One of the more confronting aspects of my academic work is that I’m often developing ideas that have little to no precedent in public discourse. In my field, there are virtually no published studies or frameworks that cover what I’m researching: Femdom. So yes—it’s exciting to be at the forefront, but it also comes with a certain weight. Being “the first” means that everything I publish becomes the thing that gets tested, critiqued, and pulled apart by everyone that follows. It requires tough skin, and a deep internal confidence in the concepts I develop because they will be challenged, and often aggressively so. And this is precisely the reason why so many important ideas never make it into public space. The fear of being torn down by aggressive idiots silences more voices than we realise.
The truth is, Femdom is one of those ideas that people love to tear down. Thus, it is radically under-theorised, and when it is spoken about, especially in any philosophical or structural sense, people often react with panic. Not curiosity—panic. The BDSM community, despite its celebration of diversity, still harbours an unspoken orthodoxy about what power exchange should look like (aka, male-centric). Any attempt to question that orthodoxy—especially from a woman speaking with authority—gets met with resistance, misrepresentation, or outright character assassination, especially by men. This is not a new thing. It’s the same cultural mechanism that’s been used for centuries to destroy women who speak in ways that challenge male-coded structures of authority. It’s not just personal. It’s systemic.
In academia, I’m trained to put my ideas into the public sphere not to be praised, but to be tested. I present so my concepts that can be interrogated. If someone finds a genuine gap in my logic, I want to know. That’s the point. Philosophers are not people who cling to their opinions out of ego. A real philosopher is someone who offers their idea to the collective in the hope that it either holds, evolves, or begins a dialogue for something better. That’s intellectual humility. But in kink spaces—especially online platforms like FetLife—there’s a widespread confusion between disagreement and attack. Someone expressing a view that challenges the default is seen not as participating in discourse, but as threatening the group. And when that view comes from a Dominant woman? God help her.
Over the years, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern. Especially from men. If a woman in the kink scene speaks too strongly, questions male-led assumptions, or shares an idea that doesn’t centre male desire, the backlash is quick and harsh, and it’s rarely intellectual. It becomes a personal attack. And such follows an ancient male pattern: brand her crazy, brand her evil, or brand her a whore.
This is white European male Christian history.
In my research into European modernity (from the 16th century onward), the one thing that becomes painfully clear is that the dominant Christian patriarchy systematically erased or vilified any woman who demonstrated authority, erotic agency, or emotional independence. Those women were accused of witchcraft. They were confined to asylums. They were executed, silenced, or institutionalised. In many cases, their own husbands or families handed them over. They had no legal rights. Their male relatives had ownership of their bodies and minds. The institutional reasons for women being admitted to asylums between 1864 and 1889 include: “novel reading,” “female disease,” “time of life,” “asthma,” “politics,” and “death of son in war.” Their personhood was pathologised. Their pain was dismissed. Their insight was called hysteria. You see this in literature too. Dominant women were written as monsters (Carmilla), whores of the devil (Matilda in The Monk), or a laughing stock that can only be corrected by the right man (Katherina in Taming of the Shrew). Dominant women were written as a cautionary tale, not allowed to have a happy ending. This directive by editors and publishers went all the way into the 1960s, especially with lesbian literature. Dominant women were marketed to be shamed, punished or destroyed.
Women’s rights in the Western world have only existed, in any meaningful sense, since the 1970s. That’s not even a full generation. So when we talk about female power today, we must acknowledge that we are still coming out of a millennia of oppression. The wounds are generational. They live in our bodies. This is what feminist theorists like Silvia Federici and Adrienne Rich have called historical embodiment—trauma that doesn’t just belong to one life, but to a lineage. And if women have inherited trauma, then men have inherited tyranny. Not only ideologically, but neurobiologically. Neuroscience and epigenetic studies now support the idea that belief systems and trauma patterns are inherited chemically and behaviourally through generations.
This means that men have neurobiologically inherited the drive to shame, punish or destroy women, especially Dominant women. Yes, misogyny is that ingrained.
When a man today attacks a Dominant woman online for being “crazy,” “evil,” or “a slut,” he is not just reacting. He is reliving a cultural script that stretches back hundreds of years. A script designed to discredit women who don’t submit. The only difference now is that he can’t burn her at the stake. But he’ll try to ruin her reputation just the same.
You can see it clearly online. Every time I post something controversial, without fail, there are men who comment with some version of “You’re delusional,” “You’re just a whore,” or “You need to be thrown off a cliff.” These are not reasoned critiques. These are inherited tropes. They are the verbal descendants of the noose and the torch. It’s become my own personal Godwin’s Law: the moment a man calls me crazy, evil, or a whore, the argument is over. He has lost. He has reverted to his male programming.
These men can’t tolerate women who refuse to be quiet, who refuse to play a role, who refuse to let male comfort dictate female expression. The only reason why women have come this far in gaining human rights is because women throughout history have stood up to this tyranny.
So if you’re a woman writing about Femdom, expect this. Expect to be silenced. Expect to be misread. Expect to be hated. But write anyway. Because every time you speak, you chip away at the system that tried to erase you. Every time you share your voice, you unearth another layer of history that was buried for being too inconvenient, too disruptive, and too powerful.
And for what it’s worth—I’m not here to be agreeable. I’m here to speak my truth.
Now, with that said, I say this: Of course, there are many men, perhaps most, who do not fall into this pattern. They are not ruled by their ancestry. In fact, many of the most powerful advocates for my work and the work of other Dominas have been men, men who have done the inner work to question what they’ve inherited, to deconstruct their conditioning, and to choose a new way of being in relation to women. They have the strength to reject inherited dominance and instead practice presence, receptivity, and respect. They uplift, they support, and they listen. They don’t silence disagreement, they invite it. And they don’t shrink in the face of female power, they recognise it as something that strengthens the conversation. These men are not threatened by women’s voices. They are invested in our freedom. We see them, we remember them, and we honour them, because they are not part of the problem, they are part of the future.