Confronting male entitlement through sex work

It could just be me, but I think that my opinions on feminist topics, on the patriarchy, bore my readers.  Oh well.  Strap yourself in.

A very dear Sex Worker friend of mine recently complained how tired she was of toxic male sexual energy.  I was astounded.  She’s a dominatrix.  My naïve brain assumed that a successful dominatrix would experience the opposite. That she would attract submissive clients, mostly men, but that they would be drawn to her in order to feel submission.

Apparently not.  Or at least not in the substance of it.  Perhaps self-styled submissives are mostly not so genuinely submissive at all.

Is this topping from the bottom?  What might that be?  Attempts by the sub, the bottom, to direct and control, either through overt or covert means.  This is reportedly quite common.  But there is something different here.

Is this being bratty?  It might actually be rather bratty in the substance of it, but when I think of bratting, I see it within the context of genuine submission.  In other words, the brat is still submissive, perhaps craving attention, craving punishment, but nonetheless, inviting the domme to take control.

It felt very alien to me when she described it.  I know a bit about her practice, as she has been a friend for quite a while, and though she doesn’t often talk about her work, over years one does learn.

This is not to sing my own praises.  I feel so deeply flawed and insecure at times, that it is hard to get out of bed.  And the choice I have made about my body, about myself, about changing my sex, has amplified that in many ways, amplified a thousand times, but also, for the first time in my life, given me the tools to heal myself.

I don’t know whether I am submissive or dominant.  In my vanilla life, I was never submissive.  A brat, yes.  Pushy, yes.  I was accused of being a narcissist by someone I had a profound respect for, and also by someone who I lost all respect for…two people I later felt were displaying narcissistic tendencies towards me.  At least that is how I felt it.

I don’t really care.  I spend too much time in therapy to be a narcissist.

But therapy hasn’t cured this feeling of inadequacy upon which the edifice of my life is constructed.  It is no mystery where this comes from.  The absence of the mother’s teat from my lips when I was born.  The sound of her heartbeat.  The rise and fall of the warmth of her chest.  Her bony embrace.  She too was a gangle of limbs, a ballerina giraffe.

It is rather astounding that something which can be reduced to such a small moment as that could have such a profound impact on a life.  But from the mother’s teat all things flow: life, nourishment, sense of self.

Is it possible that not being breastfed could leave a forever feeling of not being good enough?  Or at least, put a crack in the façade, which is not just our outward aspect, but the scaffolding upon which we erect our entire identity, our sense of self?

So, I’m not submissive.  Right?  I’ve never been submissive.  I just was rather fond of the outfits.  Of the dominant women.  Of course.  Queue laughter.

As a complete aside, it has taken me a few years as a former man, submissive, slave, trans creature to reach over 1,000 followers on Twitter.  And while I don’t wish to jinx my progress, it has taken me exactly 30 days to get to over 200 followers as a dominatrix.  And each day, it seems to go faster.  What gives?  Don’t worry, this is relevant.

My submission was clearly rooted in my sexuality, but it was never “sexual”.  Who am I kidding?  When I first began exploring, the things that I let myself do, the instructions I obeyed from various catfish, were positively cringe to me now.  I did enjoy it though.  Though I am not sure I really enjoyed tying a large bottle of mineral water to a rope and then tying the other end around my nuts and jumping up and down.  It wasn’t me.  I did it.  I didn’t complain.  It was good for me in the sense that I could see what I did or did not want, who I would want to submit to and why.

What am I getting at?  As I have become a dominatrix, I have begun to see the truth in the words of my dominatrix friend.  Male sexuality, even the submissive kind, is toxic.  Or at least, often is.

I never saw it before.  As a man, I was never in situations where it was a group setting and men were “expressing their needs” to a woman.  I had never witnessed this behaviour.  Of course I was aware of coarse language.  Lewd things men say about women.  And it is so different than the lewd things that women say of men.

I get flack for being an avowed Misandrist.  More now than I did when I was a male-bodied one.  Serious flack.  But I think of the difference between a misandrist and a misogynist…Misandry hurts men’s feelings.  Misogyny leads to the death of women.  They are not equivalent.  At all.

As a dyke, a Sapphic, woman-loving, Goddess worshipping woman, I had little experience to go with.  Suddenly, however, I find myself in the line of fire.  It started with play parties, and these have been mostly fine.  Men are less likely to be toxic in group settings, least of all in ones that are dedicated to female supremacy.  And for the professional sessions, I have had the benefit of being surrounded by a collection of really incredible ladies, women who have been doing this a long time, around men, who know how to handle them.  I don’t.

And it makes me realize that I was really never a man.  I mean, I was.  But I was also not.  I had a man’s body.  I wasn’t a woman trapped inside.  I think I was just a child in some ways.  I was always very naïve.  Part of me loves that, loves it more than anything.  But one can only be so naïve to survive, to thrive.

And by any objective measure, I did thrive.

