Where is my PVC and leather boots?

When I dreamt of BDSM, after I admitted to myself that, “Yes, Virginia, I am a sexual submissive and crave domination,” I had a lot of images about what a relationship would look like. Or more properly, I had a lot of images about what the trappings of the relationship would look like.

I didn’t know who that relationship would be with — because if it wasn’t going to be with my wife, I don’t know who it would have been with. I wasn’t about to cheat on her, and contrary to some people’s opinions, I was honest enough to admit that seeing a professional would have been cheating. It would have been sex. And I certainly didn’t think my wife was going to be open to the idea of BDSM — sweet, kind, Mary Poppins-loving housefraus do not just decide that they’re dominants. (Thank God I was wrong there, right?)

But the relationship had a certain color and shape in my mind. There were certain trappings. The title of this blog comes from one of them: boots. I have a big boot fetish. Leather boots, brown or black, zippers or laces, shin-high or knee-high or thigh-high, it doesn’t matter. I knew that if I was going to be dominated, my Mistress was going to wear boots. I mean, even my vanilla wife used to put on a pair of boots to rev me up, so there’s no doubt that my Mistress — if I ever found one or had the opportunity to be dominated — was going to wear some leather boots.

For the record, I haven’t seen a pair of boots on my wife since our second scene. When she was trying to please me and not worried about her pleasure so much, she popped on the boots despite the fact that she loathed them. She doesn’t like them at all — she feels like she’s going to topple over while pegging me in them, and she prefers her foot worship to involve her feet, not some sexy second layer of dead animal flesh. The boot fetish is about me, and domination is about her: so guess whose preferences take precedence? Not the sub’s, baby. When she became my domme, the boots that she so readily wore before went right back into the shoebox.

Corsets. Merrywidows. Garter belts. Leather and lace and vinyl. So sexy. These items of clothing are part and parcel with the image of the domme in popular culture. I knew that if I was ever dominated, my Mistress was going to be kitted up in sexy fetish wear. I was going to touch it and lick it and worship it, and she was going to make me come on it and then force me to lap up my mess. That’s the outfit, and that’s what dominant women do, right?

Um, not really. My wife has worn one corset for me a couple times, and for my birthday took pictures of herself in another, but she finds them constricting and hot and really, this is about her, right? So why is she bound up and miserable while I’m the one supposed to be suffering for her? My wife’s willing to play dress up, but she restricts herself to a plaid Catholic school girl skirt and a plain white blouse and some knee-highs, and I think she does it less because I used to think slutty Catholic girls were hot, and more because she can get in and out of it in about two-minutes flat, and the fabric breathes easily.

Pale skin, heavy makeup, piercings, and fetish-model looks. That’s what I envisioned, but it’s not on the list either. When we switched a couple of months back, she dyed her hair red at my behest — a nice, rich, red, not too crazy. It brought out her insanely blue-green eyes, and along with the makeover I arranged for her in order to upgrade her business attire, made her look super-hot, so she kept it. But my wife doesn’t look like any of the models on Kink.com or any of the girls on Suicide Girls. She looks like a soccer-mom who’s relaxing after a long day at work, albeit by beating the shit out of her husband with a flogger. “I shouldn’t have to put on makeup to hit you with a switch, dear,” she says, and again, we slide back to the truth of it all: I’m the sub. It’s about what she wants to do, and if she doesn’t want to wear pancake makeup so she can look like a 20-year old fetish model, if she just wants to look naturally beautiful the way she does, without any airbrushing — so to speak — I should suck it up.

Notice a trend here? These are all things I expected out of my domme. These are all expectations and requirements I had about the woman who was supposed to be my master. I created this image, and what this image was, was basically more appropriate for a male dominant dressing up his sub than for a submissive male expecting to serve and worship. And that’s not how it works. Maybe if I got a pro-domme and paid her some cash to dress up to fit my fantasies, I’d be looking at some pale beauty in PVC and boots.

That’s not how it works with me at home. So all of the decision-making rests with the wife. And if her image of what a domme should look like is naked with a pair of socks on in the winter to keep her feet warm, well, then, that’s what I get.

And it’s okay — I’m not complaining. Naked and no boots or makeup gave me the best orgasm of my life a week ago, and so it’s not like I’m going to complain. But it’s interesting how the reality differs so drastically from the idolized dream.