Rule #4: Treat malesub as an orientation, not as a doom nor as a fantasy game
12 Rules of Malesub Life: An Antidote to Being a Loser or a Pest (articles unlock every Sunday)
For who exactly I mean by malesub, see the Introduction.
My first high school girlfriend was abusive. When she wasn’t forcing handjobs on me — in ways that felt violating and controlling — she would lose her temper and kick me out of bed, or even punch me.
And I’d lie there on the floor weeping pathetically, but with a massive erection.
And I’d think, “This is me. A masochist. A pervert. I’m doomed.”
Because I didn’t know any better.
All I had was a dog-eared copy of All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask). The book painted sadomasochists as monsters and losers. Thankfully, the resulting shame prevented me from bringing up the subject of bondage games with the abusive girlfriend. However, it also made me think that maybe abuse was all I was suited for. Malesub was my doom.
If malesub was my all-encompassing doom, then I was powerless in relationships. Not just powerless to set boundaries, but also powerless to actually ask for kink, as it would be the approximate equivalent of asking to go skinny dipping in toxic waste.
Looking back, that seems like a miserable place to stand… or kneel.
This was, of course, pre-Internet and pre kinky revolution.
That’s my excuse. You, my friend, don’t have one… or at least won’t after reading the rest of Rule #3.
Then, just as I started university, I swung entirely the other way thanks to a book — yes, we’re still pre-Internet here — called The Joy of Sex. It treated kink as basically a fun couple activity, about playing out your fantasies.
In other words, malesub was a fantasy game.
OK, I thought, malesub needn’t define me. What I needed was “a nice normal girl” who’d play dominatrix for an evening.
“Malesub as fantasy game” turned out to be much healthier and happier than “malesub as doom”!
The snag was that it divorced kink from personality. Fetishes and fantasies were just random things you picked up from early experiences. (Maybe I shouldn’t have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? My middle name is Edmund…)
If that’s how things work, then you have to find a “nice girl” who already has a dominatrix fantasy. Good luck with that. Even nowadays, younger women with an interest in kink often assume maledom as the default. Back in the 80s and 90s, most of them didn’t actually know what kink was! I was lucky just to have Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman as a reference point.
So I wasted a lot of time — and confused a lot of girls — looking for anybody expressing anything like a femdom fantasy, e.g. the girl who joked about wanting to seduce a priest seemed to have potential…
I also tried the alternative strategy of introducing femdom to vanilla girlfriends. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to get them to tie me up, but impossible to make it sustainable. There was no good way of talking about what was in it for her.
Think about it from her point-of-view.
This was just my fantasy, which — no siree Bob! — certainly did not reflect on my personality. She, however, didn’t have that excuse. Either she was getting a kick out of being a bad person for real, which put her in a vulnerable position, or else she was cast in the role of facilitator — what we now call “kink vending machine”.
To make matters worse, this forced me to ignore the elephant in the room. I was attracted to what I saw as “assertive, liberated women” because they presented as dominant. This landed me with a disastrous double whammy. Girlfriends who were actually dominant, tended not to be very patient with my complex femdom demands. And, those girlfriends who only seemed dominant turned out in actuality to be just really needy, or broken, or dysfunctional in some way… leading me back to unhappy relationships in which my unaddressed malesub nature did indeed act like a doom!
Somehow, I ended up with Xena and our vanilla compatibilities were strong enough to sustain the relationship while I painfully evolved a far better approach: treating malesub as a sexual orientation, e.g. a modifier to gay, bi or straight (these Rules address straight malesubs).
Is malesub really an orientation? Yes, it’s where we point romantically and sexually. We prefer Eva Green to Gwyneth Paltrow, Marlene Dietrich to Marilyn Monroe, and if we have fantasies about any them, these ladies will be dominating us in some way. Femdom is our love language.
Malesub-as-orientation — necessary but not sufficient for happiness — makes everything easier!
Since it’s just an orientation, we don’t need to let it tug us to places we don’t want to go (and if we do, we have no excuse).
Since it’s nevertheless our actual orientation, we can navigate our attraction to dominant women with open eyes, looking for deep compatibility rather than grasping at any possibility of femdom.
And, when it comes to introducing or negotiating femdom, we can do so from a position of honest shared vulnerability: We’re both playing in the dark, and that’s OK (and hot).
All this is why you should treat malesub as an orientation, not as a doom nor as a fantasy game.
As always, please let me know what you think, so I can incorporate your feedback in the final book.
(See the other rules for malesub life.)
While you’re waiting for the next Rule, tale a look at my manifesto…
The Chaste Manifesto
I wrote the seven-point Chaste Manifesto as an open letter from Chastes to potential, and actual, Virgos. It’s basically how Xena, my very dominant Virgo wife, has taught me to live: You only see us caged, especially in the bedroom (“What penis?”) You don’t have to hear about our chastity (“Chastity is f…
Just after I hit Publish, I realised that I'd missed an important benefit of treating malesub as an orientation: it gives us a language for dealing with unreasonable demands along the lines of "If you were truly submissive you would..."
These can be boundary violations, "... be fine with being cuckolded."
They can also be violations of scope, i.e. going meta "...do as I ask and dominate me."
I really liked this one. I think the "it's JUST that" juxtaposed with "it IS that" makes a lot of sense, especially assuming your intended audience is young malesubs looking for long term traditional (not in gender roles, but in family structure: hetero, likely mono, likely producing offspring, thus likely aiming longer term - let's say 20+ years).
I do think that kinks (specific kinkosexual needs/fetishes) loom large in how people behave while questing for partners -- they are very important and perhaps more important than you give them credit for.