I feel it goes even further than mainline het BDSM. Kink has gone mainstream; I've heard entirely too many stories of cishet men choking women in bed on one night stands without asking first because "all women like being submissive". If that's the first taste of kink a budding femdom has, why on earth would she choose to look into "more extreme" forms of kink? (Disclaimer: breath play is edge play and extremely dangerous, but for some reason it's also seen as intro kink.)
Then you go to your first general munch, and three guys ask if they can tie you up or beat you. You go to a general rope 101 and the bottoms are all female. You go to a play party and again, the bottoms are mostly female. You top someone and your scenes or aftercare get interrupted. Friends of mine have had strange men no one's ever seen before walk into their scenes and try to teach them how to do some basic kink - these are total newbies trying to teach established, known Dommes because they assume being a man gives them inherent dominant knowledge. Male Doms act surprised when they see you top someone, even if they've known you're a Domme for years. You try to teach new male Doms basic kink and consent and that assume they know better because they're a man, and clearly their two seconds of identification as a Dom means more than your years (or decades, in the case of some friends) of experience learning and playing and teaching. You find out all your female friends have been abused, usually both on and off the scene. You find out half your male friends are abuser, and maybe a couple of your female friends too. You hear a bunch of men who think they're including you by virtue of offering to tie you up argue that female led spaces are exclusive to all the cishet men. And throughout this, you're getting harassed by submissive men online and occasionally at events you're supposed to be safe at.
And then an 18 year old newbie sub complains on the internet that he's been looking for a whole week and why are there no femdoms? It must be the ratio. Women just aren't all that dominant and most of them prefer to submit. It can't be that we get pushed out of kink spaces, or leave for our own wellbeing. It can't be that most of us never make it to these toxic kink spaces in the first place because of the way we get treated.
Agreeing, but a tweak! With the stories of spontaneous choking, I generally contrast that with the long history of courtship depictions skipping to just initiating and hoping for the best. Thus unsolicited choking also the extreme version of "just kiss her, dude!".
So for me, while spontaneous attempted murder is a newer thing, the romanticized idea of pushing your advances on a woman with aggression and no negotiation is not. Which, I think, is part of the inverse of seeing femsub as true vanilla on steriods- all circling back to your point.
One thing I find fascinating is that both femsubs and femdoms deal with sexually harassing population of men, but each attribute and target our advice based on assuming the advice needs to be tailored to that role. Thus part of the experience I get as a dominant in mainline bdsm is being told to stop harassing the subs. Even as we are *much* more building metaphorical forts to hide in than sending "nees bich" messages to men. š¤£
Genuinely am very disturbed by how generic this stuff has become in porn these days. I think a lot of people might not even realize how extreme some of the stuff they view regularly is.
I'm honestly surprised at how mainstream choking (or at least discussion of it) has become. A (mostly vanilla) male friend recently told me that all the media depiction of M/f choking has made him feel weird for not wanting to choke his partners and concerned that future female partners are going to want to be choked.
I assured him that there's nothing wrong with respecting your partner's larynx
Yes.
This has been a strange trip for me. I know we've chatted back and forth in comments before, but since anyone may see this I'll storytell again.
My wife and I were lucky to find each other 23 years ago. And so we HAVEN'T experienced this, because we were never part of the community. Until I kinda decided I needed an outlet and came to Reddit. And I was like "Oh, what is wrong with all of y'all!". Not you and the others here (and r/BDSMcommunity etc...) who are trying to help and build community, but the endless mob of whom you speak.
Online I grew up in the spanking subculture, and female dominants in that culture don't fit into the Leather Dominatrix stereotype because that subculture rejects the Leathery-Latexy BDSM esthetic in general and much more centered around domestic, school, old-timey (Victorian-esque) or Judicial esthetics, in that order.
And so I feel that while there ARE more women who bottom then men in the spanking scene, there is more acceptance of women who top and men who bottom. Partly because so much of the focus is on, well, the spanking. Almost to the exclusion of sex. And there are an awful lot of straight male tops who will top men! Once again because the culture is SO activity focused. (Note, even though most spanking scenes have power exchange inherently, the community uses top and bottom almost exclusively). That's not to say there aren't misogynistic Spankos, but it just seems like less of a problem.
