Mistress Sidonia's Femdom Blog

Argot (noun) – jargon or idiomatic vocabulary of a particular social group, especially that of an underworld body of people (pronounced with a silent ‘t’, unless of course you’re a N. American.)

The Problems of Fetish Argot

There is a huge, pervasive problem to overcome when writing a regular femdom blog – a lack of words to describe our world and it’s not just an absence of BDSM terms but sex in general. Well it is the ‘English’ language and the English DO NOT talk about sex. That’s why our erotic terms are either medical or begin as unpleasant juvenile slang. Tea bagging comes to mind (well that’s certainly British), really… we couldn’t come up with a better name? At least fellatio is rather beautiful and a bit of an onomatopoeic mouthful. So like vanilla sex, we grope around in the dark with uninspired, covert descriptions like golden showers; or flat acronyms like CBT or CEI.

We as yet, cannot even agree the plural of domme? I have come across all of these:
Dominatrixes?
Dominatri?
Dominatrices?
Dominae?
Where’s a linguist when you need one (and that’s not an expert on oral sex.)

I’ve often pondered what the collective noun for Mistresses could be? “A whip” perhaps;  and for Dominatrices (well I have to use one spelling) “a cruelty“.
I think “a stable” of slaves is now well established (and may have been coined by moi). And, “an obedience” of subs, or for Prodoms should that be “an over-excited irritation of”.

The Language of Kink

Despite being in regular parlance neither (a) Dominant nor (a) Submissive have yet to make it into the dictionary as proper nouns. You can ‘be’ submissive but not be ‘a’ Submissive. Or indeed ‘a’ Switch, or the rather kind epithet ‘Vanilla’ as a description for a non kinky person.

The word Bottom is also rather perfect as a term for the ‘receiver’ in a scene (but NOT in the gay sense, they have Polari anyway). For example, the bottom may be a masochist without a sub bone in their body, see this is where it all gets confusing… not enough words. Anyway, Bottom leads us to Top obviously and then to the idiomatic, common phenomenon of ‘topping from the bottom’ we’ve all experienced this one  😉

We have, however, created some first-rate new terms: hard limit; subspace; safeword; scene; edge play; and subdrop – to name just a few. And safewords offer up a whole new parlance – apparently shouting out “Popsicle!” or “Justine Bieber!” is de rigueur for newbies; we veterans always found “red” perfectly coherent.