I’m going to use this post as a shout out to Peroxide and his quest for information on male submissives. He’s planning to write a how-to guide on finding and dating male-subs. He’s working off of the assumption that good ones are as rare as unicorns *.
I’m not sure about the unicorn bit. I’m pretty certain I’d have remembered frolicking with fairies in mythical forests. Or the acquisition of an enormous horn. That would have come in handy. I’ve also blogged and commented in the past on that 20:1 ratio thing. Personally I suspect the issue isn’t one of rarity, it’s one of filtering. There’s no lack of signal, but there is a hell of a lot of noise. I’ve no idea what the overall female dominant to submissive male ratio is, but I do know the noise produced by badly socialized and self-serving male ‘submissives’ is high.
Anyway, regardless of the mythical and technical analogies, I do applaud the idea. So if you’ve got any interesting thoughts or information for Peroxide then send it his way. In the meantime I’ll leave you with an image of a particularly feisty unicorn. I can’t say I recommend this attitude when someone is swinging a flogger in your direction, but the image did make me smile. It’s by the photographer Vlad Gansovsky, and I found it on Mistress Lilyana’s tumblr.
* Interesting aside: Unicorn is also slang in poly circles for hot-bi-babes willing to date couples. They are apparently highly sought after and equally rare. Being a unicorn hunter is not necessarily seen as a good thing.
Hi Paltego:
I do believe what we have in that photo is a very advanced case of “SAM” (smart ass masochist). I agree with your assessment of the 20:1 ratio. I would say females who are genuine sexual sadists are much rarer than your run of the mill subbie maso male and possibly as difficult to find as the mythical unicorn. Women who enjoy being served, obeyed, worshiped and treated like a Queen are bit easier to find but still rare. Guys who are turned on by the femdom fantasy seem to be extremely common. Highly evolved submissives who do not top from the bottom, do not make demands and anticipate the needs of their Superior before she tells them what to do are possibly a bit harder to find. Guys like that have probably followed my friend Aarkey’s advice and made a conscious effort to transform themselves into the best sub they can possibly be. Those guys might be pretty rare and are possibly not available because they are already involved in relationships.
Hi hmp,
Definitely looks like a SAM. I believe that’s a love-them or hate-them breed.
Just to be clear on the whole 20:1 thing – I’ve no idea what the ratio is. My point isn’t so much that it’s wrong, just that all the discussion I’ve seen around it seems to involve pulling random figures out of thin air. My personal observation suggests that there are lots of very visible male submissives and relatively few visible non-professional female dominants. But that only tells us about the visible part of the world, not the invisible part, or the potential part.
I tend to think that dating in general is hard. In the vanilla world it’s a huge industry with lots of people trying to figure out how to make it work, to limited degrees of success. Add in all the many extra dimensions of kink and the randomization of the guys who are focused purely on the naive sexual femdom fantasy, and it gets exponentially more complex.
-paltego