The Ari Chase-Ramos Interview: Me, Interviewed by Fellow Erotica Writers

"Fiction is more true than non-fiction. Fiction uses imaginary stories to tell us truths about the world. Erotica is the most true and honest genre of fiction."

One of the most interesting things I have had the privilege of doing since I began this Substack is to interview other authors and eroticists. I have interviewed dominatrixes, AV actors and producers, women who love putting themselves in shackles, men who devote themselves to worshipping women they meet online, and erotica writers who have written together written thousands of stories.

Now I am the one taking the questions. Seven of my previous interview subjects have submitted questions. These questions come from:

Katt Ford - The author of 1,641 femdom titles on Amazon, including her latest, Cuckolded by the Cop

Melanie Russell - A master at writing grossdom and feminization stories, which are available on her Patreon, and she also has some of her titles on Amazon

Kate Granger - One of the most prolific erotica writers on Substack, she has written over 1,400 stories comprising over 5 million words on a wide variety of themes. She has recently been updating and optimizing her Amazon page.

Giles English - One of the few men to send me a question, Giles is the author of many books on Smashwords, including Bradley Jones’s Chastity, and a leading Substack author who often shares his thoughts on the psychology of femdom and D/s

Licking Dog Sho - A Japanese man who published a blog and a number of essays in femdom and fetish magazines documenting his experience worshipping random women he met online via his blog. Our interview was different and quite interesting.

M.L. Paige - The author of over 130 titles on Amazon, including many engaging in race play with white slave serving Asian Mistresses and Black Mistresses, she really ramps up the sadism in many of her stories and plays it out in creative ways

Amaya - The interviewer with the magical voice, Amaya not only writes stories on all kinds of romantic and sexual themes on her Substack, she also publishes ASMR role plays on YouTube and Substack

In addition, I also included a question from Yuna Yu, the protagonist of my recent Worship Yuna series, a recently-graduated student from Korea who loved to recruit/manipulate her white boy classmates into filming femdom fetish videos while in college. She just graduated, and she’s off to start her new job as a K-pop executive-in-training in the novella Yuna’s Graduation, a 7,900-word second-person illustrated trampling- and humiliation-heavy story.

Following Yuna’s Graduation, my next upcoming story is Maria and the Mad Dog, Part IV, the conclusion to an exciting depiction of American football with a femdom relationship at the center and power struggles between the owners. Read a preview here.

If I were to write a short bio of myself, I would say that I have published 26 titles on Amazon, about half of which focus on my real life experiences as a sub to my girlfriend, Queen Nazz, and on Thai culture. See a guide to my stories sorted by theme, geography, and more. Follow me on Patreon and Instagram, and subscribe now!

Katt Ford: What do you think erotic fiction can offer readers beyond arousal—emotionally, psychologically, or even politically?

Fiction is more true than non-fiction. Fiction uses imaginary stories to tell us truths about the world. Erotica is the most true and honest genre of fiction.

Erotica writers who create content that lets examine our romantic and sexual desires, to get to know ourselves, that lets us delve deep, and find out who we really are do us a great service.

The book Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch had a great impact on me. It helped give me the courage to truly explore my submission and find my place in the BDSM community. I had already known I was sexually submissive to women for my entire adult life. But I had tried to seek it within my ordinary--basically vanilla--long-term relationships.

I read Venus in Furs while I was in an open relationship, and I was dating others. Here was this work of literature that portrayed the allure of submitting to a cruel, bossy, aristocratic woman in terms that spoke to my heart. It was by no means a perfect book nor a perfect illustration of a femdom relationship, but I read it at the right time for me. That, combined with other factors in my life at the time, led to my visiting a femdom bar where I was whipped hard with a bullwhip for the first time. It led to me reading more erotica. It was the beginning of a metamorphosis in my life that ultimately led me to become an erotica writer myself.

Erotica lets us experience situations we couldn’t--and maybe even would not want to--in real life. Situations that let us learn something about ourselves or that let us feel emotions and sensations that bring us great pleasure and knowledge. Great writing and great imagination can really make the scene feel real in your mind. Some examples include M.L. Paige’s Welcome to the Fempire series; the brutality of the new female tyrants in this gynarchic realm is stimulating to read about, but it’s the kind of thing where, obviously, it could not actually be experienced anywhere (some of it is sci-fi), and where, even if it was possible, it wouldn’t in reality be enjoyable or healthy to be subjugated as such.

