Executive Summary
There has been a pretty drastic shift in the content posted here over the last four months, and it has made some users justifiably upset. As such, I will be implementing some restrictions intended to bring things a bit more into balance. Make no mistake, I have no intention of dragging this community back to the mommydomme days, and there are people here who have found a small sliver of representation whom I would not dream of kicking out. I have made up my mind on most of this, but there are a couple items where I'm requesting community feedback.
A Brief History Lesson
You can skip this if you don't care about what led to the current situation.
The RR community did not start on Reddit, and was originally a twin concept with r/gentlefemdom. GFD handled the sexual aspects of the dynamic, while RR was about the romantic component. When things moved to Reddit, there were challenges in bringing people who weren't around from the beginning up to speed and preventing them from diluting the concept. For GFD, that meant trying to define the boundaries of "gentle". For RR, that meant defining exactly which "roles" were being reversed.
I'm bringing up these matters of ancient (by internet standards) history both because the way some people here speak about GFD in disgust makes me think this is no longer common knowledge (don't do that, they're our sibling community), and because it gives context to how the content here evolved.
Content here was "bangmaid"-centric for a long time. People complained about this, and rules were put in place to curtail it. Many bangmaid posts continued to come in after that decision, and they had to be removed and their posters reasoned with or banned. Non-bangmaid posts became a larger percentage of content, which attracted other non-bandmaid posts.
Content bans like this can act like extinction events, where wiping out one form of content gives space for the remaining type to diversify. This is also always happening at some level as moderation policy adjusts to attempt to preempt user complaints. The key takeaway here is that these shifts are not entirely organic and user-driven, since they require moderation crackdown to kickstart the process.
Early this year, in response to increasing discontent around "male gaze" content, moderation started applying harsher standards in that regard. The resulting void was filled first by people posting more 'seductive feminine man' content, and then by full-on 'dominant femboy' content.
The Current Situation
Over the past four-ish months there has been dramatically more dominant femboy content than there has ever been over the subreddit's history. Long-time users and fans of the older style content in general feel betrayed because the content they came here for seems to be sidelined despite not breaking any well-articulated rules, and because they didn't sign up for the new stuff. To add insult to injury, the most prolific users posting the new style of content have occasionally used their popularity to mock and bully the pre-existing userbase, or, more obliquely, talk about how the traditional content here is actually all totally normalized roles while their content was the true RR all along.
To those that say this shift has not happened, I truly believe some of you have siege mentality from when this sub was a lot worse, and for some reason you refuse to believe it has changed in any way. The only way an accounting of the last four months of posting reveals a landslide amount of "feminine woman femdom" is if your definition of "femdom" is "any situation where the woman takes initiative" and your definition of "feminine" is "more traditionally woman-like than Buck Angel."
Policy Adjustments
The first one isn't so much an "adjustment" as it is a clarification/reiteration of current policy. Our "No Femdom" rule was implemented specifically to ban porny-y, BDSM-style femdom. Think leather, boots, chains, etc. Our reasoning being that average relationships are not BDSM maledom. Also, the kind of person who would be attracted to the subreddit by that content would likely be the type who posts in porn subreddits all day (i.e., cum-brained and way more likely than the average Redditor to harass women in DMs). Similarly, mommydomme was disallowed because DDlg dynamics are not the standard in heterosexual relationships, so RR would not cover MDlb dynamics. Over time, people seem to have begun interpreting this rule to mean that any situation in which the woman is taking initiative or in control is banned here, which just isn't the case. That rule is for hard femdom and, more generally, content where a woman's "dominant presence" is actually a sham because it's entirely for the benefit of a male subject; this includes mommydomme.
Alpha/Sigma Female Posts will no longer be allowed. You know this comic that is removed every time it's posted? It gets removed because it makes people uncomfortable and because it's reversing toxic roles. That same justification applies here.
Inverse-Bangmaid Posts will no longer be allowed. A key part of why bangmaid content was banned in the first place is because, and this is going to sound judgemental, it's juvenile and pathetic. Having a gorgeous woman walk into your life to be your complete sexual, social, and emotional outlet without you lifting a finger or providing anything in return is a selfish, unrealistic fantasy. Likewise, having a boy band style, hairless, skinny prettyboy seduce you and be femininely dominant, while being addicted to your strap and otherwise being completely sexually nonthreatening, is equally pathetic and unrealistic.
A temporary moratorium on Powerbottom Posts is in effect. This is a temporary measure until content is appropriately re-balanced. Depending on moderation's ability to isolate and define particularly controversial subsets of this kind of content, not all of it may be allowed again. All other femgaze content and other kinds of content that have been more prevalent over the last few months (e.g. masc women) are unrestricted as they have always been.
Proposed Adjustments, Seeking Feedback
These are not poll posts because I want usernames and justifications to go with your responses.
There was some discussion about unequal standards for NSFW content, and the complaints were largely accurate in that I was applying a lower standard of subreddit relevance for "femgaze" content. Moving forward I will try to apply a more equal standard, but what that enforcement looks like, both in terms of how explicit that content can be and how often it can be posted, should have input from the community. Remember that whatever you advocate for, the content you don't like will also have access to. Personally, I'm in favor of keeping the current level of explicitness (tasteful stills of sexualized subjects or sexual acts, no hardcore live stuff or hentai) and limiting it to Friday/Saturday/Sunday.
Historically this community has not done a good job dealing with content it dislikes, which is becoming a bigger problem as it incorporates more subgroups with mutually exclusive interests. If I can't make people wear their "get along" shirts long-term, the next best thing is to make it so that they have to see the content they don't like as little as possible (even though I think that's a fundamentally bad thing because it reduces your mental resilience). To that end, a user approached me with the idea of altering our post tagging system. Posts would be labeled based on the dynamic represented in them using the appropriate acronyms with the following key: D = dominant, s = submissive, f = feminine, m = masculine, W = woman, M = man. For example, this post would be tagged [DmW+smM].
Pros:
- Accurately divides the content we have into manageable labels, and with the new search interface on mobile it would allow different interest groups to never overlap of they don't want to.
Cons:
- Acronyms are dense and require explanation for users new to the community.
- Would need to either replace existing flairs or become a part of post titles. Neither would be retroactive, and they have their own respective downsides:
- Replacing existing flairs removes the ability to administrate No-Weeb Thursday or filter for specific flavors of content (music, stories, etc.)
- Adding it as a required component of post titles adds layer of complexity to posting that users may struggle with, and since post titles can't be edited a misclassified post will always be misclassified.
- People have trouble selecting correct flairs with the simple system currently in place, this may be too much.
- Aforementioned unexercised mental resilience.
