Fantasy v. reality

Everyone comes to this lifestyle by a different path. Mine has not always been linear, but there has always been a forward momentum to it -- I have never really had any significant periods of time where I retreated back into vanilla for too long. If I dated vanilla, it was out of sadness or disappointment in the submissive men I had been dating previously. It wasn't because I wanted to date vanilla.

So, I was looking at the Elise Sutton website today and thinking about fantasy versus reality. I would say 90% of the submissive men I've dated up until this point in my life had a problem reconciling fantasy and reality. To wit: they were always disappointed by reality because they expected it to be too much like fantasy, even if they didn't want to admit that's what they were doing. I've been involved with some very intelligent, self-aware men, who should definitely know better, and yet they couldn't get past their online-inspired fantasies of female domination.

And what's interesting is how Dominant women -- like Elise Sutton and even yours truly, really -- both contribute to that problem even as we try to solve it. We're online, writing about ourselves, seeking partners, providing a construct of our identities made in our words that submissive men take literally. However, what else am I supposed to do? I'm a writer, after all, and I can't exactly walk down to the BDSM bar down the street and meet a nice guy. (Thanks Rudy Giuliani, for making the law tough on kinky folk.) So, I go online, although drastically less than ever before.

But I really do think the problem would exist even if the Internet didn't exist. The Internet is not the cause of our problems, it merely amplifies them. It reflects us back to ourselves as we sometimes are, unflattering though that might be, and if we find we don't like what we're seeing, perhaps we should start with that.

For me, that was a realization that I won't trust men who approach me solely on the internet. You need to experience me in person, you need to know me as an every-day entity, not just some idea in your head of a red-headed Southern vixen with a whip in her hand. I mean, I am that person, but not the way you define it. Its the way I define it, and if you can't live with that, I don't really want you in my world.

I also want to know that a man has a healthy relationship between what he thinks about when he's not with me, and how he feels about what we are doing. I approach sex very much as a process to build intimacy, not an end in its own right. If it isn't perfect every single time, I don't freak out, and my boy can't freak out either. He needs to realize I can't be 100% on all the time, sometimes I'm tired and I just want a foot rub and a hot shower, and that to me is sexual intimacy for the night. But people who spend the majority of their time online, in fantasy mode, are really not able to see that.

Fantasy is there to inspire you, to give you ideas, to make life worth living -- but that's just it. You've got to live life, not live it in your head. If you spend all your time thinking about serving a woman, and no time actually serving the women around you, you are no closer than you were when you fired up your computer and went online to stare at femdom porn. And I, for one, can't use you.