HER FUCKING WEIGHT AROUND THE FUCKING HOUSE.

Okay, let me back that up a bit. Lately I’ve been seeing this perception that dominant women have this weird fixation on making their poor, mistreated submissive men make themselves fucking useful and *gasp* wash some fucking dishes or sweep a floor like some sort of sex-hating harridan instead of doing her duty to his poor neglected penis and “forcing” him to eat her out for hours (after dressing up in his favourite fetish gear, of course) while whapping him with a riding crop every so often.

There’s also this assumption that dominant men aren’t into service, that they actually care about doing kink right (read, sex sex and more sex, plus a little leather and ordering his submissive around), unlike those horrible dominant women who don’t seem to know what a dick is for (getting serviced, obviously).

BULLSHIT.

Show me one dominant man who truly, honestly would not care if his live in submissive didn’t keep his house the way he liked it. Show me one dominant man who doesn’t like it when he comes home to a tasty meal that he didn’t have to worry about doing the grocery shopping for. Dominant men fucking love service, they just don’t have to call it that because it’s assumed to be part of submission when a woman does it. It’s only dominant women who need to put a special label on PULLING YOUR GODDAMN WEIGHT LIKE A FUCKING GROWNUP because the idea that a man, even a submissive man who supposedly worships women, could actually do some fucking chores like a fucking adult is so outlandish that it needs its own special name.

I am not even slightly kidding. Read Captain Awkward Letter #813: Labor & Leisure, and #506 & #507: It is 2fucking0fucking1fucking3, so why is it so hard to divide up household chores? Don’t forget this fantastic Unfuck Your Habitat letter Ask UfYH: Don’t Give Me This Whole “Men Don’t See the Mess” Bullshit.

 

Read the comments. Read all the comments particular for letter 813 (Labour & Leisure). Count how many women had to divorce their fucking husbands because those worthless manchildren couldn’t clean a fucking house even to save their marriages.

Dominant men, vanilla men, and frankly thoroughly worthless men (seriously, did you read the comments on Labour & Leisure?) get hours and hours of extraordinarily high quality service for the princely sum of not treating a woman quite badly enough to make her leave. If men were expected to clean up after their families and do all the grocery shopping and cooking and lunch packing and budgeting and coupon clipping and washing and folding and putting away laundry and keeping track of whether everyone has enough socks and it looks like little Emily is outgrowing her clothes again, time for another trip to the mall and scheduling home repairs and making sure someone is home to let the service person in and worrying about who wants what for dinner and whether there will be enough leftovers for lunches and keeping track of Aunt Flora’s health and how Grandpa Ed is doing since Grandma Jane died and how long it’s been since the guys came over and whether he needs to pick up some beer and snacks first and whether little Emily’s soccer practice conflicts with little Oliver’s art classes and who’s going to pick up the kids early on the last day of school before the break and who’s going to stay home with the sick kid and who’s going to get a birthday present for your mother you know her birthday is next month and and and… then dominant men would be all fucking over domestic service. Funny how you don’t have to make a big deal of stuff that just magically happens for you without putting a special label on it.

For fuck’s sake guys, when a man cleans the house that’s being a fucking grownup, not “domestic service.” It doesn’t need a special title or rewards or some poor woman standing over you in heels with a riding crop unless you are a lazy sack of shit who can’t be bothered to help out unless your partner does this weird little performance of making it all about your dick.

I want to be as harsh as possible here: if you were able to clean your home just fine when you lived alone and then mysteriously stopped when you moved in with a woman, YOU ARE DEFECTIVE. Fix your shit and stop pretending that it’s your partner’s job to make tedious chores sexy.

If you enjoy fantasizing while you do boring scut work, go to town. Personally I like to put on some high energy music and make up stories in my head to take my mind off how incredibly boring mopping is, but you do you. Just stop fucking pretending that cleaning your home like a fucking grownup is in any way whatsoever unusual or noteworthy.

You will be disappointed sometimes. I touched on this in my post about losing friends and alienating people, but I think it’s worth going into a little more detail.

One of many, many problems I think is related to only seeing dominant women in porn is that it can be really hard for a guy who’s never had a friendly chat with one in real life to imagine how day to day life works with a dominant woman. If you can’t correct your ideas by comparing them with real life, you can end up assuming all sorts of ridiculous fucking bullshit. And guys, it really is ridiculous to assume that dominant women are fundamentally different from vanilla women. We’re just people.

Day to day life with a dominant girlfriend is very much like having a vanilla girlfriend – Ms Dominant will annoy you sometimes, she will ask for things you don’t want to do, you will sometimes just not fucking feel like doing what you’re told. There is no 24/7 overt latex and spankings scene going on.

Once more with feeling: you will not be playing 24/7. Finding a dominant girlfriend is not your ticket to endless kinky funtimes. She’s just a person, and if she’s a person worth knowing she has stuff going on in her life besides kink. If you’re a person worth knowing, you have stuff going on in your life besides kink too.

