Note on Terminology
Throughout this article series, I use the titles Mistress and Domina with specific, historically grounded meanings based on my etymological research into The Two Lineages of Female Domination for the sake of conceptual clarity.
I recognise and honour that every Dominant Woman has the right to name herself, to define Her own language of Power, and to articulate Her Authority in ways that align with Her lived truth. The distinction drawn here is therefore not prescriptive, but analytical.
The use of Mistress refers to the commercial and patriarchally mediated lineage of female domination as it has been shaped by male desire and sexual performance economies. Domina denotes the female-centred, sovereign lineage grounded in erotic authorship, intellect, and relational authority.
These definitions are used solely to maintain philosophical and structural precision in reading, not to diminish, categorise, or delegitimise the diverse expressions of Women who embody dominance in their own form.
The Mistress: Manâs Fantasy of Female Power
The Mistress, as she circulates through pornography, professional domination, and popular imagination, emerges from a male-coded grammar of desire. Her power is theatrical, commodified, and culturally legible. She is the woman who performs domination inside a system still built by and for men. The Domina, by contrast, arises from a lineage of sovereigntyâfemale, domestic, and spiritual. Her authority is not staged but lived; it is the expression of autonomous will, grounded in intellect, erotic agency, and female-centred logic.
This distinction does not denounce sex work or diminish the intelligence of professional dominants who navigate these economies with strategy, care, and integrity. To work within a patriarchal system is not to be complicit in its ideology; it is to survive and, often, to subvert it. As bell hooks reminds us, resistance often begins in the very spaces where domination operates most intimately (hooks 1989, 13-15). Yet the system itself was not designed for female sovereignty. The commercial framework of âMistress cultureâ was shaped by male fantasy, and it continues to reward the performance of authority that pleases men rather than the reality of Female authority that transforms.
Many of us who live Femdom as philosophy, art, or spiritual practice feel a visceral dissonance in this arrangement. We sense, in our bones, that something is misalignedâthat what the world calls Femdom is not ours. The male gaze, as Laura Mulvey (1975) theorised, has repackaged female power into a consumable product: latex-clad, algorithmically desirable, and endlessly reproducible (Mulvey 1975, 804-816). This transformation exemplifies what Luce Irigaray describes as the commodification of the feminine, where the womanâs body becomes the exchange value through which masculine culture asserts itself (Irigaray 1985, 84). Beneath the language of âempowermentâ lies an older order, the same patriarchal architecture that has always defined womenâs value through visibility, desirability, and saleability.
To differentiate between Mistress and Domina, then, is not pedantry. It is philosophy. The distinction restores moral and metaphysical clarity to the language of Female power. Mistress belongs to the world of commerce; Domina to the world of lawâthe inner law, authored by woman herself. Mistress operates through performance and transaction; Domina through presence and structure. The former represents how patriarchy imagines Female power; the latter, how Dominant Women experience it when liberated from that gaze.
This work exists because that difference has been forgotten, or more precisely, overwritten. The conflation of the two has obscured the female-centred foundations of authentic domination. To reclaim those foundations is to re-establish a lineage of erotic authority that is not male-mediated but female-authoredâpower that originates from female desire, not in male demand; that teaches through female embodiment, not spectacle; that governs not for attention, but for order.
The purpose of this article is therefore twofold: To expose the Mistress as a reflection of patriarchal imagination, and to restore the Domina as the living principle of Female sovereignty. Only by naming these two lineages can we begin to understand the depth of Female Dominationâre-educating desire itself, and reconstructing the erotic world in the image of the feminine mind.
To understand the Mistress, one must understand how patriarchy eroticises its own control. Simone de Beauvoir observed that manâs erotic imagination always positions woman as the reflection of his own supremacyâshe âmakes herself an objectâ because he has already made her one (De Beauvoir 1949, 14; MacKinnon 1989, 8). Centuries of literature and commerce have refined that dependence into an industry.
The modern figure of the âMistressâ was not born in temples or libraries, but in brothels. Londonâs eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bawdy houses, meticulously catalogued by Fergus Linnane, reveal that the eroticised disciplinarianââthe governess,â âthe birching matron,â and âthe correctressââwas a male invention (Linnane 2009, 105-127). These establishments staged the fantasy of feminine authority within a structure owned, financed, and narrated by men. Women were cast as actresses of power inside male-controlled theatres of vice. They kept the appearance of authority, but the authorship of power remained entirely male. Thus, the Mistress was a performer and an employee in a patriarchal economy that commodified the male-centric signs of female authority for male pleasure.
