Awareness

We have goldfinches who visit our yard each summer to pick at the sunflowers I’ve planted or the thistle that VK puts in one of our bird feeders. A few weeks ago we were on our deck, watching them when I confessed to VK how until 5 or 6 years ago, I was completely unaware of them. The same for the cardinals who feast on sunflower seeds all year long (provided the pesky squirrels don’t gobble them up first). And ditto for a red headed wood pecker who occasionally makes an appearance.

In my defense I’ve gotta say that bird watching was not one of my priorities. I mean, I was too busy raising a house full of kids as a full time Mom. That was A LOT of work! But then one day when I was getting near the age of forty, I did become aware of something that was unexpected. No, it wasn't the birds. It was how my marriage had become a relationship I no longer wanted to be part of in the years ahead. Stick a fork in me—I realized I was done.

For a couple of years after that I don’t think I was aware of much of anything, except maybe the fog that seemed to fill my head. But today my life is very different. I have beautiful birds in my yard! One snowy day a few years ago, my youngest son was amazed to see 5 or 6 cardinals on our deck. I thought that was so cool when I realized that even though he was 16 years old, he’d never seen anything like that.

The birds were probably always in the neighborhood. It only took planting sunflowers or a hand full of birdseed from VK to bring them into our yard. VK says all the time, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Sounded like gibberish to me at first but now I think it says it all. Once you’re aware of something, it can change your life—in ways you might never have imagined before you knew what you now know. But I think you have to open yourself to being aware.

BTW, VK dug up a few interesting facts. The American Goldfinch in the picture above is a male. The female (right) is more olive green. The male is also green but is the only bird to molt twice in one year. He turns bright yellow in the Spring in order to be more attractive to the female. Goldfinches are thought to stay with the same mate for life, except that sometimes a female will leave her first mate to tend to the nest while she goes off to mate with another male, who she then stays with for life. Ya gotta love nature!

Empowerment

VeezKnight read a post in the Venus on Top Yahoo group and thought the new member to that group made some good points. I agree. We know that many submissive men try to get their wives to lead their marriages. And some (many?) are unsuccessful. I think one of the reasons for this is that submissive men often have more to their agenda than just being in a wife-led marriage. They don’t just want to be “led”, they want to be totally and completely dominated.

It's true that there is nothing that will drive a man happily into sub space like being dominated by a woman he loves. (The fact of the matter is there are few limits to how far a dominant wife can push and control her husband if she handles him properly.) I see nothing wrong with this—it’s as it should be. And when FemDom reaches full stride that’s how it WILL be.

BUT the transition from traditional vanilla doesn’t happen over night.

In the beginning, it’s a mistake for a man to expect his submission will be defined by the level of dominance the woman is initially willing to bring into the relationship. As Paul learned below, a man’s sense of submission needs to be realized from within, without depending on a dominant woman to define it for him. The thing is, and take it from me, dominating a man is a lot of responsibility and a lot of work too!

This is why when a man depends solely on a woman’s dominance to satisfy his need to submit, the FemDom dynamic probably isn’t gonna work effectively. As you’ll read below, Paul learned that becoming an empowered submissive—instead of a needy one—resulted in empowering his wife to more fully embrace her female authority. So you see, even though a male’s role is to follow, support and submit to the female, he can actually help “lead” the relationship into being a FemDom relationship that satisfies both.

This isn’t the same as "stealth submission," where the man knocks himself out while the woman knows nothing of what’s going on in his head. This is frustrating for a man and difficult for many to sustain. But in a situation where the woman is in the loop and is at least marginally agreeable, the outcome, as in Paul’s case, can be very different. One feeds the other. The more the male empowers himself through self-actualization of his submissive nature, the more it frees the woman to explore her authority and become an empowered dominant woman. The more empowered she becomes, the more it validates and drives the male’s sense of submission to new highs—or should I say ‘lows.’ ☺ Soon the relationship is .....



Thank you to Paul for giving us permission to reprint his experience here.

Paul wrote:

For years I asked my wife to be more dominant. I bought her books. I bought her toys. I asked in every way I could think of and even though she actually complied a lot of the time I was never satisfied. For me it was like an addiction. No matter what she did for me or to me I always wanted more. In truth I was very ashamed of being a submissive male and I forever wanted her to force me to be sub so I wouldn't have to take responsibility for choosing submission.

Meanwhile, my incessant requests helped my wife to feel that she wasn't good enough. Because I always asked for more, she felt I was rejecting what she did give me and thus rejected her. She also felt that I was being extremely controlling and although I said I wanted her to be in control I was constantly trying to manipulate her.

I did some counseling with a kink-friendly therapist who had worked for many years as a professional dominatrix. She told me very clearly, " lead with love, lead with joy, but never ever lead with need! It's unattractive! " What I learned was to approach my wife with the joy of who I am and the deep love I have for her and not approach her with neediness. She also taught me what an " empowered submissive" is. I learned that this kind of sub didn't need anyone else to make them a sub. In other words, I chose to accept who I am and I didn't need my wife to do or say anything so I could feel OK about being me.

After my work with this counselor, I decided I could not create a FLR. I wonder if any man can. What I did decide is that I could be in a male-following relationship. Having let go of my shame I no longer needed my wife to force me to be the person I knew I truly am. To meet my own need for submission, I settled in to serving my wife and doing my best to obey her will whether she asserted it dominantly or not.

I had been entirely focused on myself and I truly had no expectation that she would change her behavior. The funny thing was, my wife, almost immediately after I made this change, changed as well. She became extremely dominant. She said that I had taken the pressure off of her and she wasn't feeling manipulated anymore. She said she had breathing room and was enjoying her new domain.

Basically what I think happened for me is; having made my needs known to my wife, way too strenuously, I was helped to let go of being needy and focus instead on meeting my own needs by serving her, whether she responded or not. She then did respond, big time! She felt safe to be dominant because I had finally stopped dominating the relationship with my need for submission. Does that make sense?

Yes, Paul, it makes A LOT of sense.

--Goddess V

Femquility

Imagine a small cohousing community out of the mainstream, perhaps located on the outskirts of a small rural town. It’s more akin to a village, in which neighbors know one another’s names, smile when they say hello and gather often in a central Common House. Flowers abound and gardens are abundant with vegetables grown organically as residents honor nature and strive to live sustainably.

Imagine a peaceful community in which humans cohabit, where their footprint on Mother Earth is deliberately shallow, and where respect and appreciation for the resources she provides is the order of the day. Residents live separately in modest, but comfortable houses which, while scattered randomly throughout the landscape, are strategically positioned to take advantage of the sun’s solar energy.

But these are not the only features making this community a unique place in which to live. Here woman is revered and worshipped as goddess. Here a Wise Women Council governs and men hold little sway in either private or public affairs. In this community residents reject traditional patriarchy in favor of loving, female-led relationships. FemDom is practiced openly. Women rule absolutely, with males relegated to supportive roles in submission to female authority.

Sound too good to be true? Perhaps, but not in the imagination of one visionary dominant woman. Her vision is to secure a parcel of land in the southeastern sector of the United States, from North Carolina to Florida, on which to develop a FemDom ecovillage that encompasses all of this and more. She calls this community Femquility.

Ms. Lisa Kelly of Naples, Florida is promoting Femquility via a website that presents a somewhat detailed overview of her proposed community, accompanied by welcoming visuals of how the community might look once fully established. Incidentally, all of the graphics in this post were taken from her site. Based solely on the concept, the vision, the dream, I’m enthralled with the notion of calling such a place home. I might add that Goddess V is already itching to have me back our bags.

Unfortunately, Femquility has yet to break ground, nor has there even been a flag planted to mark it’s future location. Enthusiastic as I am, the pragmatist in me warns that translating Ms. Lisa’s dream into reality will require an effort that is nothing short of Herculean. The financial challenges alone are daunting. Short of finding a wealthy dominant woman or submissive man with the financial wherewithal to bankroll such a project, how does one raise enough capital to purchase a reasonably desirable tract of land let alone begin developing it.

Then too, how does one connect with enough people willing to invest in individual properties in Femquility. How many of those people are actually able to relocate due to children, family ties, jobs and other obligations? One European recently wrote in an FLR forum: great idea but too bad its in the United States. Hmmm.


