How does femdom work?

September 17, 2020 29 Comments

Someone asked a question that was essentially ‘how does femdom work’ in one of the forums I frequent, or more specifically they were asking how do femdom relationships work, and I thought I’d share an embellished version of my answer here.

“How does your F/m relationship work? Does your sub have to be a docile mouse all the time?”

I’m single at the moment, but when I have a submissive, he is my romantic, monogamous, long-term partner. He’s the love of my life, my sweetheart, my best friend, and my submissive. I choose men who are smart, opinionated, thoughtful types, and no, he doesn’t suddenly turn into a ‘docile mouse’ because I’m the dominant.

How it works in broad strokes:

We agree that I’m in charge and talk (a lot) about how we see that working so there are few(er) surprises. I’m a big picture person and utterly uninterested in details, so I do well with a submissive to whom I can say ‘here’s the outcome I want’, and let him have at it however he pleases (this approach works well for sex also, to be honest: “I want two orgasms, make it happen, boy!” :)).

We carve out areas that either I’m not interested in or that he doesn’t want me sticking my fingers into (work, friends, and family are common ones, but could also be finances, big life decisions etc) and I don’t touch those. If I have opinions about things that are outside of our D/s agreement, we discuss them like any vanilla couples and come to some agreement or compromise together.

There are also a ton of things I might theoretically be in charge of but I don’t give a shit about them, so have no interest in making any decisions about those things even if I can if I want. A sort of ‘I can, I have the authority, but I’m not going to because it’s not fun or hot or interesting to me’ (except maybe this one time when I will, because I feel like it :P).

There is a school of thought that somehow by ‘being the dom’ I’m suddenly imbibed with special wisdom and am magically better at everything than my submissive and therefore it’s somehow my role to ‘make him a better person’ with my Oracle-like knowledge of the universe or something and he should sit and learn from me.

As a kink, that’s cool: The helpless know-nothing naïf gets schooled in life by the experienced mistress. I’m here for it.

In my romantic D/s relationships, though, that’s not a thing. I choose partners who are fully-actualised, capable, and functional adult men who already have their shit together. They are better/smarter/more experienced/skilled/successful than me at many many things. This is an absolute delight for me, and my handling of that is to take advantage of those skills and put them to use for me. His abilities are laid at my feet for me to use as I wish: That is part of his submission, and it’s an absolute gift.

In day to day life, we look relatively ‘normal’. I enjoy some rituals that will become sweet habits between us, but in the normal living of our daily lives, our dynamic is like a sleeping dragon: We both know it’s there, but until I wake it, it rests peacefully with the occasional fire-breathing roar.

If I’m wrong about something (and I will be, many times), I expect him to tell me so (politely, he will learn how to do this in a way I like). Well unless it’s something really trivial, then he can shush and suck it up, and he will learn the difference between those two types of wrongness :). If I’m about to cause harm (to him, to me, to our relationship) and I truly haven’t seen the problem and his telling me is somehow not registering with me, he has my full permission to do whatever he needs to do to stop me.

In the vast majority of our relationship, I get my way as the default, he defers to me as the default. He trusts me to ask for his input and listen and consider his perspective (he must, or he wouldn’t be with me in the kind of relationship we have together), but if I disagree with him, we do what I say.

Having said that, I always try to make decisions that are mindful of what I know about him, his preferences, his barriers, his difficulties, his mood at any given time etc. And if it’s anything important, we will always discuss it. I may make the final decision, but I’d wager that many of those discussions and outcomes would seem very vanilla from outside.

An important and inherent part of my D/s relationship is this: We’re in this together, building this life, this relationship, together. It’s not ‘me making him do the things’ (me vs him). It’s ‘us choosing this, and agreeing to and honouring our D/s agreements with love and integrity’ (us against the world).

After all of that sounding perhaps very one-sided, I’m not a selfish jerkface. I’m sensitive and attuned to my partner, and I want him to be utterly delighted in our relationship. Sometimes he won’t be, and that’s okay, that’s life. But overall, I want him to thank the gods every day that he’s the lucky man who gets to be with me, to be eager and excited to jump (how high?) to do his best for me, to glory in making me happy in our D/s dynamic, to buzz and bounce in his submission, and to have a mouth that is sore from smiling and kissing.