That whole “having a life” thing means having a dominant girlfriend is more about finding times in your schedules when you’re both free and doing perfectly “normal” stuff together like seeing movies and going out for dinner than it is about getting your collective kink on. It would be fun if everything was perversion and sex all day every day, but that’s just not how life works. It makes me sad that I even need to mention that, but to be fair, it is hard to find information about what dominant women are actually like that’s not produced by someone who makes a profit by lying to you. Elise Sutton, I’m looking at you. In the absence of accurate information, it’s easy to get all kinds of ridiculous ideas about how once you have a dom your life will be nothing but kink and scenes and sexiness forever and ever.

Which I why I have to burst your bubble about that one. Sometimes scenes won’t work out the way you’d hoped. Sometimes you’ll really really like a woman and she’ll even like you back and she still won’t be into all the same kinks you are. Sometimes she’ll be totally willing to try and into the same thing you are and it will still fall flat for no particular reason. Sometimes she’ll have a bad day. Sometimes you will. Sometimes the pipes burst and you have to work late and the car breaks down and no one feels like doing anything fun.

Again, it’s really not that different from having a vanilla relationship. Remember how when you were young and lonely and worried no-one would ever love you and you were convinced that if you could just find a girlfriend everything in your life would magically be great? Remember how you finally did get together with someone and you still had problems? And how sometimes that magical wonderful woman who was supposed to fix everything was actually kind of a jerk sometimes?

Why would you expect things to be different with a dominant woman? Seriously, why don’t we get to be people?

Shit will happen and you’re going to need to deal with it like a grownup. No amount of kinky fun is going to erase the fact that sometimes you’ll have a horrible day at work.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom here, I just want people to have realistic expectations. If you go into a d/s relationship expecting that everything will be perfect from now on, you’re going to be really fucking disappointed. On the other hand, if you go into a d/s relationship with the understanding that nobody is perfect and that bad things happen to everyone sometimes, you can have a wonderful relationship that brings both of you joy. Wouldn’t you rather have a chance at happiness than guarantee you’ll be miserable?

A while ago I saw a discussion on Fetlife about whether introversion and domination can go together, which I thought was interesting because it would never have occurred to me to question whether introverts can be both dominant at all and good at it. It’s obvious to me that introverts can be great doms, but apparently it’s not to everyone, so let’s talk about it.

First of all, people are often totally fucking wrong about what introversion actually is. Introversion is not shyness! I’m both shy and introverted myself, they’re different things. Shyness is being afraid to talk to people you don’t know well. Introversion is being worn out by spending too much time around people. Introversion can sometimes look like shyness if the introvert in question decides to spend their limited social energy on people they already know and like instead of gambling it meeting new people they might not like at all, but saving your energy for people who are important to you is not the same thing as being scared of talking with strangers.

Introversion is also not just disliking people. Being picky about who I spend my limited social energy on is not the same as disliking people in general. To be fair, introverts can burn out on people to the point where we temporarily hate everyone if we’re pressured to spend more time with people than is healthy for us, but again, that’s not the same thing as generally disliking people. It’s more like hating a song because the radio plays it fifty times a day. There’s nothing wrong with the song itself, we just can’t fucking stand hearing it over and over and over.

So given that those definitions have nothing to do with either liking being in charge or being good at it, why would anyone even think to question whether introverts can be good doms? My best guess is that it’s another profoundly irritating side effect of the stupid fucking stereotype that “real” doms are loud shouty assholes who browbeat everyone around them into doing what they want to do.

Not only do you not need to be loud and obnoxious to be a good dom, but introverts can be exceptional doms.

One of the most important parts of being a good dom is listening to your submissive and really understanding who they are, what they want, what they need, what they’re afraid of, what’s important to them. If you want to have a particular affect on your submissive, especially if you’re trying to modify their behaviour, you need to understand them. You know who is great at listening and paying attention and thinking about what they’ve learned? Introverts!

Another important part of being a good dom is knowing what you yourself want, what you need, what you’re afraid of, what’s important to you. If you don’t know what you really want, it’s kind of tough to tell other people what you want and to find people who are compatible with you. You know who is great at quietly thinking about stuff and is generally as good at observing themselves as they are at observing other people? Introverts!

On the subject of quietly thinking about stuff, that also lends itself to coming up with interesting things to do with and/or to people 🙂 It’s also good for figuring out why things went wrong and how to fix or avoid it next time.

Also, and this really should be obvious, introverted submissives exist! Some people are (bafflingly) happy with extroverted partners, but other people need partners who understand that a certain amount of peace and quiet is an absolute requirement, not a nice-to-have. If I’m totally uninterested in having a partner who doesn’t understand why I need to hide in my house for a weekend after going to multiple events during the week, doesn’t it make sense that some submissive people would feel the same way?

It is true that an especially introverted dom could be a bad match for a submissive who needs a lot of attention and social interaction, but it’s just as likely that an especially extroverted dom could be a bad match for a submissive who likes being given a task and left alone to actually do it without constant checkins.

The idea that an introverted dom couldn’t give any submissive enough attention is incredibly insulting to submissive people. Being submissive does not mean you’re a pathetic shell of a human being who can’t function without continuous hand-holding from your dom and it’s insulting as fuck to imply that it does. Some submissives would definitely be unhappy with a dom like me who does not want to hear from anyone except my husband every damn day, but others would (I’m assuming) love having a dom who gives them a little space.

Fellow introverts, you can definitely be great doms. Anyone who says you can’t needs to pretend to be an introvert for a minute and try thinking about stuff 🙂