Careful *who* you wish for

How Kinky Power Exchange becomes real #10

Photo by Patrick Schneider on Unsplash

“Are we done now?”

Xena doesn’t like meta discussions about our relationship, especially where she’s possibly in the wrong. In this case, she’s let the demerits build up, and I’m left feeling I’m doing all the chores without the excitement of the threat of the whip.

“Yes,” I say.

“OK, rub my feet. Put on your collar first.”

And she starts to read.

I obey my orders, and mutely rub her feet, and I’m puzzled. She has all the power in the relationship, and yet this kind of discussion seems to make her feel agitated and a little defensive.

I’m just not used to my very dominant wife being… fragile.

The weird thing is that her attitude is always to double down. She likes being in charge, doesn’t like any sense of obligation, and most of all doesn’t like to feel there’s anything to negotiate: yes, whatever, shut up and rub my feet.

These days, I get a similar response when I suggest I need to remove my chastity device, or suggest that when I do, I might have an orgasm.

What’s going on? How do I navigate this?

Mother Nature doesn’t care about your feelings…

We’re evolved to reproduce, not to be happy.

It’s also true that, whatever male-female relationship we have evolved for, this — in the developed world — isn’t it. Nor is the modern world anything like the one we evolved in.

It follows that modern humans aren’t very good at happiness in general and relationships in particular.

Worse, the issue isn’t that we’re bad at achieving our goals, it’s that our goals are often incompatible.

To be human is to carry around a bag of tensions. We crave hearth and home, but yearn for the far horizon. We want many friends, but not so many commitments. We need peace and quiet, and also the hubbub of the rock gig. We like to do our own thing. We fear missing out.

All this is baked into our mental architecture.

The Big Five Personality traits work independently of each other. It’s therefore possible to be, for example, both highly Extroverted and painfully Neurotic so you can enjoy an experience while finding it simultaneously terrifying. Meanwhile, with high Openness and low Agreeability, you can be simultaneously fascinated by people and not like them very much.

Add some neurodiversity to the mix, with maybe issues around sensory overload and difficulty reading situations, and it gets even more push-pull.

And that’s just humans in general human situations, including romantic relationships. There’s also challenges that are specific to romantic relationships.

(Paywall unlocks Sunday. In the meantime, read the rest of the series.)

Why long-term romantic relationships are hard…

At the top level, we have the messy business of “Attachment Styles”, the three…unhelpful ones being Anxious (clingy), Dismissive (standoffish) and Fearful (scared of intimacy). Though it’s common to attribute these to past traumas and upbringing, as I understand it, there’s some evidence that these are often hardwired and inherited. They’re certainly very difficult to shift. Essentially, if you are — say — something of a “cold fish”, then that’s probably not going to change.

Then we have the stuff that is from upbringing; unhelpful self-fulfilling lessons that the opposite sex will let you down, that all men/women are bastards/bitches. Or that you should placate and never say what you really think, that you should keep up a front. Toxic inheritance.

Finally sex. New relationship energy is reserved for new relationships. The honeymoon period is about two years. Our heart tends to be monogamous, our libido promiscuous. The trajectory of sex is towards penetration, but only 20% of women get off on it, and as women age, some of them they enjoy it less.

However, at times in our life — especially when young and wild — a Golden Window opens up and we transcend all this and fall in love and pair bond and it’s wonderful.

The relationships stays wonderful long enough that we’re thoroughly psychologically, emotionally and practically enmeshed by the time things get unaccountably challenging.

Except it’s not unaccountably challenging. It’s really clear that humans are good at falling in love, but not so good at being happy in relationships.

So far so scientific….

So far so scientific. I’ve not cited sources, but none of the above is particularly controversial beyond, maybe, you’re not supposed to say it out loud.

CAVEAT. What follows, however, is informed speculation about a category of straight dominant women, generalising from my distant dating history, my long marriage, conversations with other subs, and observing other marriages. Perhaps some of applies to lesbians, or to dominant men. Your mileage, as we used to say, may vary…

It’s important not to “other” dominant women — the shiniest latex dominatrix still has to pay her bills, enjoys watching soap operas in her pyjamas. However, this speculation relates to a category of dominant woman who does have a whiff of the other about her.

Deep breath.

Here we go.

The Virago

There’s a certain type of straight woman — and I think you’ll recognise her — who gives off alpha vibes, who pings your dommedar if you are a malesub, but who you rarely see in a long term stable relationship, and it’s clear that’s by choice. I’m going to borrow from my CARGO’verse and call her a Virago.

