The Third Wish Restores the Balance - Why I Rarely Write Submissives Who Come

A Rummage in my Inbox... 

Every so often, I receive a particular kind of message - no, not that kind of message, although, actually I get those too, and always politely decline (you have to be quite explicit with that ‘no’, I've discovered; apparently saying “thanks but I honestly can't even keep track of my house keys without repeatedly losing them” puts off far fewer men than you'd think…)

This is a different kind of message, and while I won't share any specific ones, they have a common pattern, and I suspect they say something extremely interesting about how many people think femdom - or at least femdom fiction - works. 

So, these messages. They're usually (though not always) polite; they're often from readers who were extremely engaged, immersed in the story (which is wonderful!) - and they always sound slightly wounded, slightly bewildered, as if the reader had stumbled into a room they thought they knew, and found all the furniture had been moved around.

It's been a steady theme through all my writing even years ago, but I had to flurry recently in the wake of Penny Keeps the Keys, the little free Locktober serial I released on Reddit. 

And the core of these confused - sometimes genuinely hurt - messages is always this:

“But he didn’t get to orgasm!”

Which is true. The men I write usually don't. 

And, equally, the messages I get usually love everything else about what I write: they love the story, the tension, the ache, the intensity of the denial - but often they feel wounded by the fact that after all that, the man doesn't get off. 

I find this fascinating. I find it a little sad as well, of course, because every writer would like their work to be admired, and I feel bad when readers are so invested in my characters only to find themselves experiencing a kind of “wot? No orgasm?!” whiplash at the end. 

But it is fascinating that a number of readers have this experience. 

(Far, far more readers write and thank me for not letting the men orgasm very much if at all; in fact “why didn't he come?!” is about fourth in my list of most-common messages, after ‘please be my keyholder’, ‘thank you for not ruining the story by letting him come,’ and, ‘please write more!!’ - I've written lots more; here's my Smashwords!) 

But I think the “he didn't come!!” response says something really interesting not about those readers, but about the way they've been conditioned to understand pornography, even in denial fiction. 

How We Understand Stories:

 

Everybody understands stories. Every society tells stories. It's one of the great, most brilliant, universal experiences. 

If you're from pretty much any culture (to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge), and someone starts to tell a story in which the core plot is basically ‘the main character gets three wishes’…

…then no matter where you are from, I bet you already know where that story is going. 

Because at the end of that story then you, the person hearing the story, will have been taught something about humility, and taught that, ultimately, wishing doesn't get you what you want. 

That's what humans use “wishing” stories for. 

And it doesn't matter if the three wishes were granted by a magic lamp (broadly middle Eastern), or a magic crane (Japan), or a god (common in Indian traditions, and tales of Anansi from Africa), or a great spirit like in the Iroquois tale of the man who couldn't stop wishing, or even a magic bull (Scotland). 

All of those cultures tell a wishing story, and they basically all end with the same moral:

You can't fix everything by wishing, and sometimes you should wish other people get nice things. 

The first wish will be for money, or possessions, or power, the second wish will be for even more. The third wish will be for the wish-giver to go free, or else for everything to go back to normal. 

You know that already, the moment I tell you this is a story about someone with three wishes - that must be how it ends, because that's how those stories go. 

And this is a shared narrative understanding that is old. Even in the Aboriginal stories of the Dreamtime - stories so inconceivably ancient they make Beowulf look like a Tiktok short, stories from an oral culture that records the eruption of the Budj Bim volcano something like 37,000 years ago - even then, in stories of unimaginable venerability, you can see similar patterns in which desire causes imbalance, leading ultimately to a restoration of harmony. 

So, if I wrote a story in which a selfish man found a wishing ring, and made three wishes, and every wish made his life better and he never learned anything - I think you'd feel either baffled or cheated. 

And, because of how a lot of chastity and denial fiction works, when I write a story about tease and denial and at the end the man chooses more denial - there are I think some readers who have a similar sense of bafflement. 

That's fascinating - but I do understand it. 

I understand it because none of those “haha you're locked forever and you love it!” captions are designed for people who are in fact locked forever. Indeed I suspect that, on average, captions that specifically tell them they don't get to come are the ones guys into chastity are most likely to come to. (Funding committees! I'm open to grants to study this properly!) 

