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Hi Lina! I'm a bisexual woman and my pronouns are she/her! First, I'm a huge fan of your Instagram account and have been considering becoming a Patron for a while now. I'm so glad I finally took the leap!
A bit about me- I joined the kink community a few years ago when I became a member of a sex club here in [CITY REDACTED]. There I met a few amazing play partners and couples that I would see outside of the club. I'm predominantly a sub in one-on-one play but a switch in group settings. For a while, I was regularly seeing two Doms who were polyamorous men with primary partners, as well as joining them and their partners for occasional scenes. Then, when COVID hit, I made the decision to stop seeing these partners due to the risk.
I was quarantining alone and when George Floyd was murdered I became active in the BLM protests across our city. Then, one day I was at an Occupy City Hall protest, I met a man who was extremely passionate about social justice and we hit it off immediately. We started protesting together, developed feelings, and eventually ended up in a relationship.
The only problem is that he's vanilla. I very early on explained to him my sexual history and he was extremely supportive and expressed that he would be interested in exploring BDSM/Kink with me. But so far, that has meant non-consensually slapping my ass and choking me during vanilla sex... He's not completely to blame because it's coming from a place of good intentions and he's just not at all educated about kink.
I'm looking to (hopefully) salvage the relationship and turn things around by teaching him what BDSM is truly all about, but it's been a bit challenging for me to broach the conversation because of my submissive and often people-pleasing nature, and also because I only have two years of experience under my belt. So, I've come to the expert for advice!
Any advice you can offer would be extremely appreciated, and I really look forward to going through all of your resources as well!!
I think if you pulled 5 Dom(me)s off the street (you know that street you can go to where there are just walking around? If only.) and asked them their origin stories, four out of five would tell you that the idea of Dominance was suggested to them by a sub they met. It’s my Dom’s story, and the story of a lot of Doms and tops that I talk to. Doms are not born — they’re often created by subs who are unapologetic about their own pleasure. That’s right, you’re a Dom-maker, and you don’t even know it yet.
But then you’re in this trap of being worried about topping from the bottom. Let me tell you when topping from the bottom is a problem — it’s when you can’t relax into submission because you just can’t let go of control. It’s telling your partner what to do after they’ve asked you to stop. That’s topping from the bottom. What we’re about to talk about is the opposite - it’s assertiveness about what you enjoy, and clarity about how your partner can give it to you.
Nobody wants to put their partner in a headlock and scream “DOM ME OR ELSE!!!!” So short of that, I think the answer is to have a conversation that is clear enough and memorable enough that he knows you had it. Like he’ll look back and think of that conversation as the beginning of you two experimenting with kink. This is no time to be demure, just say what you want. Easier said than done, right?? But do it for Future You, who doesn’t want to just lie there for some random unannounced spanking again.
It might go something like this: “Hey you know how I said I’m into kink? I think you’d make a great Dom. But I think because I’ve spent some time on the scene I can shed a little more light on what that means than porn. Are you open to trying it out with me?”
From there, assuming you get his consent, there’s a lot you can do to foster productive conversations around his Dom journey, without forcing him to Dom you. Because the same things won’t work for everybody, here are some ideas on how to lead a formerly vanilla (recovering vanilla?) straight into Dom-ville:
TAKE THE TEST
The BDSM test can be a fun and simple conversation starter, maybe even attached to your first chat about Dominance. I think that test and the way it displays results can be really helpful in opening a vanilla person’s eyes to exactly how deep the D/s rabbit hole goes and how much they don’t yet know. Yes, the design is clunky and uncool, but it’s a somewhat helpful tool nevertheless.
SEND THEM STUFF
I’m a huge fan of “hey have you seen this article?” and sharing content you find interesting or well-written around BDSM. Kinkly has some good stuff, as does Salty World. Oh, and here are a bunch I’ve written. And honestly, sometimes if you just google a kinky phrase something decent will pop up.