You can see that kind of thing happen of varying levels. You might have a couple that wants to try BDSM for the first time, and they might read a more ‘tame’ book that is no less useful to them.

I like that you even mentioned the potential political utility of erotica. There’s a whole question of whether erotica--and femdom in particular--has an inherent political meaning, what responsibility writers have these days, which I have grappled with in an essay. Putting that aside, I do see authors who incorporate political elements and critiques in their erotica writing. There are a lot of books examining what the world might look like under matriarchy and gynarchy in femdom, including Giles English’s works. M.L. Paige’s Maid to Serve the Chinese Dragon Lady could be read as a geopolitical commentary on the rise of China and China’s overtaking the U.S. in certain industries like EVs, outraging short-sighted CEOs who dismissed Chinese companies.

In my novella Punished by the Vigilante Dominatrix Out for Revenge: The pickup artist learns a lesson, I write the first chapter of how a reactionary right-wing government in Korea might aim to build a new dictatorship.

Eroticas can often incorporate political or business villains as characters to be punished or taken down by peg. Elijah Daniels famously wrote Trump Temptations in 2016. Actually, my first attempt at an erotica, which I wrote under a pen name, I wrote in 2016 about Trump getting punished by a debate moderator: Under the Moderator: Facesat and Dominated at the Debate. Sadly, the woman who served as the inspiration for the hero in that one ended up becoming the exact opposite of a hero in real life. I think in my future books, it might be more useful to have the political/social themes relate to the setting in which the story plays out rather than making the stories too character centric.

Melanie Russell: Femdom is often portrayed in very different ways across various media—some emphasizing sensuality, others strict control. How do you personally define and approach Femdom in your stories?

Femdom is expansive, and my taste in kinks is expansive. In my latest novella, Yuna’s Graduation (And Your Humiliation), I depicted scenes of Yuna doing a K-pop dance on the chests, stomachs, and groins, of her male slaves and scenes of women in the HR department of a record label brutally humiliating and laughing at a male applicant for a low level job in ways that I shall not describe here. But I also wrote a scene of Yuna falling for the male steward on her flight to Korea, really being attracted to her, and having him service her orally and then with his human dildo--not just for her pleasure and helping her fall asleep but also because she really truly liked him.

The style of each relationship and the varieties of sexual activity the characters engage in depends on the plot and the personalities of the characters. Sometimes I have a plan out the whole outline of a book before I write it, but sometimes something comes to me as I’m writing. The characters come to life, and then they end up defining the plot and sex on their own.

Kate Granger: Please explain (particularly to men) how they might discuss their need to submit with a partner. Does a discussion begin with the sexual, emotional, physical or practical aspects of a D/s coupling?

A lot of submissive men struggle with discussing their desires and needs with their partner because they feel shy or shameful about being submissive. I know I did. Then they might get into a kind of relationship in which their desires are not being met because their partner isn’t even aware that those desires exist. It might feel like a perfectly good relationship when it comes to everything except sex. But can an intimate relationship be perfect if the sex isn’t?

The man in this relationship who wants a dominant woman to order him around, to whip him, or do something kinky and unconventional might think, “My girlfriend could never do that...” But you don’t know unless you ask. Or she might not even know if she could do it until she discusses it and tries it. So you have to talk about it first, and you’ll either figure out, she can do it, she wants to do it, she’s been dying to try taking control; or she might say she has absolutely no desire to do it.

If she wants to try something kinky and fun, then what are you waiting for? You should have discussed your needs earlier! If she doesn’t, then you have to think. If kink is that important to your sexual drive, or if you want to incorporate femdom dynamics into many aspects of your relationship, then she might not be the one for you. Or if everything else in the relationship really is good and if your desire for femdom is just one part of your sexuality, then maybe you need to talk with her about your seeing a professional dominatrix occasionally to satisfy those needs. In that conversation, you should also be open to discussing her sexual and emotional needs and whether there’s something she wants in such an arrangement.

If your relationship is so bad that you can’t even discuss these things, then you probably didn’t have a good relationship in the first place. Some men are already married and already have kids, and that makes things complicated. But that’s just why you should have these conversations before it’s too late.

It’s also important you get to know yourself: what are your desires, how important are they too you, and what are you looking for in a relationship. If you conclude that kink and femdom are extremely important, that they are requirements even, then there’s no reason not to raise the topic on your first or second date. Once you know yourself, you should know how important sexual, emotion, physical, and other traits are in your relationship. But your needs--or your understanding of your needs--can change, and it’s nice to have a partner who is understanding of that.