And this narrative pattern conditions the way some people approach erotic storytelling: they believe the male orgasm is the point.

Like it's a natural destination, an automatic reward for good behaviour.

My work disagrees.

I disagree. 

I don't think an orgasm is the natural reward for a man who's proved his devotion. 

I think a man choosing denial is the proof of his devotion. 

I mean that absolutely sincerely. I think in many ways it's the purest, most precious, most incredible proof that a submissive is being a Good Boy. 

I cannot overstate how special that is, or how much it would cheapen the devotion my male subs show if they chose to orgasm instead of prove themselves. 

And I know most of my readers get this, as instinctively as they'd understand that the third wish undoes the first two, but I think perhaps it's instructive to set out the vast majority of my male characters do not find their resolution in a gasp and a shudder.

This is not a manifesto against male pleasure, by the way - it's merely a manifesto for a different kind of erotic architecture.

Let me explain.

The Reasons I Think Denial is Central to Denial Fiction:

1. A climax ends the story - but not always in a good way

In most erotic narratives, the moment the man finishes is the moment the tension ends. It is often a full stop, not only to the scene, but to the emotional arc.

The narrative dissolves, the atmosphere softens, the dynamic resets. 

But my stories aren’t built around the collapse of tension; they are - they have to be - built around the maintenance of it. The slow building up, the gradual development, the psychological shifts that occur as one edge becomes five, as two weeks locked becomes four, as a keyholder's power becomes paramount to them both. 

When the man remains wound, so does the story, when he remains wanting, so does the reader, and when he remains desperate, the dynamic cannot die. 

Which means that his orgasm doesn’t heighten the narrative: it empties it.

2. The erotic peak of Vossian femdom belongs to the woman

(As a side note, I do find it quietly amusing that the loudest protests about male denial always seem to come from male readers, because my female ones (and, yes, many of my male readers too!) already understand something fundamental:

She is the climax.

But this sits at the core of what I write: the Domme(s) get pleasure, the Sub(s) get denied. 

Sometimes they are denied lovingly, sometimes cruelly, sometimes both in the same book - but my boys get written chaste, or denied, or just edged into a deliciously whimpering mess… And that's how they stay. 

I think it says something about the way pornography as a broader industry treats (even submissive) men and women that a significant minority of my readers consider this to be transgressive: I am, generally massively in favour of pornography, obviously; I write it for a living! 

But I do think it's remarkable that even in chastity-focused femdom fiction writing a story in which the chaste man is denied can feel like it's jarring to some readers: what kind of assumptions are the dirty stories we tell creating, if a man choosing to be denied can hit some readers like a betrayal? 

For me, it's simple - it'd make an incredible propaganda poster for my midcentury matriarchy, run by the NVLA:

Her power, 

Her satisfaction, 

Her pleasure, 

Will bring us (narrative) victory. 

(...Quite what image would replace the crown on any hypothetical NVLA version of this poster is left as an exercise to the reader...) 

The moment my dommes take what they want - in whatever form that takes - is the peak. Even Dr Lin in Mantamer, twisted though what she wants is. Even Evelyn Brandt in The Honourable Boytoy. I try to ensure that the form and variety of my Domme's motivations are as grounded and varied as my Dommes themselves (and their bodies!). 

Because that peak, that moment of their pleasure is the moment the prose swells and the dynamic sharpens… 

…and it cannot do that without the contrast, without the Sub's desperation, whether given willingly or extracted by denial. 

If you come to a Voss story waiting for the man’s climax, you will always be waiting at the wrong door, because his denial is the engine, the powerhouse of her pleasure. 

Just as a man granted three wishes cannot reform until he sees how wrong the first two wishes have gone, the heat of my fiction comes from the way the characters embrace the Domme's pleasure as paramount. 

Which - honestly - gives it a mutuality far in excess of the power imbalance, however extreme. I think that's beautiful. 

3. Devotion is not a transaction

I am, I've learned, incapable of writing male characters who serve in order to be paid in pleasure. 

