Introducing Lady Felicity Rosenthyme

I'm writing this because Renegade Evolution in her call for submissions for the Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy set one of the themes as "Body modification, clothing, and paint as a form of self expression." Now, I don't have a lot of anything to say about body modification or body paint, but clothing as a form of self-expression ties very strongly into my experience of Lady Rosenthyme. I assumed that I would find somewhere in my last 2 years or so of blogging that I would have written in detail about her already, and I could just submit that post to the carnival. It turns out that I haven't, so this looks like a great opportunity to correct that oversight.

This is how Lady Rosenthyme describes herself on the bondage.com profile that I created for her:

I am a stern and strict governess with a main interest in teaching young ladies the elements of proper decorum and comportment, along with sundry academic pursuits should they be interested in making such studies. Refined behaviour and courtesy are a credit to anyone, and I shall seek to promote such qualities in any student who submits herself to my tutelage.

Potential students can email me at ladyrosenthyme@dsl.pipex.com

CD students will be welcome since the virtues of a lady may be learned by anyone.

Please note that I find abbreviation of my name or title to be extremely rude!

Essay Questions

Briefly describe your personality -- what makes you tick? What should people know about you?

I am precise and well-mannered, and I hold myself to the same high standards as I shall expect of any student of mine. I am a determined lady, and will have no truck with silliness or misbehaviour, but am happy when students do well or show understanding of what is required and when. There is a time to every purpose, and that includes carefree fun as well: but the time and the place is everything!

Lady Felicity Rosenthyme has opinions on many things, all of them correct!

What's your ambition? What do you hope to achieve in your life?

To teach just one girl to be a perfect lady in public life...

...and my perfect slut in private

Describe your sexiest outfit, and/or how you look when dressed up in general.

I have a regular costume for my lessons, which comprises a long black dress, high-heeled knee-length boots and a claret-coloured corset

What does a collar signify for you? How many times have you given/received a collar?

A collar is a symbol of ownership; I, as a governess, do not seek to own my students except in as much as while they are in my presence, they are to be completely at my command. But I need no such symbolic adornments to demonstrate my control.

What are your pet peeves? What really ticks you off? And how do you react when you're angry?

Disrespect for others, for oneself, or for me! When angry, I ensure that just retribution will be meted out at some point but once that has been done, forgiveness is swift. I am rarely roused to great anger, but can be fearsome to behold when I am. Nothing is forgotten, but nothing is above forgiveness.

What are your 'deal breakers'? (turn offs etc - e.g. smoking, blue hair, braces, leprosy)

I would say smoking, but I would expect any potential student who smokes to be willing to give up that habit while she is under my supervision anyway, and preferably at all other times as well. I find smoking to be inelegant and disrespectful of oneself and others, and certainly not a fitting habit or indulgence of any young lady who wishes to impress.

Here's a picture, from when I was first developing Lady Rosenthyme's real life expression, and had nothing else in her wardrobe:


Lady Rosenthyme was the way in which I came to terms with my trans leanings and felt okay with exploring crossdressing in the first place. (The observant will notice that I identify my female side as "Sucha" now - Lady Rosenthyme still exists for me, but is now only one aspect of my female side.) For a long time she existed only as a very deeply hidden and secret side of my personality, because I couldn't think of a way to express her safely, and because I was heavily affected by male-on-male gender enforcement. The most gender-nonconforming expression for a long time (indeed, since long before Lady Rosenthyme came into being in my mind, let alone in real life) had been growing my hair long. But ultimately I have always wanted to be female as well as male.

Lady R (I feel happy to abbreviate her, because I'm the one person she can't get cross at for doing so!) began as just plain Felicity Rosenthyme, but when I realised that she was Domme through-and-through, she acquired her aristocratic title. (Because of the role that suits her best, that title is intended to be read as an aristocratic title, and not simply a BDSM honorific - therefore, unless you are her servant, her title is expressed as "your/her Ladyship"). This was back in 2000, but it wasn't until 2005 that I actually felt confident enough with my feminine identity to try to develop some expression of her. I started by buying the dress in the picture above from a stall at a crafts fair, which was sufficiently anonymous that I felt I could. Then by mail order, I bought her boots and corset. After that I had to buy the lipstick, which I did at Boots Chemists, and that was incredibly nerve-wracking, even though I'm sure that people were assuming I was buying it for a girlfriend. But at last, I could let her Ladyship take her first steps in real life.

