Hello Evie! I have a question related to discussing gender preferences inoffensively. Although I like both men and women, I am not as comfortable with dating heterosexual men within the BDSM community because I have heard horror stories about abusive men becoming doms just to take advantage of newbie subs. This topic may come up in future conversations when I share my background; how do I explain my concerns in a way that makes it clear I am just trying to be safe and am not a raving man-hater?

evie-lupine:

Anon,

I mean you don’t have to walk into a munch going all I DON’T WANT TO DATE MEN, HET MALES DO NOT APPROACH. Thank God.

You can always go to queer / women focused / submissive only events. In which case you never have to bring up the subject at all. I have never had anyone ask me what my orientation was, or that kind of thing, so it isn’t like a preference or distain for dating het Dom men is going to come up in common conversation. There’s not a questionnaire you have to fill out before hand, you know?

I am not really sure you need to do much besides reject individual advances, in which case I think a simple, “I’m sorry, I am not interested in playing with men” should be enough. No justification or logic behind it needed. Put the same in your FetLife profile. Eventually people in the community will get the drift you don’t play with het males. The kind of people you want to deter the most aren’t going to listen to further reasoning to begin with (or read your profile at all), and sensible people typically don’t need more than that to respect boundaries.

I think that going into the whole “because men are more likely to be predators” type logic while discussing your background is unnecessary. I know it can be hard for this to sink in, but honestly most people are just happy to know what your preferences are and don’t need the deep internal logic to be able respect it. Be it because you’re a hardcore lesbian, you have sexual trauma, whatever, people don’t need to know *why* to be able to respect who you want to play with. And the really toxic folks aren’t going to be deterred regardless of what logic you provide anyway. In my estimation its just not worth the extra energy expense to explain your full thoughts to every person you meet.

Evie

I love this answer so much.  Because “I’m sorry, I am not interested in playing with men” should be all anyone needs to say.  In fact, it’s ok to skip the “I’m sorry” part.

Also this: “You can always go to queer / women focused / submissive only events.”  What’s the point of even having a community if you can’t get second, third, and more opinions about who’s safe and who isn’t?  No matter who they are!  (I mean, it’s worth mentioning that @femdomunicorn recently helped deal with the fallout from a woman seemed to be more of an unrepentant sociopath than a sadist.)

I know I go on and on about vanilla parallels but, really, whether you’re kinky or vanilla it’s always be 100% fine to say “I’m only interested in women right now.”  And if someone throws a fit about that boundary?  Well, if they can’t respect that boundary you probably wouldn’t want any involvement with them anyway.

Finally, I’m pretty much done saying “not all men are blah, blah, blah.”  But I can say “some men seem to be pretty good Doms.”  If and only if you’re interested in meeting some it’s hard to think of a better place to seek introductions than a good, supportive, maybe exclusive community of fellow Subs.

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