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.
OMG THIS.
Actual comment seen today on Fetlife:
M/f = “What, you mean I can get blowjobs for free?”
F/m = “What, you mean I can get someone to do my chores for free?”
I headdesked. It’s like those “porn for women” calendars that show men doing housework, as if women don’t actually genuinely want sex. It’s not that different from the “men want sex, women want babies and money” thing, which is also stupid. It’s a failure of imagination when people don’t consider that other people’s realities may be different from theirs. News flash for the bros: women damn well want sex, but a lot of the things that get in their way when it comes to getting sex are not things that you have to deal with. (From being exhausted by working a second shift in the home, to the likelihood of not getting off during casual sex, to the threat of rape if you go home with a stranger.)
tl;dr To get back to the topic, 100% agreement that many male doms expect domestic service. Many guys do. They just don’t call it that. And I really want a non-101-level discussion of the ways that women’s power in F/m and men’s power in…life in general…intersect and conflict, someday. Because I think a lot of people (or at least guys?) forget that even if your dom is a woman, we all live in the same old world everybody else does, with all its sexism. I see a lot more of people talking past one another on subjects like that than actual discussion, though. Alas.
Oh my fuck I hate those so much. Obligatory xkcd comic, because as a nerd I am incapable of not linking the “in my porn, people fuck” comic when it’s this relevant.
Yep. Every time I see a submissive guy ask how to make his wife dominate him, I die a little inside. How can you claim you want to worship a woman when you see your wife as a malfunctioning sex toy? Entitlement, it’s a hell of a drug.
And even with guys who are better than that, there’s so much stuff they just don’t see because they have the enormous luxury of not having to notice. Women really do get judged if their houses aren’t clean enough while their husbands get off scot-free. We really are seen as bitches or man-eaters for exactly the same behaviour that would be called leadership or taking charge in men. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that women often have a really hard time giving orders, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with getting shamed for being “bossy” over and over and over.
There’s definitely an interesting discussion to be had there, but damned if I know where I’d be willing/able to have it. Somebody would have to moderate it with an iron fist to keep it on track and I don’t have it in me to wade through about a thousand comments shitting on the idea that women could possibly be worth talking about. Not that I’m bitter 😉
Almost forgot: I have been pleasantly surprised by the response to this post, though. I was expecting a brigade of angry pissbabies crying about what a meanypants mcpoopyhead I am for expecting grown men to fucking act like it.
OMG that xkcd comic–I’d forgotten about that. That’s up there with the “wrong on the Internet” one for useful instant explanations of a phenomenon. 😀
Every time I see a submissive guy ask how to make his wife dominate him, I die a little inside.
Yeah, I mean, I get wanting to know how to broach the subject, or if it’s even possible to encourage someone to do your kink with you, but so much of it comes across like “How do I make her into the kind of woman I want?” and I go “Stop right there–!”
And I mean, I’m someone who definitely believes that there are a lot of dominant women out there who don’t identify with the term or who would never imagine themselves as a “dominatrix”, “mistress”, “goddess”, both because women are pushed to be deferential and because the pop culture view of a dominant woman is the porn-bitch thing. Oh, and the “If you like sex you’re a [slur, slur]” thing. I actually feel like the women who would love bossing men around in bed (or in their relationships) but who have been put off it because they don’t know it’s possible or they don’t have a word for what they want or they’ve only seen horrid caricatures…probably account for a BIG fraction of that supposed male-female F/m imbalance. Oh, but no, there are 100 sub men for every dominant women, which means you, yes you, domme I am speaking to, should give ME, random sub you’ve just met, the time of day because I deserve it! Aaaah it gets so tiring. 🙁
Totally hear you on not wanting to try modding that discussion! It could go sideways pretty quick, and honestly even as a commenter I’d only want to have it in a group that included a decent proportion of people who had already thought about some of this stuff from a feminist point of view. That way I wouldn’t be the lone voice shouting about the misconceptions and sexism while everyone else went, “But boys don’t get laid as easily, HDU say dommes might not get everything they want all the time!” or whatever.
Glad you’re getting a good reaction on this post. I feel like I’m 100% with you on the OP so I’m off here rambling about assorted related topics because I have nothing to add but “Amen!” to the original topic. 😛
Yesssss! I bet there are tons of women out there who could enjoy the hell out of topping or dominating if only they knew that being dominant doesn’t mean they’re a jerk/doomed to die alone and that they can be dominant and still be themselves. It makes me sad that so many people are missing out on a) acceptance and b) fun things they could be doing because the whole kink thing is so often presented in a way that might as well be calculated to make a nice vanilla woman run screaming.
Yeah, that’s totally one of those vanilla social dynamics vs femdom/malesub social dynamics things that irritates the hell out of me. I’m not sure guys realize they’re dragging in shitty societal patterns when they assume any given dom obviously MUST care about his feelings because she’s a woman. I mean, that’s super fucking irritating in a totally vanilla context, but in a femdom context it just makes me go “What? Do you seriously not see any contradiction between saying you want to serve a woman and expecting a woman (and a stranger at that) to drop everything and cater to your feelings?”
Moderation note: #notallmen is the least interesting thing you could possibly say in any situation. Profoundly boring and off topic comments will be deleted.
Seriously. This. Also, reading the links to the advice blogs made me really angry. I feel for the letter writers and commenters. And I’m incredibly fucking glad that I have partners who have agreed to do chores and cooking and other house care stuff without considering it some heroic sacrifice.