A Reminder the Theory of a “Femdom Ratio” Is Still Garbage

The “Femdom Ratio” 
Is Still A Garbage Discussion

Not all sub men. Not all single, lonely sub men. But sure as the seasons shift through the front end of summer into the sultry, soup-warm of August, some chucklefuck is back at it in an online kink space whining we don’t give the Ratio of Dommes to Subs enough attention because it has specifically ruined his life. There are not enough dommes to go around. Someone has failed to bring enough for the class. Lamentations ensue.

Of course, I am aware of giving some dude on the internet too much credit. Rebutting can also be a sort of endorsement, and platforming the lunatic fringe even to mock them can be a form of amplification. But inversely, the fact that I remember even if the last couple of years the discourse has shifted and I can trust folks to push back on this line of thinking, and we got that way by questioning the resulting assumptions, so I am using a random post on a forum to remind you that Femdom Ratio is incel logic for sub men and bad for men, women and everyone else.

Ratio theory, about the distribution of dommes always goes awful places really fast.

For example, this particular guy’s spin on “The Ratio” is that femdom is inherently abusive because male subs cannot meaningfully consent when having boundaries could get them eliminated from Having A Domme. Any domme. According to him, a sub must concede to whatever,  or it’s a lifetime of loneliness, because no matter how atrocious a given woman is, a man needs a woman who will play out an approximation of his kinks. Were there one domme for every sub man who wants one, he reasons, his desire for one would not be at odds with what is available to him he would not consent to stuff he thought was terrible and bad for him just to try it.

If you are a long term blog reader you can already smell the self harming sexism from here. But, I reiterate:

The “Ratio” is bullshit because men (and it always seems to be straight men, queer discourse on top shortage tends to listen to the switches and blame the objectification of tops for pushing them to hide) who fixate on it don’t see women as people, but a means to provide a service they desperately want. They define a domme as any woman who will, for whatever reason, tolerate being fetishized and doing what they crave to them. They do not define dominance on our terms (as dommes), or imagine that we exist for any reason other than to be matched with a man. If they can find women who do that, the complaint escalates to either that said dominant women are not hot enough and this isn’t fair because if they weren’t kinky they could get a hot chick, and not pander to us stuck up hags. Or they get mad sexwork exists. Just exists, as if that alone were a crime against them they were forced to engage with.

It’s never about anything other than his belief he is entitled to a partner on his terms alone.

After 10+ years of terminally online discussion, when someone drags in “Ratio” as an argument, it isn’t going to be a nuanced take on the double barreled stigmatization of male weakness and female sexual exploration, it’s going to be hot torrents of incel garbage. No ratio-cel comes into this talking about what a pity it is that women don’t get to know such pleasure as domination because of broader social forces, they fixate on that they are lonely. Then they imagine that somehow they are a surplus, but that women are easily paired up with whatever it is they imagine they want, often also bringing gender reductive bullshit about how we just aren’t wired to be dominant, boohoo isn’t that hard on subs. 

If a Ratio was real in the sense these men imagine, since the genders seem to be approximate parity, this would mean a percentage of women were also mismatched. However, since Ratio Theory is built on sexism, these women aren’t discussed or imagined to suffer to an equal degree. If it were true that women were either more inherently submissive (or vanilla) there would be a similar ratio of unmatched women condemned to similar singleness and thus equally pitiable. Ratio-cels have no such solidarity. 

And, adding insult to injury, ratio-cels also imagine the torrent of sexual harassment women deal with is “plenty of subs will do anything to have you”, a tone deaf piece of sexism on par to if we told subs there was always the Kik scammers ready to blackmail them, so really they were rolling in opportunity. Likewise, there’s a nuanced discussion on how the male gaze pandering in being able to buy services and content isn’t always a blessing because the market still makes blanket assumptions about men that can feel very pigeonholing, but no… to a ratio-cel the biggest problem is they want the porn-but-make-it-free.

Further, as others have pointed out repeatedly, other populations deal with ostensible ratios, like the limited percentage of folks who are sapphic versus straight, and don’t turn this into a neo-Marxist argument about how women secretly own the means of male sub orgasm production. The Ratio (TM) as its proponents describe it is where they decide any woman who will embody their fetish has disproportionate power over them because… Reasons. Where the reasons are always that they are desperately trying to reap the usual incel style idea that you will get one Devoted Wife for showing up while meeting the minimum threshold, and that something has broken in society failing to give that to you. 

