omisspearl

[omisspearl]

The Femdom Cultural Dialectic

Femdom-As-Subculture has a problem that is is very, very hard to define what the hell femdom even is. Many have tried, from the idea that it is just regular D/s (but that the dominant happens to be female), to the inverse of what I would describe as the “Mistress Manual” approach, where performing as a domme (and by extension as a sub) is a tightly defined set of aesthetics and behaviors. This,…

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That Time I Hate Read a Femdom Romance

(And then sort of came to appreciate it) This is not a positive review of “Melt for You”, but it’s also not an un-positive one. Ask the lifestyle dommes of the internet and one of the most reliable things we complain about is that we do not feel represented. We don’t see ourselves in popular media, except accidentally or with a Hays Code style tendency to have our stories end in punishment. We…

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Femdom Review "Wooing the Witch Queen" By Stephanie Burgis

This is PG-13 rated femdom. No, I am not kidding, someone has managed to get a three book deal from a mainstream publisher for a no sex young adult aimed romantasy series about a trio of evil witches and the subs that love them.  Lest you think I am just inferring from the setting, no, I do mean this is an intentionally kinky book. In the scenes in which the two leads (Saskia, research witch)…

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Me and who ??

[omisspearl]

Femdom Review: The Damsel by Victoria Vale

TL;DR: A rattling good thriller/historical romance with a violent and aggressive heroine finding peace in the unconditional love and submission of a genuinely supportive male lead. If you are looking for femdom romance novels, one of the places they hide is the back/middle of a series that is otherwise dedicated to different kinds of BDSM pairings, usually M/f. Most frustratingly, most tagging…

[omisspearl]

tools not rules: the importance of critical thinking

More than once, I’ve talked about the negative implications of Evangelical/purity culture logic being uncritically replicated in fandom spaces and left-wing discourse, and have also referenced specific examples of logical overlap this produces re, in particular, the policing of sexuality. What I don’t think I’ve done before is explain how this happens: how even a well-intentioned person who’s trying to unlearn the toxic systems they grew up with can end up replicating those systems. Even if you didn’t grow up specifically in an Evangelical/purity context, if your home, school, work and/or other social environments have never encouraged or taught you to think critically, then it’s easy to fall into similar traps - so here, hopefully, is a quick explainer on how that works, and (hopefully) how to avoid it in the future.

Put simply: within Evangelism, purity culture and other strict, hierarchical social contexts, an enormous value is placed on rules, and specifically hard rules. There might be a little wiggle-room in some instances, but overwhelmingly, the rules are fixed: once you get taught that something is bad, you’re expected never to question it. Understanding the rules is secondary to obeying them, and oftentimes, asking for a more thorough explanation - no matter how innocently, even if all you’re trying to do is learn - is framed as challenging those rules, and therefore cast as disobedience. And where obedience is a virtue, disobedience is a sin. If someone breaks the rules, it doesn’t matter why they did it, only that they did. Their explanations or justifications don’t matter, and nor does the context: a rule is a rule, and rulebreakers are Bad.

In this kind of environment, therefore, you absorb three main lessons: one, to obey a rule from the moment you learn it; two, that it’s more important to follow the rules than to understand them; and three, that enforcing the rules means castigating anyone who breaks them. And these lessons go deep: they’re hard to unlearn, especially when you grow up with them through your formative years, because the consequences of breaking them - or even being seen to break them - can be socially catastrophic.

But outside these sorts of strict environments - and, honestly, even within them - that much rigidity isn’t healthy. Life is frequently far more complex and nuanced than hard rules really allow for, particularly when it comes to human psychology and behaviour - and this is where critical thinking comes in. Critical thinking allows us to evaluate the world around us on an ongoing basis: to weigh the merits of different positions; to challenge established rules if we feel they no longer serve us; to decide which new ones to institute in their place; to acknowledge that sometimes, there are no easy answers; to show the working behind our positions, and to assess the logic with which other arguments are presented to us. Critical thinking is how we graduate from a simplistic, black-and-white view of morality to a more nuanced perception of the world - but this is a very hard lesson to learn if, instead of critical thinking, we’re taught instead to put our faith in rules alone.

