Note, post contains details about Phalene’s sexuality. Please only click past the fold if you’re interested, if you’re a parent or otherwise seeking to protect your sanity and dignity, check out this music video by the Poxy Boggards instead :
July 10, 2010
June 19, 2010
Harold, the Service Sub and Every Other Idiot Who Hits On Me
You end up sounding like a broken record if you’re a female in the kink scene, online or off, and you complain every time you get hit on, but it’s been a banner week for the creeps to leave their dark moist spots under a rock and fill up my inbox. First there was the strange, broken English speaking gentleman who sent me a form from some random pro-dom’s websites as an introduction, basically a request sheet of all the kinks he wanted me to fill for him. Then a few friend requests from strange men with suggestive pictures, and then globetrotting Harold, who announced I was his idea of perfection and how he was a hopeless romantic, so could I overlook the fact that he is two decades older than me father, pretty please? He also wanted to mentor me to achieve my dreams, which puts him slightly beneath the guy who sent me an introduction saying he wished we could meet so I could fall in love with him.
Start a forum for submissive men, and the first question that’ll pop up will always be “How can I meet dominant women!?” Usually kindly souls will trot out the same advice: bathe, try not to leer and volunteer at events. These are blithely ignored, and over time about a quarter of the volume of new posts in the group will be repeats of that question. Permutations involve asking how they can turn a vanilla partner into a dominatrix and kvetching that women just don’t understand, if they only recognized that a man in chastity/forced drag/under a queening chair will do the demeaning domestic work and be the attentive new age softy they crave, there’d be a riding crop in every female hand in an instant. Posts will end with the lament that dominant women are just so rare.
The problem is not a scarcity, it’s that all these guys are fucking selfish. To be perfectly frank, the amount of male captivity scenes in harlequins, while still well below traditional bodice ripping femme sub storylines, is high enough to suggest a sizeable demographic of women open to the idea of creative, female-as-top sex. However, most of these women are not dominatrices. I use that word to mean that ideal domme that these people have in their head, whose sexual likes and dislikes click perfectly with the man’s needs and desires. Sometimes she’s a mommy figure, sometimes she’s a high heeled hellion, sometimes she’s a slightly sexually assertive woman wearing fetish wear, specifically into men in drag giving her head.Pretty much all the guys plaintively crying that there’s no domme for them have figured out their sexual kinks and are now looking for the special screw for their nut. And that’s the problem. These women don’t exist. You can’t call 1 – 800-DOM-SHOP and order a svelte redhead into cigars and fur or a heavyset Indian lesbian who mysteriously wants to convert ‘worthless men’ into her gender and smother them with pie. You can send out a million request lists, but of the small pool of cigar smokers who scowl at PETA protestors while flipping their auburn hair, even if you reach the thirty or so women who meet that description, non are probably attracted to you.
Some of them have figured out that women are often not sexually aroused by their idea of fun. Those guys go for the wallets, or the dust mop, wheedling that filling their fantasies should be worth having someone give you a small sum or do your dishes. Usually of course, they work the payment in as part of their fantasy. They give you ‘tribute’ or ’service’. And it’s a biiiiiiiiiig favour to you. A man dusting! Or exchanging a small amount of money for a sex act! Wow!
I’ve complained before about being treated like a service provider, but the reality is that dominant women are not only asked to fill a service giving role, but their supposed to act like the partner is giving them that vile-taste-in-the-mouth cliché “the gift of submission”. Basically, dom or sub, if the other party is meeting your fantasies they are doing you a favour. I know, I have incredibly selfish, highly specific desires too. However I DON’T introduce myself to strange men as “Hi! My name is Phalene, I like hurting men enough to draw blood, I get a thrill from adult versions of capture the flag, and I’d like it if you dressed in collared and cuffed shirts, with shiny black boots and maintained a low body fat percent and a moderate muscle mass. No beards except by special permission, okay?”
Of course expecting these idiots to perceive that human women are people is probably a bit of a stretch, so the advice to get into a relationship with mutual respect, tolerance and enjoyment of each other’s company and let the fetishes sort themselves out as compromises built on trust and sensibly positioned boundaries is going to fall as flat as a sheet of paper under a steamroller. Oh well.
June 13, 2010
God Damn Spam! (and kink spam too)
So I survived the update of Wordpress, and I’m enjoying the new dashboard. One of the new features is page-at-a-time spam deletion. Sadly there is no way to nerf your entire pending comments inbox, but this is a vast improvement over the many click system. Still, I have 163 pages of spam to delete, mostly in Russian.
