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I actually would say that the signs of the growth of this genre don't come from fantasy-focused sites -- they come from traditionally-vanilla sites where these kinks are gaining significant ground. As more and more men are addicted to pornography, which inherently includes the experience of watching a different man have sex with a woman, there's a strong current of shame and self-contempt that I see growing in the water supply. Coupled with the increasing sex gap and loneliness crisis, what's happening is that increasingly men feel that the possibility of sex is above them, that women in particular are 'above' them, beautiful but untouchable, and this psychosexual viewpoint, combined with porn, is corrosive.
When I say "influencers" I mean something more like "onlyfans creators" and "pornstars"; a growing genre of pornography, even softcore, is "woman berates you on camera for your inability to have sex with women," which as a sign of the times is something along the lines of the rivers turning to blood. Onlyfans creators are starting to turn to this, because the demand is there, and guys who pay onlyfans creators for the 'privilege' of indistinguishable nudes seem to me to have a sense of profound sexual inferiority, which belittling and humiliating femdom can and does exploit. The problem is that shame is being eroticized and sold back to the ashamed for profit.
I don't doubt that these kinks make up only a small percentage of the active, long-lived, and well-practiced fantasy scripts in kink communities, but my concern is about the metastasis into vanilla or mainly-vanilla spaces, where I believe these kinks do real psychological damage and contribute to significant shame.
I'm not so vanilla as to be totally prudish, but I admit that reading this part made my skin crawl.
I guess reading about pure femdom gives me the same kind of heebie jeebies as when vanilla women read about maledom dynamics -- the whole thing just rhymes with "someone's being abused here, something bad is happening, get away from this as fast as you possibly can" in a way that strikes me pre-cognitively. I also don't know that I'd describe "I've cut you so you're mine, irrecoverably" as a not mentally ill cognition, but I guess at that point we're entering Szasz territory of debating what a mental illness is, and at the very least I simply believe that kind of thinking reveals a level of possessive that I can't pre-cognitively differentiate from predation. Your examples so alarmed my unconscious threat-detection system that I went into fight or flight.
I can understand this, and my point in the post was to assert that this is essentially what I think is the not-broken version of femdom. I suppose it's just a prior, or a psychological heuristic, for me that a woman who autonomously, on her own, developed the kink for domination is not the sort of person I would feel safe around. I also think #3 is much sadder than you're giving it credit -- it's not about "wanting oral sex and demanding it," but genuinely sad stuff, like a woman whose reddit post I once saw talked about how her husband calls her ugly and she was looking for "male submissives whose task it would be to praise me highly", which is all kinds of fucked up no matter where someone lands on kink.
In general, I find desires for domination to be deeply uncomfortable, and again I just can't differentiate them from predation. I can understand the masochism-pleasure-pain thing, and I can understand the "obedience as permission" thing, but what I find incredibly hard to understand is sadism. I hope I never understand it.
I do resent to an extent the fact that women I've dated have pushed me to accept those kinds of kinks, and it's a consistent thing for me that romantic, slow, intimate sex is what I enjoy and is memorable to me. Rough sex just doesn't even feel like sex to me, in a way that's hard to describe.
And I guess, to put it bluntly, "I enjoy the part of sex where I'm blindfolded and flogged," makes about as much sense to me as "I enjoy the part of the football game where the pitcher throws the ball at the batter" -- just seems like a category error.
That's fair, though in turn it's harder to get serious numbers. PornHub-Straight has a cuckold category, and it does beat VR porn... but it's a third the size transgender stuff, a fifth the size of public sex or squirting, and half the size as explicit watersports. And that still has a bunch of stuff that's not actually excluding the male sub from having sex with his wife, nevermind berating it.
It's also hard to separate popularity from prominence. I don't know much about the het side of OF, but last I looked one of the biggest personalities on the gay side was feederist kink. This is a weird, (literally and physically!) unhealthy redirection, to the extent I can understand it... and it's also incredibly rare as something people actually want, and afaict isn't something you can get trained into. It just naturally favors concentration, both because feedes are rare, and because the nature of the kink favors multiple feeders. That's still bad, but it's bad in the way Jackass is bad, rather than because it's trying to hypnotize people. If it weren't for the inevitable anorexia or bulimia, it'd just be dumb.
Unfortunately, I can't find even bad numbers on OF kink breakdowns, so I can't really speak to or against it in deeper detail.
That's fair. They are weird kinks, and I tried to pick ones that were weird in the specific way you're motioning around, rather than, say, omorashi.
