kink philosophy

Greedy. Selfish. Bitch.

Three words used so often to shame women for having needs, having boundaries, wanting more.

Three words that mean: shut up. That mean: take it. That mean: be grateful for the crumbs that society thinks you deserve.

A sub asked me this week why I used the word greedy to describe myself in a session. Why choose an ugly word? Why choose a word that seems so at odds with the type of person I am? Why would I—feminist, anarchist, generous, fiercely caring—use that word?

I answered his question and it inspired me to answer your unasked one:

There are words that I am here to unapologetically reclaim. Language our society uses to chastize women, to force us back into “our place.”

I own that word precisely because it makes you stop and think and question. I own that word because owning it forces us to lay bare what people are really saying when they use it.

Greedy, in simplest terms, means wanting more than your share. But what is my share? Too often, the word is used to try and force me to ask for less when what most women (myself included) need to do is ask for more.

So I refuse. I refuse to ask for less. I embrace the accusation. I take your barb and put it in my bio.

Because yes, I want more. More than the world has tried to offer me in so many ways. More money, more respect, more voice, more power.

When I say greedy, I don’t mean that I’m hoarding wealth. I mean that I will take and I will take unapologetically. Not because I need more than my share, but because I refuse to believe that my share is less than men’s.

I refuse to accept that my share is less money per hour than male counterparts. I refuse to accept that my share is spending more money on the same products (look up: pink tax). I refuse to accept that my share is footing the bill on beauty products, birth control, and safe sex—or being the one to be crushed under the weight of the consequences of not footing those bills.

I refuse to accept that my share is carrying more mental load, more emotional labor, more housework, more, more, more.

You see, I’m greedy like that.

In our society, money is power. Having money means maintaining power. I don’t even mean over others: I mean over my self.

I mean that because I did well in my vanilla career, I was able to quit when my industry’s ethics stopped matching my own. My fuck-you money was actually save-my-soul money.

I mean that my money has let me create art that changed people’s lives. My fuck-you money was I-see-you money.

I mean that because I expect more from the men around me, I have better men around me. The shit ones leave. My fuck-that attitude is actually save-me attitude.

Power can be used to fuck someone over and that’s the vision society has handed us because we’ve watched the men in charge suck everyone else dry—but it’s not the whole story of power or money.

Power can also be used to save yourself. Power can save others.

And that’s part of the point in flipping these scripts, in femdom and findom—when the traditionally disempowered in society are given power, the first power we gain is this:

The power to say no. To being exploited. And to participating in exploitation.

No, I will not do something that feels demeaning to me. No, I will not keep working with companies that are actively exploiting others.

That power means I get to be the person I want to be.

That money means I get to be the person I want to be.

There’s a certain type of man—a certain type of person—who uses the word greedy to demand that women (and other marginalized groups) ask for less.

Fuck. That.

I embrace the word because I will always ask for more.

Not just more money and more empowerment for me and those I love. But also more from men. Higher standards. Better behavior. Real, challenging personal growth. I refuse to baby men the way society loves to. That’s not respect; it’s infantilization.

I expect more.

Like a greedy, selfish bitch, it seems.

Greedy.

Selfish.

Bitch.

Why yes, thank you, I am.

Now go do those pushups and send for that bitch’s lunch.

“I don’t think it’s possible,” a young sub offered the subject up for debate in a group chat.

His reasoning: because of money. Money somehow made friendship, care, or true connection impossible in his mind.

I find this both baffling and irritating, so let’s talk about it.

First, have you never had a friend or deep connection with someone you also exchange money or services with? Never had a work colleague who became a dear friend? Never had a deep conversation with a therapist or life coach? Never gotten a crush on or dated someone you met in a context of financial exchange (server, bartender, carpenter, contractor)?

I have two dear friends who I met at a work conference over a decade ago. We’ve since taken friend trips to France, cried on each other’s shoulders, sent multi-hour voice note updates. And one of them has single-handedly been the greatest source of new clients for me in my vanilla work for the last decade. When we chat, we often finish up work stuff and one of us says “ok, friend mode time!” and we transition seamlessly into a space of friendship.

Why in the world wouldn’t that be possible in D/s? What about this space makes you think it’s not possible for people to have multiple types of connections—including a financial one?

Second, are y’all not generous in your personal lives?

Because I am.

A friend asked me for $100 to get out of a bad situation a couple weeks ago and I sent it within minutes. I bought a plane ticket this summer so someone I love could see his family after a long time apart. I sneak to the counter and pay for friends’ coffees all the time. I literally have a competition with my bestie to see who can secretly fund the meals we eat together before the other gets to it.

None of these financial moves by me or my bestie negate the love and friendship and connection I have with any of these people. Why the fucking fuck would you giving me money mean I couldn’t possibly care about you?