I’m 120 miles from Goddess V as I write this, yet I can hear her say, “If you think negative crap, that’s just what you’ll get.” So let’s end on a positive note. According to experts, the ideal number of people to populate an ecovillage is between 50 and 150. Since the plan for Femquility calls for just 33 individual housing units, not that many people are needed to buy in. And it could very well be that somewhere in the southeastern US, there lives a dominant woman and/or submissive man who owns enough suitable land on which Femquility could be built. It’s a matter of connecting with enough of the right people who believe strongly enough in FemDom and loving female-led relationships.

Femquility is a concept whose time is overdue. Hopefully we’ll soon be reading that construction is under way. I added a permanent link to the Femquility website in the sidebar at right. You can also join the Femquility Yahoo Group to keep tabs on progress.

RLS and FLR: a matter of genetics?

One evening about 10 years ago when Goddess V and I had first begun seeing each other, it was late, I had driven over two hours to see her, I was tired and we were sitting in my car talking. I began getting “that” feeling in my legs. Only because she noticed how they seemed to twitch uncontrollably did if I think to talk about it with her.

Then in 2004 GlaxoSmithKline began marketing Requip® for the treatment of RLS. When I first saw their ad I thought, “I’ll be damned.” What I’d been experiencing for over 15 years actually had a name: Restless Legs Syndrome. Goddess V and I looked at each other in amazement as a 60-second television ad, in a sense, legitimized what we both had considered to be just one of my odd-ball (and annoying, if you ask the goddess) quirks. Suddenly I was no longer unique or strange. I was one of many, so many that a pharmaceutical powerhouse was targeting us with their marketing campaign.

GSK has fallen under heavy fire from the medical community and the mainstream media for “disease mongering”; for promoting a little-substantiated medical condition and for attempting to convince millions of people they could avoid suffering symptoms of this condition by taking a drug that GSK had conveniently invented. As it turns out, Requip (ropinirol HCL and marketed as Adartrel® in the UK), was already an obscure, approved treatment for Parkinson’s Disease. It wasn’t until May 2005 that it was successfully repurposed by obtaining US FDA approval for treatment of RLS. Successful indeed! Sales of Requip soared to nearly $500 million in 2006, further fueling debate over GSK’s motives—except that new research indicates that RLS is genetically encoded, which may end the debate once and for all.

Two recent studies have pinpointed three common genetic variations linked to RLS. Gene scans identify a variation in the BTBD9 gene, another in the MEIS1 gene and a third in a DNA sector shared by the MAP2K5 and LBXCOR1 genes that are linked with RLS and other periodic limb movements during sleep. Says David Rye, MD, PhD, professor of neurology at Emory University School of Medicine where one study was conducted, “We now have concrete evidence that RLS is an authentic disorder with recognizable features and underlying biological basis.” It is estimated that 65% of the population carry at least one of these gene variants and that one person in ten experiences RLS.

Also known as Ekborn's syndrome, RLS was described in the 1940s by Swedish neurologist, Karl A. Ekborn. And earlier descriptions can be traced back to the 17th century when English anatomist and physician, Thomas Willis, described the disorder. BTBD9-and-whatever-genes be damned, those of us who experience RLS didn’t need GSK, or genetic research, or even the government for that matter, to tell us the sensations we feel in our legs are very real!

But this post isn’t so much about restless legs per se—and it isn’t meant to infer that FemDom is a disorder in need of medical treatment. Clearly, RLS has been affecting people for a very long time. But for one reason or another, the afflicted didn’t talked about it much until it was brought into the mainstream of social awareness by GSK’s advertising. Many of us had been quietly laying awake at night half tempted to cut off our damn legs, when suddenly we discovered there were “other people like us” out there. It became a legitimate topic of conversation through which we learned that some of our friends and acquaintances also suffered from RLS. It was a bit like when Viagra ads hit the media, catapulting ED into the light of day—but without the performance stigma that makes men shy to fess up.

Likewise, those of us living FLRs didn’t need the IOWA study or the MSNBC poll I mentioned in my last post to prove to us that male submission to female authority is gaining momentum in our society. We didn’t need to be told how it’s now being considered by psychologists as a possible marker of a successful marriage. DUH. Submissive men already know what we know. So do the dominant women who have formally acknowledge their authority over their men.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if scientists were to discover a submissive male gene along with a corresponding dominant gene in the female. But short of that the recent studies and polls are helping to validate our lifestyle by providing evidence that there are growing numbers of people out there who are “just like us.” With or without a so-called proven genetic biological basis, the transition in society to female authority is happening.

Kings don’t rule the castle — Queens do

A recent study conducted by Iowa State University shows that women are the deciders and the dominant ones in relationships. The study found that while men may still throw their weight around at the office, at home it’s a different story. Men are no longer bosses. Wives have more power than their husbands in making decisions and in dominating discussions.

According to lead author and psychologist at ISU, David Vogel, "The study at least suggests that the marriage is a place where women can exert some power. Whether or not it's because of changing societal roles, we don't know.”

The results of the ISU study contradict previous studies. “Most of the research literature in psychology,” said Vogel, “has suggested that women have less power. They have largely based that on the fact that traditionally men earn more money and so therefore would have the ability to make big decisions in the relationship.”

That wasn’t the case in the new study. Wives were more demanding, asking for changes in the relationship or in their partner, and were more likely to get their way than the husbands. As evidenced in video taped discussions among married couples, this held true regardless of which spouse had originally chosen issues for discussion.

The wives were not just talking more than their husbands. “It wasn't just that the women were bringing up issues that weren't being responded to. The men were actually going along with what their wives said,” Vogel explained. “[Women] were communicating more powerful messages, and men were responding to those messages by agreeing or giving in.”

This supports other research suggesting that “wife power” may signal a harmonious couple, that a marker of a healthy marriage may be how well men accept influence from their wives. Undoubtedly, academics will argue and debate this until the cows come home. And they’ll study it some more. But many of us already understand what’s happening. In a poll conducted by MSNBC in conjunction with a story about this study (shown below), 50% of over 8,000 people said that absolutely, the queen rules the castle.

"What we've got here is...

…failure to communicate."

A well-known announcement to prisoners by “Captain” (Strother Martin as prison warden) about Luke (Paul Newman) in the 1967 movie classic, Cool Hand Luke.

I’m not a Doctor Phil fan (for those of you who know who he is) but last week I happened to see one of his relationship “tips for the day.” It made a great deal of sense to me. He said, “If you think that relationships require work, you’re right: the answer is YES!” He went on to say that the quality of a relationship between a woman and a man can be measured in how well that relationship meets the needs of both individuals.

It takes effort (work) to understand who your partner is as a person and to learn about her/his needs as both an individual and as a partner inside a relationship. It also takes patience and a willingness to compromise when the needs of two people don’t exactly match up. And THIS requires open, honest, continued communication.

During a late evening chat in our hot tub last night, Goddess V said, “I don’t think too many couples talk the way we do, about all the things we talk about.” Understand, it’s not that we are perfect in this regard. Sometimes it takes us a while to discuss something that might be weighing on our mind. Eventually it surfaces however, and we talk. In discussion with other couples we know, it is obvious to us that they do not communicate the way we do.

It wasn’t always this way for us. Goddess V tells me she seldom had long conversations with her ex, about anything. I on the other hand often talked long into evening hours with my ex, but about mostly the wrong things. Looking back on it, I suspect that in both marriages, none of us ever really understood each other in terms of our needs as spouses or as individuals. That’s a sad commentary considering that collectively, our two previous relationships spanned nearly 50 years of our lives.

Why it is different for Goddess V and me I am not exactly sure, but I’m not about to question it. It makes me feel especially blessed when I read or hear about couples who have a pink elephant in their living room and neither partner is willing to acknowledge or address it. In some cases, one spouse knows the elephant is there while the other has no clue. It could be that’s the worst scenario of all. When you consider this in terms of Dr. Phil’s advice, it doesn’t say too much about the quality of the relationship itself. And all simply because people don’t, won’t, can’t or are afraid to communicate honesty about what’s truly important to them.

I assume that readers of this blog are here because they are considering, beginning, would like to be, or are actually in a FemDom relationship. I’m not a psychologist, but based on my experience, I would urge you to open the lines of communication—especially if they are currently clogged with worries, fears, insecurities and the like. Having been in both situations, I can assure you that being in a relationship in which my spouse knows what’s on my mind, and I know what’s on hers, is infinitely more satisfying, even if we don’t always agree or fully understand.

