The figure of the Dominant Woman, as imagined by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1870), was not discovered or encountered, but constructed. Sacher-Masoch is known to be the first “out of the closet” masochist, and he had quite a controversial life, especially when it came to his relationships with women he turned into being his Dominant. His desire did not revolve around the autonomy of the woman, but around her symbolic function within a male-authored script. The so-called Dominatrix in his most famous title, Venus in Furs (1870), was not a lived woman but a narrative mechanism, instrumental to the erotic needs of a masochist whose obsession with control disguised itself as surrender.
From the beginning, Sacher-Masoch did not seek out dominant women. He sought women he could mold into dominant types. This is evident in his early relationship with Fanny Pistor, a Berlin woman who served as the model for the character of Wanda in Venus in Furs. Pistor was not naturally cruel, nor was she sexually dominant. She was a literary collaborator, somewhat intrigued by the strange proposition to be Sacher-Masoch’s Mistress, but she was clearly out of her depth. Sacher-Masoch provided her with instructions, scenarios, and even the precise wardrobeâparticularly fursâthrough which she was to enact her assigned power. She was not acting from her own arousal or authority, but performing a fantasy dictated to her. He tutored her in cruelty and handed her a contract outlining the terms of his subjugation.
This early dynamic reveals the core contradiction of male-defined masochism: it requires a woman to surrender her subjectivity in order to simulate power. Fanny Pistor did not become powerful, she became useful. The function of the âDominant Womanâ in Sacher-Masochâs life was not to express power but to channel his fantasy of being controlled.
Nowhere is this clearer than in his later and more famous relationship with Wanda von Dunajew, who became his wife (Aurora von Rumelin – she changed her name to his fantasy character in Venus in Furs to please him.) In her memoir, Confessions of Wanda, she writes with about the toll of this arrangement. Initially hesitant, she indulged his constant pleading, eventually entering the role of Mistress only to preserve the relationship, not because it fulfilled her.
Wanda, like Fanny before her, was not a Dominant Woman. She was a woman who loved a man with an obsessive need to be humiliated by someone he had chosen, trained, and contracted into roleplay. The result was emotional exhaustion, disillusionment, and a growing sense of entrapment. Over time, the performance he required from her became not only unsustainable but deeply alienating. She was a machine of his desire, not a Mistress. She was not a woman discovering dominance, but a woman being eroded by it. Of course, female dominance is not inherently erosive, but it was to Wanda because she was never dominant to begin with.
This dynamicâone in which a man engineers his own domination through contractual scripts and symbolic projectionsâhas since become a hallmark of D/s dynamics, and as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes, perpetuates the role of a woman who indulges the desires of a male masochist as a “fantasy facilitator. The woman is not a sadist. She is not even an agent. She is a cold maternal function, orchestrated by the masochist to fulfil his aesthetic and erotic desire. Her authority is not chosen, nor inherent. It is assigned.
In todayâs terms, we would call this a form of grooming, not necessarily in the criminal sense, but certainly in the psychological one. These women were not empowered by their roles. They were shaped into them by a man whose need to control his own submission overrode any real curiosity about female dominance. And crucially, in the 19th century, there were no online communities, no Femdom groups, and no lineage of dominant women to consult. A woman could not ask herself, âAm I dominant?â because the very idea had not yet been culturally formulated. There was no way for Fanny or Wanda to discern whether they were stepping into power or simply being enlisted into a manâs fantasy.
The tragedy of Wanda von Dunajew is not that she dominated her husband. It is that she did not desire to, and did not know she could refuse.
Because of the exposure of the life and relationships of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch with Fanny Pistor and Wanda von Dunajew, a curious but consequential turn occurred. What might have begun as a manâs private erotic fixation became the blueprint for an entire theory of female dominance, one that cast the Dominant woman not as sovereign, but as servant to the male psyche.
It was Richard von Krafft-Ebing who translated Sacher-Masochâs narrative into a clinical doctrine. In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Krafft-Ebing systematically denied the possibility of inherent female dominance. For him, the woman who ruled did so only because the man demanded it. She was a conditional fixture, not a self-determined subject. It eluded to the idea that women only became dominant through habitual exposure to masochistic men. Krafft-Ebing’s position not only erased the womanâs agency, but codified male desire as the origin of female dominance. The woman’s authority was not internal, it was not hers, but was induced or borrowed from the dominant man.
