And that's a problem for me. I've had what I laughingly refer to as "gender issues" before, partly for this reason and partly for reasons relating to endemic misogyny amongst my female friends (past tense) and low-level female-oriented homophobia in my education. The last two of those have been effectively dealt with by being befriended by a wonderful collection of intelligent, outspoken, articulate, attractive, and very protective lesbians; the matter of how female submission and male submission should differ is still unaddressed.

I'm not very good at being a girl. I'm fantastic at being a woman, being fully equipped with (uncomfortably large) tits, hips, a functioning set of ovaries and the overwhelming love of chocolate, but being A Girl has eluded me for pretty much my entire life. Thus chicklit, the alure of shoes which don't have steel toecaps, and owning five black dresses which look almost identical has largely passed me by, much to my girlfriend's eternal frustration. The other thing this means is that I find submission based on looking pretty a little alienating, and that's all "femsub" seems to be allowed to offer. 

"Femsub" pornography seems to be centred on weakness, which expressly doesn't fucking wash for me - I've had enough of being weak and thinking myself weak through my life so far. It also assumes a native superiority of the "mandom" and god only knows that I've seen enough of that ridiculous attitude on CollarMe.com and other sinkholes of stupidity and bad spelling; "femsub" erotica speaks of strength and intelligence in the "mandom" and weakness and a kind of childish naivety in the submissive. Which doesn't work for me:

- I'm not weak. Physically I'm big, and some of this is muscle. I enjoy fighting, and if I'm not bored with what I'm going I have a lot of stamina

- I'm not pretty. I'm occasionally nice to look at if you're into slightly butch fat lasses who can shout for England, but I'm not pretty.

- I'm not naive or innocent, which are two terms that seem to be inextricably linked to "being unaware of your own body and what you like", and I haven't been since I was, oh, 13. If people desperately want to fuck 13 year olds they should really stay far, far away from me.

The idea of the "femsub" being inherently less than and being of interest only because she is decorative annoys me, especially as the femmedomme is apparently required to be pretty too, but the mandom and the mansub can come in whatever flavour they feel like. Rampant misogyny thy name is BDSM.

I have a lot of male-on-male BDSM porn for a lot of reasons. If the purpose of porn is to put yourself in the shoes of one of the "actors" in order to get off, I'm not going to manage well with the usual straight or girl-on-girl (never woman-on-woman, I notice) because I genuinely feel further removed from those pretty, thin girls in their make-up and high heels than I do from the guys in their work boots and their shaved heads; and if I'm going to be dominated it doesn't really work for me if the person tightening the ropes is trussed up in more restrictive clothing than I am, corsetted half to unconsciousness and wearing heels that would cripple a stilt-walker. In the defence of the apparently demised Kink.com, Amber Rayne has been known to do a fair bit of domming in overalls or military uniform, which does hit the right buttons. They also have models who don't appear to have been designed by Mattel, which is nice.

Man-on-man BDSM seems to be much more closely connected to strength; subjugation of strong male by strong male, restraints that can only really be described as "industrial", and the sense of inescapable power dominating that which is under conventional circumstances already powerful in its own right.

Women don't get to be automatically powerful and when we do it's not so linked to physical strength, so "femsub" has this whole other set of criteria which just don't work for me. I don't walk around in army boots and a scowl because I'm a butch-variant femmedomme (I suppose "butchdomme" would be a better term there) but because I'm a woman who takes the submissive role in BDSM and I'd like to have the option for my Dirty Pervert Sex to be everything that man-on-man Dirty Pervert Sex is allowed to be. Strong restraints, strong submissive, a dom or domme whose position of power isn't about their looks or about money or about looking constipated or mocking about the situation, but of having succeeded in tying up a wild thing.

I want for my Dirty Pervert Sex the same thing I want for the rest of my life, I suppose - the chance to be judged on a set of criteria that don't include how much money I spend on making myself look like a doll. The appreciation and acknowledgement of some other factor of attraction besides frailty. A little equality. And if that sounds laughable when the core of the Dirty Pervert Sex in question is to do with engineering artificial inequality then that's not irony; the inequality would be a damn sight more arousing if it wasn't so unsexily omnipresent in my non-Pervert life too.

KG, over and still not out.