Is it ethical to exploit a malesub's kink?

Kicking off a series about how, when and why it's basically OK to treat a malesub as a slave if that's what you want.

Two women trying on clothes drinking gin and tonic

“Here’s BFF’s glass, here’s mine. Put three ice cubes in each glass, then a large measure of gin, then half a can of tonic water. Got that?”

My wife forgets to say please.

I remember not to say yes, mistress in front of her friend, so we’re good.

Xena and her BFF — both formidable 50-something senior professionals — are camped out in our bedroom going through Xena’s wardrobe like a pair of teenage girls; my wife trying on outfits, BFF suggesting new combos or condemning old garments from the comfort of the basket chair. It’s a cosy unguarded very female moment where I don’t belong — Barbie World, executive edition.

I return with the drinks, and somehow BFF is delighted but forgets to say thank you. They return to their conversation before I’ve even turned to leave the room. I go back to cleaning the kitchen and processing the laundry, and check in with them an hour later to provide more drinks.

No, we don’t alas live in the CARGO’verse. BFF doesn’t know about the permanent chastity cage, nor the female led relationship, nor the whips and chains in the bag under the bed a just few inches from her stockinged feet. (Nor — before you ask — do she and Xena have a Sapphic thing going on.)

However, there’s something about me that invites certain sorts of women to treat me as a servant, even though I present as typically manly, am not remotely “lost”, and don’t fawn or “simp”. It even causes confusion when I decline to be bossed around (because being “owned” by Xena protects me from such things).

So BFF, who is always friendly, but not really interested in me as a person, takes her cue from Xena and also treats me as a servant, not for effect or as a tease, but just because it suits her…

And that makes me happy.

It’s like the time when I brought Xena a latte during a work video call and a female colleague joked that I was well-trained.

It’s not a turn on, but rather it’s deeply validating.

I sometimes imagine; what if BFF did know about the FLR and the kink and was OK with it? Maybe she and Xena could rent a holiday home and I’d spend a week wearing my collar being their actual servant, without anything sexy going on? They’d have a relaxed, pampered break, and I would feel fulfilled. Win, win.

At bedtime, Xena wants a long massage without talking, so has me put on my collar.

Sometimes, she beats me for kicks and catharsis, or to genuinely punish me for low domestic standards. Sometimes there’s oral sex… for her. And sometimes she makes me sleep in my cell — which happens when she feels like the bed to herself.

Tonight, she just wants to fall asleep next to her loving husband, so she does.

I doze for a while feeling a little sexually frustrated, but there’s nothing I can do about it — she keeps me locked in chastity, partly because it pings her sadism, but mostly because she’s gone off intercourse, and the idea of me masturbating for some reason now gives her the ick.

So, the baseline is, I’m Xena’s husband. We have fun together in the usual middle class ways; outdoor stuff, socialising, travel, museums… and cosy times cuddled up watching TV or reading.

However, when she’s getting things done or wants something, my wife automatically switches to treating me as a servant.

When she’s feeling self-contained or peopled out, or sadistic, she treats me as a slave.

Xena also takes for granted that our relationship centres her. She’s the real breadwinner, so it makes sense that I do most of the chores to support her. However, if the genders were flipped, there’d be something vaguely offensive about just assuming I’d serve drinks and snacks on demand.

That’s tradwife stuff!

“Tradwife stuff”

She also tends to simply declare her weekend plans rather than consult me.

None of it’s “play”. None of it is intended to curate a kinky experience for me.

Xena does whatever suits her, and I find that deeply satisfying. It feels like an achievement to be in this place.

I’m also completely vulnerable to her pushing me further down my slippery slope if she decides to. She has a history of doing this. Chastity started as a sexy couple game, with permanent chastity as a scary fantasy. Domestic service started as a way to generate excuses for a whipping. Female led relationship started as very ringfenced and subject to monthly renewal.

Where else could she push me?

If we had a better cell, I think I would spend more time sleeping in it — especially when I snored — and that would probably lead to me spending more time in slave mode, and I could probably stay comfortably immersed like that for months. There are also all sorts of hypothetical things that are not going to happen, but that I couldn’t say no to — the kind of thing I write about in my erotic novels.

It’s just who I am.

Part of me would love to play time travel tourist to Ancient Rome and spend a time as the… ahem… body slave of a Roman domina… subject to certain safeguards of course. I might be there by choice, but the Roman mistress would take it totally for granted that she could exploit me to suit herself and that would be wonderful… for a few weeks or months.

Which leads us to the ethical problem for dommes.

Even though we never reach it, relationships like ours circle towards something that emulates a slice of historical domestic slavery — especially the more familial kind you see in the Old Testament or Medieval Iceland — and slavery is one of those institutions we can all agree is evil.

Worse, if you took away the kinky context and flipped the genders, the optics would be… appalling.

My consent doesn’t magically make this OK. Kinky power exchange has a way of becoming functionally real. It’s also the nature of masochism to want things we don’t like, and knowing that creates a sort of runaway feedback loop I call squirm, which makes it very hard to resist anything as long as we don’t get nudged off the slippery slope. Drug addicts consent to their next fix, but that doesn’t make it moral to supply them.

The fact we love each other isn’t an out, either. There are plenty of truly awful relationships where each party thinks they love the other. It’s also true that I would probably do most of this without the love and unclear how much of my affection for Xena is of the nature of a Roman slave’s for his beloved owner, and how much this matters.

Nor is it any good saying that all this makes me happy. Sometimes, it actually makes me unhappy, sleeping on a thin camping mattress craving my soft bed and lovely wife. And the pain, when it comes, is real pain. And you could kidnap somebody and apply electrodes to the brain to make them experience “happiness” and that would still be wrong.

How do you square the circle?

I don’t think Xena bothers. She seems to take my submission at face value. Certainly, she enjoys being her authentic whole self, and likes it that I love all of her, even the nasty selfish parts. My “enslavement” is her liberation.

Unfortunately, to put it mildly, many dominant women seem to have more difficulty with this topic. That’s why this series is going to explore the ethics of lifestyle femdom. Maybe it will be useful for wannabe malesubs and dommes with qualms…

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