I recently led a discussion at a femdom oriented gathering about the challenges submissive men face when finding their way to the kink community. The topic summary was as follows:
“The community that we share that is an important haven where we can feel free to express the aspects of our identities and desires that do not match up with what the rest of society expects from us. Submissive men encounter and deal with, in their own ways, a variety of challenges in finding their way to this space. In this discussion we will explore some of conflicts created between what we desire and what we are taught it means to be a man. We will also explore some of the feelings we may have had around this journey, including such topics as self acceptance, believing ourselves worthy of desire, overcoming myths and defining our identity and finding a place where we can express that part of ourselves.”

It seemed appropriate to give a little context for how these thoughts came to be. At the time of writing I’d been involved in the kink community for around 9 years, with only the previous year or so in Toronto. Prior to that I interacted with much smaller communities on the east coast, where there simply were not enough people around to have spaces dedicated entirely to those with an interest in femdom. My initial introduction to the kink community was quite positive – a very small pansexual group, mostly of people with a significant amount of experience with the community. They understood quite well what was realistic and what was fantasy, as well as how to treat people fairly. It was not the kind of place where you would see a dominant man look down on a submissive one, because if he did and two people didn’t show up to the next munch because of it those two people represented 20% of the community! A year or so later the community was starting to dwindle since, as is tradition in the Maritimes, people moved away to find a better life. By the time FetLife came into being there was really nothing left of the scene in my community. Then with a new, open and easy to find kink social media site up and running there was an explosion of brand new people who were so very kinky and had no idea there were lots of other people like them. A new community was born! But the people who appointed themselves the leaders in this new scene wanted no advice from people who had come before, specifically believing that we “old guard” folk were trying to manipulate them to gain social power of some sort. What wound up happening was the creation of a scene that relied very heavily on traditional gender norms and conflated them with proper power orientations. I soon noticed that at events I was getting less social interaction than I did at the grocery store, and at parties found myself hanging out with a few transgender folk at the back, where we were completely ignored by everyone else. Nobody was being deliberately mean to me or anything, but they seemed uncomfortable interacting with me as though I were some strange animal that they had never seen before. So I dropped out of the scene for a few years to try and figure out just what the heck was happening. It was around this time that I met a non-binary, trans friend who was very well read on gender issues. When I picked up on the fact that we were both kinky I opened up to them about the weirdness of the behavior toward me. They had piles of links for me to read, largely being feminist gender deconstruction writings. That was when I realized the people in my scene were avoiding the transgender folk because they were confused by the intentional rejection of assigned gender roles and didn’t know how to relate to them, and that the reaction to me seemed to be similar.

The challenges we face have very common tones, but the specifics of how they are experienced changes as we move along our journey toward attending a community event. As such the format of the discussion chronologically follows the journey of a submissive guy. He has figured out at a young age that his desires are not exactly matching up with the general script society provides for how a man should feel or act, but has no other reference for this other than what is in his own mind. The challenges he faces as he moves forward from this place are oriented around 4 broad themes.

Self Acceptance
So our guy has started to realize that the way his sexuality works is a little different. The first step, and our first theme, is self acceptance.
Question for the audience: What words or phrases have you heard about what it means to “be a man”?
Examples of answers (there were many more, this just shows the theme of the answers):
* Don’t cry (or more generally, don’t show vulnerability)
* Gets laid whenever he wants, which is often (not only is he sexually aggressive, but his sexuality is rooted in exerting control. He gets what he wants.)
* Self sufficient, doesn’t need help from other people

When we’re young we’re given a lot of cultural baggage about masculinity. Things that are meant to teach us who we ought to be, how to perform that role and based on how we fill that role there is an implicit judgement about who we are. Being a man who has submissive desires can be very transgressive and conflict strongly with the gender roles we have been assigned. Gender roles that can be very strongly enforced by the people and media in the culture around us. This can create a lot of anxiety about our identity and place in society. When our guy first senses that he is different it is quite likely that his response will be to try and suppress it, and pretend that there is nothing different about him at all. That is, until the conflict becomes too great and he is forced to accept that his desire is real and never going to go away. If he is lucky he lives in a very socially liberal place and knows people who are critical of the gender role being thrust upon him, and may reach the stage of accepting himself more quickly. Or, like me, he may come from a very socially conservative place and take a very long time to get to that point.

Questions
1. Show of hands from the guys – has anyone felt a conflict at some point between their sexuality and their masculinity? (Just about every single guy in the room raised his hand)
2. Would anyone like to share some of that experience? What aspects did you struggle with? (took a couple answers and moved on to my own experience)

For me it was a mix of independence and not showing vulnerability. The messages I had gotten around masculinity said that a man is always in control of himself, and that to lose that or to require someone’s help diminished his masculinity. This created a double whammy of factors that transgressed against what I had been taught about my gender role. I desired to place myself into an extremely vulnerable state. Also, the nature of that meant to achieve the emotional state that I wanted to get to absolutely, by definition, required someone’s help. To actually seek that would have, with my understanding of gender back then, meant throwing my masculinity on the floor and metaphorically ripping my chest open for someone and hoping that they wouldn’t stab me in the heart. With the strong gender role policing I had experienced this felt far too dangerous to attempt, and it took a very long time before I found people who I could share any of this with.