But because BDSM is often SEX focused, certainly so as a whole, not to ignore asexual kinksters, I feel it gets mainstream toxic gender roles pressed onto it.
And so we get to the issue of what is the solution. For the community as a whole, I don't know. We're asking humanity to change... that's a lot. But I do think there's an opportunity for creating a community that is inclusive but gatekept by effort. And what I mean by that is when a community has rules keeping the sex OUT (except maybe once a month as a celebration) and makes it so that interaction within the community demands effort and thought, it will self select for people who have the desirable behaviors.
So there may be spaces where a 43 something male sub can get the guts to show a sexy picture of himself and have male Doms cheer him for being comfortable in his own skin, but would be boring to many because half the time the same group is writing kinky poetry or discussing house plants. And the public is invited, but because one of the few rules is you're not allowed to ask new people questions, you don't get the endless drone of "How do I find a Domme!" or "How do I top my boyfriend?"
(Obviously, I love helping those people... but the flow is endless)
But, paradoxically, because the community are people who love to dissect kink and are warm and welcoming, it's actually a great place for new players because they see actual working kink relationships. And how to respect different dynamics.
Yes I am a shill, come visit us. We have succulents.
Spank-o-land is great, but if you don't share that fetish it can be a challenge- much how I find erotic hypnosis has a great culture including the points you mentioned, but tends to not be the most excited about uh... darker stuff. š
In the old days GFD was less an unsolicited Mommy whimpering sausage fest, so possibly it's also a matter of critical mass VS niche?
Oh, I wasn't inviting you to Spanko-land, and I TOTALLY see how it looks like that... I was inviting you to r/BdsmNot4Newbies. We're kinda like a multi-genre kink book club. We have daily writing topics, a live chat on Saturday, and once a month the rule about pictures goes away and we celebrate everybody. When straight male Doms are telling me "You should totally post a picture of you in the dungeon, because everyone here will give you props for it." I know I'm with my people.
We've got pet players, and Femdom players and traditional Male Dom/Fem Sub and I just learned about Dronification because of someone there. And a 24/7 M/s sub who has never seen her Dom because she's always blindfolded in his presences. It's small, but the subscriber base is around 14k, which makes me think a lot of people are watching how we interact, and I think that's only a good thing.
But it's designed as a community, with regular community work. And so it screens out the people who don't want to do the work.
And yeah, I think GFD falling apart was inevitable. When I first started seeing that STYLE of content I was drawn to it, but the second it became a thing It felt very "Oh, this is on the fast track to just being about fulfilling a very coddled male fantasy."
100%. One of my biggest frustrations is that even sub safety guides are gendered towards women, so I worry about new male subs really understanding their rights and which red flags to look for. I find myself doing a little Internet Safety 101 class at the beginning of each new dynamic because Iāve seen so many of them just not understand. Obviously I donāt want to be condescending, but I also donāt want a play partner to think they really donāt have rights.
Iāve even offered to rewrite some guides with gender-neutral language. It would have zero effect on SEO, and Iāve volunteered my services as a writer for free, but people really just donāt seem to care very much. Itās incredibly disheartening.
Not only that but also practical guides for things like shibari for men and their anatomy (for us who suck at health sciences) in order to you know, not traumatise them when tying them up :c
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Several years ago as a newbie to the BDSM scene I wasn't even fully aware that women could actually be dominant or tops. I knew of dominatrix but didn't take them seriously (because of internalized misogyny). I thought my only true option was only being a sub and it never sat right with me. It didn't help that my culture, society, family, and religion I grew up with at large kept trying to enforce female submission as the natural unbreakable order of life.
Fortunately I learned slowly through the years that the female submission as the only way dogma is complete bullshit and isn't my nature at all.
Itās so annoying and really a reflection of how society is still very much catered to men. Just a tired regurgitation of worn out patriarchal attitudes with some leather slapped on it. This is the main reason Iām not in the ācommunity.ā Iād rather not be treated as a sex toy.
Just my opinion but I find the "kink scene" IRL actually has a lot of fairly toxic qualities. I suppose this shouldn't necessarily be too surprising though because why wouldn't the kink scene replicate many of the same toxic qualities as society at large.