Since culture forces people down channels, the Virago mostly only becomes visible in early middle age. However, google tells me there are several of her in my pre-Xena dating history.

So, by her 40s, the Virago’s peers are all shacked up or given up, but she lives in splendid isolation. Her home — usually a flat — is just the way she likes it. She likes men enough to have a history of carefully curated temporary relationships, but not enough to have one underfoot. She is, as she will cheerfully tell you, “…just no good at living with somebody else and I’m too selfish for serious relationship.”

Maybe she’s a cat person. She never owns a dog.

Most importantly, she is well aware of all the built in challenges to long term relationships, but it’s not in her nature to like making the requisite compromises.

Viragos all seem to share a certain kind of personality.

In Big Five terms, she’s Extroverted and somewhat Open. She may be carrying some historic anger, but as a baseline, she’s low on Neuroticism. Taken together, this gives her that alpha vibe — she has a mesmerising certainty — and her serial monogamy. She’s not very Agreeable, but often has a high Conscientiousness, making her impatient with other people’s mess and fuss. She may have reasons to be distrustful or dismissive of men, whether to do with past family history, or escaping from a patriarchal sub culture. Her attachment style tends to the Avoidant.

So, she’s the aloof ice maiden with fire behind the frost.

You know her.

If you’re a malesub, you’ve probably had fantasies about her.

She’s Dietrich. She’s Eva Green. She’s Paris from the Gilmore Girls.

But what if, during that Golden Window we talked about, she got married?

The Married Virago

I don’t think a Virago usually knows she’s a Virago when she gets married. Partly it’s because we don’t have a name for her, but mostly it’s because we don’t really have a way of talking about her personality type in a way that’s validating. Most of her traits are framed as barriers to overcome: control freak… ice maiden… committment issues…

So, she either pairs off with an equally dominant “alpha” male, or else one who basically love bombs her into a long term committment.

The alpha-alpha pairing is probably doomed. Great fun when you’re young, perhaps. However, endless struggle stops being an aphrodisiac when you have other things like your career to worry about.

The love bomber, on the other hand, has staying power. Unfortunately, almost everything that helped him woo her and sustain the relationship for the first few years, is ultimately destined to irritate her!

It takes an Insecure attachment style to hang on long enough to overcome her Avoidant one. He has to be really Agreeable in order to weather her Disagreeability — he needs to be always emotionally available in order to catch the moments when she is. He’s probably not very Conscientious, because otherwise he’d notice all the little spiky imperfections to the relationship. He’s maybe also less career oriented than she, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to follow her around or support her.

So, much as she loves him — is pair bonded — and much as her life is enmeshed with his, over time she finds him needy, crowding, messy, and perhaps insufficiently ambitious. He’s still happily horny, but she’s increasingly fastidious and can’t set aside the irritations.

Basically, she’s a cat person by disposition, and she’s ended up married to a human Golden Retriever.

Usually, she’s order. He’s chaos. (Maybe there are variations. Sometimes, she's also chaos, but knows where her stuff is and can't stand his chaos. And sometimes he's order and she's chaos. If so, she might appreciate the order he brings, but not like the feeling of being infantilised.)

I think couples like this bump along indefinitely. Sometimes she feels like she’s the problem and maybe listens to Brene Brown podcasts on “vulnerability”. Sometimes he makes an effort to pull his socks up. Sometimes, he’s a vanilla submissive and she’s enlightened enough to appreciate him for that. And sometimes, they’re affluent enough that his mess can be confined to a man cave, and his hobbies give her a little space — “(Sigh) Boys and their toys!”

It’s doable.

However, I think it’s common for there to be a lot of dissatisfaction and irritation on both sides. The Virago ends up feeling cross and guilty, and maybe cross about feeling guilty… and cross about that too. Worse, she’s aware that she’s not good at being a “nice” wife. That’s frustrating because she usually excels at the things she does. It also makes her negotiating position in the relationship poor, which is irritating, since she likes to be in charge.

But what if the couple does Femdom?

The Femdom Virago

Paradoxically, I think it’s hard to get a Virago to do Femdom: “This is a lot of fuss… why should I do your thing… This is just some gross male porno fantasy…”

Whereas other kinds of potentially dominant women might enjoy the meta power of service topping, unless you’re in the haze of new relationship energy, the Virago is literally damned if she’s going to follow your script.