I remember one first date in Seoul a couple of years ago when the conversation was slowing down, and, in the interest of getting something started, I said, “Do you want to know a secret I’ve never told anyone? ... I’d like to lick a beautiful woman’s feet. I’d like to lick your feet.” (Who knew I would be writing erotic novellas about it years later...

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Nothing But Feet: Ari’s Ultimate Foot Worship Bundle

Together Again (Under Her Sweaty Feet): Foot worship after a workout

Punished by the Bangkok Bar Girls: The customer must become the foot slave (Free for Kindle Unlimited members as part of The Punishment Bundle)

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Awkward? Maybe. It might have been smoother if I had commented something about how beautiful her heels were and bridge to fetishes. But it succeeded. She asked why I had this kind of fetish, we discussed it, I found she was relatively open minded towards femdom and that she was indeed quite dominant. I ended up licking her foot that night as part of foreplay, and we ended up getting into a relationship for one and a half years. That relationship, as it happened, led me to land in Thailand, where I met Queen Nazz--so everything has a purpose (even if you manufacture that purpose after the fact).

Yuna Yu: Why did you move to Thailand? Do you ever plan to visit Korea again? If you did, I would love to play with you.

Haha. Actually, I used to live in Korea for two years, and I still visit every year. That’s why I have written some books inspired by my experiences in Korea, like Punished by the Vigilante Dominatrix. I visited Thailand for the first time when my ex-lover invited me to travel with her. (We had an open relationship. I called her my “mistress,” not “girlfriend,” and she called me by my name. I was her fuckboy.)

She invited me to travel with her in Thailand that summer, and I loved it so much, I decided to stay. Our relationship had its problems, and we ended up not seeing each other any more. But I still loved Thailand, and soon enough, I met Queen Nazz.

Giles English: How did you meet your girlfriend, and how did the relationship become kinky?

Our relationship was kinky from the start. After all I had experienced in Korea, I realized that my desire to be with a dominant, kinky woman was non negotiable. So I set up a Tinder profile intended to attract my next Mistress-Girlfriend. My pictures included: me from the neck down wearing a collar, a drawing of Phylis riding Aristotle, a metal leash, a bottle rocket in my hand.

My Tinder search worked as expected. The only women who swiped right on me were kinky and sexually open.

Nazz chatted with me like a seasoned domina. She teased. She talked about things she would do, like making me sleep by her feet at night, and she said, “I will be your nightmare mistress.” She told me later, she had never before engaged in real BDSM play, but she had talked to submissive men in chat.

Nazz jumped into BDSM with zeal. She loved being pampered and worshipped. She enjoyed thinking up new ways of torturing and teasing me. She relished the process of learning new things, and she let her innate dominance and sadism show.

The journey of growing together in BDSM is different with your girlfriend than it is to be dominated by a seasoned veteran or professional who only sees you occasionally. Make no mistake, there are things a BDSM veteran can do that are otherworldly. But to see Nazz grow from a dominant woman who likes to play and experiment to one who is confident hitting me with a whip, standing on my chest, and dripping wax on me, it’s allowed us to strengthen our bonds.

Like, I had candle wax dripped on me for the first time by a Chinese-Korean woman who just loved torturing men for fun, and, although I was scared before the meeting, I trusted her in the moment. I guessed she must have done it before. But then when Nazz and I were looking for candles, researching, and trying it, when we were worried about what would be safe and all, it was a whole process where every step of the process was exciting.

Giles English: How does your kinky lifestyle integrate with your non-kinky life? How much of your dynamic is real as opposed to role play?

The kinky me became a larger part of my lifestyle than I had ever thought. First, Nazz encouraged me to write about our kinky stories and publish them. Now I’m an erotica writer. Then I started doing standup comedy. My motivation to perform and my confidence at it stems in some way, I think, from my becoming more confident in my sexuality and my identity. Of course, sex and relationships are fertile topics for jokes. My first set at the open mic was 90 percent me going through each of the whips Nazz and I have in our collection and telling the story of how we acquired our favorite horsewhip. So now when I do comedy--under my passport name--I am known to my friends, my fellow comedians, and the audience as “the kinky comedian.”

How real is roleplay? What’s the difference between role-play and real dynamics? It’s an interesting question and distinction.