Just for Fun

I recently read where one submissive man sometimes sniffs his wife’s dirty panties to motivate himself to do household chores. Another commented he does the same but never felt comfortable enough to talk about it because he thought he was the only one to do so. I know I’ve touched on this before, but it got me to thinking about this once again.

When I was in college, Philip Roth had recently published his novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, which, along with another of his novels, Goodbye Columbus, was turned into a movie. I read Portnoy’s Complaint because one of my creative writing professors happened to be a friend of Philip Roth and so he often referred to Roth’s prose as part of his lectures. In the book, the main character, Alex Portnoy discusses with his therapist various props he uses during masturbation. The eventual movie was not so explicit as the book, but I remember a scene showing Richard Benjamin, as Portnoy, sitting on the toilet with a pair of women’s panties over his head.

As I recall, the scene drew laughter from the men in the audience, but it sounded controlled to a point where it left me wondering if they laughed because they found it wildly outlandish, or because they identified with what Portnoy was secretly doing in that bathroom. I thought about that a lot afterwards. I would look at other men and wonder. I knew I had something in common with the fictional character. I knew it was something I would do again—because I enjoyed everything about panties. I liked how they looked, on and off a woman. I liked seeing her put them on and take them off. I liked how they felt in my hand when I touched them. And oh, I so enjoyed sniffing the aroma that permeates the crotch after a woman has worn them. But it wasn’t until I read the book and saw the movie that I began to wonder if maybe I wasn’t the only “pervert” to find such pleasure. Lord, a person can be so naïve can he not?

Fast forward some thirty years and I now understand that good old-fashioned panty sniffing is nearly universal among men and has nothing to do with being submissive or otherwise. There just ain’t many a man who has not sniffed, and probably worn, his wife’s or girlfriend’s panties. He may not do it often, may not admit to doing it at all, but this is only because he thinks it’s somehow wrong or he may be perceived as being “perverted.” This was me, for many years, until I met the remarkable Goddess V. Perhaps it was because I found her so sexy, or because I fell so deeply in love with her, or maybe even because she became the best friend I’ve ever had, but I absolutely could not resist temptation. Especially because she knows about this side of me, anything having to do with her panties remains one of my greatest and simplest pleasures in life.

I think it could be the same for many men, in many more relationships than it currently is. It may stem from a preoccupation with women’s underwear in general. Let’s face it, compared to the vast array of panties women wear, boxers and tidy whities are BORING. More likely, it may be indicative of the power female sexuality holds over men. We’ve all heard men tell the joke about the blind man passing the fish market who says, “Good morning, ladies,” but the truth is, men are irresistibly drawn to the very female genitalia about which they concoct crude jokes. So it only makes sense they would be drawn to the garment worn closest to that part of the female anatomy.

Are women aghast at this? Do they find it disgusting, or at best, a distasteful male trait? Maybe so. One has difficulty imagining that many women sniff dirty boxer shorts, so why should anyone expect that women would understand why men do what we do. But so what? Isn't it enough to simply understand that men and women are wired differently--and let it go at that? Instead of regarding this particular difference as something that might separate a man and a woman in a relationship, why not embrace it and use it to bring them closer together? Whether in a FLR or not, it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see how a woman might use this as a tool that will work to her advantage. My imagination may be overly fertile, but it seems to me the possibilities are nearly endless. And when you consider how impossibly complicated life seems to be getting in today’s world, isn’t it remarkable that a woman might use something as simple as her panties to motivate a man, make him more attentive to her needs, and of course turn him on in ways that will make him a very happy, loyal and satisfied camper.

“Rules,” expectations, and real-life solutions

First off, as we’ve said before, there really are no hard and fast “rules” per se when it comes to FemDom and a wife-led marriage. In fact, if we had to acknowledge there being even just one “rule,” it would be that a wife and husband must communicate honestly with one another on a continual basis. This only makes good sense regardless of what kind of relationship two people have.

There are, however, certain guidelines, or modes of thinking if you will, that distinguish FemDom from traditional relationships. Actually, these guidelines are nothing more than logical conclusions drawn from a different interpretation (and we think, a better understanding) of how Nature intended a woman and man to interact with one another-- based solely on their sexuality. These guidelines in turn can lead to building certain expectations in our minds, expectations over how FemDom and female authority is “supposed” to work. We all know what can happen when we hold expectations. Too often we end up being disappointed when something fails to measure up to expectations we had built up in our mind.

Generally speaking, it is a fact of nature that a man is more sexually driven than a woman. He masturbates more often. He thinks about and wants sex more often. When he has it, he thinks about what it was like long after its over. If he hasn’t had sex recently, he thinks about how long its been and how long it might be before he has it again. Being more visually oriented than a woman, a man is more attracted to the female’s body than she is to his. When he meets a woman, it’s typically not long before he imagines how she looks in the nude, and not much longer before he fantasizes about what it would be like to have sex with her. Granted, some men control this better than others, but ultimately, a typical male cannot help himself. It’s how he is wired.

One of the guidelines in a female-led relationship is orgasm management: the woman controls the man’s sexual release. She determines when, where and how he can experience an orgasm. Given the human male’s sexuality, one would think this would be objectionable for the average man. Yet the opposite is true. A man actually welcomes the opportunity to relinquish control of his sexual release to a woman’s authority. Perhaps this is because part of him knows he can never fully control it on his own, or because he intuitively knows he will be a better man when it is under the control of a loving woman. Nonetheless, this is why the majority of FemDom relationships begin at the suggestion of the male.

Except that the male psyche is such that relinquishing this control to a woman isn’t enough to satisfy him. He needs to be reminded of this exchange of power. The more often, the better. He needs to know that she is deliberately using her control to manipulate him in ways that suit her, in ways that bring her pleasure, and in ways that benefit their overall relationship. The more overtly she demonstrates this to him, the greater the control she maintains over him. It is the ultimate turn-on for a man. Ultimately it keeps him in a constant state of arousal (sexual and mental) that is focused exclusively on the woman in his life.

When a couple enters into a FemDom relationship, the man is more aware of this than the woman. Most likely, he wants it more than she. Thus he has certain expectations of how his newly dominant lady will use her authority; and thus, he sets himself up for frustration from the get-go. Critics of this lifestyle are quick to point out that it amounts to little more than the woman pandering to the male’s desires, playing the game just to satisfy his sexual fantasies (“topping from the bottom”). In a narrow sense, I would agree, simply because it seems the majority of women don’t initially seek out relationships in which they exercise such overt control over their men. So agreeing to try this dynamic could qualify as acquiescing to male desires. But when you consider a broader scope, the picture changes.

In the beginning it may seem like the woman is playing to her man to satisfy some kinky fantasy. But the fact of the matter is, when a man finally gets up enough nerve to confess his desires, he is sharing with her one of his most intimate secrets. And if you look past the sexual context, isn’t this what a woman wants most from her man? Doesn’t she want him to share with her his inner most hopes and dreams? Isn’t this a big part of how a woman defines intimacy in a relationship? Submissive men who read this know this to be true. So do the dominant women. But for the rest who aren’t in a FemDom relationship, once a woman establishes firm control over her man’s sexuality, he is powerless to resist it. The more she demonstrates this to him, the more he realizes he is powerless to resist, and the happier he is.

Who woulda thunk it?

This is where topping from the bottom ends and it becomes all about the woman. This is where a woman eventually comes to realize there is no reasonable limit to the power she has to shape her marriage and her man into whatever she wants them to be. If she isn't already, I think she can become more confident in her own sexuality as a woman--and also in all other aspects of her life both inside and outside the home.

Does a man fully comprehend this going into it? Maybe not totally but I think he does to a degree. I think by agreeing to turn over control of his sexuality, a man is saying that he wants her to establish authority over him and that he trusts her to use her authority wisely. It’s a damn good thing that most women have the smarts to do just that! My issue with this however, is that I thought, CRAP, on top of everything else, this is one more damn thing I have to be responsible for. Being a goddess is supposed to make my life EASIER-- not more complicated!

