However, having finally come into my own sexually and finding out that shit is still fucked up, I do have a problem with Elise Sutton being the face of my sexuality. Her books were the first ones on female domination I cam across on Amazon, and all my many internet searches led me to her. The only reason I ended up finding some good female dominant/male submissive blogs was because I got them off Bitchy Jones’s blogroll, and I had to have *her* blog recommended to me by word of mouth. No matter how I scoured the internet I never came across her with a good ol’ search engine. I can’t think of female supremacy femdom fondly just because it was the “gateway drug” for my exploration of my dominance; the reason it was the gateway at all was because of fucked up, *still patriarchal and sexist* marketing. I do have a lot of problems with the ideology of Sutton’s popular femdom, and how dogmatically it is presented.

As for anti-bootlicking men, I just have a thing for sharp-edged, knifey guys. I like them to be able to give as good as they can take. *shrug*

I think “surrendering at the right time, and not surrendering at the wrong ones” is a really good way to put it, btw.

And… my only quibble is that I think there are times to be strong-willed and times not to be. I mean, if I’m all fuzzy and headspacey, “No, I won’t lick your boots for *list of reasons*” isn’t likely to make me like someone, it’s likely to make me wonder what exactly is going on.

If it’s someone telling me, “Hey, wait, that really bothers me” about something that matters (which, yeah, may be the bootlicking even, if he’s really dramatically opposed to it), then yeah.

But I don’t think there’s this dichotomy of… spineless or pushy. I think submission is about surrendering at the right time, and not surrendering at the wrong ones. And the right time generally has to do with fun.

Though, guilty pleasure alert, I have to say that when I first found SM-related anything it was the Sutton kind of stuff. And I loved it — not because it was really what I want out of SM or D/s, as it isn’t at all — but because at a time when I thought I was totally alone and weird and women weren’t “supposed” to be dominant, here was stuff that tried to reconcile the social role I chafed at with the sex I needed.

While I’ve long since become way too queer in all kinds of ways to be comfortable with that kind of femdom or even with most femdom at all, there’s a part of me that has a teeny weeny soft spot for those people just because they told me “yes, men do want this too.”