Nazz and I do enjoy engaging in literal roleplay. She might act as the bitchy landlady or the strict teacher. She and I created characters we use in roleplay. Sometimes we play the characters in my eroticas. Since I became obsessed with Yuna, Nazz has become Yuna in some of our scenes.

But I believe you are asking something deeper: am I a slave in real life? The answer is no. I don’t do all the household chores. I don’t do the laundry or wash the dishes. (When I do, Nazz yells at me for doing it wrong and tells me never to do it again, lol.) If I’m not in the mood or mind state to be dominated harshly, I tell her; I don’t try to force myself to be the pain slut every single night.

But I have my own chores and ways of serving as her submissive or “slave” (let’s put it in quotes; we do both use that language frequently). I give her long massages almost every night. I give her “wake up call” cunnilingus in the mornings. Her amusement and pleasure is the point of our play and lovemaking. She likes to do the small things that show her dominance, like making me carry her bags and resting her legs on my lap in public.

When she brought me to her hometown and introduced me to her childhood friends, when they put me on a leash and made me give them massages, and then, later, I met her friend Kiki for a second time, and they had me refilling their beer glasses and massaging their backs while they ate, it wasn’t sexual--even if it engaged my fetishes--I was really serving them as they wished and making them feel relaxed and powerful.

I guess you can say that I could do something less intense, like giving a massage during during 80% or 90% of the time, and generally just try to put myself in the submissive position to Queen Nazz and her friends. It’s literally who I am. But my desires don’t go so far as to want to feel ongoing suffering or have my desires ignored for extended periods.

Licking Dog Sho: Were you not interested in BDSM when you were younger?

I was always attracted to dominant women and interested in trying out femdom. But I didn’t know where to find that kind of scene or how to meet that kind of woman. Besides that, I was a late bloomer. In my early relationships, I would introduce my girlfriends to something, and they would do what they liked. One of my ex girlfriends really loved facesitting me, for example. That was how we spent almost all of our time in bed.

M.L. Paige: Society keeps progressing (sometimes in a one step forward, two steps back way) and it makes me wonder if femdom will ever become mainstream or no longer exist because the ideas inherent to it are integrated into society's general idea of sexuality. What do you think?

It’s great that women are being afforded more social freedom to pursue their desires and that men can exist in a world where there is less pressure to box themselves into a one-size-fits-all stereotype of masculinity. Still, I don’t think that dominant women will ever become the majority or that female-led relationships will be considered common and standard.

First, let’s define what femdom really means in practice. That’s hard enough because there’s such a wide range of practices associated with femdom and different fetishes and kinks. There is gentle femdom and service-oriented femdom. There is sadistic femdom, humiliation, femdom in the dungeon, and lifestyle femdom. Even if all vestiges of misogyny disappear overnight (and that’s sadly not going to happen when reactionaries attack and take over governments), even if female-led relationships become more common and become widely accepted in society, there would still be a special thrill for the dominant, sadistic woman in leashing and whipping a man she has just met (and a thrill for the submissive man on the receiving end).

I don’t think most of the practices of BDSM--especially those related to humiliation and pain--will ever be considered mainstream and default. And, if they do, would that detract from the fun of it? BDSM is fun in part because it is taboo, because there is often an aspect of adventure in the search for the underground bar, and all that. It’s fun in part because it’s an escape from the ordinary blandness of society. True. But the practices of BDSM themselves are fun in and of themselves. Maybe that will lead a subgroup of BDSM practitioners who enjoy edge play to seek even more extreme forms of pain and degradation?

Kate Granger: Please describe the psychology of your submission. Please explain what you get (benefits and drawbacks) from the emotional, sexual, physical and psychological aspects of submission separately and describe how they combine as a life affirming mating strategy.

For as long as I’ve been aware of my sexuality, I’ve been attracted to the idea of being dominated by women. Images of women with whips, women wearing kinky thigh-high boots, and women in dominant or simply cool-looking poses and situations always appealed to me. Then when I actually experienced being dominated, I found I really did enjoy experiencing it. Being tied up, unable to move, and having a sexy woman take control, seeing the sadistic smile on her face as she drips wax over my stomach, feeling the sensation of the hot wax hitting my skin as electrical shocks titillate my nipples and I wonder what she’s going to do next... ...is just thrilling.

So from a very basic standpoint, my attraction to submission is about pursuing pleasure. Many have speculated that pain and pleasure are intertwined--either physically, in the brain, or psychologically.

