Erotica, porn and femdom.

I got a pingback off of one of my earlier posts from a blog called “Yes, Ma’am,” and being the blogging newbie I am, I was just happy to get mentioned somewhere. The always insightful Devastating Yet Inconsequential then cited one of today’s blogs, which made me twice as happy. It’s like I exist, suddenly. (I’m always hesitant to post on the more popular blogs I’ve got listed, like Dev’s site, or Eileen’s, or Maymay’s. I still haven’t found my sea legs yet, I suppose, and also, I wonder what the heck I have to offer. I feel like a seventh grader drinking with college kids.)

But the Yes, Ma’am blog got me to looking around the author’s site, and on the site — and I swear, I must be the densest person in the world for not realizing this — there’s actually links to femdom fiction the author’s edited. That I can buy. At Amazon. And, reading the previews it appears good enough to dive in and try…

And I am amazed by this mainly because I’m used to cruising the free erotica websites — Literotica, for instance — and while there are some exceptionally good stories there, in all of the teeming pages, I think I’ve found maybe two or three good femdom stories that hit my buttons. (One of them is a pegging story that hits my buttons and squicks me out at the same time, which is a feat for discussion another day.) The problem for me is that most of the free stories I seem to encounter with femdom have to do with cuckolding — which I have nothing against, but is a rarefied taste — and small penis humiliation. (Often, a racial element creeps in, which weirds me out a bit.) I don’t get any of that. I mean, it’s out there, and I respect it, but it’s not my scene, just as the pegging I love so much may not be a part of theirs.

All that’s fine — your kink is good, my kink is good — but it’s frustrating that I can rarely find really solid femdom stories that are written for me.

And I’m so used to cruising the free options that I never thought, “Hey, there’s material out there that might be good, but you’ve got to pay for it.” Because you know what? I’m willing to pay. And so I just did. I bought a couple of the books linked to off of “Yes, Ma’am,” and I’ll probably end up doing reviews as soon as I get them. I’m excited at the prospect of having decent femdom stories to read, since I face the prospect of two months without my wife ahead of me. (Based on Mistress160’s BDSM for Beginners recommendations, I had bought my wife Violet Blue’s “The Adventurous Couple’s Guide to Strap-On Sex,” and that had a handful of really good, if short, stories in it, but that’s the extent of our collection of femdom erotica.)

Why have I never looked at the erotica that costs money, despite the ease with which I can purchase it now on, say, Amazon? In a word: porn. Video porn. Maymay and Bitchy Jones have both complained about the lack of good video porn for their purposes, and I echo it, with my own twist — if I want to watch a decent femdom scene, I feel like I have to watch a girl/girl scene, because I femdom/malesub stuff is, to me, all wrong. And I assumed that erotica would suffer from the same failings as porn.

The women in the (admittedly limited) offering of video porn I’ve purchased with male subs and female dominants are all over-compensating. They go beyond stern, and get into the “mean” category. Maybe it’s because the confidence and cooly cruel acts I long to see are hard to show in the kind of context porn creates. Maybe it’s because the mainstream of male subs — which I may not belong to, for all I know — are used to a different ideal, perhaps one created by the whole pro-domme culture, and expect something different. What’s going on rings false to me — what I want are women who are strong and loving and when they want to be, immensely fucking cruel to men who want to serve them, and to take whatever they can give. I can’t point my finger on where the porn goes wrong, whether it’s the focus on the woman’s body rather than what she does to the man, or what, but it’s just not what I need it to be. There doesn’t seem to be any affection or pride in the domme for her slave as he takes the beating, or obeys. There’s no connection. No…romance? Hell, I don’t know.

And looking at the above paragraph, I can kind of see why femdom porn DVDs don’t give it to me — porno movies don’t give me love, they don’t give me romance, they’re about fucking. Why I should expect femdom movies to take me to this place where these women play with their husbands and lovers, and there’s a romantic element involved? That’s just as crazy as expecting to see romance in mainstream porn.

A lesbian friend once explained to me that she couldn’t find much porn out there for her. A buddy of ours, listening in, said, “I’ve got a hard-drive full of it.” And she said, “No, you have a straight guy’s idea of lesbian porn. I’m talking about porn for lesbians.” And I’m thinking now that may be the cause of the divide, for me: I feel like when I watch femdom porn that I’m watching something informed by what mainstream culture feels is femdom. The women are all kitted up in leather and vinyl, their hair is done, their makeup’s on. It’s very pro-dommey. And while I have nothing against pro-dommes, what I want to see are a husband and wife in bed. Or two people in an office somewhere. Or two people who meet cute and she just happens to break the hell out of his will. Two normal people, just having a wonderful time, with the man serving the woman and the woman dominating the man. I want cruel, I want force, I want pain, but I don’t want meanness or too much overcompensation.

The problems I have with femdom porn go equally for pegging porn. Pegging porn is either chock full of the kind of angry, unnecessary and cheesy cruelty of the worst femdom porn, or it’s natural women in natural situations, but the guys they’re doing it to are pretty obviously actors from gay porn not having a ball. There’s no middle ground.

So, there’s got to be some porn out there for me somewhere, but until I find it, I’m on my own. Here’s hoping the erotica pans out — I’ll let you all know.