Speaking of spam, a recent posting binge on fetlife drew out the usual wankers pleading with me to be their mistress. Many fleas were placed in ears. One chump was so obtuse that he simply bored on telling me how much he’d pay me (in boots and corsets) if I would please, please accept him as a slave, even after I told him that I had no interest in him. The less ethical side of me feels the urge to see how far I can push the horny idiot, including standing on his head and spitting nickles. Mothboy votes getting a PO box and making bank, but he also votes telling the guy to set himself on fire and leap off a building.
I’m also tempted to start a referral system, directing these sacks of libido at the actual professionals in exchange for a small percent finders fee. That’s one of the annoying things about this brand of sexuality- people automatically assume you’re a prostitute. I’m starting to feel a lot of sympathy for my pro-sisters, as sad and silly as the wicked wanda shtick is. After a while with guys bombarding you with requests, I wish I could demand tribute for answering my emails too. 
January 28, 2010
I’m still sick with a cold, and I’ve got a big blemish on one side of my lip that hurts a bit. My gentleman figured out what was wrong with his thesis, and I’m home with puffy lymph nodes, but much more perky than yesterday. I think I’m going to try to get this place somewhat ship-shape again, since my linens are over due to be changed and the place is piled with clutter.
One of these days I have to post pictures of thep place- for now I’m wrestling with the usual storage dilemas. My gentleman has been responding to thesis stress by complaining about how messy I am, which, given his usual habits and the state of his corner of the room, would make me raise my eyebrow if I was actually capable of that trick.
Me, I’m being mildly amused by the way my mind handles having to clean up the mess around here.
I’d be a perfect service sub, if only the darn dominant would do everything I want. You know, hot tea, obsessive table settings, research, sending me on top secret missions. Instead it’s all about this obedience crap, and people who want to shave my head and put metal things in my bits. Don’t you understand? You just exist as a means to fantasy fulfillment and making me feel less silly about my obsessive compulsive tendencies. You’re supposed to be vaguely interesting in the background, not trying to whip out that kajira bullshit or intervene with my carefully ordered schedule.
You see, I have plans, you know. Saturday morning I’m going to slip out of bed early and wake you up with tea and homemade pancakes. Then you’re going to take a shower with towels I’ve warmed on the heater and put on the clothes I’ve picked… I mean laid out for you. Then piss off and go do some work in your study, I don’t want you traipsing around getting underfoot while I wash up the breakfast dishes. I’m gonna go study now for a few hours, with a snack, and then you’re allowed to see me again when I bring a tray to your desk with lunch. Eat it and appreciate the simple luxury of a home cooked meal. Okay?
Got that? Okay, now I’m going to get dinner on so it can cook all afternoon and putter around with gardening and getting the laundry done. I’m going to bother you about what socks need doing. But don’t bother me, I have more important studying/art/whatever. Get back in your study. Shoo.
Okay, it’s dinner time. I don’t care if you hate fresh flowers and fussy table linens. Go put on a nice shirt and use the napkins I put out. Okay, good. Hey, stop having seconds, I’m saving the leftovers for another meal! Go retire to your comfy chair with a book, and I’ll give you some more tea while the fire… um… heater makes crackling noises. You can have two cookies, I’d like to think of you as having severe restraint. Not the whole batch. Hey! Put that tin down!
Okay, off to bed. On time. We keep strict bed times in this household. I’ve warmed the bed, get into your spot. And stop trying to snuggle, you’re squooshing me flat. Shhh. Oh… Sex? Nevermind, yes. Of course. No, I like this position better. Yes, like that. Mmm. No, do it the other way and you sleep in the wet spot, I’m not –that- submissive.
See, aren’t I good at serving you? Sleep well, because I decided you’re taking me for a crack of dawn jog tomorrow.
I think I’m not the only one who tends in this direction either.
January 6, 2010
PORN!
It’s hard to critique something like pornography without running up against your own hangups. One thing I noticed is that for all I get distressed by the limited body types in porn intended for women, I tend to have particular taste in male flesh, these slender boyish/femme creatures with long bones and pretty noses. I have to think about this- paradoxically F/m porn (and all porn for that matter) tends to feature a much broader range of men in all their natural chubby, hairy, blotchy and occasionally semi-erect-despite-their-best-efforts glory, unless the porn is supposed to focus on the man, at which point he becomes model hot. Sexual objectification kills diversity.
