Esther Harshom talks Femdom and Sissy Play for #Cocktoberfest

When it came to writing sissy erotica, I arrived kind of late in the game: I’d already published about fifty or so stories, most of them Femdom-themed, before it even occurred to me that I could turn my pen towards crossdressing. And why would it? After all, it wasn’t a fetish I got any particular enjoyment out of at the time. For a start, I’m a woman, and kind of a tomboy at that: where your average sissy might look at a pair of stockings and think of the sensuous feel of the silk against their legs, I view them as a ladder waiting to happen; when they see an overflowing makeup bag  and all the transformative possibilities therein, I can’t help but think of just how bad I am at being anything even approaching traditionally ‘girly’. Sissification stories, with their focus on hyper-femininity, didn’t seem like a particularly good fit for me.

Still, I was a professional, and it seemed like it might be an interesting genre to get into. If anyone could do it, so could I.

It took me three months to finish my first short story. To put it bluntly, this little experiment was a disaster. I could write Maledom books, Femdom books and vanilla with ease. I could write romance or hardcore, with main characters who were everything from werewolves to virgins. What I couldn’t do, it seemed, was write a sissy story that I’d want to read – and that fact bothered the hell out of me.

The problem, I realised eventually, was that I thought being a sissy in a BDSM relationship was all about the humiliation of being dressed in something ‘demeaning’ – that is, being made ‘less’ by being a woman. Every time I tried to get around that fact, I couldn’t do it. It seemed almost offensive to think that my gender was being used as a way of degrading people, just so they could get their rocks off. It took me a long time to realise that in good sissification and feminisation books – at least, the kind of books I was interested in – that wasn’t the case at all.

For me, sissification isn’t about the clothes you wear or how pretty your make up is. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a frilly dress or a latex catsuit, a slinky little evening number or the kind of thing that would make a five-dollar hooker blush. The truth is, the sissy stories I write aren’t about the sissy at all. What’s important, at least to me, is the relationship between the sissy and the person for whom they dress up.

To be a sissy, at least in the books I write, is to give someone complete control over you. It’s a way of saying I trust you enough to let you strip me down to nothing, and rebuild me as you see fit – even if that means taking me from a strong alpha-male sort right the way to being a desperate, slutty little girl. The willingness to submit to that kind of transformation – or perhaps the initial unwillingness, which gradually gets broken down by the realisation that this new life is what he was made for – is what really makes a main character pop for me.

And what about the Dominant – the man or woman who is given this opportunity to make something beautiful and sordid right from scratch? Well, he or she has a huge part to play too. It’s their job to guide the action and transform the clay of their new submissive into someone – something – worthy of their time and attention.

When you look at it that way, it’s easy to see that a lot of fictional BDSM relationships follow the same relationships – no matter how you dress it up.

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Esther Harshom traded in a life in academia for a mountain of erotica and couldn’t be happier. She lives in the UK with her partner, and her annual #Cocktoberfest sale is taking place right now. For more information, you can follow her on Twitter: @EstherHarshom. If you’re looking for a taste of her work, Part One of The Office Sissy is available for free on Amazon now.