So, as you know bob, I picked up a copy of At Her Feet: Powering Your Femdom Relationship a while back. I’m pretty close to the end of it now, so I’m going to talk a little more about it.

The main thing I’m getting from this book is a lot of common sense. There’s stuff in here about how to keep your intimate (sexual/kinky/romantic/etc) relationship going for years rather than months. There’s stuff in here – not a lot, but way more than most other places – about how dominant women and submisive men[1] both get to deal with the social expectation that women be submissive and men be dominant (both within the hetero kink scene and within the larger culture) and how that can make things difficult. There are a lot of reminders to the readers that a long-term, 24/7 dynamic isn’t going to look anything like a kinky weekend.

From where I’m standing, I grant you, this is a no-brainer. But my dynamic began as a service arrangement that existed outside of both S/M and sexuality/romance, and I didn’t have a lot of experience in the kink community before it started. For someone else – someone who’s spent years going to play-parties, or doing short-term or context-specific D/s on weekends or in the bedroom, moving into a 24/7 model is going to be really different. Scene-based D/s tends to come with an intensity that’s pretty-much impossible to maintain over the long-haul when dealing with vanilla family, work obligations, and so on.
… Which kind of brings me to something that I found particularly helpful in the book.

See, in spite of my dynamic’s very mellow beginnings, I spend a lot of time wondering if I’m being “too vanilla” in my D/s relationship. I have to give myself little pep-talk reminders, every so often, just so I don’t forget that I don’t have to be all “On your knees, slave!”, or even just peppering the day with ten thousand little rituals and protocols, in order to effectively run my sub. None the less, reading the authors’ description of a “typical day” in their dynamic was immensely relieving for me.
Because it was so Normal.

And I mean that in two senses of the word. I mean “normal” as in: low-protocol, easily mistake for vanilla in a lot of ways.
But I also mean it as in “this looks like us“.

And, for me, that’s a big honkin’ deal.

So, yeah.
That’s where I’m at with At Her Feet. If you are a dominant woman, or wish to serve one, you may want to grab yourself a copy of this book (although if you’re a submissive chicky, the pronouns may piss you off). It’s got some good sense in it and it’s written in a very approachable way. Most of it isn’t stuff that you couldn’t find in a (good, non-stupid) book about vanilla relationships, but that bits that are D/s-specific are handy and gentle, and I liked them.

That’s it for me, for the moment. I’m off to eat dinner with my girl.

TTFN,
Ms Syren.

[1] This book deals exclusively with hetero dynamics where the woman partner is the dominant and the man partner is the submissive. On the one hand, this is dandy. Because the authors actually say as much on the cover and, honestly, they might not have talked about those social expectations if they’d been aiming for a more gender-neutral book. Also, it bears repeating, it is awfully nice to read something where the default pronoun for “dominant person” is “she”. That said, as a domme whose submissive partner is a woman? It makes me twitch a little every time I read a sentence like “[…] you may actually have one relationship in your lifetime where you feel fully both a man and a slave”. It leaves me wondering if she’s going to feel as twitchy/uncomfortable/invalidated/irritated about the default pronoun for “submissive person” being (in this book – unlike many others) “he”, as I do when “he” is the default pronoun for “dominant”.