Probably my biggest bete noir in the world is the way culture has diminished the lust and loves of femdoms by continually presenting all of us as professionals. I’d like to set some of the facts straight about female domination.
First, a short language lesson.
A dominatrix, a domina, a femdom (or “femdomme” or “domme”), and a dominant woman are synonymous. All dominant/top (BDSM) women are dominatrices, whether they do it for pleasure or do it for pay. Here is the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of dominatrix.
Definition of dominatrix
: a woman who physically or psychologically dominates her partner in a sadomasochistic encounter broadly : a dominating woman
So every woman who takes the top or dominant role in BDSM is a dominatrix. But not all dominatrices work for money. And that distinction keeps getting blurred, so I am going to expand on it.
As you may have noticed, popular culture conflates professional dominatrices (the correct plural form in case you ever wondered) with non-professional dominatrices. To me, that’s like saying the wife who does a sexy dance in the bedroom for her partner is a stripper or that a wife is a prostitute. (We can debate the Marxist feminist readings on that another time.) If you’ve always used the term dominatrix to apply uniquely to a woman who does it as a profession, you are erasing the millions of other women who do not do it professionally.
Conflating dom and prodom, or believing that every dominatrix demands payment or gifts for domination, makes all dominant women sound as if they are driven by money, not by lust, to be dominant. That’s sexist prudery. The idea a dominatrix only dominates for money implies that women wouldn’t naturally be inclined to the power role if there wasn’t a profit motive. It re-enforces the drearily antiquated Freudian idea that women don’t feel lust for sex (or in this case, for BDSM) the way men do. It encourages het male doms in the BDSM community to harbor the sexist idea that all women are naturally sub, but some have ego issues (I’ve dealt with that). It upholds the patriarchal idea that women have/do sex for *men* and not for their own pleasure.
It also prevents many young and not so young dom-possible women from exploring their powers to get the kind of sex they want in the way they want it, by taking consensual control in the bedroom. Instead, they come to believe that being a female dominant is a matter of buying the right toys, wearing the right clothes, and acting like professional dominatrices by focusing on the man’s pleasure.
Everyone needs to get over that insulting myth right now.
I worked as a professional dominant for a few years in my 30s. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would. I attribute it to being too dominant to stand the process of catering to men’s sex fantasies. I didn’t like having to wear special outfits for them. I didn’t like sticking to the scripts they laid out for me. I didn’t like doing intimate, albeit non-sexual, things or having intimate conversations with men I didn’t respect. It did not appeal to me to have power over strangers who invested in a fantasy they projected onto me. I like having power over people I consider amazing and fun individuals because that’s where my real “top high” happens — engaging emotionally with fascinating people who give up control to the real me.
I came to this realization in the middle of giving a spanking to a client who’d flown all the way from Las Vegas to New York to spend an hour or two with me. Alas, his grooming habits were as unattractive as his personality. I was about 40 minutes into spanking his bare behind over my lap when I made the fatal mistake of looking directly at his ass. It shone like grease on an old griddle. It look liked he’d applied a thin coat of vaseline, but it was not vaseline, it was a strange kind of sweat that his pores emitted with every spank, giving his skin a vaguely yellow tint.
It was in that moment that I realized I would have to forgo the chance of making a fortune doing professional domination. I’m kind of fastidious and his oily ass was creeping me out.
I admire women who can and will put the time, expense, and effort into re-inventing their personas for a BDSM scene. I love how kind they can be to people with rare or weird fetishes and their work in exorcizing profound shame through healing sexual roleplay. I think they serve a vital purpose in the world, which is to cater to fantasies that people — for whatever personal reasons — cannot act out in their real lives, yet crave to experience. You may compare it to psychodrama, sex work, or sex-surrogacy. I think it’s all that and more. It is profoundly therapeutic for people in need and I love that there are women who are willing to step in and help them live out their deepest desires.
I am not one of them. Here are some short discussions of differences between the non-pro and the pro, based on my experiences. The “We” represents my non-pro point-of-view.
We do it because it comes naturally. Most non-pro femdoms struggle with the cultural messaging about women being demure and sweet and submissive. Once we stubbornly smash our way through mountains of cultural crap, we struggle with other feminists giving us shit or claiming we’re enabling patriarchy. So annoying and SO anti-woman.
We are women who are naturally aggressive, often opinionated and strong-headed. We have strong sadistic sides and love to control our relationships or partners or both, sexually if not at other times. We are feminists. Our BDSM usually reflects our favorite types of interactions, and we refine our skills in the course of regular BDSM play. We emphasize the stuff that makes us horny and do not feel obligated on any level to engage in experiences that leave us feeling uncomfortable. We operate as femocracies, and cut the balls off patriarchy in our personal lives. Strong, powerful, dominating women are routinely silenced and erased in culture, but there are millions of us out here.
