Domming The Patriarchy
Time is an ex boyfriend, showing up just when you feel like you’ve truly moved on, to tug at your sleeve, to caress your thigh, tempt you into going backward. She’s a circle, a pattern, full of signs. She DOES repeat herself—I’ve seen this movie before! This is a story beginning in 2016, though it could be then, now, four years into our future, or hundreds of years prior. The characters are all the same but this time I swear I’m different.
This time I’m sitting at a fancy table with a new man and his racist aunt, her rich new husband, telling me a woman in a state that doesn’t allow abortion “should move.”
Time is a cocky asshole, jokes on you, boo. Probably didn’t think things could get worse but they do. I’d like to bring my fetish wear to the family dinner, feed that ancient white man my rubber cock for dessert. See if he still thinks a woman isn’t “capable” of “being in charge” when my heel is on his throat.
When this old white man says he thinks we need a strong masculine presence in the White House so that other countries “respect and fear us,” I think I could teach him a thing or two about respect and fear on his knees—he doesn’t know that I’m the scariest bitch he’s ever met.
2016
Trump is campaigning for President and survivors of sexual assault, which to be honest, most of us are in some shape or form, are being dragged daily through retraumatization at the hands of a clown and his media circus. We don’t for a moment think he could win vs Hillary, and the fact that he’s up against a woman feels like a cute trick of the universe. Obama told us there was “hope” and here we were, hoping so hard that we were about to have our first woman president. As if that might change something. As if having a Black president did. The night of the election I shave my pussy and don a pink retro blazer in a nod to another tragic political icon, go out to meet my friends and the French man who’s in town. We’ve already fucked, so it’s implied we will again. The night starts with full hearts, smug smiles. Then the tide turns and it’s drunken denial, confusion. I know things are bad when the French man and his friend take turns caressing my body in the bar, whispering in my ear in low French accents that I should join them back at their hotel for my dream MFM and… I can’t. I tell them to leave and stay at the bar way too long. Around 3am I’m bereft and me and my smooth pussy go home and ugly cry on the phone to my mom.
Another domino in a winding eternal snaking line falls. As we watch a terrible man whose misogyny we’ve witnessed on the famous tv clip over and over grab us by the collective pussy, the Me Too movement unfurls, which is great and long overdue, but adds a layer of sludge for survivors to get dragged through—the mud of memories and experiences we’ve tried our whole lives to forget. Everyone has a story and we listen, rapt, horrified and unsurprised. I know I love dick but I start having a really hard time loving the men attached to it as I’m no longer able to ignore what I know. The man I’m dating is a feminist, he’s intelligent and kind to me but he’s admitted his ex-girlfriend has a restraining order against him, due to some violence, a misunderstanding. He got fired from the place they worked together and after a brief freelancing segue, landed an excellent, even better, well paying full time job. I love this man and I hate him so much, too. I hate myself for loving him.
I look his ex-girlfriend up on the company website where they worked. “She’s really pretty,” says my roommate at the time, unwittingly entering me into a silent contest with a competitor who has already won the race. But we should be on the same side! Her trash is now my treasure, and so when this man I’m dating one night drunkenly offers me his ass, my world turns upside down. There’s something about seeing him on all fours, waving his ass around like a flag. He tells me he wants me to dom him, and I see a pathway to channel my anger towards men by wielding a whip and shiny leather. His ass is waving like a white flag saying, you may not be able to conquer the world, but you can conquer this hole. You might have to deal with terrible men everyday of your life, but you can be a terror to my prostate and make me moan like the babygirl I am.
My introduction to domming is cobbled together from a few different websites I surf incognito, and my friend who has recently started chatting online with submissive men. She’s desperate to embody femdom to the point where she’s made this desire her whole personality. We go to diners and sit in fluorescent light discussing Aziz Ansari, and recall all the times we’ve been coerced into bad sex or worse. We go to Purple Passion and discuss the colors of dildos and what they represent, thinking VERY hard about our domme identities.