The problem doesn’t stop there.

If it weren’t enough that they were just ambiently sexist, ratio-cels *also* end up pushing dommes out of any community they lodge in, since the desperate demand for a lady to metaphorically hump the leg of kills any other conversation – which actively increases the very problem they are complaining about. Dommes won’t stay in large numbers in communities where the primary focus is our ability to be found and made to gratify subs. The wall of misery posting also sets the tone for any sub joining, because their introduction to how things work becomes a wall of “Where is MOMMY??”  Anxiety about potential rejection gets stoked in a sort of socal rummunition, where any problem that might exist gets reframed as the desperate need to have a domme now.

Ironically, you get where we started, dudes being taught by other dudes to unicorn chase, to lower their standards even as they inflate what they expect a domme to be capable of adding to their life. Conversations about reciprocity or “sub skill” or sub-on-sub mentorship are deprioritized over the conflation of what is fetishized with the whole people doing it. Everyone, the subs, the dommes and the community they might interact in, becomes poorer for it.

But any discussion about this behaviour gets derailed by trying to be sympathetic to single dudes because they are suffering. Unfortunately, as per vanilla incels cloaking themselves in how vulnerable they feel to be lonely, that’s how they get a wedge that makes them seem less toxic.  In our desire to be supportive, we forget the fact that people who behave like misogynists don’t get a pass for having pain. The same goes that you have to be ruthless and at the wiff of anything arguing that “dommes have unfair power because they are rare” or men claiming their lives are ruined because they can’t get a domme-wife have to be excised immediately because the conversation gets so poisoned by bad faith possessive/controlling nonsense around dommes as panaceas and public resources that anything useful gets lost in the harm done.

The Harsh Truth About The Femdom Ratio

femdom ratio | ratio subs who bitch about the domme shortage are just another type of incel

If you aren’t in the mood for tough, skip this post. I am well aware that a lot of submissive guys are extremely depressed about their inability to meet a femdom. This link is for nice advice on how to find a domme. Don’t read this post if it’s going to send you into a self castrating death spiral, ok?

Boys, you and I need to have a little talk about the so called “femdom ratio”, m’kay?

Just about every day, a submissive man skips into a forum or bdsm group somewhere and complains loudly that there just doesn’t seem to be any non-pro femdoms out there.

Not only does this cause every non-professional femdom in the group to intensify her urge to only lurk, or leave outright, I find a pretty common pattern in these guys. To be exact, three consistent features:

1) They haven’t actually looked.

Ok, sure, they made a fetlife account, stumbled into a reddit group about femdom or popped into a discord. Maybe they got as far as femdom twitter or the comments and inbox of some domme’s website!

But they are invariably acting like a man walking through the local restaurant district decrying they lack of private family kitchens welcoming them inside for home cooking. The minute they discover they aren’t instantly rewarded for thinking about kink with a hot loving femdom girlfriend, or the first few lazy messages get silence or a price sheet.. complaints! Additionally, sometimes they immediately demand someone else help them find where all the hot, single, promiscuous (and usually somehow monogamous to them) dommes hang out.

Do they google the problem? Of course not. Do they ask other sub men in relationships how they got there? Nope. They want something like the weird pneumatic sex tube tinder out of Logan’s Run.

2) They are boring as hell.

Ok, maybe they actually have positive qualities, but they sure as skippy have literally no idea how to share them. I can hear the tea kettle whistle of shrieking indignity already. But Pearl! Dating is HARD. The femdom ratio is so bad you ask us to be the exceptional top 1% of all submissive men.

No, you numpkin. First of all, you can’t be the top 1% of submissive men, that’s Silver and he belongs to me. Truth is most humans are vaguely earnest little potatoes, and that’s ok. People like potatoes!

But the average femdom ratio whining sub is going to send you a message that says “hello, I am potat, age X, I want to be told how to jerk off”. Some of the more creative ones might put something they hope you are like “I hope you are blonde” or “I want a nice mommy”.

Don Juan of the femdom ratio idiots might muster “you look attractive”, picture provided to him or not. Yawn. They essentially want a woman to find them fascinating, while giving her nothing to fasten herself to.

