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.