Comparing this to the men I like – pointy chins, and a tendency towards boyish faces and ridiculously broad shoulders (I oggle necks and shoulders with the sort of lust that my curvy female bits are traditionally supposed to be lavished), but am otherwise very tolerant about pudge-y tummies, crooked teeth, and other parts of being human. None of this inhibits arousal with a bed partner and tends to contribute to their individuality.
I seem to be comparitively unique from my porn loving female peers in that gay porn does nothing for me. I tend to squint really hard and reverse the gender of the dominant individual or look at single male nudes without context (kinky or otherwise). I’ll watch straight porn for men too, and project myself into the female model while plugging my ears to the hideous dialog. About the only gay porn I’ve seen where I mentally left it as it is was honest to goodness lesbian porn, not girl on girl porn starlet scenes, which do nothing for me, but indie dyke porn where the model is being really pleasured. Interestingly these feel like masturbation- true it may involve multiples, but my interest was again projecting into both partners and it worked for me because my nerve endings would respond well to the sort of stimulation I was witnessing (unlike the disultory poking of straight porn’s lesbian scenes).
When I look at porn that’s available in the standard line up there’s Kink.com’s “Divine Bitches” and “Men in Pain” I can’t call them hetronormative since they do a very good job with their gay line “Bound Gods”. But sometimes something hits the right spot for me. Without more fanfare, here’s Filthy Amphibian’s delightful art:
September 9, 2009
More Kink (All I seem to think about these days really)
Growing up, my mother always put a strong emphasis on the fact that there’s a monster in all of us. Her own fascination with torture bled into the philosophy she imparted, that hurting people could feel good.
So the question for me is not why I’m a sadist, or puzzling out the duality that seeing most examples of suffering pulls up the maternal care taking, while hearing a guy go ‘please don’t!’ about torture makes me smile like the Cheshire cat. The question is why is the glee I feel in torturing someone attached to my libido.
Various theories are posited. Mine is that this stuff is genetic. My mother theorizes that she accidentally traumatized me as a child, triggering masochism and awareness of how truly good seeing a person in distress can feel. Other people suggest I’m working on my psychological issues through a safe filter. But sex is a very, very odd place for things to end up when it could have easily gotten stored with competitive enthusiasm for violent sports (which I have, but I like to participate, not watch and there’s a sexual component that many people don’t have) or fascism.
Maybe what I’m looking at is basically a female desire to rape people. Not all sex is sensual, by candle light and with rose petals, and if you posit that there’s a feedback system that positively rewards organisms for unkindness, to risk hauling in that bastard child of fuzzy science and cultural ideals: evolutionary psychology, this kink encourages me to screw people I’m victimizing so I can harvest their genetics. While people natter on about good providers, and wanting a man to look after me ‘cuz I’m a poor weak woman, maybe one of my reproductive strategies is to go the rounds with the tribe’s war captives or hunt out myself a nice male who might otherwise be unobtainable to me, and ravish him.
Except evidence suggests that some of us kinky folk are getting something emotional out of it, but carnally speaking, there’s nothing going on downstairs. This is a quick reminder about the fallacious tendency to assume what is true for you is true for everybody else. And the evolutionary reproductive strategy falls flat when a partner may just be in it to feel cozily possessed. That, and masochists and men who actively seek this dynamic thrill me and make my preferred target, even as they’re begging for the pain to stop (please?). So I’m not really set up to go out and rape some poor young man unless he happens to be wandering around with the expectation that the women of my tribe are vicious amazons and sort of likes it.
New hypothesis- human brains are very fluid and flexible, violence is an inherent part of being human, and dealing with it successfully as a perpetrator or victim gives you an advantage in this reproduction of genetics game.
Still, I’d love to see how my brain is firing when I’m taking pain (endorphin rush, release of anxiety, arousal, anger) or giving it (glee, endorphin rush, love). I need an MRI system in my dungeon.
September 7, 2009
Gender & Kink
There’s a lot in this kink business to make the feminist in me froth at the mouth. And no, I’m not talking about the images of pretty girls tied up, or the way that rape is dressed up as a perfect fantasy or that rad-fem line about how many sex acts are degrading to women. Rather it’s things like the two opposing camps, the female supremacists and the people who announce women are inherently submissive, and little things about how gender in constructed in the scene and in the archetypes. This is not a different world than vanilla, it’s all the baggage of the rest of my life seen through a somewhat tasteless spooky-goth lense that dresses people up in shiny black and involves a lot of smacking.