The way I see it is, if I’m the goddess, then I get to decide what we do and how we do it. So not long ago I decided that while orgasm management is a good thing, it isn’t something that I wanted to be totally responsible for. I told VK that I still will absolutely be the one to decide when and how he has an orgasm. And sex will still be primarily all about ME. But I don’t want to have to put up with any grumpiness if he thinks it’s been too long since we were intimate or since his last release. I’m usually well aware of how long it’s been, and I’m okay with teasing him—maybe not everyday—but often enough to keep the poor boy on edge. But there are lots of things going on in our life that intervene. I don’t want to always be the one to find the time to be sexually intimate. I don’t want to be the one who always has to set the stage. So I told VK, just come to me and suggest it. I’d rather he ask than mope around waiting for me to always be the initiator. Or get pissed off because he thinks I'm not holding up my end of the relationship.

If I’m in the mood, or I think I can get in the mood, we’ll go ahead and do whatever, even if its only allowing him to masturbate while I supervise. Geez, I'm not a heartless bitch-- its easy enough to take a few minutes to watch while he takes the edge off. If I think he should. This is not to say that VK has only to ask in order to receive. Not likely. That would destroy the management dynamic and the control I know he graves. But for me, our arrangement lightens what I saw as an added burden on me. And it helps eliminate expectations in his mind, and in mine too, of how our FemDom relationship "should" work or how often this or that "should" happen. To the point VK made at the beginning of this post, there are no set “rules” of how a wife-led marriage must work. As long as wife and husband communicate honestly with one another, they can find what works for them.

Sidetracked

Sometimes life has a way of directing us away from the straight and narrow path we often envision for ourselves. Not that FemDom is all that “straight”. LOL, you get the idea. But that’s the way life is. You gotta go with it, deal with it and move on. Otherwise it can eat you up inside. I’m better at this than VeezKnight. Not because I’m a woman and he’s a man, but because that’s just the way I am. Aside from my gorgeous looks, this is one of my qualities that attracted him to me in the first place. ☺

Going into Spring we had a lot of plans. This included finally completing some long overdue home remodeling projects as well as changes and improvement in other areas of our life. Most of it went to crap. We also had unexpected and out of the ordinary expenses, as well as many family obligations that kept me rooted in my role as mother, sister, daughter.

I think it was in March that we had one of our hot tub talks when I told VK how lousy I had been feeling for the past year. He knew this already, but I also confessed certain fears I was experiencing about my health and how frustrated I was because it was an obstacle in many areas of our relationship. We would say we would start making time for this, or we would start doing that, but nothing would happen. To be sure, this wasn’t always “my fault,” but I was feeling guilt and dissatisfaction that often it was because I was constantly exhausted, or my libido was practically nonexistent, or because there were other constraints on my/our time. Then wouldn’t ya know but right about then VK came down with a debilitating physical injury. So much for the physical labor necessary to carry out our home improvement plans.

Anyway, VK did a lot of research on the Internet and diagnosed me with hypothyroidism. I’d been tested for that before but never officially diagnosed or put on medication. He encouraged me to “insist” my doctor test me yet again. So I did. You know how it is when you get blood work done. You worry that they might find something wrong. This time I was worried about the opposite, that they WOULDN’T find something wrong. As VK had learned, the medical industry has changed the standards considered to indicate normal thyroid function. My doc confirmed this and sure enough, my blood tests revealed I was now well within the abnormal range. This pisses me off in a way because for years I have been told that, despite having five or six of the common ten to twelve symptoms, blood tests showed nothing out of whack. Then suddenly, oops, we’ve decided to shorten the yardstick. Now you’re 5’5” instead of 5’8”.

The good news is that within 3 days of taking medication, I began to feel better. Also, last week VeezKnight had surgery to correct his problem. Right now he is still a miserable pain in my ass due to post surgery pain, but that is improving every day. And he is bitching about all of our plans that haven’t gotten done… and won’t in the near future. I know he is also feeling frustrated about how I have definitely not been feeling like a goddess these past months. This is going to change.

My point in all of this isn’t to solicit sympathy from anyone. We all have challenges, obligations and plain old crap in our lives that we’ve gotta deal with. It’s called life. Being in a FemDom marriage doesn’t make us any different than anyone else. It’s true that I haven’t much felt like a goddess lately, and VK hasn’t been as good a submissive as he has been in the past. But this will change. Now that we see light at the end of the tunnel, I plan to have discussions with him about how we might get back on track. I know he’ll have a few suggestions too.

I also plan to outline a few ways that VK can share more of the responsibility in maintaining our dominant/submissive relationship. And maybe some steps we can take to help him be less negative about some things. I think that negativity is nothing more than a bad habit that can be broken. Hopefully I’ll find the time to write about all of this in another post. VK and I will talk things over and I’ll decide on how we’ll proceed. He gets a vote, but I get a vote and a half. That’s part of the beauty of a wife led marriage. And if some of it doesn’t work for us then we’ll readjust as we go. We both agree on what we want, we just need to work around setbacks in getting there.

Sexual Power for Women

This landmark ebook was written by Georgeann Cross. An early Internet champion of female domination, she completed and posted her book way back in 1997. It’s in PDF format and free to anyone who cares to download it — most likely for the same reason Elise Sutton does not charge to view her monthly updated website. These are women who are more concerned with sharing their teachings than with making money. While they differ somewhat in their approaches, one can see definite parallels in the social change they advocate: stronger, more passionate relationships between men and women and a more peaceful world through female dominance.

Georgeann Cross is not a pro dominatrix or a female supremacist. Nor is she a militant feminist. Throughout her book she makes it clear that she appreciates and loves men. However, through many years of experience, she has developed an uncanny insight into the male psyche, that they should, need, and even want to be controlled by the woman they love. Ms. Cross presents some rather compelling arguments for a woman to establish and maintain her sexual power over her man, particularly with respect to reviving and sustaining the initial passion that occurs (then wanes) in a relationship between a man and a woman.

I know I am preaching to the choir to those of you already in this lifestyle. I don't agree everything Cross says, but for anyone interested in pursuing FemDom and female authority, I would highly recommend you give this book a read. Her lively and entertaining style, along with her sense of humor and non-threatening demeanor, probably make it especially appropriate for any woman who may be considering adopting this lifestyle at the request of the man in her life, which, as most of us who are in this lifestyle know, is often the case.

Ms. Cross’s book can be found at www.francescaspizza.com. Considering the subject matter, that's an odd name for a URL, but if you read the book, it'll make sense. All paragraphs in italics that follow are excerpts from her work (I have paraphrased in a few instances) and remain the sole property of Georgeann Cross.

Ms. Cross writes, “I’d like female domination to become so nearly universal that no heterosexually active man can escape our civilizing influence. That can happen only through the cumulative effort of a great many women. The techniques of female domination have tremendous potential for good… [Though] they also have potential for mischief, whether intentional or thoughtless… I’m confident the good will far outweigh the harm, and someday we’ll all be at peace. Women in general are decent, especially compared with men… Men, by nature, have as much good in them as we do. Sadly, most have been taught to keep it hidden — to keep up their guard and seek control over others. They’ve learned that good is a sign of weakness and that they have to appear strong lest they be abused and exploited. The way to appear strong is to act mean.

“Female domination offers such great hope because it gives you a way of nurturing the good in your man, of persuading him to leave behind the fears and defenses of adolescence, of encouraging him to act in accordance with the most noble of his predilections. And it gives you a way to get started — a way to find the good in your partner.”

Georgeann Cross’s approach calls for dominating men by using irresistible female sexual power. Throughout her book she advises women how to turn a man into their personal sex/ love slaves and expounds the many benefits and affects this has on a committed relation. She is neither a female supremacist nor a professional dominatrix. She uses light bondage to help create and reinforce a psychological Catch 22 that she calls The Loop. Essentially, she creates in a man’s mind a need to resist her attempts to sexually stimulate him, such as asking him to agree to do something he doesn’t want to do while stimulating him. Then she proceed to prove to him that he cannot prevent himself from getting turned-on despite his objections (provided he is bound – most often spread-eagle on a bed -- and cannot physically resist or escape).

Her basic definition of a male love slave is as follows. However, she makes it clear that this is only a starting point. The rules may include anything a woman decides upon.

1. He has to be completely faithful and not have sex with anyone else.
2. He must take off as much of his clothing as she tells him when alone together and let her touch any part of his body any way she wishes.
3. He must touch her any way she tells him, or not touch her if that’s what she says.
4. He must allow her to tie him up whenever she wants.
5. He must masturbate while she watches if she tells him to.
6. He must tell her all of his secrets and fantasies.
7. She will almost always be on top when they have intercourse.

