I read a book recently that made me so angry I nearly threw it into the sea.  It wasn’t designed to be controversial – it was a light, funny holiday read that I’d downloaded because it looked fun.

The book itself was good. I mean really good. It was laugh out loud funny, at points. It was interesting and had twists, turns, car chases and a fair bit of blowing shit up. Unlike my own book, it didn’t have much wanking, but you can’t possibly have everything. Unfortunately, despite being a bloody entertaining read, it made me angry – the author had gone to great pains to draw all of his male characters as interesting, in-depth individuals, but when it came to the women he’d obviously got bored. Each had just one characteristic, which was her primary motivating factor and drove everything she ever did: there was Bitchy woman, Supportive woman, Bossy woman, Hormonal woman – like a lazy misogynist retelling of the seven dwarves.

Our dashing, complex hero battled villains with backstory. Our bit-part dudes and walk-on cronies had needs and desires and flaws and foibles and all that good shit that humans have. Our women? Well. One of them had a sexy nun costume.

Women as filler

The book came in the middle of a period where I’ve watched lots of TV and films in which women have been there purely as fodder for the development of male characters. Whether it’s a wife getting killed in the first episode to give her husband dark reasons for revenge, as a tempting prize for our hero to win in the second act, or as a scheming harpy obstacle for our dashing gentleman to overcome, it pisses me off.

Yeah, some female characters are always going to be cardboard-cut-outs: I don’t expect you to tell me the tortured history of the lady whose only contribution to the plot is that she fixes our hero’s car at the beginning of act one. But what I do expect is that if women play a major part in the story, they should be more than just furniture or the faceless catalyst for a painfully bad sex scene.

What do two-dimensional women do?

It’s not just the poor characterisation and ‘but women are so complex I couldn’t possibly write one as if she were a human being’ – the women-as-insignificant message is woven into the story itself. Here is a list of some things that men in the book got to do:

• Drive tanks
• Have epic car chases
• Fire guns
• Be on TV panel shows
• Invent new scientific instruments

Here are some of the things the women got to do:

• Fuck the main character over for child support
• Have epic temper tantrums
• Give massages
• Dress in aforementioned ‘sexy nun’ costume

At one point a woman got to join in a fight, and she beat the guy by – can you guess? Go on, guess – kicking him in the nuts. Of course she did! Because men, while infinitely more powerful and violent than women, do at least have one weakness.

Women: know your limits

I’m not just angry because the women didn’t get to be president or whatever, though – in this book they didn’t even get to perform basic human functions. For example: our hero’s girlfriend had a job. We know this because he made repeated reference to ‘her job’, and talked about her ‘leaving for work’ and all that jazz. Yet at no point were we told much about what she actually did. Compare this to other minor characters, whose entire backstory was fleshed out in the space of a couple of paragraphs, and we were told not only what they did but how they felt about it, whether they liked their colleages, and if they’d ever had an amusing office incident involving a photocopier or a bottle of Tipp-ex.

Amazingly, one of the women didn’t even really get to speak. As the baddies and goodies were fighting at the climax of the novel, she – who had up until that point remained almost completely silent – was asked how she felt about something. She responded by letting out a ‘shriek of rage’. That’s it, just a shriek. At a certain point (the point at which bad women fight good women because that is how it’s supposed to be) I think she manages a word or two. But although we’d fleetingly been told she was a ‘bossy’ person, at no point did she utter a word when men were in the room. Unless – and I shit you not – it was for one of the scenes where she had to fawn and drool over a guy. Then, with ‘oh baby’s’ and ‘I love you’s and slobbery kisses, she piped up a fucking treat.

Full-blooded women

Sure, there are some awesome female characters woven into amazing literary masterpieces. This is just one book out of many many millions, and it wasn’t ever intended to be the defining literary masterpiece of a generation. But it’s not the only one, it’s just a neat example to use because it makes so many of these common mistakes in just one story. There are plenty more where it came from, though – TV dramas and films in which women are there purely so the male character can have an epiphany/get laid/perform a daring rescue.

Sometimes these things are wholly necessary, of course – we need the hero to go through scrapes in order to come out on top. And having one or two cardboard-cut-out characters is necessary for a story. But does it always have to be that way round? A tortured, complex guy leading plastic women to safety as they shriek in fear then fall at his feet? How about you give a girl a shotgun and let her storm the castle?

I know some male authors complain that female characters are hard to write. Or, in the case of video games manufacturers, that our soft bodies and gigantic battering eyelashes are so difficult to animate that to create playable women would cost more money than there is in the Universe. I originally wanted to refer to this as a problem of misogyny – these writers are unable to believe in their female characters or female audiences because they fundamentally don’t care about women. But that’s not the problem really, is it?