So: what does it actually look like, when rule-based logic is applied in left-wing spaces? I’ll give you an example: 

Sally is new to both social justice and fandom. She grew up in a household that punished her for asking questions, and where she was expected to unquestioningly follow specific hard rules. Now, though, Sally has started to learn a bit more about the world outside her immediate bubble, and is realising not only that the rules she grew up with were toxic, but that she’s absorbed a lot of biases she doesn’t want to have. Sally is keen to improve herself. She wants to be a good person! So Sally joins some internet communities and starts to read up on things. Sally is well-intentioned, but she’s also never learned how to evaluate information before, and she’s certainly never had to consider that two contrasting opinions could be equally valid - how could she have, when she wasn’t allowed to ask questions, and when she was always told there was a singular Right Answer to everything? Her whole framework for learning is to Look For The Rules And Follow Them, and now that she’s learned the old rules were Bad, that means she has to figure out what the Good Rules are. 

Sally isn’t aware she’s thinking of it in these terms, but subconsciously, this is how she’s learned to think. So when Sally reads a post explaining how sex work and pornography are inherently misogynistic and demeaning to women, Sally doesn’t consider this as one side of an ongoing argument, but uncritically absorbs this information as a new Rule. She reads about how it’s always bad and appropriative for someone from one culture to wear clothes from another culture, and even though she’s not quite sure of all the ways in which it applies, this becomes a Rule, too. Whatever argument she encounters first that seems reasonable becomes a Rule, and once she has the Rules, there’s no need to challenge them or research them or flesh out her understanding, because that’s never been how Rules work - and because she’s grown up in a context where the foremost way to show that you’re aware of and obeying the Rules is to shame people for breaking them, even though she’s not well-versed in these subjects, Sally begins to weigh in on debates by harshly disagreeing with anyone who offers up counter-opinions. Sometimes her disagreements are couched in borrowed terms, parroting back the logic of the Rules she’s learned, but other times, they’re simply ad hominem attacks, because at home, breaking a Rule makes you a bad person, and as such, Sally has never learned to differentiate between attacking the idea and attacking the person. 

And of course, because Sally doesn’t understand the Rules in-depth, it’s harder to explain them to or debate with rulebreakers who’ve come armed with arguments she hasn’t heard before, which makes it easier and less frustrating to just insult them and point out that they ARE rulebreakers - especially if she doesn’t want to admit her confusion or the limitations of her knowledge. Most crucially of all, Sally doesn’t have a viable framework for admitting to fault or ignorance beyond a total groveling apology that doubles as a concession to having been Morally Bad, because that’s what it’s always meant to her to admit you broke a Rule. She has no template for saying, “huh, I hadn’t considered that,” or “I don’t know enough to contribute here,” or even “I was wrong; thanks for explaining!” 

So instead, when challenged, Sally remains defensive: she feels guilty about the prospect of being Bad, because she absolutely doesn’t want to be a Bad Person, but she also doesn’t know how to conceptualise goodness outside of obedience. It makes her nervous and unsettled to think that strangers could think of her as a Bad Person when she’s following the Rules, and so she becomes even more aggressive when challenged to compensate, clinging all the more tightly to anyone who agrees with her, yet inevitably ending up hurt when it turns out this person or that who she thought agreed on What The Rules Were suddenly develops a different opinion, or asks a question, or does something else unsettling. 