Ms. Cross explains, “Consider this little-considered truth about the relationship between the sexes: If a man is horny to begin with, and the sexual chemistry between you is such that you naturally turn him on, and he’s physically unable to resist [tied up], you can make him have an orgasm; his will alone can’t prevent it.

“It’s easy to see why this truth is so obscure. The situation doesn’t come up in most people’s lives. A man is rarely put in a position where he’s unable to resist what a woman might do, and when it happens, it’s not in the presence of a woman whose intentions are sexual. Even among couples who play at bondage the situation is rare; when the man is tied up, the woman doesn’t create in his mind a need to resist the stimulation she offers. Besides, we’ve been acculturated to a view of masculinity that tells us that men are always eager for sexual release. We’re not used to thinking that a man might be subjected to sexual stimulation and try to resist it. This in turn feeds the rarity of the occurrence; the situation has so seldom been set up because only a few women have thought to do it.”

Cross details how a man will be embarrassed at being so obviously turned on by this situation. Moreover, his embarrassment will turn-him on further, that all of the woman’s attention is focused on him, that she has taken control of his body, that she can elicit from him his most private thoughts and feelings, that he has no place to hide, that he is so intimately exposed to the woman in every way.

“Stripping the last bit of commentary from that explanation, we’re left with the simplest possible description of the psychological Loop in which a man finds himself when placed in this sort of situation: He’s embarrassed at being turned on and he’s turned on by his embarrassment. I call it the Loop because that’s its shape — a self-reinforcing cycle made up of two components, each of which fuels the other. The way I take control of a man’s sexuality is to set up this Loop in his mind and feed it, doing this to add to his sexual arousal and that to add to his embarrassment.

Irresistible power
“There are two reasons it’s important to understand that you’re irresistible. One is that it builds confidence. Confidence gives you an even sexier aura and makes you even harder to resist — an effect that’s magnified still further when your man is unable to interfere with what you might do. Confidence also keeps you from being bluffed off course. If you set up this sort of scene, especially if you do it for the purpose of gaining leverage in dealing with [what you consider to be] a problem in your relationship, many a man will try a bluff to get you to stop as soon as he sees what you’re up to. He’ll do it even while tied naked and helpless. He’ll ask in a disappointed tone, designed to make you feel guilty, whether you’re 'that kind of person.' He’ll tell you that what you’re doing turns him off, hoping to stop you before you’ve had a chance to make your own observation of the intensity with which it turns him on. He’ll tell you you’ll never see him again. He’ll tell you more things than I can warn you about. Whatever he tells you, it’s best met with a confident demeanor. You won’t always succeed this way, but almost always. If you lack confidence — if you let yourself be bluffed — you’ll never succeed.

“The other reason it’s important to know you’re irresistible is that if you’re to control your man completely, he has to know he can’t resist you, and he has to know that you know he knows. It’s actually necessary to demonstrate this to him, and to do so repeatedly throughout your relationship. “If that were the whole story of The Loop, its potential would be awesome enough, but there’s more. First, the Loop has a way of getting burned in — it quickly becomes a man’s habitual mode of arousal. If you press your body against his and kiss him, not only does his cock get hard, but he gets embarrassed by knowing that you can feel it. Without additional prompting he gets further excited by his embarrassment, by knowing that you know he’s embarrassed, and by imagining what you might do with both his hard cock and his embarrassment. Even your smile, by itself, teases him about the secrets you know and becomes a powerful erotic stimulant.

“Second, The Loop is addictive. Your lover begins to fantasize, even crave, scenarios in which his loss of control turns out to be especially embarrassing. His fantasies keep him turned on, and his awareness that it’s you who transforms fantasies into reality keeps him turned on to you in particular. As a consequence, his need for you is much stronger than it would be in an ordinary relationship. Because he needs you, he wants to please you. And his addiction to The Loop (and to you) can sometimes be made to compete with other, destructive [habits] he might have, giving you a degree of leverage in getting them under control.

“Third and best of all, The Loop can make a man love you with truly phenomenal intensity. We women have traditionally been more in love with our men than they with us. This is because we’ve opened ourselves up to them, shared our secrets, and been accepted. At least that’s how it was early on, when love was new. Later, if things went according to the usual pattern, we continued to share what was important to us, and our words were barely heard and dismissed as trivial. Not as good as what we started with, but a pretty fair substitute when you consider the alternatives: it’s better than being rejected and it’s better than feeling obliged to keep everything inside as men do.

“At the beginning of their relationships with us, men, too, open up and share their secrets. Love involves an exchange of vulnerabilities, and a relationship that doesn’t begin with mutual self-disclosure doesn’t get off the ground. Men, though, are raised to seek mastery over everything they encounter, including their women, so they soon find it necessary to erect barriers against us, hide their vulnerabilities, and do what they can to control us. In the process they lose the feeling of being in love, and it’s a great loss.

“The Loop is a vulnerability that your man has to share with you. Unless he goes to the unlikely extreme of ending your sexual relationship, he can’t avoid the Loop; you can make it part of any or every sexual encounter. And once you’ve got him turned on, he can’t refuse to share his feelings; even if he’s reticent, his body will tell you everything. When you comment on what it does, even if only by saying, 'Mm-hm,' he’ll know that you know!”

Sexual excitement
“The most obvious advantage of sexual slavery is that it’s tremendously exciting. After a while, a man in an ordinary relationship becomes sexually bored with his partner and comes to regard lovemaking as more duty than pleasure. If he’s not committed to the relationship, he seeks a new and therefore more exciting partner, then repeats the pattern until he makes a commitment before getting bored. When he gets bored with a partner to whom he’s committed, he stops making love. If his libido was weak to begin with, he becomes impotent. More commonly, he delivers brief, mechanical sexual performances devoid of emotion.

“Many women blame themselves when this happens. Some blame their partners. In actuality, blame is inappropriate. Men are wired to lose interest in a partner who’s always available. They can’t help it. Fortunately they’re also wired to turn on to the techniques of female domination; they can’t help that either. And the power of these techniques to excite is far greater than the tendency of monogamy to bore. If your man can’t have you whenever he wants, if he gets to experience that yummy little thrill only on your terms, boredom never sets in. He remains always a bit insecure, always eager to please you, always horny for you.

“A love slave spends much of his time in a state of sexual arousal. He may find this frustrating at times, but always exciting and never boring. I’ve heard of two love slaves in their seventies who were vigorously potent, and one of them had given up on sex in a conventional relationship fifteen years earlier, believing he was too old.

“A particularly introspective man might appreciate this, as might a man who has been rescued from sexual boredom without a change of partner, but a man of ordinary self-awareness who is sexually enslaved early in a relationship will likely attribute his state of continuous arousal to his lover’s attractiveness alone. And so much the better for her!”

Love
“Like sexual excitement, being in love is a delicious feeling. Men, control freaks that they are, rarely seek it; they seek sexual flings instead. Nevertheless men do fall in love early in their relationships and feel a loss when they assert dominion over their partners and the feeling goes away. Eventually a man reaches a point in his life where he becomes aware that he’s no longer in love with the woman he married and, unless he ends or at least risks his marriage, he’s doomed to live out his days without ever experiencing that feeling again. Grim.

“Female domination saves a man from that. A love slave is, first and foremost, in love with his partner, and the feeling doesn’t go away. Many factors contribute to this, among them the same insecurity that keeps him sexually excited, her sharing of his vulnerability with respect to The Loop, and his eidetic recollections of her teasing.

“As with sexual excitement, only an uncommonly experienced and introspective man will understand that his enslavement is what makes him love his partner with such enduring intensity. The average man will be aware only of being in love. Both will be emotionally committed.”

Intimacy
“Men crave intimacy but fear it. Generally fear wins. A woman who sexually enslaves her lover can tip the balance so he can enjoy being known by her.

“Early in a relationship, when a man is in love, he wants to share all his thoughts, feelings, fantasies, beliefs, hopes, dreams and fears. He rehearses what he’d like to say, but typically can bring himself to voice only a small fraction of what’s inside. He’s learned to keep it all to himself, and the learning is of a sort that’s difficult to overcome.

“As the relationship matures, he feels obliged to control it. The necessity of confronting his partner as an adversary when they have differences (for that’s how he sees it!) now makes self-disclosure impossible. The enemy might learn something she could use against him. This is war, and he has to win — has to expand and consolidate his control.

“From her point of view, the most appealing aspects of his personality have disappeared behind an impenetrable wall. From his point of view, he’s involved in a relationship recognized as the ultimate in intimacy by his friends, colleagues, church and state, and he’s emotionally isolated.

