kink philosophy

findom, kink philosophy

Do you crave my cruelty—or simply my authenticity?

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First, a truth:

Sometimes it surprises me what you consider mean.

When I tell you a hard truth, even gently: mean. When I say you should embarassed (because you should be): mean. When I laugh at a shenanigan: mean. Teasing is mean. Directness is mean. Taking men off the pedastle that society pretends we’re all supposed to keep you on: mean, mean, mean.

In my day-to-day life, this is the truth I live. In a world that doesn’t expect or reward directness, confidence, or truth-telling in women. And now even in this world, in D/s, where my meanness is craved, requested, begged for, even—the definition of meanness didn’t shift as much as I expected it to.

That’s not to say I’ve never had requests for real cruelty. I have.

But that’s not most of them. Most of the requests are for something else.

Not meanness.

Simply…authenticity.

Simply: mask off. Tell us what you really think.

Maybe the allure is the gift of knowing that if I praise you, I mean it. That I am not interested in babying you or kissing your ass. That I am not here to infantalize you the way our society loves to. That you don’t get the free pass the world too often gives you. The one that feels wrong. Feels inauthentic.

Because it is.

Women smile at you sometimes because they’re afraid of you. They pacify you because they don’t want to deal with your bullshit. They excuse your bad behavior or stupidity because they don’t expect any more from a man.

Babying you has never been a sign of respect. It’s a sign of not wanting to handle another toddler-level temper tantrum—of seeing you as less capable of self-control, care, intelligence, and so on.

In some ways, you live in a world that treats you like a child. And I suspect that for many of you, you feel the wrongness of that.

You feel the inathenticity of how women must interact with you in day-to-day life.

And you feel how it keeps you separate from us. From our power. Our care. Our truth.

Whether you were able to articulate it to yourself or not before this moment, that wrongness lodges in your throat and chokes out the feeling of real connection.

Which is why you tell me you love a mean girl.

It’s why when I don’t pretend to be impressed, it feels so right.

It’s why “that’s stupid” or “do better” or audio of me laughing at you don’t hit as barbs. They hit as euphoria.

Kittens, I suspect that some of you are tired of the lies. Tired of how those lies keep you from real, authentic connection with women.

And you don’t know how to ask to tear those walls down, so you ask me to be mean.

That’s also why some meanness doesn’t hit. Doesn’t scratch the itch. Because if this is you—if you are the one I am talking to—you didn’t want to cosplay mean. You wanted truth. You wanted truth so badly that you hoped it would sting.

There’s more than one type of request for meanness. There’s more than one type of sub who loves a mean girl. There is more than one layer to this onion to peel back.

But this is one of them.

One layer. One type of sub. One request for “meanness.”

A request not even for meanness, but simply for straightforwardness, a type of truth serum, a holding of boundaries that feels real.

And if this is you, I want to hear from you. I want to give you the gift of that authenticity. I want to show you what it feels like to be truly respected—expected to live up to a higher standard.

And don’t worry. I will laugh at you plenty along the way.

kink philosophy

Submission isn’t inherently humiliating

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“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.

kink philosophy

What do you really mean when you ask for ownership?

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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.

findom, kink philosophy

Let’s talk about self-sabotage in findom

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It starts with a spark, a twitch, a catch in your breath. She’s beautiful. She’s powerful. She’s already got you figured out and you just know it.

That’s the domme you want to serve, the domme you want to wrap you tight around her perfectly manicured finger.

And so you reach out. You hope. You send a message. You send age verification. But when it comes to your money, you hold back. It’s a pastry or a coffee and then—nothing more.

Then you wait.

I’ll send more when she impresses me, when she seduces me, when she takes over my mind, you tell yourself.

Inevitably, she never does.

Because what you don’t realize is that you’ve already put a wall between yourself and that hope.

By asking her to give and prove and invest in you without you investing in her, you’ve clung to your power instead of releasing it.

You’ve set her up to chase, to work, to beg (ew). And either she won’t because most dommes won’t. That’s not what we do. It’s not the power structure we crave, the kinds of connections we’re seeking here.

Or she will chase and beg and it doesn’t work. Because that’s not actually what you want, kitten—to turn her into someone courting your favor. You haven’t set yourself up for surrender. You have asked her to submit to you instead of the other way around.

And so you ruin your fantasy before it begins. Because of that pesky little asshole:

Fear.

One of the disservices culture offers to every person raised as a man is this: it plants in you a fear of being taken advantage of by women.

(Now, depending who you are, you might be in the findom or femdom space because you want to be taken advantage of – and hi cuties, adore you, not talking to you in this one. Y’all are already on board. But for the others, the skittish little kittens stepping into the space scared…)

You are scared of the scams, of the ripoffs, but way more than that scared of the vulnerability. Scared that if you open up, give freely of your time, your energy, your care, your truths, you will end up rejected.