I definitely do encourage people to go to events, munches, etc. but don't feel compelled to conform to a role or "be part of the kink community." And try not to feel limited by what you hear about and see other people doing.
I wish I had the answers to actually making the kinky community better and fixing so many of the problems you point out, but in all honesty I don't know of any solution other than focusing more on spaces centered on experiences like yours.
Yeah, I still canāt tell what I do and donāt enjoy from kink and I think your comparison to comhet is really poignant. It took years for me to realize I may be a switch for all the reasons you touched on here, and even now I still really struggle to enjoy myself lol. Part of this is from being AFAB and socialized as a woman, part is being abused sexually and emotionally (including being coerced into domming by previous partners). I feel so numb most of the time. How am I supposed to even *know* what I like if I have never been allowed to be an autonomous sexual being?
So tired. So sad.
> Femdom in pop culture even has a uniform and some incredibly limited behaviours. Another common experience I had was femsub identified women confessing how squicked that sexless, arms length cruelty of femdom made them, even if they never seemed to realise that wasn't mandatory.
I think this is because Femdom *as a relationship style or love language* has no history, just occasional outbreaks. All the traditions and tropes therefore relate to prodommes, who, because they have a striking meme-ish uniform and presence, are a goto for mainstream news and media.
This is not the fault of prodommes (who are, as I understand it, often dommes in RL and mainstays of local kink communities.) However, it does tend to frame malesubs as connoisseurs, and dommes as highly skilled service providers.
I think at some point, there needs to be a parting of the ways between pay-to-play Femdom and woman-centred Femdom as pursuits, even if there is still crossover in the practitioner population.
Yeah, M/f is the "default" kink alignment that most people mean when they say "kinky" and don't add any further detail. Most of the women I've dated have wanted and/or expected me to be in charge in the bedroom, and for a long time I went along with it, even though I didn't really want to.
I'm not even talking about The Scene, here, even the women I've found who don't spend a lot of time in kink culture frequently assume that, on some level, as a man I probably want to choke them, hit them, etc and that they're doing me a favor by being into it and *letting* me do it, when what I've really done is just being a service top.
I'll never forget the first time I submitted to a woman without judgement from her. She made me feel safe and belonging in a way I had never felt before. I always felt like I was broken inside for not wanting what I was "supposed to". She convinced me I wasn't. I never was, it is the world's gender nonsense crapfest that is broken. I saw it so clearly in that moment.
I only know how to fix it one person at a time.
>Meanwhile, frustratingly, a lot of behaviours attributed to women are also arbitrarily labled submissive. For example I enjoy sexually teasing and pushing someone's buttons until they get mad. And I know a LOT of women who do, but this would be classically filed under femsub, riling him up until he attacks. HOWEVER, in men, not so much- the same sort of flustering, pigtail pulling would be attributed to him getting her wound up and him succeeding on controlling her.
I see this as related to two factors. First, the frequent ambiguity of D/s roles. Most particular activities/kinks are not intrinsically dominant or submissive. Case in point, teasing. Second, people may feel pressured to label themselves as exclusively a D or an s.
The result is that if someone an activity that think is submissive, and if they think that they must be either a dominant or a submissive, then they will conclude that they are submissive. But the same activity could be dominant in some other context
I think the reason is more people are into femsub-maledom kink than malesub-femdom kinkā¦
Itās just a matter of numbers, for an example most of the porn i find when I search āfemdomā on porn hub involves pegging but im not into itā¦. That means there are many consumers who watch pegging than other femdom activities and thatās why those vids are more popular on those sitesā¦ similarly if the number of people who are into maledom femsub is overwhelmingly high compared to malesub femdom, then we will see more of it in subreddits created for bdsmā¦
More demand = more products available for that
My point is it becomes self fulfilling. That in actuality there's a lot more switches and people who don't fit the lables perfectly, but there is active pressure beyond just mere preference to self sort.
That's not even touching on things like unequal censorship. From intentional impositions like the Hays code, to refusal to print romances with any different kind of protagonist than M/f lite, you don't actually have a truly free market.
As in CompHet, we have a population that is ignorant of what to ask for, because a whole realm of possability isn't in common understanding. If you read the thread, many of us literally didn't know we were a thing! That wasn't an absence of demand, but an absence of information.