Sometimes I feel bad when these guys decide to replace servility for a personality. They forget that Service is a fetish itself, so anyone receiving it will already think that the sum total of the needed interaction is done. Then again, so many of these blokes have basically turned into Nice Guys who think being the door troll at the dungeon party is the secret to sexy femdom love that I have also learned it’s a quicksand of covert contracts.

Learn to hold a fucking conversation. Learn to build on more than just being horny or trying to just claim you are a good sub. Learn to make your appearance visually interesting. Be a potato, sure, just try not to be an unpeeled raw potato on an otherwise empty plate.

3) They have never considered what the inner life of a woman might be like.

At my most sympathetic I blame being raised a boy, and thus actively discouraged from considering anything girly. A sheltered young 20 something can be forgiven his innocence on women. It’s the same learning curve a baby domme might go through when she discovers that the zipless free labour promised by service subs isn’t actually reliable enough to make her feel powerful. We can all be a little dumb sometimes.

But these guys consume the porn specifically targeted to tease them, and never think beyond that. It’s a radical revelation to them that straight dommes don’t also (usually) want to look at porn that focuses on dommes to get off. It’s a bridge too far for them to consider that women can have a spectrum of approaches to their kink, or their own porn and media separate from what the subs like.

In short, they have a level of empathy that’s stunted to the point of projecting the self onto others. What they want, they feel, is all they need to know to please her. Sometimes it comes out as unsolicited nudes or offers of service tailored only to the guy’s pleasure. Sometimes it’s as easy as being bewildered that women have different safety concerns and relationship priorities. Either way, when these guys complain about the lack of dommes, they are pretty explicitly defining dommes in terms of their desires, not hers.

This kind of femdom ratio guy may also pop up in a very conservative country where overt sexuality can be punished, or even fatal to the woman. What makes these guys unsympathetic is it hasn’t occurred to them that dommes exist in these environments too. They are so busy complaining that none of the women around them are inherently into their kinks it doesn’t occur to them that these women might very well be as kinky as them and forced into the closet even harder.

More Variations of the Big Three

Got it? Ok, let’s look at common permutations of those three fuck ups. Slap yourself if you are doing any of these “no domme due to femdom ratio” pitfalls.

  • Waiting for a femdom to fix everything and do all the work once they throw herself at her feet. (AKA the starfish sub)
  • Femdoms don’t exist unless you want to sub to them. (AKA women invisible when I don’t look at them)
  • No skill in vanilla, assumes that femdoms will all be inherently attracted to them, because all the porn ones aren’t picky about everyman protagonists. (AKA dommes are PEOPLE?!)
  • Searching for the magic domme dating formula that unlocks her private messages and from thence, her dungeon. (AKA dommes are a special hive mind)

But I can’t find any femdoms, and I’m not an incel!!

Great. What separates you from ratio subs (ratiocels, if you will, as coined by dommeextra) is that you can understand finding a compatible partner takes time. Being single and looking is not the same thing as maintaining behaviors that are the kink scene version of a fedora.

As long as you acknowledge that everyone has challenges, it’s ok to feel a little blue. Just like, quit the woe is me no dommes exist shtick and you won’t be an insufferable mess, as well as being lonely.

Here’s the most common replies people give when I tell them the femdom ratio is bullshit and toxic:

It’s not fair, the femdom ratio is because subs would serve ANY woman and women are picky.

No, everyone who has a viable relationship is picky. If you really weren’t picky, things like sex work wouldn’t cause you to screech it isn’t reeeeal femdom.

You just like shitting on men for being weak, you misandrist!

No, honey. I have hammered out post after post of helpful, patient advice on how to find a mistress. I am going to take a good faith interpretation that you just have a hard time seeing humans suffer, and I will be clear with you: letting men do those three things I listed keeps them lonely and isolated.

I’ll leave you with this point:

To go out and express your desires, as a submissive man, is fucking brave. You are running against gender role training where being openly weak, vulnerable or wanting to have either of those might even get you attacked.

But as long as you keep telling dominant women they don’t exist, you are shooting yourself in the dick. You are loudly signaling to them that unless they can be available to you, you won’t give them the basic respect of considering their presence as humans.

Try asking not how to find a domme for yourself, try asking “what spaces do dominant women enjoy being in?” and I bet you will start to find us everywhere. Ask yourself why spaces might exclude dominant women, and fix that, and we fall out of the fucking woodwork.