I started out that way, admittedly, back when I wrote on AO3 and things - but goodness it created unsatisfying endings. I've deleted them all now, thank goodness, so they can't haunt me! 

But generally speaking, I find my joy in writing submissives who allow their denial to transform them somehow. 

They serve for many reasons, true: Joe in Sense of Submission is submitting for love of his partner; Rudy in The Ruritanian Pretender is submitting for love of a country; Marcus in Under The Typewriter Keys is submitting because a cursed typewriter is making him stick to his promises of doing Locktober - so there's quite a range there!

But ultimately, all my men submit to denial because on some level, placing their pleasure and trust in the hands of their Domme(s) lets them feel understood, unburdened, and reshaped.

They do it because that act of trust and devotion gives them somewhere to place all their complicated longing, and, often, to prove that when they say ‘I love you’ they really, really mean it. 

And responding to the enormity of that devotion with a fleeting, conventional orgasm would cheapen the very thing that makes it so compelling.

If one of my Submissives begs to be denied to prove that they will submit everything, that their feelings are so strong they'd offer to abandon one of their most primal urges just to prove what a Good Boy they want to be - as Sam does in Penny Keeps the Keys… 

Well, I'm sorry. Writing his orgasm at that point just seems cruel. 

It would be the smut equivalent of telling someone “I love you” for the first time, and having them stare at you blankly and respond “Okay. D'you want tea or coffee?” 

I can't imagine how Sam would feel, offering something so enormous, devotion so total - and having Penny throw it back in his face by letting him come anyway. 

Just as the noblest use for a third wish is to wish everything back to how it was, a submissive’s willing sacrifice should be accepted and honoured as with the gravity it deserves. 

Will Penny let Sam orgasm in future? Sure, almost certainly! 

But it would be disrespectful to his love if I wrote it happening. 

Some Conclusions:

I want to be clear - if you've read one of my books and got to the end and felt frustrated that the man didn't get to come even once - that is okay! I absolutely don't want you to feel like you're being told off. 

(Besides, when I tell people off, trust me, they feel it…) 

And of course, sometimes readers do write to say they finished one of my books feeling breathless, or unsettled, or unusually silent for a few minutes: good! 

That means the story worked.

Erotica, at its best is not about release: it is about charge.

The slow tightening. The emotional current running under the dialogue. The quiet inevitability of someone realising they are no longer the centre of their own body, that they're no longer in control of their own pleasure, that they want her orgasm even more than they want their own even though they've never felt this desperate in their life.

If orgasm dissipates that tight little knot in your chest, I'm not going to let you down by writing it.

I'd always rather leave you breathless, just a little unfinished, just a little tense. 

Feeling just a fraction of that precious, perfect ache that my characters feel.

Because the final wish is always the sacrifice. 

The first wish for immediate gratification goes wrong. The second wish never fixes it. 

And in the end, all that's left to wish for is for things to be fixed. For the power of wishing to be taken away. For the genie to be free, even if that puts you back living in the vinegar bottle where you started. 

In a wishing story, the satisfaction never comes from seeing the wish-maker cash in their chips and live luxuriously ever after. It comes from seeing their choice to use the third wish to please someone else. That's how the wish-maker gets their release. 

And in the same way, choosing denial gives my lovely subs more catharsis than any fleeting orgasm could ever give. Sure - a Domme might give it later, a Domme may decide anything... But her granting it would mean nothing if the sub wasn't willing to surrender, for her, his wish to come. 

So, no, I very, very rarely write stories where my precious, wonderful submissive male gets to come. 

But that's not something I do for cruelty, addictive though their whimpers are. 

I do it because the story is not finished when they fall apart: it's finished when they understand.

And when what they wish for isn't orgasm but to prove their surrender. 

Some readers will always want something simpler - and that is perfectly fine; I'm confident you'll still enjoy 99% of my work, especially if you imagine that the orgasm is taking place just after the end papers!

But for those who come to my fiction for tension, devotion, ambiguity, and the slow-burning pleasure of not being given what you think you want…

You already know why the men rarely come, intuitively, because the kinds of femdom you've already been reading have taught you how to hold the ache in your heart - but I hope this post has helped you put it into words. 

And if it still hasn't? 

Well... Now you know what to wish for.