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.