This framework became foundational in medical sexology for the next 100 years. Subsequent theorists and clinicians repeated Krafft-Ebingâs conclusions, framing female dominance as an aberration or imitation rather than an orientation. Sigmund Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and later in Femininity, placed sadism firmly on the male side of the sexual spectrum. Female dominance, when it appeared, was seen not as erotic truth, but as a neurotic symptom, perpetuating the idea that females were inherently submissive, and thus were masochists. Where Krafft-Ebing medicalised male masochism, Freud psychologised female dominance only to strip it of legitimacy by attributing it to unresolved conflict or penis envy.
Havelock Ellis, in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, suggest that female dominance is perhaps a genetic accident or from exposure to male masochists. Robert Stoller in Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred suggests that women who dominate must be reenacting trauma. This genealogy has created a consistent narrative, across disciplines, in which the Dominant woman is never self-originating. She is never a subject. She is never real. Even in post-structuralist philosophy, this trope persists. Deleuze, in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, frames the Dominant woman not as an erotic sovereign, but as an aesthetic function within the masochistâs contract. All this amounts to the Dominant Womanâs subjectivity.
What began with Sacher-Masochâs autofiction and Krafft-Ebingâs pathologisation has now embedded itself in the modern cultural imagination. The Dominant Woman is not thought to be, she is thought to be acting. She is assumed to be performing, either for love, for profit, for vanity, or for the male gaze.
Margot Weiss, in Techniques of Pleasure, confirms that even in contemporary BDSM communities, Femdom often reproduces the same patriarchal assumptions. Femdom communities frequently reproduce a heteronormative culture centring male entitlement even when those men are kneeling. The Dominant Woman is still presumed to be serving. Her presence is tolerated as long as her cruelty gratifies a manâs fantasy, rather than expressing her own orientation.
Staci Newmahr, in Playing on the Edge, critiques how this is compounded by pornography and pop culture. Pornography depicts female dominance limited to exaggerated roleplay, reinforcing the notion that dominance is only acceptable within the boundaries of performance and fantasy.
Female dominance has thus become not something a woman is, but something she does. And what she does is assumed to be done for someone elseâa partner, a camera, a paycheck, or an identity crisis. This belief that dominance is an act, not an identity has opened the door for many women to adopt the role for reasons unrelated to orientation. To appease a partner, to cosplay a persona, or to boost self-image through glamor or control. The result is a cultural landscape filled with women playing dominant, but very few women being recognised as Dominant.
Krafft-Ebing claimed that a woman could become dominant by habit. That still haunts us. It has become socially acceptable to presume that any woman could âdoâ dominance, as though it were a behavioural trait rather than an identity. It is a presumption that equates bossy with Dominant, angry with Domina, and being controlling with erotic authority. And… It mistakes a poorly regulated personality for a structured identity. This is why the authentic Dominant woman has yet to be formally recognised in academic literature. Not as a sadist, not as a performer, not as a pathological inversion, but as a sexual orientation, relational position, and lived identity.
Like queerness, Dominance must be demonstrated through consistency over time, not experimentation. An identity is not a costume to be worn on weekends, nor a sabbatical to explore ego. It is sustained, emergent, and developmentally coherent. And yet, to date, no psychological or sociological study has developed a typology of Dominant Women grounded in lived experience, internal desire, and independent authority. All existing models originate from the male need to be dominated not the female desire to dominate. Until this changes, even when men encounter a woman who is genuinely Dominant, they are unlikely to believe her simply because their intellectual lineage has trained them to disbelieve her sovereignty.
That disbelief, tragically, has been made credible by the many women whoâconsciously or unconsciouslyâstepped into a role never meant for them. As Iâve written elsewhere, the damage this has caused is not just cultural, but political, relational, and ontological.