Bitchy Jones and Maymay both did beautifully calling kink to task for this sort of thing, for me, the very striking way that this makes me feel uncomfortable is that my sexuality is still treated like a commodity.
I spent a fantastic few days at the Montreal fetish weekend, awash in a sea of pretty peacocks and charming images. I’m going to be going glassy eyed over several public performances of F/m with good chemistry for weeks after this and there were truly pretty men in imaginative costumes. If you looked at the official pictures from the events though (taken by a swarm of pushy men with expensive cameras), you’d think I attended a lesbian separatist fetish weekend in which a scant few men snuck in. Hundreds of snaps of pretty girls; face shots, provocative poses. Couple portraits, with pictures of men the exception, not the rule.
Similarly the entertainment at events suffered from the fact that if you blinked it would slip back into burlesque. Often the shows depending on an interest in seeing a woman take her clothes off or writhe sensually around. The trapeze artist and the woman who danced in the Spanish web at the ball Rococo took great effort to make sure you knew they were lovely women. That’s fantastic, but where are the lovely men?
Women dom’d women, and topped men, and men topped women, but the stage was strangely missing M/m. I know there were many gay male couples floating around, so how must they feel?
The fetish fashion show drove this home. While I’d happily mug the ladies for their outfits and skip around in them shocking the grocery store clerk and the more naive exchange students from the Midwest, there were loads of pretty clothes for me and not a stitch being shown in the lineups for men.
And it’s not like it’s hard to make masculine costumes. Hell, there were plenty on display, a black latex ram, punkish spinney creations (very popular), demon suits with wing blades operated by fishing line and historical costumes with tight breaches to match the corseted women… And so on. If I could sew well enough I’d be putting out the line right now of pretty things for men that were stylish and non-cross dressing.
But back to my point about being something to consume: Both sides of the gender superiority thing construct a very narrow definition of womanhood. For a subculture where having breasts is no proof of your genetic gender, people are pretty quick to either thrust me up onto a pedestal for qualities I might not possess or put me down as a sheep in need of a firm hand. This can be pretty awkward in either respect because it’s a narrow box to shove slightly more than half the human population into.
Classically the people who believe in gynarchy say it’s because women are warm, empathetic and emotionally intelligent, bringing wisdom that will end wars. Men who say women are submissive point to their classic social position and need for protection, talking about evolutionary biology or theology, or maybe gorean psychology. They generally phrase things in terms of a yin/yang, with female deference not as an explicit proof of male superiority but part of the natural order of things, like plug into socket.
I’m a young woman, who sort of conforms to the physical proportions desired of women in my era, fresh faced, vivacious and vicious in my interests. If you talk to vanilla people, the image ‘dominatrix’ is the closest to what I am, though not a label I embrace personally, and this symbol is what people perceive about kink. I’m bossy, aggressive and I like violence. According to the gynarchists, either I fail as a woman because I raid from the masculine side of things or my superiority is so unsupported as to be a point of religious faith. According to the man-as-patriarch, this is the flapping around of an unsatisfied woman who needs a Real Man ™ or I’m a unicorn who can be satisfied with a nice fluffy ‘female’ man. Both sides are very quick to write from the perspective of how females fit into this, either above or below. I really would like to see some f-sub writing on the perspective of gender-as-orientation, because while it seems like men write in generalizations (as do the female tops who believe their own hype enough to call their gender the best) the f-subs are all writing about personal service and the closest I’ve seen to them talking about belonging at the feet of men in general is waxing poetic about service making them feel fulfilled.
So where do I, the visual spokesperson for my kink, fit into all of this? I want a master like I want another hole in my head, but I don’t want to top someone because they believe in extreme sexual dimorphism, I want it to be submission gently coaxed (or brutally conquered) because of who I personally am, with mutual respect. And not the yin/yang separate but equal role bullshit, either. Subs aren’t subbing because this is mystical; it’s a fetish where, unlike the people who love inanimate objects, luckily the object of my desire can love me back. They might be the bolt to my nut, but to work we’ll both need to be made of the same material and my perfect opposite would probably find me dreadfully tedious and overbearing. They might get off on that, but being healthy we’d end up compromising.
Am I comfortable that this subculture, just like the mainstream culture, objectifies my body and treats it like a point of extreme interest? Well, I like being looked at. I like nice looking men too though and I’d appreciate it if men were treated like sexual acquisitions as well. I want equality in a world where people are furiously masturbating to the idea of enslavement.