Feeling Worthy of Desire
There is another side to this gender role issue. Not only does our hypothetical guy need to become comfortable enough with this identity to claim it, but he needs to come to believe that there may be other people out there who will both value and desire that identity. He needs to believe that he can find people who have also rejected this gender script. The problem here is that part of the gender role we’re conditioned to accept says that high levels of masculinity are a large part of what makes a man attractive. If a guy loses points from his Man Card, he is by definition more feminine and less attractive as a partner. This is one of the spots where misogyny hides in our culture and hurts men. Performing masculinity, in traditional terms, means constantly having to prove that your masculinity is genuine and complete. This approach places masculinity in direct opposition to femininity, and values it more highly. So when our guy wonders if he can be attractive what does he do? He goes online, and starts asking questions! It’s a fairly safe place where if he is rejected he may feel some shame at his identity, but as far as society is concerned his man card is intact.
Question: Who has seen submissive men posting questions like these, on large FetLife groups in particular?

* Do femdoms really exist? (I have actually seen this question many, many times. Including once not long before this talk on a group named for women who love submissive men. You’d think the name would give it away, but the conflict with social conditioning can make it seem like the partners he is looking for are just a myth)
* Can a dominant woman respect a male sub? (Also spotted very recently, and regularly over the years. The guy’s gender role conditioning is so strong that he sees it as incompatible with submission, and that to act on those desires would mean he cannot be respected)
* Is male submission unnatural? (I’ve never seen a femdoms ask this, for obvious reasons. But I have seen many guys ponder about it openly, for reasons similar to the previous example. This is an idea that seems to be very prevalent among male doms and some fem subs. I have actually had a male dom say this to me and my dominant in the community before. Pure gender role policing, and pure bullshit. But new guys will likely run across it at some point.)
* A general form of question – Do dominant women like X? When you see this question it often seems to betray some form of gender anxiety. In the simple form the guy is asking about a specific fetish that creates in him certain feelings that he associates with being in a submissive role. He wants to know if there are actual people out there who will openly state that it is something that they can be attracted to, because he doubts the possibility of it. For example in my case, my submissive desire is rooted in feeling both controlled and consumed by a partner’s desire – so I might ask if there are dominant women who like tying guys up in rope. The more complicated form of this shows a deeper level of anxiety, and seems to betray a belief that male submission and masculinity are incompatible. These questions are based around personal habits as opposed to play activities, and when questioned on it they will reveal that they believe these habits make a guy more feminine. ie: always sitting down to pee. The line of thinking seems to be that they must purge as much masculinity as possible from their lives in order to truly achieve their place as a submissive. For some people this may be the legitimately desired end-state, because their innate gender is completely non-conforming and for them kink is giving permission to engage in a taboo. But when you see this online it often seems to be prescriptive. That is, that this kind of experience is an absolute requirement of being submissive for someone who is perceived to have a masculine gender.
* I also asked the audience for other examples of such questions and received some good ones. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to recall any of them right now!

Many of us, or even most of us, are in some sense or another gender non-conforming. Obviously some more than others. Even after our guy finds it within himself to accept his desire, he can be weighed down by the negative view society has of his rejection of the male gender role script. This can create a sense of worthlessness, as though he is an interchangeable cog for a machine in an ocean of identical cogs. This comes down to feeling as though our submissive desires are a serious failing as a man. I have a theory that this is contributes partially, or even significantly to the ocean of copy paste spam from submissive guys. They believe that their sole defining feature is their failure to perform masculinity correctly, and that all submissive men are in the exact same position. This means that to act out his desires he must present himself in the right place at the right time, as though he were a zebra that desired nothing more than to be eaten by a lion. The lion doesn’t care which zebra they eat, they just want to eat! So they figure that a shotgun full of spam is the approach most likely to succeed. Not only is this lack of self worth and confidence unattractive on it’s own, but it has an odd element of ignoring the desires of prospective partners. If all submissive men are basically identical then women can’t have any particular reason for choosing one submissive over another. Also note how this can breed a sense of entitlement toward dominants, and jealousy toward men who have “won the lottery” and found what they were looking for.

