One recent series of books that we both enjoy is the Dancing Backwards series by Thomas Lavalle.
This series recounts the life of Kelly, a “Bossy”, voluptuous, hyper driven Alpha-Female and her submissive, beta-male husband chris.
The story itself is one told many times.
Shy, conflicted, naturally submissive chris has difficulty meeting Women. Encouraged by his friend he decides to take a dance class, an obvious opportunity to interact with Women in a setting that mandates such interactions. There chris meets Kelly for the first time and instantly falls under the spell of this Sexual Sorceress. Smitten, chris yields naturally to Kelly’s forceful personality, something She came looking for, a man who would follow Her lead in all things. Their dance partnership blossoms into a life partnership with chris moving into Kelly’s apartment where he proceeds to serve his new Goddess, cleaning, cooking Her meals and doing Her laundry, all to Her specifications. This help allows Kelly to focus on Her schoolwork, She being a natural academic superstar, while intellectually mediocre chris focuses on Her needs ( as he should.)
Marriage follows, in which chris vows to “obey” Kelly, who explicitly doesn’t make the same vow towards chris. With numerous attractive job offers Kelly selects one with the greatest opportunity for advancement, which means the couple must move cities.
Kelly installs Her new househusband in Her new apartment so that chris can get on with the unpacking while Kelly digs into Her new career with full force.
Here things start to go off the rails. Eventually, with Kelly distracted by the demands of Her job, Her attention on chris wavers. Naturally She expected him to be able to function without supervision and strict control but unsurprisingly this isn’t the case. chris becomes bored, lazy, and worst of all lets the performance of his duties become sloppy and rushed. There’s even masturbation involved.
All this comes to a head one night as Kelly, at the airport after a long business trip is left waiting by chris. Not acceptable. While fuming alone in the terminal Kelly does however witness a scene that causes a fundamental reawakening within Her. It’s one of those strange, random, events that sets in motion a new life direction. For there in the airport Kelly is the silent witness to an older Dominant Women delivering a swift, pointed rebuke to a younger male, a collared, fit male, Her collared male property, for that is what he matter of factly seems to be. one who obviously feared his Mistress and scrambled to obey Her. This scene caused Kelly to realize two fundamental truths. One being that the harsh treatment She had witnessed clearly got results and two, it sexually excited Her in a way that surprised even this naturally dominant young executive. She couldn’t help but contrast the slave boys swift, automatic, obedience with Her slacker househusbands poor performance.
There and then Kelly decided that it wasn’t enough for Her to just be the Alpha-Female to chris’s beta-male, Career Woman to househusband, naturally dominant to naturally submissive, no that wasn’t enough for Her and is wasn’t enough to get optimal performance out of Chris.
The only thing that would fix this situation was for Kelly to fully express Her natural dominance towards chris and for him to surrender himself in total submission to his stunning Goddess. Mistress and male slave. That was the only way forward, sexually, domestically and practically.
Pretty hot and romantic right?
What strikes me about these books are several things. One is the high quality of the writing. The plot is fantasy, yet it’s also plausible fantasy. The author wonderfully describes his characters, both physically and psychologically. Lavalle also has a remarkable gift for being very specific about articles of Women’s clothing, displaying a wonderful command of fashion.
The thing i find most affecting about these books however is how they make me feel. Reading the description of chris’s lazy behavior and attitudes, his feelings of submissiveness and his struggle to reconcile these feelings with the expectations of patriarchy fills me with a sense of shame and humiliation.
You/you see chris very much reminds me of myself and my own struggles, some of which i’ve already documented on this blog. i too have always been naturally submissive towards Females and harbored a deep desire to live a life of submissive service to Women and in particular to a beautiful dominant Woman. i also clearly had no idea, beyond my own wild fantasies what exactly that meant or how to go about it.
Needless to say my initial attempts at such relationships ended in humiliation and pain. Being a male, and despite my submissive nature, i still gravitated towards laziness and listlessness. i struggled with reconciling my real desires and beliefs with the patriarchal notions of the wider society. This would often manifest itself in resistance to showing deference or obedience towards my girlfriend in a public setting where that could be seen and commented on by others. i feared embarrassment, having my true nature exposed. Needless to say this generated conflict in relationships, this dual nature, attentive and obedient in private, arrogant and egotistical in public. i eventually understood the sorts of trust issues this behavior generated. No Woman would find that acceptable, let alone the type of Alpha-Girls i gravitated towards. More than once i was marched out of a Girlfriends door, my arms stuffed with my belongings, told never to return. i drifted form relationship to relationship all ending in frustration. The time in between i spent absorbed in Femdom porn and fantasy, literally masturbating my days away. That’s no exaggeration. Over one year end holiday i literally spent each day getting out of bed, eating breakfast, followed by stripping off and masturbating all morning, stopping for a quick lunch, then continuing into the evening until i either ejaculated or was so rubbed raw it became painful to go on. The next day i would wake up and repeat it all over again.
