It has been true for the entire lifetime of this blog that fictional depictions of dominant women are really limited, and most typically tailored to what subs are attracted to. Or being more precise, what a certain paying audience of sub men will purchase. This standard tends to depict dominance in women as a vocation performed for the benefit of subs (or their vulnerability and persecution fantasies) and is often gender regressive as heck.
For example, there’s a whole dialectic around the ubiquity of strapons- is this like the little fake beard Queen Hatchepsut wore in her official portraiture, to project authority, or is this a rare overlap of the ostensibly hetero into queerness? Either way, it’s practically compulsory to penetrate and very rare to see depictions of your penetration if you are a dominant. Likewise much frustration is noted that dominants are seldom depicted as attracted to or even liking our subs. Not so in hetero male dominant/femsub land, where the slave princess fantasy is perfectly common in the stuff targeting women. And, at the very least in the porn for men, there’s definitely no shortage of degradation, but the femsub is at least the main event.
This has a carry-on effect that if your version of femdom doesn’t look like most typically available versions of it, you are more likely not to realize your desire. In the inverse, a lot of lifestyle dommes share their lightbulb moment was finding an image or story they just vibed with (often outside of conventional porn altogether) and chasing that feeling down the rabbit hole. Further, when all depictions of you are so very limited, if you are a dominant you get endlessly frustrated by a conga line of idiots who think fiction catering to them is an educational documentary about you.
In any case, lifestyle dommes generally agree that porn is collectively failing us.
Dealing with this is still a work in progress. Unfortunately a lot of folks get stuck in a frankly SWERF style approach – they decide that since most porn (and pop culture depictions of dommes) are garbage, that it’s actively malicious on the part of the people who make it to keep doing so. While I do think that the almost exclusively “Mistress Manual” dominatrix-in-a-box source of approach on the education side is actively bad, you have to be more nuanced in your tackling of the problem. Getting into a war with the existing content creators about how they are pandering internalized misogynists or fixating on the bad fake subs who just want to be catered to isn’t working. I say that as someone with a lot of yelling about not getting anything approaching the rep I want.
At best, if you fixate on trying to stop the existing content, all you do is make everyone miserable and some Republican/Conservative politicians cream their suit at what good potential ally you might be to their latest (bad faith) protect the kids crusade. But, we should be able to discuss the problem without doing things like trying to redefine the larger category of Femdom to mean “stuff only me and my friends who agree with me are into”. Sure you can argue yourself blue in the face that femdom should centre women’s pleasure more than it does, but the current content situation will point out that we are assuming the people involved don’t enjoy it. You can see how that’s a subjective dead end?
And, inversely, I am not saying to turn your brain off completely. There is value in consciousness raising discussion. All media is subject to criticism and pointing out trends and implicit biases is one of the ways we bring change and establish community with people who feel similarly. But is our goal here less content overall? Or is it more of the good stuff for dommes?
I think it should be the latter, and for that there’s a very big, slow next step. We are going to need to spend a lot of money or make our own erotic content, if we feel otherwise. You are also going to need to grapple with systemic barriers that exist outside of the business (and amateur hobby) of erotic or otherwise deviant to the norm content.