Pushed to this sort of breaking point, some people in Sally’s position go back to the fundamentalism they were raised with, not because they still agree with it, but because the lack of uniform agreement about What The Rules Are makes them feel constantly anxious and attacked, and at least before, they knew how to behave to ensure that everyone around them knew they were Good. Others turn to increasingly niche communities and social groups, constantly on paranoid alert for Deviance From The Rules. But other people eventually have the freeing realisation that the fixation on Rules and Goodness is what’s hurting them, not strangers with different opinions, and they steadily start to do what they wanted to do all along: become happier, kinder and better-informed people who can admit to human failings - including their own - without melting down about it.   

THIS is what we mean when we talk about puritan logic being present in fandom and left-wing spaces: the refusal to engage with critical thinking while sticking doggedly to a single, fixed interpretation of How To Be Good. It’s not always about sexuality; it’s just that sexuality, and especially queerness, are topics we’re used to seeing conservatives talk about a certain way, and when those same rhetorical tricks show up in our fandom spaces, we know why they look familiar. 

So: how do you break out of rule-based thinking? By being aware of it as a behavioural pattern. By making a conscious effort to accept that differing perspectives can sometimes have equal value, or that, even if a given argument isn’t completely sound, it might still contain a nugget of truth. By trying to be less reactive and more reflective when encountering positions different to your own. By accepting that not every argument is automatically tied to or indicative of a higher moral position: sometimes, we’re just talking about stuff! By remembering that you’re allowed to change your position, or challenge someone else’s, or ask for clarification. By understanding that having a moral code and personal principles isn’t at odds with asking questions, and that it’s possible - even desirable - to update your beliefs when you come to learn more than you did before. 

This can be a scary and disquieting process to engage in, and it’s important to be aware of that, because one of the main appeals of rule-based thinking - if not the key appeal - is the comfort of moral certainty it engenders. If the rules are simple and clear, and following them is what makes you a good person, then it’s easy to know if you’re doing the right thing according to that system. It’s much, much harder and frequently more uncomfortable to be uncertain about things: to doubt, not only yourself, but the way you’ve been taught to think. And especially online, where we encounter so many more opinions and people than we might elsewhere, and where we can get dogpiled on by strangers or go viral without meaning to despite our best intentions? The prospect of being deemed Bad is genuinely terrifying. Of course we want to follow the Rules. But that’s the point of critical thinking: to try and understand that rules exist in the first place, not to be immutable and unchanging, but as tools to help us be better - and if a tool becomes defunct or broken, it only makes sense to repair it. 

Rigid thinking teaches us to view the world through the lens of rules: to obey first and understand later. Critical thinking teaches us to use ideas, questions, contexts and other bits of information as analytic tools: to put understanding ahead of obedience. So if you want to break out of puritan thinking, whenever you encounter a new piece of information, ask yourself: are you absorbing it as a rule, or as a tool? 

[omisspearl]

What To Do With The Under 18 Kinky People?

I’m going to talk about an elephant in the room, or precisely speaking an elephant that, while left out of the room, still requires addressing. This particular piece, I think will also distress and disturb people, not because it talks about abuse in a standard trigger warning fashion, but because it requires me to say something flat out: minors need kink as part of a rigorous and inclusive sex…

[omisspearl]

How to Reduce Risk of Community Predation

[Content Note: talk about abuse and sexual assault with specifics and hypotheticals] This is a part 2 to “Gaiman, Consent & Community Safety”, a reaction to the Vulture article “There Are No Safewords” In the aftermath of exposing a community predator, as well as the inevitable disgust and horror, it’s always possible to see how the group contributed to the perpetrator becoming a sustained…

[omisspearl]

Gaiman, Consent & Community Safety

Gaiman's abuse of his victims is not just a tragedy, but a textbook example of community predation. The BDSM scene is particularly vulnerable to this.

[Content Note: talk about abuse and sexual assault with specifics and hypotheticals] The Vulture recently published There Is No Safeword, a rigorous deconstruction of the ongoing history of predation by author Neil Gaiman, acting against multiple, vulnerable women. This, alone isn’t new information. Nor is the role by which he used BDSM to try to justify his actions. What the article did did,…

[omisspearl]

(text description in ALT and below the cut)

Based on some rumblings I heard, I ended up quickly throwing together a fun little WIP bingo sheet! I'll admit I largely wrote the prompts for writing, but I think a good number of them should also apply to art!