Pro dommes may or may not be naturally dominant. They may or may not be feminists. A few just see it as a job only. Others frame it as a “service to the Community.” There are prodoms who leave their dungeons to return to traditional or LGBTQ vanilla relationships.
MOST professional dominants get training from a trusted source, often working as apprentice doms. Some seek out BDSM education so they can prepare to fulfill a very wide range of fantasies, including fantasies they don’t share or don’t fully understand. If you’re a professional dominatrix, you have to cater to a huge pool of potential clients, so skill acquisition is important to expanding your business.
We do it for free. Non-pro dominatrices do it for free because we are looking for the non-material rewards: the eroticism, the feeling of power, the arousal of bending someone to your will, the nakedness and emotional intensity, the ability to release primal impulses to hurt someone while knowing you are giving them what they crave most. We do it for fun. We do it for orgasms. We do it for healing. We do it for love. We do it because it amuses us. Most of all, we do it because it’s who we are. For the past 20 years, I’ve limited who I play with to people I love. Loving them and doing BDSM with them is the best of all worlds for me.
Now, for a professional dominatrix, BDSM is her living. She has to charge, and she has to favor the client who pays the most or adds tributes and gifts to their fee. It’s a business relationship first, even it evolves into a personal relationship. I had a counseling client who complained because he attended a party where his long-time prodom gave most of her time to a couple of banker-looking men in expensive suits who brought cases of champagne to the event. He showed up with an inexpensive bottle of wine. It was like Practical Economics 101. Of course, she has to value her best and most generous clients over the cheap-skates. This is how she pays her bills.
There’s one kind of ineffable “payment” all dommes get, though. Both pro and non-pro reap the rewards of being adored by their slaves. You can’t actually put a price on how great that is for a person’s self-confidence.
Our private lives are kinky. If you watch any form of public media, you get the idea that a dominatrix has few or no friends and spends all her time flouncing around in fancy dungeons. Professional doms don’t live that way and non-pro dominatrices are totally omitted from this ridiculous stereotype.
People in the BDSM Community, on the whole, form long-lasting if not permanent bonds with other kinky people. They often become our chosen families, and we are involved with them and their relatives too. We have dinner with them, we watch movies and discuss books together, party with them and lead full home lives with our chosen BDSM/fetish/Leather families and friends. We don’t do BDSM all the time, we don’t wear our Leathers all the time, and we don’t smile cruelly all the time while provocatively dangling a stiletto at people. But we do get to be our BDSM selves when we’re with them. Since I live with two BDSM partners, I never have to be anyone but my natural dom self, even if I’m cleaning up doggie poo or washing dishes because they worked late.
Some professionals are educators and icons in the BDSM Community — I’m thinking of Matisse, Midori, Cleo DuBois, Eve Minax, Stephanie Locke, and many other fabulous women I’m honored to know. But most prodoms today are doing it as domme-for-pay. They may be hiding their job from their parents or families, keeping it a secret at their straight gigs, married to someone not kinky, or planning to leave BDSM behind once they get their college degrees. They may have kids at home or other, much straighter, jobs as well. So the private lives of professional dominatrices are not necessarily kinky but neither are they all glamorous settings and expensive gear all the time. For many hard-working professionals, downtime means not having to think about “the office” (i.e., dungeon) at all and dealing with all of life’s little chores and challenges.
We don’t dress up all the time. All the cool clothes that dominatrices wear are only a tiny piece of the true-life picture for nonprofessional dominatrices.
Most of the top women I’ve talked to feel strongly that a woman can wear any damn thing she wants, or nothing at all, and still be in charge. One of my favorite memories is of a summer evening in New York with two sub friends. We had a lovely dinner but it was so hot in the city, I jumped in the shower when we got back to my place and changed into a tank top and jean shorts. I walked out with wet hair and both my friends got so turned on, they begged me to top them then and there, barefoot and wearing cut-offs. IT WAS DELIGHTFUL, No toys, just hands and, of course, my sternest tones of voice.
My old friend Ava Taurel — a mighty force in the pro dom scene in the 1980s-90s in New York City — once told me that putting on tall leather boots mentally prepared her to transform into Mistress Ava. The dominatrix uniform — the high heeled boots, the leather corset, the garters, the stockings — empowers some women. I see it as a pretty but pretty silly stereotype that’s been imprinted on the public imagination. Thousands of femdoms pose in the same exact outfit. You can even buy cheap knock-offs for Halloween costumes. They’re about as realistic as the “hot nurse” costumes are to RNs.
