The Femdom Cultural Dialectic

Femdom-As-Subculture has a problem that is is very, very hard to define what the hell femdom even is. Many have tried, from the idea that it is just regular D/s (but that the dominant happens to be female), to the inverse of what I would describe as the “Mistress Manual” approach, where performing as a domme (and by extension as a sub) is a tightly defined set of aesthetics and behaviors. This, incidentally is a larger part of a discussion over what is and isn’t BDSM, but people who identify with femdom as a way of describing what they are into do not tend to concern themselves with that overarching debate. Battle lines within the niche have, for the last decade or so, been drawn particularly fiercely around how much dominants should or should not take the pop culture idea of femdom seriously.

Neither camp has a clear agreed on name for the difference in their approach. On the more hardline of distinctions, the domme-doing-whatever-they-want people would phrase their boundary as lifestyle versus commercial. This can’t be right though, because this group *also* won’t stop complaining about the lack of romances or other content targeting them. They don’t tend to be self aware about this (if I hear one more kinky libertine calling someone else a “porn addict” unironically while curating their own fantasies, I may start slapping people), but the complaint about the alienation of lifestyle only dommes remains in itself valid. Inversely, most of the stuff that would be summarized as commercial doesn’t see itself in any conflict with anyone at all, except maybe censorship. Aggravated discussions by internet strangers about the heart and soul of lifestyle femdom do not reach or influence beyond that… except there’s the other issue of the participation of subs in stuff.

A Femdom Partnership Problem

Once we go outside the more abstracted complaints of how femdom is depicted (or marginalized within the BDSM community at large), the other major flash point is that femdom, as defined in any interpretation consistently expects that subs are going to be a part of this. People who consume works targeting them tend to turn around and try to replicate it with their partners… or seek what they imagine in fantasy in real life. This equally true regardless of whither you are a D type or an S type.

This is not so everywhere. Queer slashfic, for example, are not so concerned with attaching themselves to actual gay men as a third wheel as much as imagining the expanded dynamics of fictional ones, usually through expressing one’s own much more complicated queer identity. Readers of Romance may have romantic relationships, but it’s actually pretty rare they drag their fiction into their actual dynamics, asides from the most fringe people you hear about holding a Twilight/Court of Thorns and Roses wedding or whatever. Furthermore, this tends to be pretty self contained, a mostly female reader base consuming the works of people they presume to also be female. But, people generally agree that BDSM is first and foremost a paired sport. And everyone seems to agree that the other half of your potential duo is doing it wrong, damn it!

Again on the hardline lifestyle only side people tend to get a little silly with how stridently they reject any input from subs on defining things as valid. Recently the trend had been to take anything a given lifestyle dominant prefers not to engage with and call it “bottoming” if a sub suggests it or even, more ridiculously “dominant bottoming” if it isn’t their verbatim fantasy (instead of the other person’s). They are not entirely out to lunch, in so much that it is important to push back on aesthetic limitations, as in such low hanging fruit like the idea that dominants cannot be penetrated, but they ultimately tend to arrive at very weird places like that nobody should feel submissive from anything unless they personally approve it. Real problems like the objectification of dominants tend to be discussed not in those terms, but assuming that somewhere if it is worked for, there is a platonic ideal femdom people should actually strive for.

Unfortunately, femdom is a big club and everyone’s in it.

You can absolutely make a few individuals feel really shitty about their preferences, but no matter how much a small core of frustrated lifestyle dominants try to narrowly define what subs are allowed to be, they will at best only every rule over little potholes of the internet that don’t actually take into account the big tent. Inversely, no matter how much you try to coerce dominants into playing along with only someone’s fantasy version on the sub’s they will largely just leave or decide dominance is not for them. So it also goes in the other direction, that people who have a non-inclusive mode of femdom and then whine about a lack of partners have made their own misery. Meanwhile, no matter how much you think you have created a perfectly dominant pleasing idea, that’s someone’s idea of kink dispensing hell. Much of this conflict comes from submissive and dominant persisting in being thought of as a sort of genderless heterosexuality, where they are defined by their attraction to their other half.

To this line, I have tried, to no particular success, to get people to acknowledge that “feeling dominant” and “feeling submissive” don’t have to be paired. They certainly can be, as many people do find that inspiring this feeling in another person can create a delightful feedback loop. However, if all the subs disappeared tomorrow, people with dominant fantasies and preferences would still exist. If nobody was actually emotionally or erotically satisfied as a dominant, subs would still exist. All told, it’s actually a miracle we are compatible at all, but so much misery is just people assuming everyone is automatically on the same page. The subs assume what makes them feel submissive is inherently attractive to dominants, but this, and I must emphasize it here, is equally true in describing dominants telling subs they can’t use that label unless it pleases that specific dominant.

Nonetheless, we will not cease trying to find our other half, and for that we need words.

Humans are fundamentally social beings, and because it is possible to make BDSM work as a paired activity sometimes, we will not stop trying to do so. But, once you come together with another person you end up needing to communicate what, in this case more so than any other, is are very abstract emotional concepts. Power, vulnerability, a sense of intense belonging… or whatever else draws you to BDSM, these require a symbolic language. Nobody is telepathically imposing our emotional states on each other, we are going through elaborate efforts to build a feeling together.

This is where the morass of tropes, symbols and behaviors we associate with femdom come from. They are messy, tilted towards certain audiences more than others, and occasionally so insulting to one or both parts of the dyad as to decidedly kill the mood. On top of that, they aren’t even reliably consistent from person to person! Nonetheless, they are also inherently unavoidable, as they also give us a scaffold to build on. The whole concept of femdom, in itself, exists as a category to facilitate communication, and evolved under two circumstances concurrently: people trying to share what they liked to replicate it with others, and people trying to curate what they liked for their own gratification. Both are fundamentally social purposes with immense cross pollination. Then (of course) the supposedly shared language becomes a potential trap, because it is also designed to exclude and protect against.