Alternatively, share something you think is terrible and tell your partner why! As you know, kink research is all about developing your own taste and accepting or rejecting styles and patterns based on what works for you, and introducing this concept to your budding Dom will help him feel less overwhelmed by all the info out there.
HIT THE BOOKS
Go here for all my sex & D/s book recs and do a two person book club.
*If you buy from the above link, I'll get a percentage of your purchase and you'll be helping Bookshop support local bookstores!
TAKE A CLASS
Hit up your local feminist sex shop and see what’s on offer, and go to a workshop as a date.
We’re also living in a golden era of online workshops for a variety of kink skills. I’ve made curated lists of these for paid subscribers here.
I’ve also designed a few online courses!
Conscious Kink teaches you how to build a D/s dynamic with custom protocols and punishments. It will help you negotiate a power dynamic that will suit your needs over time and help you have a lot of fun along the way.
Sub Survival Guide will take you through each step along the way from submissive dreaming to submissive doing. In this situation, its comprehensive guide to scene planning could be helpful for you both to review!
Paid subscribers to this Substack get 25% off both of them. See the bottom of this post for the discount code.
SET BOUNDARIES
Just as you would with any other partner, go over your soft & hard limits / what you’re into/curious about! FetLife, despite being a hot flaming pile of garbage in most other ways, has a solid list of “fetishes” to sort into these categories, and it might be fun to go through them together, or to make your lists separately and share.
This will introduce your vanilla partner to the idea that kinky sex is made up of building blocks that are all treated with polite neutrality. Choking? No thanks. Pee? Maybe! We don’t yuck each other’s yums here, and that’s pretty magical.
WATCH 50 SHADES AND SHIT ALL OVER IT
I'm serious. Watch it and roast it in front of him so he gets a crash course in how fucked media portrayals of D/s are.
HIRE A PRO
Book a professional to walk you two through a scene either virtually or irl! They're pros for a reason!
PLAN TOGETHER
Once your proto-Dom feels ready to start approaching real scene play, I think an interesting way of not topping from the bottom, but still helping from the bottom, would be to get involved in their scene planning. At least in the beginning! Mr. Dune likes to call this stage “getting out the yellow legal pad,” because there is literally a yellow legal pad He uses to bullet out scenes that involve new or more challenging logistics that we haven’t played with a lot.
In your case, I think it could be a really great communication exercise to sit down with him and help him bullet point out a few different scenes — maybe 3. Then you have Scene A, B, and C, and he knows you’re ok with any of them. So when you’re ready to play, he can surprise you with one of the scenes, and do his best to enact it and see how it feels. It could literally be as simple as:
Sub kneels in front of Dom to begin
Dom puts a play collar on the sub to indicate that the scene has begun
Dom agrees to “narrate” everything he is doing by phrasing each step as a command that the sub can always safe word. If saying something as a command doesn’t work, it could be something like “you’re going to get choked now” and the sub can always call “yellow” (it’s just about getting in the habit of verbalizing stuff so you have a reasonable warning)
Sub receives an over the knee spanking
Sub is blindfolded for sex
After sex will be aftercare where the sub can give feedback/praise as needed
And just increase and add nuance from there, always reemphasizing the importance and role of safe words, and that you’re an adult and in charge of your own limits and safety. He does not need to constantly check in and ask if you’re ok — he needs to trust you to call your safe words if you aren’t.
What this comes down to, in the end, is on-boarding someone into a world where sex comes with high stakes and a lot of planning. And the amount of reward you get out of it is directly proportional to how much you invest. This can be a really hard concept to grasp at first when you’re emerging from a sex culture that emphasizes “winging it” and “not talking about stuff because it’s not sexy” so there’s always going to be work to be done there. But if the vanilla in question has a kinky soul that’s just waiting to come out? They’ll be so grateful to you for opening the door. Who knows? This could be the moment that turns this mild mannered social justice warrior into a hardcore social justice Daddy.
And if he’s not open to doing the work required to be a Dom? Listen to the below podcast episode from last week about dragging a partner into doing the proper research required to manhandle your tender flesh.
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