Her personality is essentially the same as mine, but is seen through a very different lens. Sometimes I regard the different personas I have as being like looking at a transparent crystal from different angles, because in each one you can see the elements of all the others, but those elements appear differently and with different emphasis. Lady Rosenthyme has as her strongest elements my confidence, my pedantry and love of accuracy and correctness, and my fierceness. Despite her intense strictness, she is also wild and uncontrolled, and some of the darkest elements of my personality and past find their expression most freely in her as well. To my mind, she is genuinely scary, but she also wins respect when people get to know her. In some ways, I sometimes think that her Ladyship, despite being in my mind very feminine, also seems to possess many of the traits in me that are most masculine-identified in modern culture!

To bring this back to the topic of clothing as self-expression, dressing as Lady R is obviously a form of self-expression in that I am expressing myself as her Ladyship and displaying that (although I have never yet dressed in public, and likely never will - you can see from the picture above how well I don't pass!) However, she is also a way of my channelling the attributes that she possesses most strongly.

I strongly, deeply, wish that I could attend job interviews dressed as her Ladyship - even wearing the corset under my regular smart clothes would be good (but a claret corset under a white cotton shirt would probably show through, and that would be... um... awkward!) Her Ladyship's confidence is something of which I am deeply envious in any such situation, and while that confidence has to be a part of me for her Ladyship to possess it, yet I find it so much harder to access when I am me as opposed to when I am Lady R.

While I can access Lady R without dressing as her (for example, whenever I am buying women's clothing or accessories, I always access Lady R's confidence and femininity to help me present as confident of my right to be in the shops selling those things), I find that she is much easier to find when I am dressed, which seems strange to me but there is the association. The corset in particular helps me feel her power, confidence and forcefulness in a way I just don't without it, however hard I try. The number of times when I wished I could have that confidence in visits to the Jobcentre, for example, and yet couldn't summon it from within myself - but the one time when I wore that corset under my t-shirt (so it was invisible to the outside world), my attitude was somehow very different and I did have that sense of confidence. I would wear it more often, but it's really difficult to put it on by myself!

As I noted above, I nowadays more often identify as Sucha than as her Ladyship when expressing my female side, and Sucha is a much more cheerful persona in general. While the concept of Lady R was an important step for me in breaking through gender-normative conditioning, eventually it became clear to me that she really only expressed one side of my feminine self, and because she was this alternative persona, as I mentioned above, a lot of stuff that I'd buried from the past found its way into the open again through her. That also was quite an important healing process in many ways, but it did mean that Lady R wasn't going to be as free as I needed to be. Sucha shares many character traits with Lady R (as explained above, strictly speaking she shares all those character traits, because they are both "me", seen from different angles) but she is much more about the carefree inner child, that Lady R would never ever allow into the light of day! As a result, Sucha maybe has more of the traditional "feminine" traits than does Lady R, and can be quite a "girly" persona. For this reason, it troubles me a little as a feminist that Sucha is the most obviously "switchy" persona I have and is the most free in expressing my submissive side (she is also quite the sadistic Domme too, though!) and I worry about what that says about how deeply inculcated patriarchal norms are in my psyche.

Sometimes my head feels a little bit crowded with all these different personas camped out in there, but at the same time I am very pleased with the way that I have been able to break free and express myself, both through the mental states that Sucha and her Ladyship represent, and through the physical expression of dressing as her.

One other note to make: Sucha, Lady R and myself are clearly three different genders/gender identities, under the "social construct" model of gender to which I subscribe. Does the term "polygendered" exist to describe this state of existence, I wonder?