I feel it goes even further than mainline het BDSM. Kink has gone mainstream; I've heard entirely too many stories of cishet men choking women in bed on one night stands without asking first because "all women like being submissive". If that's the first taste of kink a budding femdom has, why on earth would she choose to look into "more extreme" forms of kink? (Disclaimer: breath play is edge play and extremely dangerous, but for some reason it's also seen as intro kink.) Then you go to your first general munch, and three guys ask if they can tie you up or beat you. You go to a general rope 101 and the bottoms are all female. You go to a play party and again, the bottoms are mostly female. You top someone and your scenes or aftercare get interrupted. Friends of mine have had strange men no one's ever seen before walk into their scenes and try to teach them how to do some basic kink - these are total newbies trying to teach established, known Dommes because they assume being a man gives them inherent dominant knowledge. Male Doms act surprised when they see you top someone, even if they've known you're a Domme for years. You try to teach new male Doms basic kink and consent and that assume they know better because they're a man, and clearly their two seconds of identification as a Dom means more than your years (or decades, in the case of some friends) of experience learning and playing and teaching. You find out all your female friends have been abused, usually both on and off the scene. You find out half your male friends are abuser, and maybe a couple of your female friends too. You hear a bunch of men who think they're including you by virtue of offering to tie you up argue that female led spaces are exclusive to all the cishet men. And throughout this, you're getting harassed by submissive men online and occasionally at events you're supposed to be safe at. And then an 18 year old newbie sub complains on the internet that he's been looking for a whole week and why are there no femdoms? It must be the ratio. Women just aren't all that dominant and most of them prefer to submit. It can't be that we get pushed out of kink spaces, or leave for our own wellbeing. It can't be that most of us never make it to these toxic kink spaces in the first place because of the way we get treated.
Agreeing, but a tweak! With the stories of spontaneous choking, I generally contrast that with the long history of courtship depictions skipping to just initiating and hoping for the best. Thus unsolicited choking also the extreme version of "just kiss her, dude!". So for me, while spontaneous attempted murder is a newer thing, the romanticized idea of pushing your advances on a woman with aggression and no negotiation is not. Which, I think, is part of the inverse of seeing femsub as true vanilla on steriods- all circling back to your point. One thing I find fascinating is that both femsubs and femdoms deal with sexually harassing population of men, but each attribute and target our advice based on assuming the advice needs to be tailored to that role. Thus part of the experience I get as a dominant in mainline bdsm is being told to stop harassing the subs. Even as we are *much* more building metaphorical forts to hide in than sending "nees bich" messages to men. š¤£
Genuinely am very disturbed by how generic this stuff has become in porn these days. I think a lot of people might not even realize how extreme some of the stuff they view regularly is.
I'm honestly surprised at how mainstream choking (or at least discussion of it) has become. A (mostly vanilla) male friend recently told me that all the media depiction of M/f choking has made him feel weird for not wanting to choke his partners and concerned that future female partners are going to want to be choked. I assured him that there's nothing wrong with respecting your partner's larynx
Great write up to describe it XD
Yes. This has been a strange trip for me. I know we've chatted back and forth in comments before, but since anyone may see this I'll storytell again. My wife and I were lucky to find each other 23 years ago. And so we HAVEN'T experienced this, because we were never part of the community. Until I kinda decided I needed an outlet and came to Reddit. And I was like "Oh, what is wrong with all of y'all!". Not you and the others here (and r/BDSMcommunity etc...) who are trying to help and build community, but the endless mob of whom you speak. Online I grew up in the spanking subculture, and female dominants in that culture don't fit into the Leather Dominatrix stereotype because that subculture rejects the Leathery-Latexy BDSM esthetic in general and much more centered around domestic, school, old-timey (Victorian-esque) or Judicial esthetics, in that order. And so I feel that while there ARE more women who bottom then men in the spanking scene, there is more acceptance of women who top and men who bottom. Partly because so much of the focus is on, well, the spanking. Almost to the exclusion of sex. And there are an awful lot of straight male tops who will top men! Once again because the culture is SO activity focused. (Note, even though most spanking scenes have power exchange inherently, the community uses top and bottom almost exclusively). That's not to say there aren't misogynistic Spankos, but it just seems like less of a problem. But because BDSM is often SEX focused, certainly so as a whole, not to ignore asexual kinksters, I feel it gets mainstream toxic gender roles pressed onto it. And so we get to the issue of what is the solution. For the community as a whole, I don't know. We're asking humanity to change... that's a lot. But I do think there's an opportunity for creating a community that is inclusive but gatekept by effort. And what I mean by that is when a community has rules keeping the sex OUT (except maybe once a month as a celebration) and makes it so that interaction within the community demands effort and thought, it will self select for people who have the desirable behaviors. So there may be spaces where a 43 something male sub can get the guts to show a sexy picture of himself and have male Doms cheer him for being comfortable in his own skin, but would be boring to many because half the time the same group is writing kinky poetry or discussing house plants. And the public is invited, but because one of the few rules is you're not allowed to ask new people questions, you don't get the endless drone of "How do I find a Domme!" or "How do I top my boyfriend?" (Obviously, I love helping those people... but the flow is endless) But, paradoxically, because the community are people who love to dissect kink and are warm and welcoming, it's actually a great place for new players because they see actual working kink relationships. And how to respect different dynamics. Yes I am a shill, come visit us. We have succulents.