“Sexual slavery makes it easier for a man to talk openly with his partner about matters of emotional significance. It does this in several ways. If she uses her sexual power to take control of all aspects of the relationship, making whatever decisions there are to be made, he doesn’t have to be ready for battle. There isn’t going to be a battle, so there’s no tactical disadvantage in having a history of intimacy.

“If she considers his needs in making her decisions — and she would be foolish not to — he’ll learn that it’s in his best interest to let her know what those needs are. He’ll learn to prioritize them honestly as well. Some things matter to him a great deal, others only a little. There are preferences he might insist upon in an ordinary relationship that aren’t his at all, but represent instead what he thinks he owes his family or what he hopes will impress his buddies. If she considers his stated needs in good faith, her decisions will suit him best if he’s been honest with her. Intimate self-disclosure thus becomes a way of getting what he needs and wants.

“The Loop, by being a significant vulnerability he can’t help but share, gets him accustomed to being intimately known. Other secrets no longer seem so dark as to be worth hiding. In time, he learns his partner isn’t dangerous and he gets comfortable enough to talk openly about anything. Eventually he realizes she knows him quite well and loves him for who he is, rather than for the image he was trying to project when they met or for some utilitarian advantage. That’s a truly exhilarating high — one that the conventionally dominant man will never reach.

“Because he’s in love, he wants to share his thoughts, feelings, fantasies, beliefs, hopes, dreams and fears, just as at the beginning of a conventional relationship. And the love inspired by sexual slavery lasts, so he actually has a chance of communicating it all, then going on to share the changes that come with maturity and age. Happily ever after.”

A Higher Level

This is about a man and a woman who very nearly failed at their relationship—before this night, and before it became a story about a woman and her man.

The Goddess returned from her shower to find her knight sitting on the edge of their bed. As one of his routine duties, he had collected the clothing she had dropped on the floor and placed it in a basket with other laundry that he would do in the morning. The man was naked as she had instructed. He looked at her adoringly, expectantly, almost child-like as she entered the room. It was an expression to which only now she was growing accustomed. Except for a towel that was wrapped around her wet hair, she was also nude. Though she carried more than a few extra pounds on her frame, she strode confidently to her chair and sat down. She knew by the way her knight drank her in with his eyes that he truly did not care, in fact, actually relished the voluptuous curves that now formed her middle-aged body. Contrary to social standards bent on convincing her otherwise, this made her feel more desirable and all the more deserving of his worship.

Tonight, as the object of his worship, she would address a different persona of the man who was her husband. As well as her knight in shining armor, he was her partner, her best friend and confidant, and her lover. And because he had given himself in submission to her, he was also her servant and sometimes her slave. “Fetch your collar,” she said authoritatively.

He rose obediently to his feet and retrieved a black leather collar from a dresser drawer. As he approached her with collar in hand, she snapped her fingers and pointed to the floor. He went down instantly and covered the remaining distance to his Goddess on his knees. Handing her his slave collar, he leaned forward.

She fastened it around his neck, then she sat back and smiled. He had purchased the collar at her request from a leather crafter on eBay. It was the first D/S toy they had added to their bedroom toy collection. The Goddess used it often. She liked seeing her man wear his collar and marveled how he obeyed her implicitly when wearing it. Moreover, she found it was easier to dominate him when he was collared. She lamented that, because they still had grown children at home, she could not have him wear it as often as she desired. She had assured him however, that once the kids were gone, she would have him wearing his slave collar, and probably little else, a great deal of the time. “There now, that’s better. You’ll be wearing this to bed tonight.”

She continued to survey the man kneeling before her, his head bowed in humility. Even now it surprised her that the once self-absorbed man who had engaged her in frustrating power struggles, now eagerly supplicated himself before her. It had been over two years since they had first discussed adopting a FemDom lifestyle. As was typical in female-led relationships, it was his suggestion. Being open-minded, she agreed without much reservation, primarily because she had always felt a woman should be treated as a goddess. She reasoned that a lifestyle that promoted this thinking was bound to be a good thing. Still, the transition had been a challenging process. Fraught with several frustrating setbacks, it required genuine and sometimes uncomfortable honesty, with themselves and each other, and also a willingness to consider ideas that departed from traditional thinking. The truth was, despite her naturally bossy nature, and her husband’s eagerness to submit, only now was the Goddess beginning to feel entirely comfortable in her dominant role.

The Goddess toyed with the chrome-plated ring on her husband’s collar, making it clank against the D-ring that held it in place. Their journey into FemDom had not been without surprises, and this was one of them. Hardware: the Goddess discovered she liked the sound of hardware. Leather: she discovered she liked the aroma of leather in the bedroom. She also discovered that together, hardware and leather made her wet. “So,” she teased, “Do you still want to worship and serve me?”

Her question was more rhetorical, more of a ritual, than it was a real question. Since female authority had become the rule in their relationship, how they related to each other as man and woman had changed considerably. Their relationship and marriage had been transformed to the extent that both understood there would be no turning back to the vanilla lifestyle from which they came.

“Yes I do,” he replied, looking downward at the floor.

“Why?”

“Because you are the woman I love. And you deserve to be worshipped.”

“Why else?”

“Because I’m submissive and need to be dominated.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

He paused for a moment, as if considering how to respond, but he knew the answer without thinking. It was the same answer he gave her every time she asked this question. “Because I’m a male. Because I like how it makes me feel.”

She reached out and lifted his chin so that she could look into his eyes. “Yes, I can see it in your eyes. You need it. You crave it, don’t you.”

“Yes, my Goddess.”

“Then you’re a lucky man I allow you to serve me. You’re lucky I give you what I know you need.”

“I surely am.” He cradled first one foot then the other, bowing to plant a kiss on each.

As he did so she added, “But you won’t always like what I give you.” Her words resounded in his head as both a threat and a promise: ‘you won’t always like what I give you.’ Words, they were merely words. Yet she was becoming adept at stringing them together to make them every bit as controlling as the links of the chain leash she sometimes attached to his collar.

“I know… but I trust you. Thank you.”

She reached out and ran her fingers through his hair. “So tell me, in what ways did you think of me today? I know it’s difficult for a male, but did you actually think of me with your brain… or just your cock?”

He smiled at her . “With my brain of course.”

“Really? Then it seems to me if you’d been using your brain, you’d have thought to sweep the kitchen floor today.” He had taken on many household chores she had assigned, even a few she hadn’t. And he was as good if not better than she was at most. Yet there were annoying times when it seemed he deliberately shirked his responsibilities. This frustrated her immensely. She closed her fingers, capturing a handful of hair and pulled. “Why should I have to waste my time talking to you about this?”

“You shouldn’t. So, maybe I wasn’t thinking with my brain.”

“No, maybe not. Submissive or not you’re still a man, and you all think with your cocks. She brought a foot up between his legs and flicked his penis with her toes. “This is what controls you. That’s why I must have complete control of it. When I control the cock, I control the man.” She tapped his balls with the top of her foot, just hard enough to make him wince slightly. “You agreed to give me control of your cock, didn’t you?”

“Yes I did, Goddess.”

“I think you must forget that at times. Maybe you need a daily reminder that this,” she punctuated her words with another tap to his balls, “does NOT belong to you. It belongs to ME.” Then she began to tease his cock with her foot. Within a minute or so he began to grow erect. She expected he would arch his pelvis forward, just slightly, in an effort to intensify the contact with her foot. When he did so, she met his advance and began to massage his growing erection with her foot. The Goddess was, in fact, a self-proclaimed foot-whore. In addition to enjoying having her feet worshipped, she adored how her husband took pleasure in anything that had to do with her feet and shoes. As she toyed with him, an idea came into her head. She decided it was time to use this to her advantage. “Looks like this poor little thing needs relief.”

“Well it has been three weeks.”

“I don’t need you to remind me how long its been,” she scolded. She ceased the motion of her foot but did not remove it from his crotch.

“No, of course you don’t. I only meant that because its been…”

“Oh please,” she interrupted, “you’d still want to cum even if it were only three days.” She resumed massaging and toying with her husband’s cock as she mused, “I don’t know, do you think you’ve earned the privilege? Should I let you jerk off?” Before he could answer she added, “Maybe I’ll think more about that while you get busy with your mouth.” She schooched her butt forward in her chair so that she was half reclining and spread her legs.