August 30, 2009
Impressions of Being Stompy
I’d really honestly intended to have this blog talking about dull things like cooking and pretty clothing, but it’s a cheese toast blog and what I’m doing is learning about the very satisfying part of me that wants to do mean things to men.
I’m a sadomasochistic control freak. One of the awkward things about this is that it comes with a hell of a lot of baggage. So does normal, vanilla sexuality, or for that matter, being human, but lately it’s been all about the weirdness that comes with exploring what my orientation means to me. And a lot of time saying no to things it doesn’t mean to me.
There’s a few problems with being a straight woman into seeing horrible things happening to men you care about even beyond the obvious ethical one. For one thing, all the porn about your sort of pairings is directed at men, and tends to be created from the premise that you want to see attractive domme women. One finds oneself furtively ogling torture scenes from movies and peering through fashion magazine spreads, while feeling guilty that the guys in Men in Pain shoots aren’t hot (I mean I’m sure to people who love them they’re beautiful, but most of the models seem to be just sort of lying there like a trussed chicken or serving as a blood supply to the body part being tortured).
Then of course there’s the non-fantasy world of other humans. For the longest while I stuck to age appropriate partners: boys my age. They tended to be pretty amenable to messing around with fluffy handcuffs, and my own flexibility helped. I also explored in the safe anonymity of the internet more or less un-chaperoned. Now I’m older and in a bigger city, so it’s munches and blogs on feminist-kink.
So far meeting the kink community has gone something like this: “Hi! Umm… Yes. Sometimes. No. No. No. FUCK NO! Ew. No. No. Yes, oh god yes, yes! Yes! Yaye! Nope. No. No, thank you, but thanks for asking. Maybe. No. How would that even work? Yes, please. Nice to meet you. No. No. No. Not on your life. No.”
First impressions show me that kink culture is full of old people and has the drawback that it tends to allow creeps to join. That and I’m spending a lot of time telling people that I don’t sub. Which I don’t, beacuse I get angry if I try, and the older I get the less patience I have for faking it. It’s starting to be worrisome, when even a guy you’re trying to top is regarding the languid pose you’re lounging in as ‘vulnerable’. I mean, rawr! Being vulnerable doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see you on your knees, crying.
This gets to the crux of the problem. People are socially ranked by the positions they take due to some involuntary quirk of their orientation. Subs go gah-gah over the moon putting doms on pedestals. Doms dress themselves up with symbols of authority. The most hardcore are the 24/7 life stylers, and people who inflict or take bloody injuries, either being held as the ideal or called crazy.
My point is that kink tends to get treated as a costume, and the length of time in which you’re willing to wear it and its tightness on your body determines your seriousness. I’m trying to imagine ranking say, gay people that way or people with an object fetish, or even normal vanilla loving. It really doesn’t compute. Maybe it’s because so much of this is furtive and underground or maybe it’s because people who share my cluster of kinks are getting off on power imbalances which are only ethically possible with a lot of negotiation (thus leading to the on/off business) and simultaneously something that makes people desperately horny, so being able to rank people by which end they hold the garden gnome for the yodeling garden gnome sex is intensely emotionally satisfying for them.
Only I don’t fit the uniform for a dom. I’m hardly the only one to complain about this, there being a wealth of writing on the subject of thinking fetish heels and latex corsets are all too common. But I’m thinking about the dilemma I have getting dressed to go to munches. I want to look pretty, but yet unavailable. Attractive and approachable, but unbreakable. I got so frustrated with this sort of game that last time I went I said screw it, and arrived with my hair in pigtails with enormous red bows, the sort of thing I’d wear every day if I could get away with it.
The other big piece of icky is that I’m traveling in a circle so sexually open that people who would normally never say boo to a goose proposition me for sexual acts so explicit and inappropriate that covering my mouth to keep the puke in is becoming a reflex. I don’t mind having a conversation with a man old enough to be my father (which is early forties by the way), but kink doesn’t remove the creepy exploitive subtext of an older man hitting on you.
It’s hard juggling having sexuality with a degree of restraint. It’s also interesting to be jumbled in with all manner of perversions. I think I’ve met seen naked or scantily clad more transgendered and transvestite people than ever before in my life in the past few weeks. I’ve been hit on, insulted, hit on and insulted.
And a lot of people have worked very hard to define me. For some reason ‘innocent’ is the first adjective that most people seem to use, as well as ‘vulnerable’ and much is made about my mischevious smile. I wonder if I were older if I’d be fearsome or if this is part of my personality. Even my mother calls me a ditz-domme. So yes, that’s what kink in Montreal is like.