That’s really what you’re scared of, isn’t it? Not even being scammed. Being rejected by a real person you admire and want.

And so you enter spaces holding back, being stingy with your money, your time, your care, your emotions—and you’re shocked when that inspires stinginess in the person you’re interacting with. When it never works.

The reality is that when you are generous—truly generous—it frees up the women in your life (be that personal connections or dommes) to be generous with you.

In other words: how you enter a dynamic either creates an atmosphere of generosity or one of stinginess. Either your domme knows from the start that she is treasured, you see her time and presence as valuable and she can trust that you will keep showing up with generosity and care—or she knows that she will have to draw every coffee send from you painstakingly.

And kittens, nobody wants the latter when they can have the former. Dommes who are successful in this space and in their vanilla careers aren’t going to chase you around for scraps. We aren’t going to trade in our power for the day just because maybe you’ll turn out to be better than this later.

For those interested in feminization or simply deconstructing the ways that society has limited you as a man, this is me ushering you into the sisterhood by telling you our secret:

Generosity is how women relate to each other.

We show up emotionally, physically, intellectually, financially. We bring each other food when we’re sick or sad. We fight over who pays for each other’s coffee. We show up planning to be generous and we are often met with generosity in return.

This takes courage. It takes a willingness to be the one who is sometimes overgenerous. It takes an acceptance that sometimes you will be generous with a person you never see again or never get anything from—and actually that’s beautiful. I’ve paid the rent of strangers on GoFundMe before just for the feeling it gives me when I think of that person checking their email and finding that stress has evaporated from their life.

This is what I personally mean when I say I don’t want findom to be transactional—not that it shouldn’t include money (lol to everyone who has suggested that; are you lost, bro?) but that you should come in with generosity, care, and admiration from the start. Show up giving. Show up sacrificing. Show up not expecting anything in return—even as you hope for connection to blossom.

That is how you set yourself up for real success in a dynamic. Any dynamic. In BDSM and in life.

This is how you make me want to surprise you with more care and play and space than you ever expected from me.

To get there, you’ll need to be brave enough to rip entitlement out by its roots, to give with only the expectation of how it will make you feel, not what you will get for it.

kink philosophy

Maybe if y’all stopped judging each other, you’d also stop judging yourselves

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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.

kink philosophy

I’m not here to overpower you; I’m here to overpower your fears

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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.

kink philosophy

Do you serve out of love–or fear?

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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.

kink philosophy

You’re at a crossroads. Don’t set up camp there.

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Oh hey there, nervous kitten. Let’s sit down and have a chat.

Because I see that shame spiral you’re stuck in. And damn it looks nasty. You’re fucking tired, aren’t you? Fucking desperate. Because no matter how much you chase the thing your soul is craving, it never seems to work.

For some of you, that’s because you’ve hit a crossroads and you’re paralyzed with indecision about where to go.

One side leads to your authentic self. Which sounds like a pretty fucking easy choice. Yes, please and thank you.

Except the part where you aren’t sure you like that person. Where you haven’t reconciled with them. Where you see the ways that taking that path would make you subject to societal ridicule.

The other path is a path of abstinence. Cutting off that part of yourself that society isn’t thrilled out and pretending it never existed. Keeping it tied up tight and locked in a closet (and not in the fun way).

That sucks a lot too. And your soul knows you really don’t want that path. To have to pretend to be dominant forever and ever. To have to subscribe to a very specific (boring) version of masculinity that isn’t really you. To never know what it would feel like to really sink in, find the edges of that part of yourself, know entirely who you really are.

So here you are, at the crossroads, building yourself a little tent city.

I’m here to say that won’t work either. You’re in fucking quicksand there. Never able to really sink into a dynamic and find yourself. And never able to fit like you want to in Just Vanilla Land either. And so it’s yo-yo time. Back and forth. Shame over what you crave. Shame that you can’t pretend effectively enough to stop craving it.

Ultimately, you are the person who gets to decide if you:

Work (because damn it will be work) toward embracing your kinks as part of your authentic self and actually giving a shit about yourself as a whole person instead of just the parts society finds palatable

Or

Keep hiding parts of yourself, keep wearing a mask and performing a stupid form of masculinity that most women don’t like anyway (notice how in polite society more and more women are opting out of dating men). Choose this route and you get to keep feeling exhausted and shitty about it.

Make no mistake: the society path will keep you in that shitty place and so will camping out halfway. So will scrolling on Reddit and telling dommes you want to submit but then being unwilling to show up for yourself when something is asked of you and running away when the shame hits hard.