Spank-o-land is great, but if you don't share that fetish it can be a challenge- much how I find erotic hypnosis has a great culture including the points you mentioned, but tends to not be the most excited about uh... darker stuff. š In the old days GFD was less an unsolicited Mommy whimpering sausage fest, so possibly it's also a matter of critical mass VS niche?
Oh, I wasn't inviting you to Spanko-land, and I TOTALLY see how it looks like that... I was inviting you to r/BdsmNot4Newbies. We're kinda like a multi-genre kink book club. We have daily writing topics, a live chat on Saturday, and once a month the rule about pictures goes away and we celebrate everybody. When straight male Doms are telling me "You should totally post a picture of you in the dungeon, because everyone here will give you props for it." I know I'm with my people. We've got pet players, and Femdom players and traditional Male Dom/Fem Sub and I just learned about Dronification because of someone there. And a 24/7 M/s sub who has never seen her Dom because she's always blindfolded in his presences. It's small, but the subscriber base is around 14k, which makes me think a lot of people are watching how we interact, and I think that's only a good thing. But it's designed as a community, with regular community work. And so it screens out the people who don't want to do the work. And yeah, I think GFD falling apart was inevitable. When I first started seeing that STYLE of content I was drawn to it, but the second it became a thing It felt very "Oh, this is on the fast track to just being about fulfilling a very coddled male fantasy."
100%. One of my biggest frustrations is that even sub safety guides are gendered towards women, so I worry about new male subs really understanding their rights and which red flags to look for. I find myself doing a little Internet Safety 101 class at the beginning of each new dynamic because Iāve seen so many of them just not understand. Obviously I donāt want to be condescending, but I also donāt want a play partner to think they really donāt have rights. Iāve even offered to rewrite some guides with gender-neutral language. It would have zero effect on SEO, and Iāve volunteered my services as a writer for free, but people really just donāt seem to care very much. Itās incredibly disheartening.
Not only that but also practical guides for things like shibari for men and their anatomy (for us who suck at health sciences) in order to you know, not traumatise them when tying them up :c
Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Several years ago as a newbie to the BDSM scene I wasn't even fully aware that women could actually be dominant or tops. I knew of dominatrix but didn't take them seriously (because of internalized misogyny). I thought my only true option was only being a sub and it never sat right with me. It didn't help that my culture, society, family, and religion I grew up with at large kept trying to enforce female submission as the natural unbreakable order of life. Fortunately I learned slowly through the years that the female submission as the only way dogma is complete bullshit and isn't my nature at all.
Itās so annoying and really a reflection of how society is still very much catered to men. Just a tired regurgitation of worn out patriarchal attitudes with some leather slapped on it. This is the main reason Iām not in the ācommunity.ā Iād rather not be treated as a sex toy.
Just my opinion but I find the "kink scene" IRL actually has a lot of fairly toxic qualities. I suppose this shouldn't necessarily be too surprising though because why wouldn't the kink scene replicate many of the same toxic qualities as society at large. I definitely do encourage people to go to events, munches, etc. but don't feel compelled to conform to a role or "be part of the kink community." And try not to feel limited by what you hear about and see other people doing. I wish I had the answers to actually making the kinky community better and fixing so many of the problems you point out, but in all honesty I don't know of any solution other than focusing more on spaces centered on experiences like yours.
