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.