Do you think my bestie cares less about me because I paid for the apartment we rented for an art retreat a few years ago or do you think it was a lovely gift and deep moment in our friendship?

Do y’all really have that toxic a view of money? As if it poisons what it touches instead of being a tool like any other—a tool that can be used for exchange (theoretically morally neutral), to give care with no expectation (morally rad as fuck), or to control another person (only morally ok if consensual).

So if you think that D/s, findom, or femdom connections cannot possibly be genuinely caring or turn into friendship or romance outside the financial aspect, kittens, I invite you to examine that belief in yourself. Why do you believe that?

Are you coming into this space with a transactional mindset you haven’t communicated? Do you have the expectation of friendship and when you find it unmet you feel resentful? Could it come from a misogynistic belief society has handed you saying that women are just trying to take advantage of you (non-consentually)?

I can’t answer those questions for you. I’m just inviting you to sit with them.

Not every findom connection will turn into friendship—but that doesn’t mean 0% will. And just because someone isn’t your friend doesn’t mean they don’t care about you. My physiotherapist isn’t my friend but she quite literally changed my life. Same thing with my first therapist.

So dear lord, let’s stop the binary thinking that money stabs any chance of real care in the heart. And stop assuming just because money is involved, care cannot be. Don’t come into dynamics expecting the person to become your bestie or your girlfriend, but don’t be surprised if your connections are deep and caring and have more than one dimension.

First, the truth: I see you, kitten.

I see you out there, submissive to your marrow, longing for control, for purpose, for guidance, for care. And spending all your time cosplaying dominance because you feel you have to.

You cosplay at work. You cosplay in dating. You cosplay in the bedroom.

And all of it: submission. Not the kind you crave – but submission all the same.

You perform dominance because you are submissive to our cultures’ dictates. You perform it because you feel that the women you date expect it of you. Sometimes because they tell you they expect it of you.

But you’re not dominant. You’re an actor in a play you never auditioned for. You submit to the script because you it’s all you’ve ever done. Because it’s safe. Because it keeps your life intact in a world that sees male submission as weak.

Kitten, I’m here to tell you that it isn’t weak.

That going off the script is unusual precisely because it’s fucking brave.

That showing that side of yourself is courageous precisely because much of the world doesn’t understand it.

Which is why you come to me. To rest. To be yourself. To stand in your authenticity instead of the script. And because you know that everything else is just pretend.

This is your real world. And now is your moment to approach.

“I feel humiliated,” he said.

And your first thought on reading that might be: duh.

Consensual humiliation is a frequent part of D/s play. It’s definitely part of what I do. It’s not a surprising sentence in the online spaces we inhabit.

But here’s the thing. This time was different. This time I had to pause.

Because, kittens, I wasn’t humiliating that man.

This wasn’t a humiliation session. I had not said or asked for anything humiliating. There was no SPH. No insults. Not even a hint of gentle teasing.

Just me asking, “how does that make you feel?”

And him: “I feel humiliated.”

I paused. I recalibrated.

Because the thing he was describing as humiliating was this:

Simply being himself.

Simply being a submissive man.

It was the act of submission. It was the fact that he wasn’t trying to dominate me—a woman. This is what was making him feel less.

In a world that demands men perform dominance at all costs—especially toward women—this man felt humiliated simply by the fact that he was not trying (in what would have been an extremely non-consensual act) to dominate me.

Kittens, I want to talk about the rage I felt.

Not toward him, but toward the way society beat into him this message—that his submission was weakness, not gift.

And what the actual fuck.

What has the world done to you, telling you that your desire to serve, to care, to rest, to admire and follow and worship women, is somehow inherently humiliating?

What is humiliating about care?

What is humiliating about putting your pleasure after another person’s?

What is humiliating about the simple act of not trying to enforce your will on another person?

Of admiring someone else and striving to be more like them, serve them, show up for them, show up like them in the world?

Nothing. The answer is nothing.

This is not humiliation. It is a kind of hero’s journey.

One that requires death of ego, sacrifice, and the ability to grow, change, live in your authenticity, and rest.

To stop pretending to be the smartest person in every room (“smartest person” doesn’t exist anyway, because there are a thousand different types of smarts).

To stop having to perform confidence and hardness and stoicism you don’t feel.

To stop playing at the specific version of masculinity you’ve had shoved down your throat your whole life until you feel so suffocated that you might just crawl into a corner and cry (out of sight, of course, because performance).

The only reason these things are seen as humiliating is because society has deemed all things feminine humiliating. Which means bowing down to them is humiliating too. And performing anything society has (wrongly, it should go without saying) deemed feminine (including submission itself) has been deemed humiliating.