Ultimately, the goal is to have fun, and finish whatever WIPs you can (without burning yourself out or having a bad time). If you needed a sign to pick up that project you've been putting off, the time is now!

3x4 Bingo square titled "Finish your fucking fics february"

the top three across left to right read "Update your oldest WIP", "Finish a WIP that's been buried deep in your drafts", and "Finish a WIP that you haven't posted yet"

the second row reads "Finish a recent WIP", "Finish a WIP you're scared of" and "Finish a WIP that's been haunting you"

the third row reads "Update a partially posted WIP", "Finish any WIP/Free Space", and "Finish the next WIP in a series you've been avoiding"

the last row reads "Update your newest WIP", "Finish a WIP that's been ignored for at least 6 months", and "Finish the next chapter for a fic you've been meaning to for months"

[omisspearl]

Trying the Solace by Lovense

I reviewed a sex toy by making poor Silver use it.

Is the Solace good, though? Short answer:  The Solace is ambitious, creating a toy in an underserved niche and miniaturizing a fucking machine to a bit bigger than a chunky loaf of bread.  Unfortunately, the tech is not there yet, but it’s a good try and incredibly impressive for what it is. If you are an early adopter, or get off on the aesthetics of machines themselves this could be a great…

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"A Holiday Under Her Control" -Femdom Christmas Romantic Comedy

A lot of you have heard my particularly strident complaints that there’s a distinct lack of both femgaze femdom and femdom romances. So… I wrote a book! A sweet, sentimental and wonderfully cozy story about two people finding each other and falling in love through femdom. It’s spicy as a gingersnap, but it’s also a story about the magic of finally feeling seen by someone who completely gets…

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There's a few works from the progressive left that entered the lexicon in the last decade that I personally avoid, "privilege" and "problematic", both not because I think the underlying/original context for the terms were wrong but because the contexts they appear in now bring in awkward connotations or end up being more of a weapon or a place where ideas go to die.

Privilege is a useful idea to help you examine the human tendency to assume that everyone is starting from the same place and completely acting on their own initiative. Unfortunately it tends to be tied up in our moral suspicions of entitlement and good fortune. For example there's a current discourse about the privilege of reading. It's useful to acknowledge literacy takes more than just willpower and people who don't enjoy the same fluency with the written word are not unvirtuous. Inversely, an important part of broader literacy obtainment is built on allowing that reading for pleasure is an important part of building capacity. Privilege discourse is correct structural and medical things alike can make literacy more than just trying hard. This particular word, however, tends to contain a shamey implication of undeserved things you should not be attached to or work towards.

Problematic, on the other hand, is one of those concepts that is particularly weaponized. It is (ironically) problematic in itself. It goes from acknowledging a particular part of something being flawed and therefore engaging with it means acknowledging flaws and needing to think critically even as you choose to, to a euphemism for something off that allows one not to engage with the why. Other people have already pointed out it is too broad- that people and media alike both get labeled problematic when it can both soften the noxious (eg it's an understatement about something truly hazardous) or vague enough to exaggerate the harm in other things (letting you shame them while not overtly taking a hard stance anyone could argue with). I find in practice problematic is either used as an excuse or an ultimatum.

I suppose as some sort of conclusion, it's also worth noting that both privilege and problematic have the complexity that they can apply to literally anything. For example every single thing in my apartment and the apartment itself are both symptoms of my privilege and problematic in their origin. It's both useful to acknowledge that this is how the world works and also won't get me particularly far past that. But since both term have evolved past "okay, X, but now hear me out about this additional perspective and complexity" and to often meaning "here is some shorthand for why this is some bullshit", I now try to use other words.

