OWK I - Rise of an Unique Femdom Project

After running teasers and spoilers for six months - being kind here - let's cut to the chase.

Goddess Amazon, here pictured at Residenz Avalon in Berlin [couldn't resist] visited the OWK in better days.

Ever since Game of Thrones decided not to go out with a spectacular bang, HBO is frantically searching for a replacement. One of the ideas being floated, is a show called "Confederate" about a post-Civil War society where slavery is legal. Floating that idea causes the inevitable backlash.

In the year 1580 the Ming dynasty is ruling China for 212 years. It will take another 64 years for the Middle Kingdom's emperor to lose its heavenly mandate. In that same year, the Battle of Omosu took place in neighbouring Japan. Recent archaeological evidence confirms wide female involvement: DNA tests on 105 bodies revealed that 35 of them were female. Closer to home, also that year, construction for a castle near the Czech city of Černá began.

History repeating itself? Some 400 years later they built a wall to keep the vanilla's out.

Fast forward four centuries to 1996, where the internet is still a novelty, available only to a handful of scholars. Around that time, some of the early adopters are using bulletin boards. For most of us that are into femdom however, specialized magazines are the main source of information when it comes to their unique preferences.

Around the same times, advertisements for an alternative reality, one where women ruled over men - unquestioned - start to pop up in those magazines. Having spent over two million euro in renovating a sixteenth century castle in the heart of the Czech republic, the doors to the Other World Kingdom [OWK] are about to open. Twenty years later, it is easy to underestimate the excitement and buzz it created throughout the global femdom community.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 creates a before and after. Sounds all to familiar right now, doesn't it? Before, most people are convinced judgment day is near The end of all human life on earth - by nuclear extermination - will happen any day now. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, its former satellite states turn 180 degrees, focusing on the West. The euphoria would be everlasting... Some "expert", Francis Fukuyama argues in 1992 that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism signals the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and is destined to become the final form of human government. Despite his message of ever-increasing liberalism, he is wrong.

In the end, nothing lasts forever - OK, except for love maybe. That is, if you are one of those, who are blessed beyond belief. Neither unfettered free market capitalism nor the OWK did make it, but now we're getting ahead of our story.

In the 1990s everything is for sale, especially in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc. It makes some [men] very rich, these days commonly referred to as oligarchs. Nobody exactly knows what happened, but real estate prices in Eastern Europe were at an all-time low after the collapse of Communism.

Information about the OWK - the grandest femdom experiment ever - remains scarce. "Welcome to the other world", a 2015 article by Good Magazine is no doubt the single best source on information about the OWK. As an added bonus it is written by someone who doesn't get femdom, but is a gifted journalist at heart. In the article, the author explains how the mid-nineties were a time when land was cheap - a five-bedroom house in the Czech Republic might have gone for about 35.000 euro in today’s money. That makes it all the more surprising that over two million euro was spent on renovating the OWK.

Even today, people wonder where all that money came from. Of course it can be someone's nest egg. Others say queen Patricia, the ruler of the OWK, inherited the land. More distressing is the suggestion that the OWK was funded by the Russian mafia.

The why and how will forever remain a mystery. That's OK by me. The way I see it, the stars had lined up. The [Western] world was entering a new phase, shedding the shackles of Communism. Wherever it came from, the necessary funds were available. All it took was someone to take the reigns. Lo and behold, Queen Patricia, ruler of the OWK, rose to the occasion. Queen Patricia is a bit of an enigma herself, but judging from the limited resources available, the queen was instrumental in the creation of the OWK. It is impossible to assume the role of sovereign of the OWK without having a deep, passionate interest in femdom. It doesn't mean, however, that many others, including men, were instrumental in creating the OWK. Of course not everybody shared the queen's beliefs. There are persistent stories about models imported from the Czech capital of Prague, serving as guardians. You can hear the wolves howling at the moon, just because they don't agree.

For some, an exclusive female led and operated OWK is all that matters. I disagree. In the end it is all about creating a safe space for women and men who are into femdom. I realize, this is very much an out of character comment, but ignoring the qualities of anyone who doesn't fit one's narrow view of the world is the the very opposite of strength and dominance.

So the stars conspired to make the impossible happen. The OWK was born at the right time, at the right place. Property in Eastern Europe was cheap. The prevailing mode in the West was one of euphoria and increasingly liberal. The internet evolved at breakneck speed, allowing to OWK to spread its message to many around the world at little cost.

Any business - and yes, the OWK is a business by necessity - cannot rely on luck alone. The OWK got several essential things right when it started. Marketing, more than anything else, is what contributed to the initial success of the power playground. With Twitter, Facebook and internet, these days it seems like a given. Don't be fooled, most modern start-ups manage to get it wrong somehow, despite it all. Older kinksters no doubt remember the early days where the OWK spread it message through their own magazines. Not ordinary magazines, but glossy ones, not only conveying the right messages but also filled with attractive women dressed in outfits that brought grown men to their knees. To this day I wonder how many slaves "seduced" their mistress to visit the OWK because of this picture-perfect seduction. Guess some things will never change. And yes, that's irony.

Despite it all, a little over a decade later, the OWK was no more. -  So how was it for thow who visited?

Continued in Part II: OWK: A Day in the Life.