Q is for Queen (and queening)

Hi everyone!  Welcome to the A to Z of Sex.  I’m Dr Lori Beth and I am your host.  We are working our way through the erotic alphabet one letter at a time.  Just a reminder this podcast deals with adult content, so if you don’t have total privacy, you might want to put on your headphones. Today the letter is Q and Q is for Queen (and also queening!).

Queen as a nickname can be short for drag queen or can refer to a woman who is dominant.  Today, I’ll talk about both uses of the term and also cover the activity queening.  I’ve had a couple of questions about drag queens and transvestites and I’ll answer these as well.

Drag is traditionally not just about enjoyment and sexiness.  There has always been a challenging element of drag that is about the gender fuck.  Particularly the queens who do not look feminine and do not try to look feminine.   Drag highlights rebellion and nonconformity.  Today, even traditional drag attracts audiences of all genders and is often seen as highlighting a person’s struggle to define identity and style and willingness to be an individual, not conforming to social beauty standards.    There is an increasing young female audience that sees drag as empowering them to discover and be who they are.

Drag queens don’t usually dress in women’s fashion for the purpose of sexual excitement and enjoyment.  They do so for the purposes of self-expression and entertainment.  Drag queens are not transvestites as they do not fetishize the female clothing and accessories. Many drag artists are very talented performers and popularity has continued to increase, especially since Ru Paul’s successful reality show Drag Race. 

People of all genders choose to dress in drag though drag queens are the most well-known.  There has been a growing body of fans for drag kings and drag king shows as well.

Many people believe the history of drag in Europe began in the 1800’s with the pantomime.  In the United States, some people trace the history of drag back to minstrel shows which originally had performers in black face parodying black men and then had performers begin to parody black women.  These were not positive performances.  They were used to mock black people. 

Whereas drag in the gay community was used to celebrate and seen as progressive.  Drag continued with vaudeville where female impersonators became very popular.  The most famous female impersonator was Julian Eltinge who performed on Broadway as a woman.  During these times, female impersonators were seen to be white straight men.  This art form declined as a connection with sex work and homosexuality was made more often.

In the earlier 1900’s, drag moved into night clubs and began to be associated as entertainment within the LGBT community.  Since being gay was criminal at the time, it became riskier.  People would go to nightclubs to experiment with boundaries between gender and sexuality and drag queens became extremely popular.

Drag queens often participate in pageantry – prominent in Pride parades though this has often been controversial as many people express concern over the image of homosexuality this presents.    

Many millennials are exploring gender through drag.  Pecs is a group of performers in the UK who explore gender through drag.    The performers are all CIS women at the moment.  They say ‘Unless you fuck in a vacuum, sex is a gendered experience.’  As a result, they use drag and performance to explore further.    

Rob wrote in to ask ‘I love watching the drag queens. I go to a show most weeks.  I find them really sexy.  Does this mean I am gay?’  Rob this doesn’t mean you are gay or even bisexual, though you could be either.  It simply means you find them sexy.  We find many things sexy that we don’t want to act on in reality.  Relax and enjoy the shows.

In kink circles, a queen can also be a dominant woman.  Some cultures use the term queen to refer to any woman and in reference to treating your partner like a queen or finding that partner who will be queen of your world.  This is popular within the African American community where men are also sometimes referred to as kings.

When referring to a dominant woman, a queen is the woman in charge.    Queening is when a dominant woman sits on her submissive’s face.  This is sometimes also referred to as throning or simply as facesitting.    Sometimes the woman is sitting directly on the submissive’s face.    However, there are also special stools and chairs and some ‘thrones’ made explicitly for queening which allows the dominant to take some of her weight off of the submissive and engage in queening for longer. 

Some women use facesitting as simply another oral sex position.  They are not engaging in this because they are dominant but rather to give a different type of access and vantage point.  Most women who engage in this worry about being too heavy for their partners or suffocating a partner.    Couples who are using this for oral sex often have the woman facing the man’s head so that he is not completely enveloped by her body.  He is approaching from the front.  Women who are using this for dominance often envelop the entire head of the person they are queening.  One of my favourite articles on facesitting can be found on Harlot Media.  The link is in the podcast notes.

The mark that queening is seen as the act of a dominant was highlighted a couple of years ago when the UK decided to change the laws on pornography so that images of facesitting (amongst other types of images) would become criminal.  To protest these changes, there was a facesitting protest outside parliament.  The campaign decided to sing Monty Python’s Sit on My Face while demonstrating facesitting (with clothing on). 

Queening has become popular with people who are not kinky as another sex position that makes oral sex really interesting and sometimes a hell of a lot more fun.  The biggest barriers to enjoying this are the thoughts that women can have while they are sitting on their partners faces.  Women worry if they are too heavy, if they will suffocate their partner.  They worry about their smell and taste and what happens if they fart.  If they have a male partner, they worry about their partner’s beard or lack of a clean shave and if their vaginal lips will get chafed.    If they are able to relax, most women report that this position provides lots of pleasure.  They highlight feeling empowered and enjoying the control they have.  They also highlight loving that the focus is on their pleasure and nothing else.

Jack wrote in and asked if queening was really dangerous.  He said that he was worried about being suffocated but also worried about how he could engage in safe sex while his face was being sat on.     Jack you don’t need to be worried about suffocating as this is really rare and the only cases I could find were cases in which the person was deliberately attempting to suffocate the person they were sitting on!  As for getting sexually transmitted infections: Facesitting involves being exposed to bodily fluids and so there is a risk of infection.  The risk is raised if you have bleeding gums or oral cuts.  There is a risk to the person who is doing the facesitting of catching oral herpes if the person who is underneath has this infection.   You can’t have completely safe naked facesitting sex.  However, the risks of infection transmission are lower than for many other sexual activities.  If you want to be completely safe from infection, have the queen keep her panties on and make sure that her fluids don’t leak through.  Maybe keeping trousers on would be better (less likely to be leaks).

Thanks for joining me this week for the A to Z of Sex. Write in with your questions to drloribeth@atozofsex.com and visit both websites www.atozofsex.com and www.the-intimacy-coach.com to learn how to awaken your authenticity, arouse your sexuality and ignite your desire.   For a free 30 minute session with me, head over to www.atozofsex.com and click on the button that says ‘book now’.   If you have enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes and/or Sticher and please subscribe!  Why not join me for my upcoming free webinar 4 Secrets for Arousing and Igniting Your Authentic Sexual Self.  Click the link in the podcast notes to sign up or head to https://the-intimacy-coach.com/4-secrets/.

Join me next week when the letter will be R and R is for Red Flags.