The problem isn’t a lack of empathy, money, or basic human decency: it’s a lack of imagination. Which, if you’re writing fiction, is a tricky hurdle indeed.

Yes, we live in a patriarchy. And in our patriarchy, men are generally at a bit of an advantage in terms of money, power, opportunity, and so on. But I’m not going to talk about that today – I want to talk about power and penetration. Specifically the idea that the power in any kind of sexual play is, by default, in the hands of the penetrator.

The other week I wrote something disgustingly filthy about pegging (aka strap on sex). In subsequent discussion, a few people talked about me ‘having the power’ and ‘being the dominant one’, which was interesting. Even when I’m fucking a guy with a big fake cock, I don’t tend to feel that dominant. I get waves of it occasionally, but it struck me that we do tend to assume that strap on sex gives the wearer an immediate power boost. That it’s the cock that’s synonymous with power. That no matter how doe-eyed and submissive I usually am, just by strapping it on I have performed a transformation into a powerful sexual superhero.

Are strap ons powerful?

Of course, there are a lot of expectations around being the penetrator. Watch most mainstream porn, or even most mainstream romance, and men tend to be seen as the ones in control – the ones doing. Men fuck, women get fucked. But of course, although this is the way the story tends to play out, there are a hundred different problems with it, as there are with most of our expectations around gender.

Naturally the obvious point is that not all men have dicks, or indeed want to be the penetrators. Likewise there are many women who can be powerfully sexual, who can penetrate and fuck, while their partners (male or female) prefer to be more passive, more laid-back. And – in the kind of situations I enjoy – there are many people who switch between the two.

I enjoy sex in which I am the fucker rather than the fuckee, and to be honest I don’t usually need a strap on in order to do that. In the right mood and with a fair wind behind me I can shag a guy using only my delicate, weak, unpowerful vagina and he’ll still feel as if he’s been used like a fucktoy.

Your dick as your weakness

Not only can you be powerful with no dick at all, but there are certain sexual situations in which a penis can be the very opposite of a powerful tool: it can be your weakness, your misery, and one of the ultimate symbols of submission.

Knowing you can penetrate me with your dick might give you power in the eyes of a society with a skewed view on genitals, but it’s not going to make you feel that powerful when you’re lying on my bed, constrained by an order not to come, twitching and moaning as I rub lube gently into the aching head of it. Nor when I squeeze it to just before the point of pain and you beg me to put it in my mouth. And certainly not when I lie on my back, with your bound wrists behind my neck, and tell you to fuck me without coming.

As you pull out, shaking with the need to come and pleading with your eyes, your penis doesn’t feel very powerful, does it?

A dirty story to illustrate the point

So are strap ons powerful in and of themselves? The fact that they don’t give direct pleasure to the wearer does give the wearer a certain element of control. Maybe I’m the ‘powerful’ one when I fuck a guy with a strap on purely in virtue of the fact that I feel nothing – that I’m wholly focused on what I can do rather than what I can feel.

Except even that doesn’t really work, because this lack of feeling can also be harnessed to make the wearer feel deeply cowed and submissive. Ask the guy who loved the trembling feeling of submission so much that I used to wrack my brains in bed at night trying to think of new and better ways to make him feel small – the guy who, eventually, I ordered to fuck me with a strap on.

He got hard and shook and begged me to let him fuck me – wrists bound behind my head, as above. I turned him down and dressed him in the strap on harness instead, letting him fuck me with cold, rubber strokes until I came – twitching and clenching around a cock that couldn’t feel it. A cock with no desire, no sensation, no power. Then I told him I was done, and he curled up hard and aching and unable to fall asleep.

What makes a powerful dominant?

Power isn’t contained within a penis – real or fake – and it doesn’t accrue to you just because you are the penetrator. This is one of the many myths we’ve been fed for a number of years, which we still tend to play up to in much of our fucking. I certainly do most of the time – as a straight female submissive, dominance and dick usually go hand-in-hand. I want to be on the bottom, I want to be penetrated: I need to get fucked.

But it’s nice to take a step outside this every once in a while – think about what it is, exactly, that makes someone powerful. It might be different for different people: what makes him powerful is his voice, and the way he has with commands and words. What makes her powerful is the way she can speak volumes just with her eyes or a turn of her head. What makes them powerful is their imagination – the fantastic new things they can order their sub to do, that brings both parties to the brink of shivering climax.

Power isn’t contained within a particular object, or act, or person: it’s a complex, intricate thing. And it’s good to remind myself of that every once in a while – not only does it give me a better perspective on what I truly love about dominance, it also gives me loads of new ideas.