There are other attributes of BDSM that go beyond the physical and the sensual. For example, I also like to be leashed, and I like to serve my Queen to make her feel good in situations that do not involve physical pain. It just feels good to be in the presence of a beautiful and amazing woman and to make her feel happy. Why would I want to be with someone if I didn’t think they were amazing?

That’s enough reason for me. I don’t think my preferences and my actions need to be justified beyond the fact that they make me happy and they seem to keep me healthy in the long-term.

That said, I will try to answer what might be happening from an evolutionary standpoint. I am aware of theories positing ways in which submissive sexual and lifestyle attitudes could be beneficial to the mating and child-rearing prospects of an individual or a society. Eva Jozifkova, Martin Konvicka, and Jaroslav Flegr found in a 2014 study that mating pairs made of partners separated by hierarchical disparities conceived of more children than equally-ranking pairs.

The theory holds that the lower-ranking partner has the opportunity to have healthier and wealthier children by mating with a “high-status” partner--when status is defined by health and wealth. The lower-ranking partner would be deferential to the higher-ranking partner in making lifestyle decisions, reducing conflict, and making it easier to raise more children effectively. For most of human history, the male would typically be the higher-status partner, and women, even those who might be dominant in their psyche, often had to adapt to, or be forced into, the lower-status role.

Now, it should make sense that if more women are getting higher educations than men and being increasingly able to earn as much or more than men, that it could be an effective reproduction strategy for women to find lower-status men who accept their role and for men to take the lower-status role in a relationship. This, of course, oversimplifies a lot about how society works and how individual preferences work and the fact that things that are theoretically beneficial for a societal might not be desirable for individual members of that society.

Plus, the concept of “higher-status” and “lower-status” is flawed when it comes to BDSM. The theory behind the study is using things like health and wealth to define what one’s status should be within a relationship. But such measures often do not correlate with one’s interest in BDSM. There are chubby women--who wouldn’t be “high-status” from a definition that looked at conventional attractiveness--who have dominant personalities, confidence, and sadistic tendencies. There are wealthy, fit, and conventionally attractive submissive women who sing songs about how (being on the receiving end of) chains and whips excite them. There are wealthy men--“high-status,” so to speak--who pay thousands of dollars to be used as a floormat by professional dominatrixes. In that case, their desire to be humiliated and subjugated by women is not serving any apparent reproductive need. So I don’t put too much stock in most theories of evolutionary psychology as it relates to an individual’s sexuality.

Perhaps evolutionary psychology can explain general tendencies within a population, but if we consider that every population exists on a bell curve, then there will be outliers.

Amaya: Your questions as an interviewer are so well-developed and informed, you’ve done a lot of research on your interviewees. What have you learnt from interviewing writers and how has it developed you as a writer?

I can see how many writers take different approaches to writing and publishing, conceiving of ideas, and more. The origin stories, how each writer became interested in writing, first of all, and in writing erotica, specifically, were interesting.

I see how people can come from different backgrounds and have expansive interests and how their interests can shape the way they write: Kate’s interest in personality archetypes, for example, and how they can shape characters. Lisabet, having been publishing across multiple decades, had a lot to say about how the industry and the genre changed. M.L. commented on how much she learned from chatting with pro-dommes and observing them at work.

I’m struggling to point to one concrete thing I did with my writing as a result of my interview, but I’m always trying to improve my process and my results and picking up things from what I read and hear. It’s a certainty that I took some knowledge subconsciously from my interviews and everything else and incorporated it along the way. Earlier this week, I published “A Guide to Ari’s Stories,” which separates my stories by topic, geography, fetish, and more--and I would have to say Kate’s epic content map helped give me the idea.

M.L. Paige: Are there any trends you've noticed in femdom writing, especially in more recent works? Where do readers seem to be headed and how can those of us writing for them think about how to keep delivering fun, titillating stories?

I notice there have been a lot more stories about futanari or futua. There had been stories about sissification and stories about men being forced into gay situations. But futa seems different and also different than transgender. It came out of Japanese popular culture--anime specifically--and it usually brings up connotations to Japan. Futa are typically female or non-binary in gender and in body apart from whats under their pants. Sometimes they are hermaphrodites. There was already a lot of manga and anime about futa, and now there are more and more erotic novellas.

I don’t believe every author needs to be chasing the latest popular genre if it’s not their thing. But one lesson is: writers should be enjoying stories in different mediums and different genres and taking inspiration, thinking how something that is popular somewhere else might translate into erotica.

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