At the very least, there are few people who will be able to process the role of their privilege without the whole safe space for learning that knapsack metaphor was incubated in. And very few people tossing the problematic lable around where I have seen it do anything like making space for the extra elements being more labour than they first appear or serving as a sort of wincing hand wave to avoid an unpacking that might deal with it.

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Gift of the Magi: kinky addition

I bought Silver a cock and ball stretch and seperator for Christmas.

He bought a cock and ball stretch and seperator to wear for me.

[omisspearl]

Property Under Pressure

Edge play and intimacy around bodily functions. Not quite watersports.

Not quite watersports. It’s somewhere between 3 and 4 pm. He slips out into the narrow hall that connects his office and the bathroom to the main area of our apartment. When we moved in together, one room became his space, while I sprawl out in an organic extension of hobby clutter across the rest.  Thus, with his office, I feel like I need to ask to go in, even when it is not in use. Not in a…

[omisspearl]

I find a lot of dominants have a tendency to look at the toxic, rigid part of masculinity and very uncritically determine that they need to be Stoic and Achieving Protectors Who Are Worthy Of Submission for real. To hear us talk about ourselves makes me sometimes feel like I am eaves dropping on a specific kind of Christian Men's group. I won't argue that some of us are exemplary human beings who benefit from that. However, like the complimentarian gender roles of conservatism, I find the idea of the dominant as already being on the pedestal before you get there or powered by awesomeness de-centers the role of consent and the efforts of the oestensibly submissive party.

This idea of the Dominant Who Leads is often paired with focusing on "inspiring" leadership based on how awesome someone is in their own perfection and drive. My political science degree would argue that's generally not how power works in real life. It's a lot of gossip and metaphorical horse trading and emotional labour to build a consensus of people with influence or to do work. Shit gets done by teams, and while in the short run you can take charge by simply doing so authoritatively, one of the major differences in studying how people from marginalized populations in leadership roles describe their power and people from privileged groups describe it is that the former tend to emphasize *team* and the latter *themselves*. The self focused group are generally less accurate in their assessment of how things actually happened.

Kinky people who fetishize power imbalances don't always ground themselves in the reality of how things get done. This is fine for fantasy, but then this escapes containment and much like people expect sex to work like a hentai cartoon, they also try to Great Man Theory Of History their way into the foundation of a dynamic.

Dominance, for me, is not having to try. I am absolutely not on any out of dynamic pedestal, and make no effort to climb there. I am not particularly competent a a lot of things. I can't emphasize this enough that while I have a sort of crazy person charisma and confidence, none of this translates to real world value of why I should be allowed to dominate someone in the kink sense.

Don't get me wrong, safety and mutual respect are important, but I am not going to put on the armour of trying to argue I am leadership material to explain my power. My Property submits to me because I am sweet, empathetic, love him to bits and have a natural streak of sadism. Our dynamic owes more to our respective soft skills than because I demonstrate discipline on myself.

I say this looking at a pile of laundry I need to fold the height of my knee, next to the resume I need to tweak, the novel that's 4 chapters from done, the undone thank you cards from our wedding. I am procrastinating putting on the work out clothes I need to for my pilates class by writing this.

Meanwhile, he is one of those type A, cross fit 4x a week, gets promoted every 14 months at work has his shit together type people. It would be incredibly presumptuous and silly to say he needed me to run his life for him in any real way just because he fantasizes about being a mindless drone, harem slave boy, etc... I am, in fact, here to add chaos and complications to his perfect bachelor orderliness.

To be precise, I am a bully. I cause him problems on purpose. My empathy allows me to make them manageable problems, but problems nonetheless. Our dynamic is 24/7, but not because he found someone better than him at making decisions for him. It's because I trust his judgement in accepting what amounts to ongoing suggestions he chooses to consent to. He, in turn, trusts me to not suggest stuff that will actually ruin his life and will probably lead to either entertainment, mutual emotional fullfilment or both.