My boyfriend has handed over his credit card with a lingerie allowance after I’ve explained to him I need costumes to play this role. As I purchase Pleasers and get laced up in a shiny patent leather corset by a wonderful German woman, I snap photos and put them on FetLife, accidentally acquiring new subs in the process. One says he’ll clean my whole apartment to simply share air with me. Another begs me to send him my boyfriend’s cum in a condom to drink…all the way to the UK. I imagine him reheating our used condom and laugh, we don’t even use condoms! Roe V Wade is still intact…at this point.
I buy a paddle made of incredibly heavy rubber, and go back to my boyfriend’s place to leave my little red mark on the big bad patriarchy.
The first time I bring out the paddle I’m drunk. Tell him I have a surprise, and use my foot to guide him to his knees. “Close your eyes,” I say. “Bend over,” I tell him. I watch his hopeful helpless self with his soft smile and closed eyes, waiting to get hurt by me. I fetch the heavy paddle from my tote bag and begin to whack, making him count out the thuds. As I watch in the closet mirror, my bicep twitching each time I raise the paddle, my tits jiggling with the reverb, I let the feeling of power fill me up like a cock. I like the way I look wrapped in stockings and PVC. I’ve always adored a femme fatale and the pop culture image of a powerful woman. And now, I own a fitting wardrobe.
One day, as I hover over him, slowly sliding up and down on him, my tits smothering his face, feeling particularly powerful, I ask him if he likes it and he responds, “Yes, ma’am.” I haven’t told him how to address me but I’m startled with disgust. Ma’am is what every woman under the age of 50 dreads being called. It’s a term synonymous with dry dusty pussy. I think for a beat and then I tell him to call me by my name. Somehow that feels the most potent—I’m just a girl but I’m also his master. This is the most honest moment in my charade of dress up and role play. It’s me who wants respect, not this persona.
I find his prostate through lots of adventuring, poo crusted under my nails, and near weekly trips to Purple Passion for new toys. I explore his ass like uncharted territory, amazed as a scientist about the hidden joys of the human body. I deeply enjoy watching his face before he cums that way, so blissful like a baby. The positions he gets pretzeled into are vulnerable, interesting. My own gender binaries get challenged. I respect the tenderness required of giving because I have so often been the receiver of unkind thrusts. But honestly, after the initial thrills, this all starts to feel like work. Me playing dress up. Devising schemes for his orgasm denial and punishment. Being in charge ALL OF THE FUCKING TIME. I’d sit on his face, rubbing myself to oblivion but miss hearing a voice talk me through it. I want a strong but gentle daddy, like the one this world needs. Because I’m a bad bitch outside of the bedroom, when I want to get fucked I’d simply like to relax.
Even out of PVC and dungeons, I’ve always dommed men. I’m the scary friend, the one you are a little worried is going to make the new guy you’re dating cry. The one who is bound to talk back to the obnoxious men at the bar, the one who won’t just smile and fake it when people bring up racist, sexist, homophobic rhetoric.
I just prefer intellectual domming. I don’t like to hurt the ones I love, I like to humiliate and degrade the idiots out at bars who’ve never met a woman who talks back. The men who think they’re important because they floated to the top of companies they were grandfathered into. The ones I’ve had to explain the meaning of privilege to. What excites me most is turning the tables on unsuspecting bros who have never been belittled, never been scared on the streets, telling them, “You dropped something,” then when they search the floor, say, “Your smile,” as I give them a big one, like so many men have done to me before.
Maybe I just never truly understood the appeal of domming a boyfriend, or I’m just not a good sexual dom. Or maybe I’m the realest kind of dom because I know in sexual D/s dynamics, the submissive is really the one in charge, calling the shots and creating the boundaries. The dom must carefully read her sub, anticipating their needs, and remaining one step ahead to push them to their limits. I don’t enjoy men trembling with fear within the four walls of our bedroom, I want them shaking in their boots in the halls of congress. Behind closed doors, domming them, we’re still working for them. And that’s not going to change the world. I’d rather tower over the pretend powerful men, not because it gives them pleasure, but because it demands their acquiescence.
And yet, here we are.
2024
Time is the asshole that spurned you but taught you a valuable lesson. And hope is a dangerous thing. My only weapons are my words. The only work I’ll do for free is fight for a more just world.
This time I’ll be different.