Probably the only way to do it and make it sustainable is to follow my advice to take vanilla things she already likes and unreasonably enhance them through kink. I’ve done this in more than one relationship, but screwed it up each time by not realising that was what I was doing: “Oh, great! She’s whipping me. Now she’ll also do [laundry list here]!” (Spoiler: She won’t.)

Last time I talked about “careful what you wish for”, and how if the femdom version is better, then it will tend — over time — to overwrite the vanilla part of the relationship. For example, if oral sex is better when you’re in slave mode, then it only happens when you are in slave mode.

That has to be true for Viragos, but at a deeper level. Whereas, normally, Femdom — as long as it’s actual Femdom and not scripted dervice domination — merely offers a woman a highly customised sensual experience, and maybe upgraded domesticity from her partner, for a Virago it offers liberation.

In each part of the relationship that gets Femdomised, she’s free from both the things that irritate her and from the nagging feelings of guilt and even insecurity around those feelings. She can basically be grumpy and selfish, and not only is that OK, it’s actually — according to her enthralled partner— a major turn on. If he’s truly, deeply, submissive, it will go great.

Oral sex with no finish for him? Awesome.

She wants the bed to herself, so he sleeps on the floor or in another room? Cool.

She whips him, masturbates, then ends the session? Exquisite!

She doesn’t like to feel a sense of obligation, so he remains locked in chastity throughout this? Wow.

There’s no way Femdom isn’t going to just take over the bedroom. The Virago is like somebody who grew up in the heteronormative 1950s and got married, only to discover that they were gay. Everything suddenly makes sense, and reverting makes no sense. And anyway, he’s not going to leave her for somebody nicer, because nicer doesn’t push his buttons.

Now extend that into a full Female Led Relationship.

Most of the relationship tensions are resolved in her favour. His mess is never underfoot, and nor is he when she doesn’t want him around. Her space is how she wants it, and she has all the space she wants. Love and affection are there on tap, as is intimate service as one-sided as she likes. And “on tap” implies that the stream can be turned off whenever it suits her, with no need to justify herself.

More than that, all her bugs are features. She doesn’t have to change, doesn’t have to feel guilty about not changing.

If a relationship can be validating, then the Virago is validated… not that she’s in a hurry to share this information — we’ll come to that.

Which takes me back to Xena.

Dominated by dominant fragility…

When thinking about what motivates dominant Viragos, you have to remember that there’s a whole culturally approved and maybe instinctively compelling Standard Vanilla Relationship on the lurk, looking for signs of weakness. The Virago knows she can’t go back to that or to being that person, and the resulting fragility seems to drive a fierce defensiveness around maintaining the dynamic.

I think this is why it’s hard to negotiate about the kink. She’s in charge, so why should she? If you push, then you’re making your submission conditional, threatening the whole dynamic. She can either let it crumble, or push back. Since she’s dominant by nature, she does push back and you — being a submissive — cave.

It’s particularly difficult to change the things that point to your dynamic, especially if the change would instead point to the Standard Vanilla Relationship model. In my case, asking to remove my chastity device and having an orgasm is the vanilla equivalent of saying, “I’m going to the pub. Mind if I leave my wedding ring behind?”

It’s not about a particular kinky activity, it’s about an existential threat and triggers an appropriate response.

I think.

And that’s the final thing.

It’s very near impossible to have honest “meta discussions” about the dynamic because for her to do so would be to confess a vulnerability and erode her negotiating position — which is why this is all informed speculation on my part.

Viragos just don’t talk about this stuff, and maybe one of the benefits of an FLR is not having to.

Negotiation — Yes, grudgingly.

Revealing conversations — Not so much.

Careful who you wish for…

Obviously, if you’re a malesub in a Female Led Relationship with the kind of woman I call a Virago, you’re basically stuck. Marriage — or equivalent — has entangled your lives. You love her anyway. As long as she’s not actually mad or bad, you’re a moth orbiting this glorious flame, so you might as well enjoy it.

That’s where I’m at. This is my life, and I go at it with the same gusto of an old time Christian hermit pursuing his vocation. He spent his life up a pillar chastely praying, I’ll spend mine in a different sort of worship, locked in chastity.

If that’s not the life you want, don’t court a Virago, don’t marry her, don’t introduce her to Femdom, and really, really, don’t even playfully float the idea of a Female Led Relationship.

Careful what you wish for. Careful who you wish for.

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I think that’s it for this series on how Femdom becomes real! Next week I’m going back to serialising my Femdom novels. While you’re waiting, check out the Viragos in action in my first CARGO ‘verse tale…

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