Femdom Virgin

Femdom.

Might as well in ancient Greek for how familiar I am with the meaning and all the nuances of the word.

I'm relatively new to erotic fiction as it is, much less true erotica or some of the more interesting subgenres. So it is thought provoking to ponder the effect of traditional gender roles on the D/s power exchange. Since I haven't had the time to come to any conclusions, I'll instead talk about my own experience in breaking free of gender stereotypes.

I come from about the most traditional gender-specific background  you can get. Dad worked, Mom didn't, two kids and a dog. No divorces in our family. The only chink in the armor of complete adherence to paternalistic values was the conspicuous absence of church in our lives, for which I am profoundly grateful, having seen the mess that a rigid religious upbringing can sometimes cause.

My family literally broke into two groups in my formative years, the workers and the waited-upon. Bet you can guess who was served and who did the serving.

The men of the family did things like hunt, work outside the home, and watch sports on tv, with the occasional foray into male-specific chores like firing up the chainsaw to take care of pesky branches, snowblowing the drive, cleaning gutters and digging post holes.

The women did everything else.

Without questioning. Without complaint. And without help -- with the exception of us girls, aka wives-in-training. Usually tucked away in the kitchen, so as to not disturb the discussion of whatever sport was being shown.

We had meals or snacks ready for "the guys" whenever they returned from one of their activities. We picked up their stuff, cleaned, cooked, and gave them all the choices, regardless of what was preferred by or easiest on us.

We kept the younger kids "out of their hair," especially the girls. Boys were tolerated since they would become the next generation of sports-watching, hunting males.

And nobody ever questioned this. It was like living in a 50's sitcom or Little House on the Prairie.

I knew from a young age how to play the game, and didn't think for a long time about whether I truly believed in it. I was already considered a bit odd, a bit different in that I escaped into books constantly and thoroughly. So much of this happened around me rather than to me.

My first realization my normal family wasn't "normal" came from spending time with one of my high school friends and her mom. She was divorced (more than once) and dated, fed her kids take-out, let them have parties, and actually had sex. We knew this since she had an amazing arsenal of toys in her room, a stash of tattered erotica, and on one occasion, we actually heard sex going down...in the middle of the afternoon.

She emerged with the guy, who in hindsight was a toy boy, much younger, looking disheveled and completely happy. It really struck me, seeing total satisfaction on a woman's face, and it wasn't from being told that the meal was delicious. They were both wrapped in towels, and on their way to the hot tub, she told my friend to order a couple pizzas for our dinner, to make sure to eat some salad with it, and to stay out of the backyard while they "swam privately."

Mindblowing and evocative stuff for a teen from a simple family. Especially one with my kind of imagination.

I'd love to be able to tell you that I blew all conventions out of the water, broke with tradition and became the sort of feminist that would have completely shocked everyone around me. My politics and social views are my own and are so vastly different from my family's, polar opposites in fact, that we agree to disagree and just don't discuss.

But here I am mirroring what I grew up with, married with two kids, a stay-at-home mom (albeit one that writes m/m erotic romance), living in the 'burbs. When I visit home, I fall back into the traditional roles, more out of respect for their house/their rules than anything. It's almost like playing a role, one I'm so familiar with that it's like an old movie you've watched so many times you know the dialogue by heart. In many respects, I play the role daily in my own home as well, since my husband came from an even more traditional family than did I, with the additional strict Catholic upbringing on top of everything else.

I consider my liberation to be one of the mind, and while I still struggle with the cage of gender role stagnation, I consider myself to have already won the most important battle...to free my soul.