Shall we say it louder for those in the back: fuck society.

Fuck all the scripts they force us into based on fake rules that benefit the few while many suffer.

The truth is that submission takes strength. Especially in a world that doesn’t understand it.

It takes strength to take off the mask in the face of that societal scorn.

It takes strength to let go.

It takes strength to trust yourself into the hands of another person.

It takes strength to live in your authenticity.

It takes strength to tell society that it can go fuck it’s stupid gender rules and the ways they hurt us all.

It takes strength to tell society that it’s wrong. The person you want to admire and serve is a woman. That the characteristics you want to adopt, the way you want to live your life, is led by a woman. And even if your dom is a man, it takes strength to submit there, too. To reveal that there is a part (or the whole) of your soul that longs to not be the one in charge.

There is plenty of space to explore humiliation in these dynamics. It is BDSM, after all. But I need us to stop pressing subscribe on the boring, unexamined opinions society has tried to enforce on us all.

Submissive men aren’t lesser. Submission isn’t inherently humiliating.

It’s simply another way of being. Another type of strength. Another way a human can feel deeply themselves and deeply connected to another person.

If you’re reading this, consider it my love letter to male submission. My fist in the face of the idea that submission is inherently inferior or less than. My righteous anger.

There are plenty of things I will humiliate you over and laugh at you about. (Laughing at men is, in fact, one of my favorite sports.) But this is not one of them, kitten.

Your submission is fucking beautiful. And any laugh it inspires in me is one of delight.

Who will own me?

Seeking ownership!

Long-term only.

Own me. Devour me. Collar me. Keep me.

Who will own me?

Who will own me?

Do you hear the longing in it? The way these words slip into my inbox full of weight, full of truths just simmering under the surface. Questions under the question. Longing that has attached itself to a single word.

Ownership.

When subs ask about it early in conversation, there is almost always something else behind the words.

It’s not simply: will you own me? Not really.

It’s this: am I safe?

Am I safe to surrender? Will you still be here when I show you the messy parts, the scary parts, the shameful parts? Will you stay when I let go?

Ownership doesn’t really promise those things, just like marriage or commitments in the vanilla world don’t and can’t either. At the end of the day it’s trust and connection that create that safety.

But.

But the request for ownership tells me something about the asker. Tells me something about what they need. What they fear. And what makes them feel safe.

Will you still be here when I show you my whole, real, messy self? This is usually the real question they’re asking and the one I try to focus on instead of ownership itself.

The reverse is also true.

When a sub comes to me and says “I never want ownership.” When they skitter at the mention of it. There’s something behind that too. It’s often the same question but with a different anxiety at its helm:

Am I safe?

This time: Am I safe to leave? Will you promise not to trap me? Will you promise not to hold me down? If I get up the courage to say that I’m quitting, will you let me go?

These are usually the subs who have been manipulated, blackmailed, or otherwise non-consentually harmed in dynamics before. And so what they need to know is this: will you let me leave without a fight?

Of course, these are not the only reasons that people ask these questions. There are those who fetishize ownership itself. There are those who want to use lack of commitment as an excuse for lack of care. There are more than two ways to feel about this.

But for most of the people in my DMs, these two requests for psychological safety ring deeply true.

They are often there because my words made them feel seen. And before we take another step they need a slice of reassurance:

Am I safe?

To stay. To go. To be authentic.

The label is nearly never the point this early on in a connection. The connection itself is.

Gather round, kittens. We need to have another talk.

This time about some sub-on-sub crime.

Yep, that’s right. I see y’all out there, participating in the same bullshit society forces on submissive men. Shaming each other. Shaming yourselves. And then partitioning submission into tinier and tinier boxes.

Those other guys aren’t really submissive, I see some of y’all arguing. Because they get pleasure from humiliation or because they shy away from shame or because they quit and come back.

Most subs aren’t as good-looking as me, some of y’all (audacious as hell) DM me.

Probably some loser in his mom’s basement.

Probably can’t get girls.

Probably society was right.

Excuse the hell out of me, but fuck that shit sixty-three ways to Sunday. Fuck it when society forces it on you. Fuck it when we dommes uphold it. And fuck it all to hell when y’all put it on each other.

Have you thought about what you are doing to your own soul when you drip with disdain toward other submissive men? Have you thought about how much that knife you aimed at their heart is headed straight toward yours?

When you say you aren’t like other submissive men, you are implicitly agreeing with every stupid societal trope that says submissive men are less. Are worse. Are ugly. Are undesirable.

And within this kink, there is space for you to explore those feelings, that kind of rejection, those humiliations—safely, consensually—if that’s your thing. But using those beliefs to rip each other’s self esteem to shreds in public spaces and domme DMs isn’t consensual kink. It’s nonconsensual cruelty. It’s boring, run-of-the-mill unexamined participation in the narrow categories society loves to box us all into.