Myself, I only dress for occasions when it’s an occasion. I live in t-shirts and leggings. I feel like I’m in drag when I wear garters and stockings, while spiked heels always made my back hurt. I modeled a corset way back in 1994 to walk the runway at Constance Slater’s “Dressing for Pleasure” fetish show and it was the first and last time I allowed anyone to constrict me that way. I couldn’t breathe! WTF? It felt very undominant to me personally. I have no interest in wearing a male’s fantasy of how I’m supposed to look. I hate clothes that restrict movement. I like to create my own stern looks, from makeup and jewelry to footwear and fetish outfits, with the emphasis on what makes me feel sexy and powerful that night.
Still, the uniform is so imprinted on the male imagination, that many men demand their dominants wear conformative outfits and shoes. That is how Ava first discovered that her clothes were essential to building her persona and projecting the female power sub men craved. As a former actress, she knew that by radically altering your look you can inhabit a different personality and project a powerful illusion. That’s what actors and models do with their make-up and costumes. It’s what she did to make her dominant persona come to life. It’s something that professionals do to build their clientele.
Updated May 10th. A Twitter friend made a good point today, that some kinky woman love wearing dom clothes, so I’m adding it to this discussion.
We need control. Where submissive women choose to give up control of their bodies to a Master or Mistress, Femdoms choose to be in control. That includes whether or not they want to dress a certain way or dress at all, whether or not they use toys, whether or not they choose to have intercourse. Their dominance shapes their life choices, the relationships they have, and sometimes the work they do.
Long before I was a femdom, I knew I was kinky. I thought that was bad, and tried to suppress it throughout my teens and twenties. What liberated me was realizing that there were men who actually wanted me to act out the fantasies I was so ashamed of having. My first year of SM clubbing, I saw a scene up close where a woman whipped her partner raw. At the end, they announced their engagement and kissed madly. My brain whirred! It was incredibly romantic to me! Suddenly, I realized maybe I could “have it all” in BDSM — the best sex, the control I needed in bed, and true love with a partner as kinky as me. It was staggeringly liberating.
I just needed to find an ethical way to be who I knew myself to be. I got the permission and the ethical framework (safety, safety, safety!) from the world of BDSM, where once impossible sex dreams come true. I think that is the biggest struggle for a nonpro dominatrix: learning to accept that she is one and then creating her OWN vision for how her relationships should look.
Prodoms are variable. Their needs pattern after their private lives. If they’re kinky at home, see above. If they lead mostly straight lives, they may not have the power or autonomy that private dominatrices have in theirs. That suggests they may not have the same drive for personal control that someone like me experiences. I can’t be happy in non-kinky relationships. Tried it. Didn’t like it.
We’re lust-driven. In my experience, the typical nonpro dominatrix is driven by the same lusts and needs that male dominants have. We feel safer in relationships when we’re in charge. Kinky sex turns us on. We experience sex as a powerful, almost overwhelming force that makes us want to handle people roughly and express passion in direct, strong language. We exteriorize our otherwise antisocial needs (power, control, ruthless domination) in safe ways, with people we deem safe. We lust to be dominant. We lust to express our inner dominance. We lust after submissives who will grant us the joy of using their bodies for our gratification. We love the whole process of stepping into the leadership role in relationships and living up to the ideals we set on how to do so ethically.
It’s wonderful when you see it happen (as I have) between a pro domme and a long-time client, but the reality is that most professional relationships are transactional only, driven by economics not lust. It doesn’t make them less effective in the dungeon. Nor do I think they owe anyone an apology: if they do a good job, and clients get their money’s worth, their private lives are irrelevant.
That said, it irks me when tv shows (like Netflix’s badly flawed parody of prodoms, “Bonding”) embrace stereotypes and treat women who do it for money as the ur-symbol of female domination. In reality, you see, there are a hell of a lot more non-professional dominatrices than there are professional ones.
The stereotypes portrayed send negative messages to women who are curious about female domination. It makes them think that being a dominatrix is shameful and dangerous. It re-enforces the idea that they need to wear a male-fantasy-based uniform and act out fantasies they personally find distasteful. It teaches them that dominatrices exist to cater to male sexual fantasies. If that’s not sexist, I don’t know what it.
I want every woman out there who’s ever been curious about female domination, who is wondering how and where to begin her journey to being a powerful woman in the bedroom (or dungeon, or hotel room, or board room, or everywhere in her life), to know that female domination begins with what’s already inside YOU. If you have dominant fantasies or leanings, perhaps a nagging sense that you would be happier taking charge of your sex partner, then connecting with that impulse should be your next adventure in self-understanding.
Drop me a line if you’re interested in femdom coaching