Happily, he buried his face between her thighs. Her pubic hair, still moist from her shower and smelling of scented soap, tickled his nose as he licked and kissed and nibbled. Mindful not to rush to her clit too quickly, he traced along her labia with the tip of his tongue. Eventually he parted her folds, probing tentatively, then sounded her depths with his tongue to lick her inner most recesses. “Damn, have you been taking lessons?” she teased. “You’ve gotten so much better at eating my pussy.” She draped one leg over the arm of her chair to give him deeper access. He helped to spread and support her legs as he serviced her. But knowing his Goddess as he did, he knew it would be only a matter of time before she moved to the bed. There she could recline and fully relax to let herself drift with the tides of approaching orgasm.

When she moved to the bed he retrieved a vibrator from the night table before joining her. He then placed a wedge-shaped pillow beneath her buttocks before crouching between her legs to continue. Tongue tantalized. Fingers coaxed G-spot. Vibrator titillated clit. The Goddess deliberately prolonged this exquisite torture until she could no longer hold back burgeoning energy of eminent finality. When the first wave crashed in on her, it knocked her nearly senseless. Then wave upon wave followed, threatening to pummel her to pieces and sweep them into the cosmos. Her thighs came together, vise-like and with such force they may well have imploded his ear drums had his head still been between them. A gutteral “Fffuuuuuuck” escaped her throat as her body recoiled with the intensity of her release.

He could scarcely contain a grin at her outcry. There were times when “Cheese and crackers” or “Geezo-wheezo” simply didn’t cut the mustard. This was certainly one of those times. Still, considering the situation, he found her use of the F-bomb to be a curious paradox: no manner of fucking he and his Goddess had ever engaged in had produced such an obviously powerful orgasm. What’s more, since assuming her dominant role in their marriage, there had been less intercourse, yet his Goddess now routinely experienced orgasms of startling intensity. They seemed to consume her to the extent that he sometimes thought she was in pain rather than ecstasy. Sobering as it was to male ego, this was undeniable proof that the penis played fourth-fiddle behind vibrator, tongue and fingers. Happily however, he did not allow himself to feel inadequate as a man. He chose instead to find satisfaction, a sense of pride even, in helping the woman he loved to achieve such lofty sexual highs, even though it didn’t require his cocksmanship.

His Goddess lay trembling in the aftermath of her orgasm. When he attempted to lay beside his her, to embrace her as he usually did, she pushed him away saying, “No. Go kneel beside the bed and wait.” Her request was unusual, but nonetheless, he complied without question. He knelt quietly for several minutes before his Goddess had recovered enough to roll over and sit on the edge of the bed in front of him. She quenched her dry mouth with a glass of water he had placed on the night table before saying, “Now then, still want to cum?”

“Yes, Goddess, if it pleases you.”

“Oh, indeed it will,” she replied with a wicked grin. “Play with your cock and get yourself off. I want you to cum on my feet.” Seeing a look of surprise on his face, she waited a moment before delivering the kicker, “And then I want you to lick them clean.”

Utter consternation swept across his face. “Ummm,” he stammered.

“Ummm?” I give you permission to cum and all you can say is ummm?”

“Well, it’s just that…”

“Just what?,” she interrupted. She reached out and slapped his face, not overly hard, but enough to ensure she commanded his full attention. “I didn’t hear ummm when I use to suck your cock. I didn’t hear ummm when I let you cum in my mouth. Did I?”

“No.”

“And I didn’t hear ummm when I swallowed. Did I. Well did I?”

“No.”

“I always meant to give to a big sloppy kiss and give it all right back to you. But I never did. Big mistake.”

“But…”

“But nothing. It was all fine and dandy with you to have woman who would do that for you. For YOU! Get it? I did it more for you, than for me.” He flinched when she leaned forward, expecting another slap in the face. Instead, seeing a look of guilt cloud over him, she took his face into her hands and spoke more quietly. “Hey, it’s okay. That was then and I wanted to please you. But this is now. And your job is to please your Goddess.”

She leaned back on her hands and brought her foot into his crotch. Almost involuntarily he looked down to watch as she began to wiggle her toes against his penis. “The choice is yours.” A knowing smile formed on her lips because she knew the outcome even before she posed the option. She understood how the male urge to cum was powerful incentive to agree to nearly anything. However she also knew the incentive lasted only to the moment of orgasm, after which all bets were suddenly off.

As she expected, he took himself in hand and began to masturbate. She watched and waited. Though she had already told him to cum, as he approached the edge of the abyss, he dutifully ask for permission to leap over it. This was always a moment of great anxiety for him, when teetering on the brink. It would take the slightest nudge to tip him over the edge, such that he could easily provide with the simple stroke of a hand. Yet he was without authority to do so. Sometimes she would allow him to provide that final stroke. Other times she would make him wait. Sometimes she would deny him altogether. And that would be the end of it. When he asked for her permission she replied, “Not yet. I want you to promise me you will lick up every drop.”

“Okay,” he said through clenched teeth, still looking at her feet.

“Not good enough. Look me in the eye and promise.” She met his gaze when he raised his head to look at her. “Say it.”

“I promise, Goddess.” And he was soon tumbling over the edge. Though caught in the throws of mind numbing orgasm, he remained diligent enough to control the direction of his ejaculation as best he could. He positioned and held his penis so that most of his semen fell on the pedicured feet of his Goddess.

“That’s it,” his Goddess encouraged, “let it go all over my sexy feet. Doesn’t that feel amazing? Like nothing else in the world, huh.”

When he was fully spent, he remained kneeling in front of his Goddess, looking down at her feet, at the mess he had left on them. She wiggled slightly the foot that had received the bulk of his load and said, “Now be a good boy and get busy licking. And be sure you get it all between my toes.”

He accepted her foot into his hand and slowly bowed his head to meet it. She could see by the reluctance in his movement that his enthusiasm had vanished. When he hesitated as his mouth neared her foot, she thought he might renege on his promise. For a moment, as she sometimes had in the past, she wondered if perhaps she was being too cruel and should let him off the hook. Then, before she could consider this further, she felt his tongue against her flesh. He began to lick, though slowly and with little conviction.

“Ooo, I like this,” she said. Even though this involved her feet and his orgasm, making it register somewhere between a treat and discipline in her husband’s mind, she realized that this was a nearly effortless way to push one of his submissive buttons. It took less energy than spanking or some of their other activities. Some creativity might help, just to make things interesting, but it required less planning too. “We’ll have to do this lots more,” she added. “Maybe next time I’ll have you eat your cum out of a pair of my panties. Dirty ones. Mmmm, won’t that be a yummy treat. I know how you love panties with my scent on them.”

He said nothing and continued to lick her feet, but now with increasing fervor. When he had finished, she said, “Now get a hot washcloth and wipe my feet. Wash your face and rinse your mouth too. Then I want to snuggle and kiss awhile.”

When he returned from the bathroom, he carefully wiped and dried her feet, then kissed each of her toes before joining her in bed. "I love you," he said as he slid in beside her.

"I love you too."

Wife and husband embraced and kissed tenderly before finally she said to him, “You do realize we took our relationship to a new level tonight.”

“You took us there.”

“No, I led and you followed.”

He knew this to be true in most areas of their marriage. “Yeah, I did.” Then after a pause he asked, “Does this mean you’re gonna have me do that all time now?”

She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Not always the same way, but yeah, I am.” Then with her lips close to his ear she added in a whisper, “Even when we fuck.”

“Oh.”

She raised up on one elbow so that she looked down at him as he lay next to her, “What’s the matter, are you ashamed?”

“Kinda.”

“Why? Because you ate cum or because you liked it?”

“I wouldn’t say I liked it.”

“Maybe not, but you wanted to do it. You just needed me to make it happen.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled long and slowly, knowing there was little sense in debating that this was essentially true. Now that she had made it a reality, he knew he would need to accept it was yet another paragraph written in the growing description of who he was as a man.

She patted her hand against his chest and said glibly, “Hey, it's no big deal. It’s not as if it makes you a cum slut.”

“A cum… oh that’s great. That’s just fuckin-A fantastic.”

She chuckled at that. “It IS when you think about it. You were in sub-space, big time. We both know that makes you happy… and a better husband. And that, my dear, is what makes ME happy.”

She kissed him on the lips. “Good night,” she said as she tugged playfully at his collar. “Hope this isn’t too uncomfortable to sleep in.”

