omg lesson#37: the phenomenon of the vanishing female dominant...

i've long heard talk of dominant women who 'left the scene' or 'left the community' or 'left fetlife'....mostly in disgust. 

there were whispers here and there at munches, conferences, in different f/m groups on fet, in passing conversations with people who pay attention to f/m stuff. ostensibly, it was b/c they just felt all these spaces were just more of the same that they got in the vanilla world or, more often than not, the lack of respect they felt in the vanilla world coupled with all the demands of so called submissive men in the kink world.

which i found odd. b/c i thought on fet, there were places where i got a chance to really discover myself and figure some shit out and understand that the things i'd always thought and the relationships i'd always sought were actually quite normal. or as normal as kink can be, i guess. what i liked and what i wanted had a name. and the kinds of men i was most drawn to and attracted to, had a name. that first blush of self discovery was intoxicating and exciting and liberating!

and then came...the other stuff. the relentless fuckbois. the constant disrespect of so called submissive men that felt the need to diminish my new found sense of self. felt the need to tell me how wrong i was; how i needed to be dominant in order to make them happy; how i needed to re-think dominance to fit their idea of dominance. and then there were the dominant men who told me i just hadn't found the right man to submit to. that no women were really dominant. that 'submission' was inherent in the feminine and femininity.

which, gotta be honest, rankled. b/c no, i was pretty clear i wasn't submissive and no, if i wanted to get into a relationship where a man told me how i was to behave and be and act, i'd tell them to fuck off and stay single.

i've never needed a man that badly to forego my sense of self.

but the relentless nature of all these men began to remind me of something else. the desire of the vanilla world to place women in their 'place'. in their 'box'. in their 'role' in society. and i've never wanted that and in fact, have gone against that my whole life. and often felt the pariah. the misfit. the one that didn't belong b/c i just didn't seem to want what i was supposed to want and didn't always do what i was supposed to do. i always seemed to take the other path. and found men who met my needs, along that path. which is probably what led me to kink in the first place.

but in kink, i can also see, the desire of men to steer me and mould me and make me what they want me to be and do what they want me to do. and that's not what i'm after.

as a dominant woman, i want to lead. i want power. i want control.

and not that there aren't perfectly lovely men who get that. but the overwhelming and very loud majority are no different than what i contend with in the vanilla world. only with more demands of me. of my time. my energy. my kink.

so why did i stay on fet for so long? at first, i wanted to give back for all the things in my journey of self discovery. but in the last year, i've really considered leaving. like all the other dommes before me who grew disillusioned with the kink world. the lack of the respect, the constant onslaught of fuck bois, and the relentless misconceptions about female dominants...i mean why bother? i could get the same lack of respect and understanding in the vanilla world. without the added requests of 'be my fetish dispenser'.

is it any wonder why dommes continue to leave?

it makes sense to me why they choose to hunt in vanilla world (i've had far more success finding submissive men in vanilla land than i have in kinkland). the lovely non demanding submissive men on fet either live far far away from me or more often than not, already have partners. and for good reason. they are very much in demand.

i suppose there are always a new crop of women like i once was, lured in by the chance of self discovery and excitement at understanding there are others like me. but eventually, i think the rose coloured glasses will fall off and they will vanish, too. we'll disappear into vanilla land and find our vanilla submissive men and keep our toes out of the 'community' and the 'scene' and just do our own thing.

after all, as dominant women, doing our own thing will never really fit into what the men want us to be...and that probably means we often don't find kinkland to be any more welcoming than vanilla land. imho.

Nov 28, 2020

edit: i left fetlife as of march 2021.