Developing an Identity
At this point in the journey our guy has accepted that his desire is real and not something he can ignore, and believes it possible that it could be something that someone will find desirable. He likely isn’t sure of that yet, but the possibility seems real enough to take the next step of expressing who he is so that those people who may exist can find him. The problem is he still has trouble expressing what he wants in ways that aren’t vague. They always seem to start out with this general statement of “I want to give up control.” Ok. Great. But what does that mean to him? What does it look like? He needs examples or role models to see what the possibilities are. At this point in his journey he has two options for inspiration. One can be sort of ok sometimes, and the other is just plain bad.
1. Porn. Specifically femdom porn. Aside from some amateur material, it seems to be almost nothing but stereotype. The men seem to almost universally fulfill the “worthless worm” archetype. Men who are defined by their failure at performing masculinity. The interaction between the guy and his partner seems to indicate that his being in this position can be nothing other than shameful, because his partner appears to believe he is pathetic and undesirable. At best she is indifferent to him, but always she is there to either punish him for his failure to perform masculinity correctly or as an idle amusement for her. But actual desire is almost never a part of the interaction. The problem isn’t that this style of play is represented in porn – after all degradation is a totally legitimate kink. The problem is that it is the only style of interaction that is really represented in femdom porn. This exists in male dom porn as well, but it isn’t too hard to find examples where the guy actually appears to want his submissive. This presentation of dominant desire seems to be even more prevalent in lesbian femdom porn. Someone in the audience noted that the people funding and directing pro porn are all men, and from what I’ve read always dominant men. What is happening is that we’re seeing our identities presented through the lens of traditional masculinity. When the submissive is a woman she isn’t failing in her feminine role, but giving in to who she really is. But when a guy steps into the same role he is committing the ultimate sin against the identity assigned to him, and the presentation reflects that belief.

Question: How many guys have watched femdom porn? (one smartass didn’t raise his hand :p)
Question: If you found it easy to find porn that represented well what your perceive as your identity, and presented a dominant partner who seemed to be like someone you would actually want to play with, leave your hand up. Otherwise you can put your hand back down. (only a few guys left their hand up)
Same set of questions was asked for the dominants, with the same result. Porn is very clearly serving very few of us well.

2. The online “community” – which is barely deserving of that name. This is a place that is also full of stereotype and myth, though many people like us who actively participate in the real world community occasionally participate and inject a little reality. But the problem is that once we’ve moved from experimenting with our identity online and start going to munches and parties we often find little need to go to groups online. Especially in a place like Toronto. If we want to interact with people like ourselves, we just come down here!

Question for the audience: What generalizations have you seen about male subs? Either about the essential nature of their character, or what requirements they must fulfill to make them a “true” submissive.
Example answers: spineless, bad lovers, unattractive and only subject themselves to this because they’re too pathetic to get laid any other way, must not have limits (because doing so is asserting their masculinity, which by the incompatibility concept makes them not submissive)

These are all judgments about our masculinity. When we believe that these norms around masculinity are both proper and true, we’re buying into a system of beliefs that devalues our own humanity and presents us as lesser than we are.

Question for the audience: I’m curious to know if anyone has found positive role models for male submission.
Answers: A ton more than I ever expected to see and unfortunately I can’t really remember many of them. One thing I noted is that many would not be found in association with kink. The main exception I found was Gomez, from the Addams Family.

Representation matters. A while back we had a documentary night here where we watched Miss Representation, which was about female gender roles. At one point in the film Whoopi Goldberg was being interviewed, and had a story that highlighted the importance of seeing people who are engaged in a role that you would like to be in. When she was young she was watching Star Trek on TV and Lt Uhura was on the screen. Whoopi was shocked at this and ran to her mother yelling, “Mommy! Mommy! There’s a black woman on TV and she ain’t no maid!”. Until this point she hadn’t considered it possible for a black woman to be on TV portraying a role that commanded respect from other characters. Seeing this made her realize that this was something she could do, and it factored heavily in her eventual acting career. Representation does matter, but the representation of submissive men in kink culture is currently quite negative. This stereotype of ourselves is something we have to struggle with and ultimately reject if we’re going to take the big step of joining the community.

Joining the Community
At some point most of us will decide that exploring online isn’t enough. It can be a great place to try to discover the possibilities because it is safe. If you get rejected you can just turn off the screen and not worry about the social impact of revealing your a serious part of your identity. But chatting online isn’t a replacement for face to face. Many guys will stick to personal ads, likely because a rejection in that case generally only means being rejected by one person at a time. This can be a very unproductive approach however, since online dating itself can be hit or miss as it is without adding the requirement of kink compatibility into it. Eventually some guys will be driven to posting messages about being lonely and wanting to know if other people can relate to that. Unfortunately this sometimes gets read as posting a personal ad rather than a call for sympathy, but always someone will reply – “Get thee to a munch!” Huh? A munch? What’s that?”

Question: Would anyone like to share their first experience of coming to a community event? Was it a pansexual space or a femdom one? (we were actually out of time and didn’t get to this question, but the idea was to show the kinds of fears or anxieties guys can have coming out to this kind of space for the first time. Everyone is a little scared walking into their first munch since all of our desires are rather taboo, and revealing that about yourself feels quite risky. But for guys the taboo is amplified by the gender role policing they’ve experienced. My first time was in a pansexual space, and a friend had to push me through the door. I was frozen in place by the idea that everyone in there would know what I was, and that I had no idea how they would react.)

Walking into this space for the first time is a big moment. For all that we try to avoid drawing attention to ourselves, we’re openly making a statement about who we are that goes against what society expects of us. It is the end of one journey in self discovery, and the start of another.