In defining femdom as a category, we must make our peace with its dialectic. On the one hand the existing role sets we are given can be stultifying and are one of the things that discourage lifestyle dominants from exploring or self identifying with it. On the other hand, the norms are also things that sustained as an effective means to an end, or represent things that are in themselves marginalized and need space to be. And, broken as they are, they also present a place to argue and correct. By definition of having the norm you can challenge it or change it.

Take putting things in holes, for example. It is at once true that penetration is not inherently submissive, and that the social constructs around penetration usually label it so. It is true that most women come clitorially more easily than vaginally. It took a lot of work to break a norm vaginal sex was superior, a belief that just happened to benefit the frequency of orgasm for the average person with a penis, while causing people with an orifice needless pain. It is also true that having what you are allowed to do ranked in a hierarchy that discourages penetration when that works for you is not freedom, either. Are strapons allowing a liberation? Or are they creating a tyranny that you need a penis surrogate to be truly dominant? Is the psychological weight of a dildo more or less valid than its absence of nerve endings for the wielder? Is receiving cunnilingus more dominant than giving a blow job? People have feelings about this answer that are as strong as they are collectively inconsistent.

Make it a butthole, and you add an even greater layer of complexity. Not only will this conversation take you in circles forever, but it in itself creates an echo. If, as a person, you feel externally compelled to penetrate (or not not penetrate) rejecting that in itself could equally make someone feel submissive OR dominant. To put it bluntly, there are few more transgressive acts in BDSM-as-culture than a dominant of any gender putting a butt plug in or getting their partner to penetrate them anally. At the same time, you would be mighty silly if you insisted dominants must do butt stuff or they are actually not having any real power.

This blog started on the side of defining femdom as “dominant that happens to be (vaguely) female” and honestly a somewhat cringe level rejection of the pre-existing norms, and over the course of its run has seen me arrive at more-or-less the middle. Largely I blame being a contrarian, but also I could not ignore a fundamental dialectic. You have to share a space, but also have room to make the space work for you.

What is dialectic, anyway?

A dialectic is a point in which two answers to a problem conflict, but the nuance of the situation means that neither can be taken as wholly correct. In Political Science (the genre of social philosophy most concerned with power) they teach you this example with the story of the visiting, dirty soviet peasant and the public urban baths. So the metaphor runs, bathing the peasant will make the bath dirtier for everyone, but also the peasant will be cleaner. It’s told as a humorous story, of the local soviet counsel endlessly debating how the baths should be allotted, but it amounts to a great cautionary tale about looking for easy, binary certainty where humans are involved.

For femdom, the dialectic is between those norms (what femdom is presumed to be and by extension not be), versus the individual.

We are, infinitely and simultaneously, the person who needs the bath in a way that will alter its function, and the existing status quo. We are shaped by a femdom ratio, and that the ratio theory is bullshit. We are at once oppressed by a strapon and elevated by it. These discussions are simultaneously the sort of need-to-touch-grass level of misplaced emotional investment, and also navigating the fundamental human condition. And there will never be a perfectly correct answer to anything. Ever.

But you can still move towards dialectic reconciliation…

I, for once, am able to offer some sort of solution. Firstly, nuance doesn’t remove your ability to act, rather it frees you to act more. Infinite angles for criticism can feel like endless work, but it also means the status quo can never truly trap you. Another fact is that people who consider the human will remain advantaged in finding what they seek over those that do not. The last part is that there’s a measure of serendipitous compromise in where things accidentally overlap.

While the Soviet bath dialectic story is one of stress, and bad outcomes, a dialectic can also be the story of the cat grooming the rabbit. This is a real thing pet owners notice, that even two species that fundamentally should be incompatible can accidentally arrive at a best case outcome. For a cat, grooming another animal is a peaceful dominance display. For a rabbit, an animal doing grooming is a gesture of submission. Both animals believe they win, and can maintain a very aimable co-existence that way, despite having fundamentally different perspectives. A lot of making femdom work for everyone is more like that, not a zero sum game, but reaching a sort of balance. It’s not so much getting everyone on the same page, as integrated into the same story.

As I said coming in, the extreme versions you can try to approach femdom with, either a hardline tactic of entirely rejecting its existing tropes as invalid or being completely ruled by them, won’t work. In the first place the former approach just gets as ridged over time as the latter, and the limited definition version eventually gets itself left behind.

Essentially, you need to adopt a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to the practice of understanding where people are coming from and trying to define things. You have to be willing to update your definitions, without being so open minded your brains fall out. You can accept that some thing that comes externally may arrive with an assumed meaning, but also allow that it doesn’t have to be that way or that you can’t nudge back. Essentially when you accept the dialectic is there, it stop being able to mess with you.

The dividends, by the way, are a living, resilient community around what you are trying to do and better communication with the people you try to do it with. And I think (in conclusion) it would be remiss not to emphasize that these two things are the points of conflict that got us here in the first place. All our arguments about definition are either about a sense of belonging or in trying to be sure we get what we want.

No community is so elastic it can include everyone (and fractures and niches will still remain a feature not a bug), but you get a much more over arching system you can all click into if you make things more of a buffet. And simultaneously, while no amount of rigidity of definition will actually solve say, do me subs here to demand a laundry list, or egomaniac wannabe cult leaders trying to do so via calling it dominance, you get more mileage to be critical of both if you are less focused on if they are real/true and more on them being very, very stupid. And come on, do you want a partner who hangs things everything on validity or on your mutual needs and joys, as individuals in a bigger thing?