Completely selfish, self absorbed, behavior. The only redeeming result being that it reinforced my feelings of inferiority towards the Superior Sex, my deep desire to be in submission to Them, and allowed me to become highly skilled in denying myself orgasms while maintaining a prolonged erection, and sexual attentiveness, skills that would in time become very appreciated and coveted. The psycho-sexual power that Women had over me was undeniable.
Eventually with the help of Female friends i began to ground myself. Some came to know my secret, allowing me to serve them domestically, doing chores much like chris in the story. This satisfied some of my desires, i could now be found useful, serving selflessly in a way that fulfilled me and made Their lives easier, contributing to Their success. Others allowed me to be an intimate confidant, in which i gained a greater understanding of the amazing and complex Female mind. A few even indulged my fetishistic desire to bow down at Their feet and kiss Their shoes or boots, something i noted they seemed to very much get into once They got over the initial oddness of the request. Unlike myself, who was painfully shy and embarrassed by my desires, i found Women to be amazingly open and frank about sex and relationships. They were clearly aware of the power of Their sexuality over boys and were not at all shy about it, the management of males being a routine topic of conversation. They would even play little mind games with me to test out Their ideas knowing they would get an honest response.
i became far more attentive of the dynamic between the sexes, the Female-male dynamic. i soon noticed something obvious yet astonishing. Even in the most vanilla seeming relationships the Women tended to be natural leaders and deciders, expecting acquiescence and compliance from Their males, and getting it. i noted that these sorts of loving yet clearly Female led relationships were strong, harmonious and long lasting. Relationships where the male was ego-centric, selfish and non-compliant always ended in acrimony and tears.
All of this knowledge i brought with me into a new relationship.
At first Goddess and i had a rather conventional relationship, though one where She was the clear initiator. She was the one who maneuvered me down a dark path on a cold winters night, turned me towards Her and kissed me deeply for the first time. It was She who mounted me on Her bed, taking my wrists one by one, binding them to the bedposts. i offered no resistance as She lowered Her sex to my face. i lapped Her up each and every time bringing Her to ecstatic heights while She toyed with my raging erection while denying me completion. It was She who would tightly wrap Her soft hand around my hard shaft and march me behind Her down the hallway and into the shower where I would lather Her up, pleasuring and worshiping Her as a living deity.
Our/our relationship began in the sexual realm with Goddess pushing me down deeper under Her spell, testing my submission to Her will, my desire to pleasure Her and my skill. My desire being infinite while my skill came with repeated practice, instruction and correction.
With Her sexual authority and power over me established things became less easy for me. Having extracted from me my deepest fantasies and feelings Goddess knew i was compatible with Her own Alpha-Female world view and proceeded to extend my training beyond the sexual into the domestic. And ‘training’ is exactly what She meant, having repeated on numerous occasions Her firm belief that “boys need to be trained.” This was at the time She was just getting Her business going and needed plenty of domestic help with tasks She didn’t have time for anymore. Even before moving into Her home, the earlier, smaller one, my appearance at Her door each morning became a routine and became my full time focus as She insisted that i quit my dead-end job and that She would take care of my expenses until my lease was up, then I could move in with Her.
All of this I had no real problem with, i’d loved doing domestic chores for some of my Female friends. What surprised me and what i found difficult was the high and exacting standards Goddess maintained in Her home. i remember spending an entire Saturday learning how to properly fold towels and make Her bed. Each time She inspected my work She would find some flaw and in Her stern voice say “ no, do it again.” It was the same for everything about Her castle. It wasn’t a simple question of something necessarily being done wrong but that each and every task had to be completed in exactly the way She specified. Nothing else was acceptable and failure would mean not only doing it again, but a withering verbal rebuke of my specifically male stupidity, laziness and inability to listen. Her true nature, which i had only caught glimpses of before was gradually, bubbling to the surface.
The verbal rebukes gave way, at Her intense insistence, to more physical acts of instruction, discipline and punishment all of which i willingly submitted to.
Needless to say by the time i moved into Her home, abandoning my belongings, i was thoroughly domesticated to Her exacting standards and eager to be taken possession of. The constant gestures of submission, the strict discipline/punishments, the delicious humiliations,The Coven, being publicly displayed, the club would all come soon enough. i would be taught to “submit, worship and obey” and find a life more fulfilling than i could have ever imagined.
This is the dilemma Kelly puts before Her chris. he may submit to Her strict demands, bow down at Her feet and serve Her as Her slave or he may leave. A simple binary choice that chris struggles with.
Every time i re-read chris’s inner debate and turmoil i feel a visceral deep understanding. Lavalle clearly understands the inner conflicts of the naturally submissive but not yet fully captured male. He seems to also capture the complementary conflicts in Kelly. Her desire to fully express Her innermost dominant nature. She knows males are inferior yet will She finally resolve to live a life true to Herself? For me his choice is obvious, and well for Kelly and chris, you’ll just have to see how it goes for Them for yourself.
It may be fantasy fiction but it’s close enough to being real that Goddess and i can almost see O/ourselves in these pages.
For links to his books and his blog visit Thomas Lavalle's at http://thomaslavalle.blogspot.com/
