Letters From Blog Readers

I am a young woman who is new to seattle, and fairly new to kink in general and am curious about involving myself in the kink community around the area. any tips for a beginner? My long term partner and I have toyed with flogging, hot wax and other fun things, but i would like to bottom someone, if simply for the experience, and to learn technique, (and maybe to indulge my masochistic side.) I know that you do not run a dating service, nor do you see women professionally, I am simply seeking some of your wisdom!

My advice is: join the Wet Spot. It's the most reliable entry point into the local BDSM community, and it's a safe, well-run, and relatively non-threatening atmosphere. My lover Max is teaching a "Bondage For Sex" class on Sunday, May 1st, and that might be an excellent opportunity for ya'll to come scope out the place. (Membership is required for most WS events, but not for Max's class.)

In your professional opinion (Christ, now she’ll probably charge me!), just how prevalent is the submissive male in our culture? And what if anything do you think the phenomenon says about our society? Susie Bright has said that she sees a definite trend in the number of porn manuscripts that cross her desk containing submissive male themes and that this must be emblematic of deeper fault lines in our culture. I find Elise Sutton’s stuff interesting, but I don’t buy her thesis that a female-dominant society would fundamentally change the world. After all, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher weren’t exactly paragons of peaceful but firm maternal leaders!

The really submissive male? Not terribly prevalent. Of course, I don’t think there are that many genuinely submissives females, either. I think there are a lot of people of both genders who have sexual fantasies involving dominance and submission. But only within the confines of what they find erotic, and only to the degree they want it. Bedroom submissives, we sometimes say.

There's not a damn thing wrong with that, you understand. I myself do not identify as submissive at all, but do I like to get tied up while I have sex sometimes? Hell yes, that's fun. And as a dominant, I've done intense D/s scenes lasting as long as a weekend.
But people who want and can happily sustain the "total power exchange" thing, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week? Quite rare. I've only met a few. (And I've met a lot of kinky people.) I think the number of men interested in kink is simply about a) it being more accessible than it used to be and b) men generally pursuing their sexual fantasies more aggressively than women.

Re: female dominant societies - I agree with you; Ms. Sutton's perspective is interesting, but I don't support the idea that women are fundamentally superior to men, morally or in any other way. Power corrupts, and I don't think that women are any more immune to the temptations of mass political power than men.

Generally speaking, what she does really isn't my style, anyway. I like taking people on an intense trip, but I think part of the fun for me is taking them out of a "normal" headspace and into a submissive one. If they just lived there all the time, I think I'd get bored pretty quickly. No challenge.


An amusing final note: Don't you hate it when this happens during your kidnapping scenes? Of course, only in Holland would they be cool enough not to arrest the people on some obscure charge of "disturbing the public morals" or something…