On Being a Female Submissive (and Doing What You Damn Well Please)

Like any high-powered executive, I have my needs. After another hard day at work as the CEO of Carol Queen World, an unincorporated melange of diverse subsidiaries, I often want to unwind.

If I were one of those highly paid jokers in a three-piece suit who sails through life in a cell-phone-equipped Jaguar, acting at the whim of an all-powerful board of directors, I might cruise down to the local domme house and handsomely pay some cute, latex-clad art students to walk all over me. Let go of some of that damned responsibility. But CQ World isn’t turning sufficient profit yet to allow me to be so profligate. Much as I’d like to support the local sex industry, I usually can’t afford to drop the C-notes.

Luckily, I have what most of those Straight White Guys don’t: someone waiting at home to cater to my every pleasure. And I do mean every. After all, the foundation of the sex industry is the SWGs’ home lives, bereft of every manifestation of kinkiness. But that’s not true at my house: My beloved wife and I have eyebolts in the walls and a heavy toybag full of dildos, nipple clamps and Heartwood whips. And my wife didn’t even have to read Lady Green’s book about female dominance—well, for one thing, he’s not a female. I am, though, and I know what I want to do when I get home—get tied down to the four-poster bed, get spanked and finger-fucked and called salacious, rude names—isn’t supposed to go with my status as a glass-ceiling-breaking female executive, nor with my feminist politics.

Well, fuck that. This woman knows what she likes, and what she likes is sexual submission. The feminist community would rather not grasp that some of the lady CEOs in their midst are just like some of the guys: wanting to give it up when they get home from the office. And I think that’s substantially more feminist than not knowing what you like at all or trying to suppress the scary fantasies that sneak in to fuck with your politically correct self-image. True, I went through a difficult period of guilt about these desires, not because they were kinky, but because they were unfeminist. Being dominated by a woman was one thing—that was just a controversial variant of lesbian sex—but when my partner was a man, the transformation I’d hoped for—my getting on top and showing him who was boss—didn’t happen at all. If anything, I was more excited by submission to a man (not just any man, mind you; don’t bother forming a line). Submission to a man was really perverse.

Struggling with this political question, I learned indubitably that politics don’t make a cunt wet. Sexual submission never meant that I wanted to be nonsexually submissive. A fine executive I’d make then! What I want in bed is different from what I want out of bed. No, I take that back. It’s exactly the same—it’s what I want. Just like the businessmen who keep my pro domme friends in business, my desire to bottom is about my own pleasure. I know that in emphasizing the pleasure the bottom gets, I’m giving short shrift to that enjoyed by the top. Well, too damned bad; I’m not one of those old-school D/S practitioners who thinks the top runs the show and the bottom has to find a way to eroticize what the top wants, no matter what pesky or heinous new ideas Sir or Madam has had today. With a dominant who complements me and my desires, the chemistry of our bodies, our actions and the roles we take on meshes gloriously into the kind of sexual feelings porn and romance novels (in their differently gendered and proto-kinky ways) only hint at, and in our top and bottom modes we end up, oddly enough, as equals in pleasure. When the chemistry isn’t right, why bother?

The kink community in its infinite collective wisdom has developed certain customs that, if we allow ourselves to practice and learn from them, boost our chances of finding a perfect chemistry. What do you think negotiation is all about, besides telling your top that you have contact lenses in and an asthma inhaler in your purse? It’s an opportunity to do what nothing else in our society encourages us to do: be completely open and honest about what turns us on, what we want. The difficulty is in seeing yourself as entitled to have what you’re negotiating to get.

Sexual submission, because it is my deepest (and my erstwhile most guilty) pleasure, has actually reinforced my strength and my self-esteem in two ways: First, I’ve struggled through the challenge of learning to negotiate with my pleasure as the paramount goal, which is very feminist, actually, although I know the girls down at Women Against Practically Everything don’t see it that way. (What, one wonders, do they negotiate for?) Second, erotic joy, orgasm and fulfilled fantasies make us stronger in ourselves, not weaker; however those desires are shaped, getting what we want sexually helps us move towards what Maslow termed self-actualization.

I’m pretty sure I’d never have evolved into the CEO of my own life without the ego-enhancing effects of mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting sex. Before I could count on living my erotic fantasies, I didn’t perceive myself as someone who could do as she damned well pleased. But now?

Get out the cuffs, honey. I’m home!