A man was worshipping my feet the other day.  He was kissing my leather boots, licking them, but mostly rubbing his face on them.  They are really nice boots, fancy, with painfully high heels.  Painful for me.  And later, when I was trampling a man, painful for him too.  But this man who was supposedly “worshipping” my feet but was really just squeezing them in a totally shite way, was clearly bored, and was a bit insulting as well.  He wanted to make sure he “got his money’s worth.”  Not just from me, but from all the ladies present.  In the end, I sent him to get me a drink.  I thought ‘entitled ass’ and also that he should invest his energy in learning how to massage a foot.

Do you think I should have told him that he was a pathetic excuse for a foot fetishist?  That he was a pathetic little worm, worthless, useless, limp-dicked human that did not deserve to be in the room of any woman, let alone a roomful of Queens and Goddesses?  A few days later I bumped into him at another event and discovered that he had a humiliation kink, so I guess so.  The delicious irony was that out of 20 slaves who were put up for auction that night, he was the only one that nobody bid on.  Once you get a reputation for being a jerk, word gets out fast.

But honestly, if you are a foot fetishist, and you crave to serve a woman’s feet, then learn how to do it!  

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to a weekend of dominant women talking about various aspects of this world, and one domme had relayed how shit the male subs were at cleaning.  And she was saying, “why would I want to have to check up on you for such a simple task?”  I wrote about it, wondering why a man who had a service kink, a cleaning kink, a maid kink, could end up doing such a shit job…are men totally incompetent?  

How many married women say this of their husbands?  Doesn’t know how to clean, do the dishes, load the dishwasher, do anything around the house?

Where is that powerful male energy?  The kind that likes to please a woman?  The kind that has a mentality of right first time?  I don’t think of men as sloppy in their deeds.  Nor do I think of a genuinely submissive man as anything other than strong and profoundly competent.

We all know that men are also capable of amazing things, great art, great projects, glorious feats of athleticism, courage, are capable of being heroes.  Some are even capable of listening, holding space, and being able to love.  So, what gives?

And especially from a submissive man?  Shouldn’t they even be better at all these things?  If you are going to submit, then why not do it well?  Why not add real value?

My guess is that 99% of submissive men are not really submissive, they just want something that might be ostensibly submissive, but is really just some form of kink, a fetish.  I single out submissive men because half of my emerging practice is submissive women, and boy are they different.  I don’t get any of the drama.

My sessions with women are very, very different than those with men.  Yes, I have gotten over my refusal to spank or strike a woman, which has been an interesting journey…but the way I might “hit” a woman is very different than I might hit a man.  Women seem to like the feeling of being spanked insofar as it enters their mind.  The context is what matters, not the physical pain.  My women “clients” are almost always tied, and there is a mix of caressing, slapping, sensual touch, sensual noises, dirty talk.

I have been able to spank women because we have been able to find an equilibrium: they tell me exactly what they want.  They never let go of agency, even not in pretend.  They also ask.

My men, however, always tell me what they want.  And they are very insistent.  I played the other day with a series of men alongside several other dominatrixes and lifestyle dommes.  We passed the men around or they came to us.  There were some fabulous, sweet men there.  There were also some men who were new to “submission” but who were genuinely trying even if it came out wrong.  There is something you can see in intent that just means they need to learn.

But in the same mold of the loser man who couldn’t give a foot massage to save his life, a pretty poor showing for a middle-aged man who claimed to have been active in “the scene” and “foot obsessed” for several decades, there were other men who had really screwy ideas.  And what floored me is that these men describe themselves as submissive.

I overheard one man speaking to a domme colleague, opining on dommes who “drink their own Kool-Aid” too much and start to think they are better than men.  I get that letting the mask devour the face is a toxic syndrome which does affect a minority of dommes, or celebrities, or “important” people.  But we all know that the true measure of character is when someone keeps their humanity.  Keanu Reeves is an oft-cited example.

Anyway, my fellow domme was horrified by the way this man was presenting himself to her.  His sense of entitlement was profound.  Gents, being safe is not enough.  It also matters what kind of energy you put out.

I absolutely love the expression, “the oppressed cannot be the oppressor.”  The context for this was white male whingeing about how hard it is to be a white, hetero-normative, cis male.  That this was coming from a man who also has no personal knowledge of economic hardship is pretty tough to swallow.  And how many women out there sympathize with how tough things are for men these days?  Are we serious?

To be submissive is to learn.  It is to embrace your insignificance in the universe.  It is to honour those around you, to be a kind and gentle contributor to civil society.  It is also to acknowledge privilege, particular in a world which is lurching with great leaps and bounds to a society founded on justice for the few, the rich, the powerful.

Donald Trump won the last election not because the Dems lost, or because his policies were any good.  He won because he turned this social angst of being disenfranchised, the threat of losing privilege, into an axe to grind, to railing against the system, the establishment.  But the truth is that he is the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing, the ultimate flim-flam man.

And while I hope that his election represents the last gasp of the stale, male and pale power block, I fear that things will have to get much worse until they get better.

What are you willing to fight for?

As for me, I will be separating men from their privilege one at a time.  And I will be working with women to help them find their power, their voices, their will and hunger to resist.  Ditto for every BIPOC, LGBTQ+ or other marginalized person.  The defenseless and the weak need friends.