This is not to condem women who roleplay Femdom. Nor is it a critique of sexual experimentation, erotic performance, or fantasy exploration. Roleplay has a place. Desire has many languages. But there is a point at which experimentation becomes impersonation. At which erotic curiosity becomes a form of identity theft. And that is the point we have reached here in the discussion…
To pretend to be a Dominant Womanâfor personal sexual gratificationâis not far removed from a man using a Dominant Woman for his own. In both cases, the womanâs authority is not respected as real; it is consumed as a resource. One uses her image. The other uses her identity.
The current state of Femdom culture is saturated with women who are not Dominant in orientation but who pretend dominance to bolster sexual ego. And while that performance might be empowering, arousing, or even transformative in some contexts, it is still a performance. These women are not claiming an identityâthey are borrowing one.
Imagine a heterosexual woman proclaiming she is a lesbian because it sexually excites her. She opens a social media account celebrating lesbian love, hashtags herself as a lesbian, posts performative images, and enters lesbian spaces to converse with other lesbians. But in private, she is not aroused by women, does not sleep with women, and in fact finds the thought of female intimacy sexually repellent. We would rightfully call this deceit and inauthenticity. Worse, we would recognise it as a form of erasure, taking up position within a community whose identity she does not share.
This is what happens when non-Dominant women brand themselves as Dominas. Not out of orientation, but out of opportunism. For ego. For aesthetic. For clout. For control. For revenge. And yes, this is personal to a Domina whose identity she is mimicking.
I have lived my Dominance for decades, not as kink, not as trauma, not as fantasy, but as an unchosen truth. I was punished for it as a girl. Pathologised for it as a teen. Mocked for it as a young woman. Now I find myself not only misrepresented by men, but mimicked by women who reduce my identity to a convenient persona to justify and camouflage their own bad behaviour.
Let me be clear: treating men badly is not dominance. It is immaturity. It is vengeance. It is often unresolved pain. But dominanceâreal female dominanceâis not defined by senseless cruelty. It is defined by erotic truth. And yet, a generation of women has come to believe that behaving badly toward men is what makes them powerful. That the Domina is a kind of post-feminist license to avenge. That calling oneself âMistressâ is enough to validate whatever damage one wants to inflict.
Where did this idea come from? It came from men.
It came from centuries of medical literature, psychology, and philosophy that insisted that female dominance is not realâthat it is a game, a habit, a performance, a reaction, a revenge play, and a neurosis. That women dominate only because men want them to. That the act is never hers, only the mirror of his desire. That there is no such thing as an inherently Dominant Woman. That idea began with male theorists, but it is now being sustained by wannabe Dominas, women who perpetuate the illusion that dominance is a temporary role anyone can wear, just like putting on and taking off lipstick. These women donât just dilute the meaning of Femdom. They actively contribute to the disbelief of real Dominant women.
Everyday, in every area of my life, I labour to convince people that Femdom is real. That being a Domina is real. That female erotic power is real. And, I even have to do this in BDSM contexts. I have to punch it into everyone’s heads because I guess I wasn’t there to oppose when the world had a meeting to agree that Femdom is just one big fake. But seriously, it is a safety, consent and respect issue. There is one thing to get consent for just mere roleplay, and quite another for the real deal. But I digress…
Like any identity, Dominance must meet the same conditions we demand of others: consistency over time, a coherent inner orientation, and the capacity to evolve within that framework. It is not a phase. It is not a kink. It is not a sabbatical year in a womanâs thirties to âexperimentâ before returning to her boyfriend. Identity is not who you pretend to be. It is who you canât help being.
That is why the real Dominant woman remains invisible in academic literature, unacknowledged in psychological models, and disbelieved even in kink communities. Because she is still being overwritten by men, and now, also, by other women.
As I said, this is not about shaming, but it is about integrity. If your arousal depends on playing a Domina, just be honest. If your desire is to control men in scenes but submit to them in life, just own it. But do not take the identity of a Dominant woman to feed your own pleasure while denying the very existence of those of us for whom this is not a game. Because some of us have lost family over this. Some of us have been expelled from our communities. Some of us have been ridiculed, pathologised, and erased. And now we are being impersonated.
Letâs call this what it is. Fake domming is plagiarism.