“I suppose I’ll get use to it.”

She was not entirely sure to what her husband referred, wearing his collar to bed or tasting his semen. Either way she replied, “I know you will.” Then she rolled over, turned off the light and snuggled down beneath the covers. He did likewise. A few moments later she reached one hand behind her and pinched his ass. “See you in the AM… cum slut.”

The Goddess was pleased and not surprised to hear a sigh in the darkness that spoke of her knight’s contentment.

Fishing

Thanks to all who so eagerly left comments to my last post. Honest, Goddess V and I weren't fishing for compliments or encouragement. But it was nice to receive just the same. I only wanted to say that we hadn't lost interest in promoting wife-led marriage (or even in FemDom itself), simply that I had come to an impass composing something I felt worth saying. An idea or two has occured to me so it would seem the well is not yet dry.

Still Alive

Yes, we are still among the living even though we haven't posted to this blog in over a month. Truth is, I am wondering what more we can say here. And would it make an appreciable difference in advancing the cause of female-led relationships?

It appears that other blogs are stagnating as well. (Some have even been hijacked.) Happily there are two sites that churn along. Around Her Finger and Elise Sutton, which, in my opinion are the best out there as far as informational purposes go. AHF is easily the site more likely to pique the interest of a woman who is new to this way of thinking.

Socialization

Goddess V often tells me I think too much. I smile at her and say, “Ya think?” She’s right, mostly, but the deal is, I enjoy thinking. It’s part of who I am. I can sit quietly alone, with no TV, no radio, no distractions, and think—about all kinds of things. After writing my last post about gender roles, I’ve been thinking about socialization in general, and about how it defines us in many ways we don’t readily consider. Take women’s underarms for example ☺



The practice of eliminating body hair, both for men and women, is evident throughout the ages as far back as 3000 years B.C. and has ebbed and flowed from one culture to another. Men have concerned themselves with body hair on again and off again, and to a much lesser extent, so have women. Historians generally agree that shaving for American women began in 1915 with an ad in the up-scale magazine, Harper’s Bazaar. The ad featuring a photograph of a young woman dressed in a slip, a robe covering one shoulder, with her arm raised above her head to reveal a hairless underarm. At the time the term underarm was considered objectionable and unfit for print, so the ad copy was skillfully crafted and began: “Summer dress and modern dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.” Within a few months however, ad men through caution to the winds and began writing ad copy like, “The Woman of Fashion says the underarm must be as smooth as the face.”

The HB ad was the first in an onslaught by male marketeers to convince high-society women it was time, in fact, “necessary” for them to deal with not-so-feminine tufts of hair that someone, presumably the opposite sex, ostensibly found to be “objectionable.” An altruistic motive? Hardly. American women represented an untapped market for razors and assorted other toiletries the marketers themselves had yet to fully envision. Yes, American women had more than hair under their arms. They had big dollar signs. In the eyes of consumer marketeers, they were little more than juicy, low-hanging plums just ripe for the picking. By 1915 McCalls was running similar ads directed at middle class women. Bolstered by sheer and sleeveless dresses that were gaining popularity in women’s fashions, the movement toward redefining femininity in America was well under way.

Women’s razors and depilatories made their debut in the Sears Roebuck catalog in 1922, the same year the company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves. By this time however, the underarm battle had been largely won. Advertisers no longer felt compelled to explain the need for their products and could concentrate on distinguishing themselves from their competitors. The anti-leg hair campaign was less intense with the volume of leg ads never reaching the proportions of the underarm campaign. At the time there was little practical need for smooth legs. Hemlines that had risen during the Roaring Twenties plummeted in the 1930s. It wasn’t until Dr. Wallace Carothers at DuPont invented nylon in 1938 that an affordable alternative to silk stockings became available to the masses. Nylon stockings first went on sale on May 15, 1940, selling 780,000 pair the first day and 64 million the first year. Presumably, women rushed home to try on their first pair of nylons and decided it was time to start shaving the legs too.


According to one major razor manufacturer, a female who begins shaving at age 12 or 13 will do so about 6,336 times throughout her life. This equates to the average western woman dedicating approximately 32,000 minutes, or 533.34 hours, or 22.22 days of her life denuding her legs and underarms of unsightly hair. When I compare this to how I spend darn near this much time in my car each year just traveling to and from my job, I suppose 22.22 days in a lifetime is not that big a deal.

Then again, when you multiply 22.22 days by the number of shaving women in America: that’s many hundreds of years worth of otherwise productive woman hours that are wasted balancing on one foot in the shower! Next, consider how just one particular model Gillette razor recently earned $400 million in sales during its first year in the marketplace. It’s easy to understand why Proctor and Gamble was willing to plunk down $57 billion to acquire Gillette in 2005. In our age of global marketing, countries in which women still do not shave represent an opportunity for huge additional revenues, which is why companies like P&G are presently engaged in campaigns designed to convince those ladies they need to get with the program. The impact then, of cultivating women as consumers of razors, is massive--on our time as individuals and on our economy. But that’s not the half of it.

Shaving underarms and legs has become part of our western socialization and has helped to define our expectations for the female gender. When we see a woman raise her arm, men and women alike expect to see her armpit to be clean shaven. When we don’t we are taken aback, repulsed even. Stop for a moment to consider the true power in this: something as natural as underarm hair, which was given by Nature to every female on the planet, is now seen as being unnatural and decidedly unfeminine. Perhaps even more importantly, this has helped to defined how many women think of themselves as females. I dare say there are few women in America, sporting more than a few days’ growth under their arms, who could look at their image in a mirror without grossing themselves out.

For the most part, media advertisers must first persuade us to entertain a negative self image, simply because this affords them the best opportunity to present their products as solutions for correcting that imagined negativity. Make no mistake. This means there is a direct (and critical) correlation between our investment in negative self image and our investment in advertisers’ products. Witness Gillette’s TV and print ads for the premium-priced Venus razor for women that “brings out the goddess in you.” The logic is elementary, and damned insulting if you ask me. You know you’re a goddess wannabe. But you don’t use a Venus razor, so you’re not. What’s more, you can’t look like the mile-long-legs-to-die-for model in our ads. But never fear, ladies, Venus shaving system for women to the rescue. Simply shell out the bucks for one and voila, problem solved.

Dr. Rita Freedman, nationally known author, speaker and women’s psychology expert, writes in her book, Beauty Bound, “Body hair signals sexual maturity as well as dominance. Females are socialized to censor body hair, just as they are taught to repress their sexuality. The silky legs and hairless underarms of a child-woman connote her sexual innocence, even as they make her more sensuous… part of a social myth of female beauty which serves to keep women in their place as ‘the fair sex,’ powerless, weak and properly submissive.”



This is not a call to ban the blade among women. It’s just a shame shaving has been foisted on females when it should be a matter of choice. It’s equally a shame men and women alike have been condition to grimace at the sight of female body hair. Nonetheless, despite rising female authority, and despite a 2004 European study* that may indicate an increased incidence of breast among women who shave and use deodorant, I doubt women will toss out their razors the way feminists discarded their bras in the 1960s. Not any time soon anyway. Smooth legs and hairless armpits may or may not be good things, depending on your point of view. As Rita Freedman states in her more recent book, Bodylove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves; a Practical Guide for Women, “Good looks are a real source of women’s social power and can be useful in a variety of situations. There’s a difference between pursuing beauty joyfully and pursuing it desperately. Looking attractive is part of the game of living. But playing with your image should feel like fun, not a contest in which you always wind up on the losing side.”

Speaking of contests, below is a European ad for breast cancer awareness (the English version) that won an award in an advertising festival in 2005. Had this billboard appeared on an interstate in the United States it probably would have stopped traffic.

*The US study, by Chicago doctor Kris McGrath of Northwestern University, and involving over 437 women with breast cancer, suggests that deodorants or antiperspirants might be linked with breast cancer, but only together with underarm shaving. It is the first evidence of such a link but is far from conclusive. The study found that the more zealous the underarm regime, the younger the women were when diagnosed with cancer. Those who shaved at least three times a week and applied deodorant at least twice a week were almost 15 years younger when diagnosed than women who did neither.
This issue first gained publicity in the 1990s when a hoax email was widely circulated. It claimed that underarm shaving creates tiny nicks, allowing chemicals from deodorants or antiperspirants to enter the body and trigger tumors.