Femdom as relationship patch

How Femdom and Female Led Relationships can work as a patch, but not always and how to know...

Femdom saved our marriage.

New relationship energy had long gone, the stress of life and work had caught up.

We had a dead bedroom, and I’d chased the kink so hard that even that had run away.

Then, one evening, Xena came back from a girls night out and I was waiting in bed in my chastity belt — a homemade thing of webbing and modelling materials — and my pitch was basically “how about we do stuff but I stay locked?”

The bedroom on Xena’s terms just worked. My wife always liked what my friend

SkinShallow

calls “running the fuck”, but it turned out to be less about getting things she wanted as avoiding things she didn’t.

Sex therapists like Emily Nagoski (she’s on Substack, but I won’t tag her - a different world) talk about sexual Brakes and Accelerators. You can hit the Accelerator with all the turn-ons you like, but it won’t help if the Brakes are on.

In Xena’s case, the Brakes were around boundaries and sensitivities and not liking to feel she had to respond to any pressure, even my enthusiasm. And she was mostly off penetrative sex.

“Giles wears a chastity device, Xena is in charge” pretty much fixed our dead bedroom.

It helped that my wife has a strong sadistic streak once she had permission to indulge it with no consequences or implied sexual obligations: “You beat me, then we shag” turned out to have been a losing formula.

Then there was the relationship stuff. The same traits that enabled me to woo Xena — boundless enthusiasm, lack of attention to the annoying little things — made me a difficult person for her to be married to. Xena needs space and tranquillity and tidiness. Needless to say, our Attachment styles are probably mild versions of Insecure (me) and Avoidant (her).

Adopting a Female Led Relationship fixed all that. Xena can tell me what to do, no matter how unreasonable. She can set the domestic standards, no matter how nitpicky. If I, or the world, irritate her, she can take it out on me, or consign me to my cell and have peace.

And here we are something like fifteen years later, me in my fifth year of permanent chastity, and Xena cheerfully enjoying control over her relationship.

How our Female Led Relationship works

The dynamic works structurally because the baseline is “she exploits my kink to get what she wants and to veto what she doesn’t”.

It’s not a bargain, trading kink for unreasonable benefits. Rather, without the kink, giving her those benefits would be “ego dystonic”. For example, Giles would feel hurt and sad sleeping in a separate bed from his wife, but Slave Giles accepts his cell and finds some satisfaction in the affirmation of his status.

So we have a functionally real power relationship expressed through kink that makes sense: slave collar and cell, actual discipline, chastity device, plus some tailored protocol.

Xena mostly just finds all this convenient. There’s no expectation that she will get a kinky thrill from ordering me about, though sometimes I detect a delightful amused cynicism.

Day-to-day, my chastity device is to remind me of my place, to keep me from masturbating, and to remove any implied pressure to have sex, and the discipline is just discipline.

However, when she’s in the mood, the kink is there waiting for her to invoke. My extended chastity pings her sadism and she has whips and chains to hand, and away we go…

Is it healthy?

Our Female Led Relationship feels right, but is it healthy?

Dodging any deeper philosophical questions, Femdom and FLR has given us nearly fifteen years of marital contentment. We have full lives and the R part of FLR is stronger than ever.

There are also psychological benefits.

Xena’s experience of routinely being heard and obeyed at home seems to have improved her confidence out in the professional world. Her sense of owning me, of her bugs being features, seems to make her more secure in general.

Meanwhile, my sense of being “owned” has mostly deleted my tendency to anxiety and mild depression, along with some ADHD-adjacent behaviours. Open-ended chastity has probably helped with this, something I could not have imposed on myself.

So for us this works.

How about for other people?

Can you tell whether a Female Led Relationship would improve your relationship?

As Reddit will tell you, kink isn’t a substitute for therapy, and power exchange relationships can spiral into some badly dysfunctional co-dependent private hells. Even if there’s no spiral, mismatched needs and expectations can bend one or both parties out of shape.

FLR probably only works as a patch for people who are functioning adults but have specific difficulties, especially around relationships. It isn’t going to work on any issue that requires a psychiatrist or a social worker, or on a damaged relationship where trust has gone.

A good way to frame this is that entering an FLR is like moving to a different culture.

It doesn’t change people — not immediately — but maybe they thrive better in the new environment. This is the kinky version of the Netflix trope of our hero finds happiness in the slower paced lifestyle of rural Italy.

The point is that you can’t expect anything more than a new culture. Rural Italy might reduce your stress levels, but it won’t fix your OCD and it might be disastrous for your alcoholism.

And, just as it would be unrealistic to expect that a wise old Italian grandmother will take you under her wing and sort you out, it would also be foolish to expect either party in an FLR to suddenly acquire the wisdom to fix themselves. Or the other person.

Yes, maybe things work better in a (very localised) culture where she gets her own way, and he follows orders, but you’re still the same people.

Which leads me to final test: a sobering thought experiment.

If it were real, she wouldn’t acquire a slave she needed to fix, nor feel obligated to respond to his demands, nor feel she had to keep him if he became troublesome. And he couldn’t rein her in, nor get her to do things for him, nor risk being too much trouble.

So ask yourself, would I keep him as my real slave? Would I pick her as my real owner?

Which is maybe what my CARGO stories are really about.