If there is anyone who should be able to stan submissive men, it’s a submissive man.

Reminder: submissive men come in all shapes and sizes and levels of success with women and in life. Reminder: lots of people live in mom’s basement and that’s fucking fine. Mind your business. Reminder: “getting girls” is a not a measure of your worth as a human being and we’re people, not things you “get.” Reminder: submission looks different for different people, and you don’t own the definition.

In short: maybe if you stop judging the hell out of Dave, you can stop judging the hell out of yourself too. And then we can bid farewell to u/deleted for good and you can just go ahead and live your truth.

Lean in close, kittens, and let’s have a chat.

Because we need to talk about power. And desire. And the truth behind a truth.

I see you there, longing to be devoured. Overtaken. Overpowered.

I see the relief on your face when you think I might. The hope that I could.

Overpower you. Overtake you. Devour you.

That is your truth. Your longing.

And this is the truth underneath it:

I’m not here to overpower you, kitten. I do not bend you to my will by forcing something inside you. I am not the demon slipping under your skin so you can abdicate responsibility.

I am here, instead, to overpower your fears.

I invite you into the darkness, your darkness, and because I’m there, you follow.

I transform the darkness into desire. I rip from it the judgement.

I am shield and stone and safety net. You walk the tightrope because you believe I will catch you if you fall.

You do not follow because I force you. You follow because deep down you want to and you trust me to light a candle, take your hand, and show you that the fifty-foot demon is survivable. That you were always stronger than you thought.

When you ask if I’m going to make you cage for longer than you’ve ever caged before. When you ask for humiliation, for me to speak your deepest fears aloud. When you have been talking around on wounds that healed wrong and I re-open them so they can heal properly this time.

This is not me overpowering you, kitten. This is what you longed for the whole time. And what you needed was someone bigger than your fears.

Our society has a hard-on for the idea of men leaving a legacy. Being remembered. Chasing immortality.

You see it in the tech bros doing their extreme all-meat diets, drinking the literal blood of their sons to stay young (yes, that’s a thing), hustling so much that they break the entire culture in an effort to matter.

It doesn’t seem to come from a place of joy. Not building something because you love it, because you want it to change your world in some way—but building because you desperately need to matter. Need to be remembered. Need to be important.

In other words: fear.

It comes from fear.

Fear that they are not enough on their own.

Fear that they really are meaningless.

Fear of being forgotten. Unloved. Disconnected.

Sometimes I see the echoes of this anxiety in D/s. A desperation to serve that comes from that same dark, anxious place:

Do I matter?

Do I have purpose?

This can manifest in the search for a domme, all anxious energy and a terrible fear that it won’t work. It can keep you from settling in to a dynamic and trying. At the first hint of challenge or reality, you want to move on because the magic you were looking for was a bolt from the blue, a lightning strike.

Purpose! Sudden and complete.

And for a lot of the best and longest-lasting dynamics, there is a slower build than that. A quiet progression. Built not on fear but on love.

I don’t mean romantic love. I mean that instead of being driven by the fear of not being enough, the fear of being meaningless, the fear of being unlovable—and a terrible need to prove those fears untrue—a dynamic can be driven by hope and admiration for another person and a slow-building trust that you can go this deep with them. That you can find yourself in the dynamic. That you can matter.

That love is for yourself. For your authenticity. And for your domme—because even without a romantic component, service is love. Because love is action. Love is care.

What we learn in moments of real connection is that we don’t need to matter to the whole world. We need to matter to a tiny slice of it. As our complete and authentic selves.

Which is why these kink relationships often have deep meaning beyond the sexy bits. For so many in this space (especially subs raised as men), a domme is the only person who sees that secret part of them.

And sometimes sessions and service are requests for the answer to that heart-heavy question:

Do I matter?

Am I enough?

Which means it’s vital for us as dommes to answer that question with a yes in our actions. This means aftercare. It means showing up after you have seen that secret part and saying I’m fucking proud of you or I want you to stay or let’s do it again, bitch. It means consistency. It means seeing and not running away.

And for subs, if this is the dynamic you crave, it means being brave. It means being honest with dommes as you build trust. It means working on entering into what you hope will be a long-term dynamic with a readiness to face the hard emotions instead of running from them. It means prioritizing care over fear. It means prioritizing the opinions of yourself and the person who truly sees you over the rest of our extremely dumb society.

It means facing the hard emotions along the way and finding the part of yourself that serves from a place of care, admiration, and connection.

And the big secret is this: that’s when the fear recedes. That’s when you stop caring about some big bad legacy, stop fearing that you are not enough, and find instead that you are precisely where you want to be.