Do these things strike you as wrong because of their motives, because of the degree of possessiveness, or because the actions don't fit your sexual register? Most women I've met into this sort of marking aren't especially possessive (for women, damning with faint praise as that might be by gay standards). Male impregnation kink (uh, straight or gay) can focus around the exact same 'we're together forever' now thing, as can just the 'fingernails down back' kink, or even people who get really worked up over giving hickies. Are couple's tattoos or piercings bad because they're Szasz-adjacent, or just because they're trash?
Those sort of situations exist, and they are sad, and there's a lot of variants on it. I just don't see the recovery as the sad bit, necessarily. The initial abuse is sad. Maladaptive coping mechanisms do happen, and they are bad as a tautology, and those are sad.
Getting off on a merely weird coping mechanism feels more... nonoptimal? Inefficient? Getting into relationships where 'value my appearance' or even 'don't call me ugly' is a sexual ritual rather than just room temperature is a limiting factor because a lot of guys will genuinely find that goofy, but it doesn't mean you can't also have it as the room temperature outside of the bedroom (or the scene), either. But the asshole ex-husband caused the damage; this is just the repair work.
If you have this coping mechanism, it's worth admitting and spelling it out, both to yourself and to potential partners. It is a limitation. Even small stuff can be enough of an ask, and some forms are a lot more invasive. That's true of a million things, though.
That comes into a difficult spot, because there are some useful notes to show ways domination can be different from predation, or how healthier (or at least more sub-friendly) forms of sadism look, if sometimes weird ones that are far away from what you see as sex (or far away from what is sex, thank you fucking machines), but I don't want to throw them out if they're going to be actively harmful for you.
I can empathize with the division: even as someone that likes subbing, it doesn't take much that doesn't fit the scene to break the mood, and I've experienced it. Dunno if it's as rough for me as for you, but it's definitely a difficult situation, and actually pushing back can be uncomfortable.
Not wanting a single drop of it's absolutely fair, and honest, and something you can and should draw a thick red line around. Just because someone has these kinks doesn't obligate you to try them out, and even if someone has these kinks for sympathetic reasons, that doesn't mean anyone has to try them out.
Thanks for the substantive engagement. I had to reflect on it.
I'm not the biggest fan of tattoos in the world, but I'll admit, a tasteful, discrete couples tattoo is up there with "Baptizatus sum" in terms of tattoos I could respect. I think it's a silly idea, because that's a dangerous thing to mark your body with given the possibility of divorce and it tempts fate, but you know, I don't totally hate it.
And on reflection, I actually don't think it's the possessiveness of it that makes this concerning to me. It's the bodily harm element. I suppose I have what the kinksters would call a 'hard limit' for bodily harm, weaponry, cutting. I also understand there's a big thing in the kink world where people get bruised up and it's a point of pride, and I find that hard to think about. I guess I understand a little redness on the butt if you're into spanking, but when hematomas get involved I'm extremely squicked. I have a slight impulse to use the "I think X is good, actually" meme here, and I guess I'll just say it: "I think people leaving the bedroom uninjured is good, actually."
I actually find possessiveness, when it's mutual, hot and one of the more fun aspects of a monogamous LTR. So the fact that that women into cutting men with knives aren't actually that posessive is actually a disappointment, in one sense, to me. And if they're not particularly possessive by the standards of women, that in a way contributes to my point: that to act this way towards a man creates distance between her and him, in a way that may make actual long-term committed love psychologically improbable.
I guess I'm very skeptical of most means of social control, and I have a bit of that libertarian "ThIs Is My LaNd!" energy in me, where I imagine myself in the place of someone being sexually dominated in the way you're describing, and the visceral reaction is "get the hell away from me." I control me.
So it's not possessiveness as much as it is control that I find uncomfortable; possessiveness in the mutual self-gift sense -- "I'm yours forever, you're mine forever" -- is the most romantic thing in the world. But when it gets to, "I have placed a locked device around your member so you do things for me" it just activates primal bodily defenses. Partly because it's just weird, and partly because it's not mutual.
What strikes me, I suppose, is that "we're together forever" is a good impulse for a couple to have, and it would be great if we had a major social institution that could ratify this formally so people don't have to rely on tattoos and piercings to accomplish it. We could keep the jewelry aspect. Maybe men in robes could officiate.
I guess what I'm saying is that, as a good socialcon, I have suspicions that maybe some elements of kink are post-sexual-revolution attempts to re-impose the compelling aspects of the tradition, and I worry it does so, but in a degraded form.
