Submissive men, this is your periodic reminder that the bar to impress a dominant woman has been set so low that you should be worried about tripping over it, not failing to reach it. Don’t believe me? Here’s an except from an email I sent last year:
When I asked if you could tell me anything about yourself as a person, I wanted some information about who you are outside of your kinks (which you did not need to list for me again. I’m not stupid, I can scroll down to your first message and see the list there).
The truly sad thing is that the message I was replying to was far from the worst I’ve seen – the content may have been terrible, but at least it was all spelled correctly. However, all the attention to spelling and grammar in the world won’t help if you refuse to treat me like a human fucking being.
Guys, the bar is so low that all you have to do to impress a dom is to treat her like she’s a person. Seriously, that’s it. You don’t have to be rich, powerful, or a combination motorcycle race champion/underwear model. All you have to do is start from the bizarre and outlandish assumption that we’re people with interests of our own, not a malfunctioning fetish vending machines. I can’t even begin to tell you how infuriating it is to be so badly disrespected so very often by people who claim to worship women like me that the most basic acknowledgement of my humanity is all it takes to get my attention, but the smart men out there should be using my frustration to their advantage. Someone might as well get something out of this mess.
Oh, and for bonus points: read your potential dom’s writing! Using myself as an example, I have an entire goddamn blog that tells you more than any profile ever could about what I care about, how I think, and who I am as a person (sure, the blog mostly shows my ragey side, but there’s still a lot of information here). If you’ve found someone on fetlife, for fucks sake read their profile and look at their posting history (scroll down a little, it’s below their websites and above their fetishes). Making a comment about something your potential dom said recently is not only a great way to start a conversation, but it shows that you were willing to make the grueling effort of clicking your mouse a couple of times and doing a little reading.
Grumpy as I very often am, I really do want to be impressed by submissive men. I know many of you have a good handle on this already, but for the guys just catching up: I want to read your messages and wonder whether I’m awesome enough for you. I want your messages to make me sad that I don’t have room in my life for another awesome submissive man and determined to find someone to set you up with. I want your writing to impress me so much that I ask if I can use it as a guest post on my blog. I want you guys to be as amazing as I know you can be. Can’t you meet me half way?
An approximation of one of my favorite (online) exchanges:
RandomSub: I really want to know more about you.
Me: Did you check out my website?
RandomSub: No. I saw you have one, but that’s so much reading… and I don’t want to get to know your website, I want to get to know you.
Me: *facepalm*
I don’t even… Where on earth did he think those too many words came from?
Oh my gosh. Facepalm indeed. *sigh*
on the average people arent going to want to read pages and pages of text to initially get to know someone. if more interest is generated they may at some later time however.
this is the point of having a profile with Some information.. succinct to show personality and interests to then start a dialog and get to know the other. more in-depth research can come later.
the same is also true … but more so with a lot more complications… if youre going back into that persons past postings on threads to see what they wrote. the potential There for misunderstandings is enormous.
defiantly ranty, and somewhat off base, imo.
Ooh, terrible writing and awful reading comprehension – sexy! Now, now ladies, don’t all message him at once.
One of the problems is the way that men are socialised, and the various rites of passage that mark their progress from boyhood to manhood. They learn various things about women and the female gender role that militate against them seeing women as human beings.
Among many patriarchal tropes that men acquire is the notion that women are irrational, fickle, incomprehensible creatures who are controlled in unpredictable ways by their hormones and their organs. It’s no accident that the words ‘hysteria’ and ‘hysteric’ have their etymological origin in the Greek word for ‘womb’. In the words of the song ‘La donna e mobile’.
If that is the case, women might just as well be from another planet, forever mysterious and not worth the smallest effort of empathy or understanding. Instead we are fed arrant nonsense like ‘Men are from Mars, Women from Venus’ – a mish-mash of bad science and cod psychology that, significantly, became a best-seller.
In fact if little green men came from a distant galaxy and visited earth, most men would feel they had a better understanding of them than they do of terrestrial women, because they’d be guys after all.
This isn’t so much as a domme/sub issue, it’s a man/woman issue. Men, particularly, are trapped on the Procrustean bed of an absurd gender role called ‘masculinity’ that is deemed to be fixed, biologically determined, and a law of nature in perpetuity. This role blinds men to the existential realities of shared humanity and makes them ignorant of the many ways in which we could and should empathise with women, accepting and welcoming the diversity and complexity of relationships that subvert the patriarchal narrative.
In short, we’re highly conflicted emotional amputees, and most of us don’t even know it.
So much this!
Really well said.
I haven’t been here in a while (shame on me), and I come back to a torrent of awesome. My wife and several of our friends go through the same thing. I think the biggest problem is that there are a lot more people out there with fetishes and kinks than there are who are submissive. The hordes of guys who send these idiotic messages (which shouldn’t be acceptable to any woman on any dating site of any kind) are just like every other douche out there, except that they watch Femdom instead of regular porn.
This is of course a generalization, but I’m beginning to wonder whether men can actually hear women. Or maybe it’s how women phrase wants/expectations that has them confused? Requests, suggestions, and preferences probably seem unimportant since they sound optional, as do phrases that start with “I would like” and “I expect.”
In my admittedly limited experience with family and friends, anytime I’ve been bluntly straightforward, I’ve been insensitive. (Ex. “You said you were going to pay me the money you owe me today, so where is it?”) But an alternative is to say, “Are you ready to pay back the money you owe me?” And that simply doesn’t carry the same oomph. Version A starts a fight and may our may not yield results. Version B means I get paid when he feels like it. But maybe the upshot is men become used to not taking women seriously until it’s too late.
So sorry to reply long after the fact, but just found the blog and am working my way through. I couldn’t agree more.
If one is truly interested in purchasing a car, one will do due diligence in researching the car, consumer reports, values, experiences, complaints, etc. If one is seeking a job, one ought to show up to the job armed with as much information about the company as possible, from stock trends and history to principle officers to the background of the company, culture, wages, job descriptions, expectations, etc. It’s not a high standard at all; it’s really the minimum one should expect from a prospect. The same is true of any endeavor, and if one is going to contact a person who has provided so much information freely on the web, then the least one might do is read the material to gain an understanding. Failure to do so is proof that one is neither motivated, nor particularly interested.
If one is truly interested in a woman, one will learn all he can about her; her needs likes, dislikes, wishes, hopes, dreams, demands, desires, and moreover, make an effort to learn who she is. A friend who was obsessed with John Denver once approached him for an autograph. John Denver was very approachable, and a genuinely nice guy, but he observed that anyone who listed to the music already knew the man and had far more of him than a mere signature. I submit that a man who is interested in a woman who has a blog, will avail himself of every detail on the blog in an effort to know here, before he asks for her time or attention. One who professes a desire to serve her, but thinks only of himself, has no real desire to serve her.