Those of you who know me know I love comedy almost as much as I love dick. Anyone with the ability to make me laugh gets bonus attractiveness points and most likely a large slice of my heart. So I’m delighted to welcome this week’s guest blogger. RB is a stand-up comic who struggles with one of the eternal dilemmas: how do you keep a straight face when something sexy also makes you want to burst out laughing? Sex and stand up comedy wouldn’t have struck me as a natural pairing – I’m a notoriously miserable twat when it comes to laughter during sex, and as a general rule if you giggle when I’m naked I will burst into horribly unattractive tears and order you out of the bedroom. But thinking about some of the stranger things we do in pursuit of orgasm, I have to admit RB’s got a point: sometimes we are hilarious creatures.

Sex and stand up comedy

*SLAP*
‘Oh…FUCK.’
‘When I spank you, what do you say…?’
‘Um…’
‘Well, little slut?’
‘I don’t know, what DO I say?! This is sex, not Mastermind!”

And we collapse into giggles, in a sweaty, semi-clothed heap, and the moment’s gone.

When I first became interested in BDSM recently, I thought the greatest conflict it would present would be with my feminism. How, after all, could you campaign for sexual autonomy and equality, then be completely dominated in the bedroom, and called all sorts of names you’d seethe with anger at in the outside world?

Obviously, I realised quickly that it chimes perfectly with feminism; you can do whatever you damn well please in the bedroom with a consenting and understanding partner, whether it be being beaten with a riding crop, pissing on someone (I’ve heard that’s a thing…), or straightforward missionary in the dark.

No, the biggest conflict I’m experiencing; being a sub and being a smart-arse.

I’ve been performing stand-up comedy for over a year. I’m a fledgling but I’m pretty damn good. I also perform spoken word poetry and improv – I feel I could, just about, call myself a ‘comic’ without sounding like a massive arse. It’s my life; I love it, I’m good at it, and I want to make it into a living someday. But with this, my personality has shifted into one of ‘tiny loud clown’; I take very little seriously and spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make people laugh (including strangers). If I can find an acceptable opportunity to take the piss, I’ll take it. So, how on earth am I meant to react when a man pulls me onto his knee and slaps my arse, again and again, whispering very low, ‘fucking jailbait.’

A handful of people that I’ve spoken to have assumed I’m a domme, and I can understand why. I’m loud and confident to the point of hyperactivity (off-set by the occasional depressive episode where I stay in bed for two days, cry and cannon ball Pringles tubes). I’m very argumentative and opinionated, and I talk about sex, in and out of stand-up, with a frequency and volume which amuses and alarms people in equal measure.

But, BUT, this is the thing. Performing is exhausting. Commanding an audience’s attention can take all your nerve, courage and confidence; and I do an awful lot of it. When I get to the bedroom with someone; to relinquish control, to hand over the keys, is such a relief. It’s like taking your shoes off at the end of the day. I can relax. I’m in someone else’s hands. And oh, what capable hands they can be. As refreshing as it can be for a loud little idiot like me to quiet down and obey orders, it’s equally fun to watch a soft-spoken, polite, unassuming person take the command they might not otherwise have in their everyday life; to watch them transform into a beast who’s going to fucking have you – use you and bite you and turn you into a panting wreck.

‘God, you’re so fucking wet, you little slut. You want me to untie you? You want me to fuck you? You want to feel my cock inside you, do you?’

‘…yes.’

‘Yes, WHAT…?’

‘Yes, sir. Oh, fuck, FUCK…’

Keeping in character is tricky. Sex is never like the movies. There are knees slamming into faces, narrow beds to fall off, crap knots, sneezing. Having to move out of a kneeling position during a spanking because you desperately need to blow your nose. Hearing the word ‘balls’ and bursting out laughing. Just realising the absurdity of the entire situation and failing to take it seriously. I’m a beginner, and I’m still stumbling through a sea of spankings and commands and filthy hard limit lists, and I’m still going to get the giggles. Occasionally I worry that I won’t be able to stop; I’ll degenerate into a pile of hysterical laughter, those fits that make your stomach ache and tears leak out of your eyes, and I’ll totally undermine the person that I’m with.

But, when you’re on your knees with your wrists tied in front of you, and he’s behind you, fucking you in short, hard strokes; slapping your arse with an open palm, chuckling darkly as you gasp at the sound, and the quick burst of pain, calling you a ‘filthy…little…BITCH.’ and you feel as if you might either come or go absolutely fucking mad…

…it’s hard to make a joke. Or make any noise at all, except to moan, and to swear, and to scream.