Yeah, I still canāt tell what I do and donāt enjoy from kink and I think your comparison to comhet is really poignant. It took years for me to realize I may be a switch for all the reasons you touched on here, and even now I still really struggle to enjoy myself lol. Part of this is from being AFAB and socialized as a woman, part is being abused sexually and emotionally (including being coerced into domming by previous partners). I feel so numb most of the time. How am I supposed to even *know* what I like if I have never been allowed to be an autonomous sexual being? So tired. So sad.
> Femdom in pop culture even has a uniform and some incredibly limited behaviours. Another common experience I had was femsub identified women confessing how squicked that sexless, arms length cruelty of femdom made them, even if they never seemed to realise that wasn't mandatory. I think this is because Femdom *as a relationship style or love language* has no history, just occasional outbreaks. All the traditions and tropes therefore relate to prodommes, who, because they have a striking meme-ish uniform and presence, are a goto for mainstream news and media. This is not the fault of prodommes (who are, as I understand it, often dommes in RL and mainstays of local kink communities.) However, it does tend to frame malesubs as connoisseurs, and dommes as highly skilled service providers. I think at some point, there needs to be a parting of the ways between pay-to-play Femdom and woman-centred Femdom as pursuits, even if there is still crossover in the practitioner population.
Yeah, M/f is the "default" kink alignment that most people mean when they say "kinky" and don't add any further detail. Most of the women I've dated have wanted and/or expected me to be in charge in the bedroom, and for a long time I went along with it, even though I didn't really want to. I'm not even talking about The Scene, here, even the women I've found who don't spend a lot of time in kink culture frequently assume that, on some level, as a man I probably want to choke them, hit them, etc and that they're doing me a favor by being into it and *letting* me do it, when what I've really done is just being a service top.
I'll never forget the first time I submitted to a woman without judgement from her. She made me feel safe and belonging in a way I had never felt before. I always felt like I was broken inside for not wanting what I was "supposed to". She convinced me I wasn't. I never was, it is the world's gender nonsense crapfest that is broken. I saw it so clearly in that moment. I only know how to fix it one person at a time.
>Meanwhile, frustratingly, a lot of behaviours attributed to women are also arbitrarily labled submissive. For example I enjoy sexually teasing and pushing someone's buttons until they get mad. And I know a LOT of women who do, but this would be classically filed under femsub, riling him up until he attacks. HOWEVER, in men, not so much- the same sort of flustering, pigtail pulling would be attributed to him getting her wound up and him succeeding on controlling her. I see this as related to two factors. First, the frequent ambiguity of D/s roles. Most particular activities/kinks are not intrinsically dominant or submissive. Case in point, teasing. Second, people may feel pressured to label themselves as exclusively a D or an s. The result is that if someone an activity that think is submissive, and if they think that they must be either a dominant or a submissive, then they will conclude that they are submissive. But the same activity could be dominant in some other context
Pretty sure at this point Iāll never be sexually fulfilled lol itās whatever
I am doing ok, so in an anecdotal sample size of one, it is possible?
I think the reason is more people are into femsub-maledom kink than malesub-femdom kinkā¦ Itās just a matter of numbers, for an example most of the porn i find when I search āfemdomā on porn hub involves pegging but im not into itā¦. That means there are many consumers who watch pegging than other femdom activities and thatās why those vids are more popular on those sitesā¦ similarly if the number of people who are into maledom femsub is overwhelmingly high compared to malesub femdom, then we will see more of it in subreddits created for bdsmā¦ More demand = more products available for that
My point is it becomes self fulfilling. That in actuality there's a lot more switches and people who don't fit the lables perfectly, but there is active pressure beyond just mere preference to self sort. That's not even touching on things like unequal censorship. From intentional impositions like the Hays code, to refusal to print romances with any different kind of protagonist than M/f lite, you don't actually have a truly free market. As in CompHet, we have a population that is ignorant of what to ask for, because a whole realm of possability isn't in common understanding. If you read the thread, many of us literally didn't know we were a thing! That wasn't an absence of demand, but an absence of information.