I'll cop to having had some fairly submissive fantasies from time to time, and if you
bound and gagged me andforced me to take the BDSMtest honestly at gunpoint, I think you'd see me ending up on that edge of the spectrum pretty decisively. If this is what you've been suspecting all along, congratulations, I'll give you one Stanley Nickel.But I think what alarms me in reading your comment is how... alien, and potentially dangerous the 'dominant side' of these kinks are. As I said before, I flat out don't understand sadism as psychology, and I have a serious ethical worry that building out the neurological pathways associated with it, even as part of sex and role play, is a change in the person that leads to vice, not virtue. I just have no desire to 'control' people in the way you've described, and I guess I would find it fantastically hard to trust someone who expressed that sadism or that kind of intense control formed a part of their psychological makeup.
Moreover, I just have significant doubts that femdom/maledom dynamics can coexist with heterosexual love as I understand it. I just have a strong prior that small elements of disrespect in a relationship, which are behaviorally indistinguishable from some elements of femdom, will eventually bubble into large-scale conflicts and profound disrespect that will destroy the relationship. The kinkster claim is that the underlying psychology is different, even as the behavior looks the same, but that's what any apologist says about something that looks bad, and the internal psychological state of dominant women is invisible to me and it would take a very large mountain of evidence to prove it to my satisfaction.
It should be noted that our conversation here is taking place as part of a thread based on a comment that argues some elements of maledom BDSM are compelling to women because of a widespread female desire to submit to men in broad contexts. This is obviously the subject of intense and impassioned debate, but what is hard for me to deny is that maledom dynamics, at the very least, follow the gradient of standard heterosexuality in a way femdom doesn't.
A corrolary of this is that, to follow femdom dynamics where they lead, you must work against this gradient, and I have serious concerns that doing this would also work against the normal psychological gradients that keep men and women together.
I do my best to resist the blackpill, but there are elements of the blackpill I find at least somewhat plausible, and the risk of the blackpill being true indicates to me that the risk of these dynamics to heterosexuality is potentially ruinous. To use the language of the blackpill: saying that these dynamics don't utterly ruin and destroy heterosexuality is to say that women stick with betas, and in particular stick with them while holding them to be the primary object of their sexual interest. I'm just not convinced that it's possible for a woman to 'look down on' or 'control' a man sexually, while still loving him.
To belabor the metaphor, it's a hard pill to swallow, intellectually speaking. It's a nice thought, but I hold whatever fantasies I may have internally, because I just don't see a good argument for how they'd ever be treated with respect or understanding or desire. I'd like to think differently, but I don't know how I could.
I guess it's, again, my socialcon self showing up here, but I'm not sure my first description of it would be "a merely weird nonoptimal coping mechanism." I think what's being asked for is simply love, in its true form, and it's my opinion that making this a 'sexual ritual' -- or more particularly to what's going on, a ritual of control -- is a healthy response. But I also have a configuration of morals such that I hold even people in pain to an incredibly high standard of conduct.
And, as a hopeless romantic, I do have to admit I find it hard not to see a romance-shaped hole in every human heart, and configurations of intimacy that lack this, or seem to approximate it without fully reaching it, strike me as strictly worse than nothing at all. But this requires a pretty demanding set of metaphysics and morals to uphold, and I don't necessarily expect that people will find this persuasive even if I do.
Ah -- I think something got lost in translation here. What I mean is that I actually have felt pushed into being a 'dominant' partner with women before, and haven't liked it. Even if she enjoyed it a lot and demanded I do it more, I really didn't enjoy the part where her nipples ended up bruised or the nasty degrading names she wanted me to call her. It just doesn't feel right to me. Again, I like the version of sex where everybody walks away uninjured. I realize that puts me in a minority.
I admit that female sexuality includes a lot of these features, and I don't love it, really, but I've accepted that to get the companionship and intimacy that I want I have to pretend I enjoy domming from time to time.
No woman has ever offered to dominate me in any sense, and I don't know what I'd do if the offer were made.
I've experienced being on the receiving end of someone's dominant fantasy, in fantasy solely, but it wasn't a woman who did that, and I was alarmed enough by what they were saying that I got the hell away from them as quickly as possible. It hot for a bit, but I knew very quickly this person Meant Trouble.
I suppose the overall texture of my feelings about the kink community is that I just don't experience sex as an avenue of 'play' and identity shifting in the way they do -- as far as I'm concerned, sex is the most identity-relevant and immediate experience you can have, and it's been my experience that trying to shift it away from that identity and immediacy cheapens it, makes it less compelling.
I also find it very hard to participate in role-play and identity shfting in non-sexual contexts, and things like acting, ass-kissing, dishonesty, going along to get along, play pretend are all very difficult for me. I experience the world very immediately and very, perhaps the word is authentically? and I find it hard to put on airs. I just kind of am what I am. So perhaps I just have the wrong psychological configuration to find any of this comprehensible, except insofar as I've stated.
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