It doesn’t move you closer to being the person society is trying to force on you. And it doesn’t move you closer to confidently living as yourself, society be damned.

I’m not saying the first path means living loud and proud as an armpit fetishist with everyone you meet or putting “foot worshipper” on your resume. I’m saying that first path is about meeting your real self and deciding you’re cool with them. Deciding that you like yourself as a whole human being with messy parts and silly parts and exquisitely stupid parts (which we all have, including the vanillas).

Let me also be clear that I understand that shame is part of the kink for many. Shame is a desired feeling in some cases. But it’s also how a lot of subs describe the thing that keeps them from what they want—and it’s to those subs that I am speaking here.

If you want to take that journey, it’s one you’ll need to take with yourself, probably a kink-safe therapist, and a safe domme who can stand consistently with you in that space. But to do that, you have to stop planting that flag at the crossroads.

What you are chasing here is the relief of submission, of being who you are, of being safe to let go. And when you hold back, plant your heels to keep from going down that self-loving path, the person you are cheating out of that relief is yourself.

kink philosophy

On tolerating discomfort

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Throughout my life, I have often been the one people come to when tragedy strikes. When loss upon loss presses heavy on their souls.

And a common thread in those conversations is this:

The people around them cannot tolerate the discomfort of their sadness, their rage, their grief.

They want to solve it. They want to banish it. They want optimism and positivity and movement away from the sad, hard thing.

And what I can do in that moment is sit with those hard things. Defend those hard emotions. Welcome them because hard emotions aren’t evil things trying to destroy us. They are part of us. They are signals. They tell us this mattered.

You grieve because you love.

You hurt because you hoped.

You’re angry because something is wrong.

You are in pain because you are alive.

Discomfort is not my enemy. Pain is welcome in my space. And because of these truths, I can witness those things without trying to usher them away, sweep them under a rug, pretend they never happened.

This is a mirror into how I see the uncomfortable parts of BDSM—the intentional pain, humiliation, and degradation. The requests to make someone cry.

They are sometimes a request for permission to feel those taboo feelings.

Especially for men, who are raised to think of so many feelings as an indictment of their masculinity. As if being human wasn’t man enough. As if pretending not to feel pain was some kind of courage.

Part of my role as a domme is to hold space for the hard feelings. To let them exist and grow and excite and relieve.

This space lets you face the questions society is uncomfortable with. What happens if I am humiliated? What happens if I am crushed? Where are the limits between tolerating discomfort and finding a boundary?

And this is part of why the vanilla world cannot understand. Because as long as they are running from the so-called negative feelings, they cannot know the depth of those feelings. The way that they can be tangled up with pleasure and relief. The way that you hold them and find yourself more whole. The way that they shape not only your sexual desires but also—if you are going deep enough—the way you show up in the world overall.

kink philosophy

My body is a revolution

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When I was young, my parents tried to convince me to have plastic surgery.

If you’re surprised by that, you’re in good company. I didn’t have the surgery. This is what I look like. The teasing photos, the videos—nothing on my body has been altered by the medical establishment.

Only by time, maturity, fashion sense, and an ever-more-confident sense of self.

But the hard truth is this: my parents made it clear to me that my body was not good enough.

They wanted to police my eating. They wanted to consult a plastic surgeon. They definitely wanted to dictate my clothing and piercing and style choices.

Raised in religion, this meant I wore them two sizes too big. No collarbones or underarms or cleavage showing. No shape, unless “tent” counts as a shape. I was supposed to hide. I was supposed to keep men from their “sinful” thoughts. I was supposed to be less—in mind and in body.

But I left religion. And I left them. And every year, I leave more of that baggage behind me, tossed into dumpsters where it belongs.

I replaced the baggage with a carefully curated suitcase of admiration.

For my lean muscular dancer legs, the high arches of my feet, the softness of my belly, the plunging cleavage that appears in nearly everything I wear.

I love my eyes, dark and deep.

I love my curls (when they behave, let’s be honest).

I love the soft curve where neck meets shoulder, the hollow of my collarbones, my eyebrows, my lips, my well-tended smile.

Every time I see myself and feel a deep sense of pleasure at the sight, this is my revolution. It is my power. It my hard-won gorgeous joy.

Every time I post a photo and the simps beg to kiss my feet, it is my revolution.

Every time you tell me I am perfect head to toe.

Every time you worship.

You are worshipping a phoenix birthed from the ashes that were supposed to ruin her, to make her small, to trap her so deep in shame that she was willing to go under a knife for it.

She is a revolution. A goddess. A warrior.

And she deserves every drop of that adoration.