Why Implicit Female Led Relationships are bad for everybody involved

A vanilla submissive does things
 ‘when he feels like it’.

Dominant relationship and sex blogger Ferns talks about the problem with vanilla submissives versus D/s submissives:

A vanilla submissive does things ‘when he feels like it’. A non-vanilla submissive does things ‘when he feels like it, but even if he doesn’t because that’s what we agreed, so he will do it anyway and be happy that I used my authority to push him to do it’. (source)

To roughly summarize the post:

Ferns prefers a Female Led Relationship. She needs to know that she really is explicitly charge outside the bedroom, and that her partner experiences her authority as an expression of love. Otherwise he'll get bored, feel things are unfair then push back and ultimately leave.

I think this exactly mirrors the submissive male experience of  vanilla D/s relationships, ones where the dynamic is unacknowledged even if there is bedroom kink. I call these iFLRs (implicit Female Led Relationships).

 ...she does not respect us when
we submit

We subs easily drift into iFLRs especially when we're young because we have a strong drive to submit. We may also knowingly "stealth submit", ceding power to our partner without getting her buy-in. This also results in an iFLR.

Implicit Female Led Relationships are bad for everybody involved.

There's often a big ethical problem with iFLRs because we tend to submit to domineering women rather than dominant ones, meaning we latch onto a woman who has issues with the way she relates to other people - typical traits include selfish, narcissistic, spiteful, impulsive, lacking in empathy - and then enable her to go further down that road.

Essentially, we take somebody a bit crazy and nudge them into being even crazier because it pushes our buttons. Not very ethical.

There are still problems even if we do manage to find a genuinely dominant partner because we fail to negotiate an actual Female Led Relationship.

For a start, we can't trust her to remain dominant and to also respect us. She may at any moment demand we "man up", or try to goad us into a reaction. This can be because she reads our submission as passive aggression, or because she worries about being evil, or because she does not respect us when we submit. Conversely, she may need to justify the iFLR by disrespecting us - bad for the sex and the relationship as a whole. Either way, any bedroom Femdom may actually make matters worse.

All this is reason enough for subs in iFLRs to push back, even if we are kinky. Occasionally we will try to assert a more traditional masculinity, which means behaving like a dick - not something our partner will appreciate.

It's far, far better to have an explicit agreement so you
both know where you stand - or kneel

Finally, not acknowledging your FLR means you can't communicate about it. This leads to tense conversations in which she's trying to get her way without admitting being the dominant partner, and you're trying to submit without seeming to be a doormat. "What are you in the mood for?"/"What did you have in mind?"/"That depends..."  Worse, you can't set or negotiate limits, so she may second guess herself to the point of irritation.

So implicit Female Led Relationships are a minefield. It's far, far better to have an explicit agreement so you both know where you stand - or kneel - and can actually talk about it. That way you can skip to the bit where you both enjoy the domination and submission in the bedroom and in the rest of your life.

The chances are that if you are already in an iFLR with a dominant woman, you probably both know what's going on. You've probably even been stealth submitting.

Perhaps it's time to have an honest conversation?

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