This illusion of power functioned as a containment strategy. What appeared as female dominance was, in truth, the reorganisation of male control through erotic performance. The Mistress existed to reassure men that even in submission, they remained the centre of the scene. As Mulvey later observed, patriarchy sustains itself by eroticising the spectacle of woman while denying her subjectivityâthe male gaze renders her image powerful only insofar as it serves masculine fantasy (Mulvey 1975, 813). Within the brothel, as in cinema, female authority became a visual event, not a political reality. The woman might have wielded the whip, but the coin and the script of the scene all belonged to men. The Mistress controlled the male body only within boundaries prescribed by a patriarchal economy. Her domination was controlled by and conditional on the desires of her clients.
- When a womanâs domination is conditional upon the desires of her submissive, she is not exercising power but performing it within a patriarchal script that grants her only the illusion of authority.
Edward Shorter shows how the same script migrated into clandestine Victorian literature (Shorter 2005, 200-212). Pornographic flagellation novels such as The Convent School (1876) and The Mysteries of Verbena House (1882) presented womenâs power as both erotic and absurdâa titillation that reaffirmed male supremacy precisely by eroticising its temporary inversion. This cultural containment of female power mirrored a broader Victorian anxiety about women who stepped beyond ânatural submission”. The male imagination could tolerate a âMistressâ only when her dominance was choreographed by men and directed toward male pleasure; real female sovereignty remained unthinkable.
As literary and medical discourses of the time reveal, a woman who wielded actual authority was cast as monstrous, hysterical, or insane. From the femme fatales of Gothic fiction to the clinical “research” of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, dominant women were rendered pathological unless safely enclosed within the structure of male desire (Krafft-Ebing 1886, 17; Showalter 1985, 4). The same century that produced flagellant brothels also produced Draculaâs Mina, Carmillaâs predatory lesbian, and Krafft-Ebingâs Psychopathia Sexualis, which framed female sexual initiative and domination as a pathological symptom of male masochism (Krafft-Ebing 1886, 89â100). In each, the narrative demanded a patriarchal resolutionâthe âdisorderlyâ woman destroyed, cured, or absorbed into male need. Even within brothels, where dominance was performed, womenâs gestures of authority were scripted by the men who paid for and controlled them (Linnane 2009, 153-54). Thus, the eraâs sexual theatre turned feminine command into a safe spectacle while punishing its reality. The Mistress was permitted to act powerful only so long as her power remained a fantasy authored by patriarchy itself.
The twentieth century did not abandon this commodification, but just rebranded it. The language of industrial fetish gave way to sexual fetish, but the economic logic remained unchanged. By the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had refined this male erotic logic into what Marx might call a âfetish of domination.â Power had become a commodity. It was measurable, purchasable, and endlessly reproducible. The âMistressâ was the brand identity of that commodity.
When post-war sexual culture embraced âBDSM,â it did so through male-coded lexicon inherited from American militarism and leather fraternities (Hennen 2008, 57 & 188-189). The heterosexual âMistressâ merely inverted gender within a grammar already authored by men. Her imageâboots, latex, disciplineâwas assembled from the visual residues of fascism and the eroticisation of uniformed control. The clientâs fantasy of submission required her to imitate masculine power to be credible (Hennen 2008, 9; De Beauvoir 1949, ch.14).
The problem is not the Dominant woman, but the imagination of man. Patriarchy has trained him to recognise power only when it looks like his own. “The male point of view forces itself upon the world as its way of apprehending it. The perspective from the male standpoint enforces womanâs definition, encircles her body, circumlocutes her speech, and describes her life…” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). Women are pushed to see reality through his terms, which denies their point of view and contradicts at least some of their lived experience. Domination, in his worldview, is by definition masculineâauthoritarian, disciplinary, and aggressive. To satisfy his fantasy, the woman has to perform his language of command: boots and barked orders, authority as spectacle, and severity wrapped up in a uniform costume. In this sense, the Mistress becomes not the subversion of male power but its mirror imageâa male dominator in heels. Catherine MacKinnon describes female sexuality under the conditions of male supremacy (113-114), where womenâs erotic authority must mimic the very dominance that oppresses them. Thus, even her âdominanceâ is still defined through the male frame of reference. Judith Butler further exposes how such performances of gendered authority reproduce, rather than subvert, the hegemonic codes they imitate (Butler 1990, 45â48). And Simone de Beauvoir exposes what a woman really means to man: âFor him she is sexâabsolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absoluteâshe is the Otherâ (de Beauvoir 1949, 16â18).
This is why the commercial Mistress remains a patriarchal construction. She enacts domination as men have historically understood it, not as women live it. However, authentic Female DominationâDomina powerâis not a reversal of male domination but a subversion of it. It does not mimic male aggression; it transcends its grammar entirely. It is ontological rather than theatrical; an embodied authorship of order rather than a display of control. Where male domination depends upon force, constraint, and fear, female domination arises from structure, insight, and relational intelligence. Patriarchal culture, built on centuries of conditioning, has no neural or linguistic capacity to recognise this difference. Modern masculinity has been neurologically and culturally disciplined to equate power with violence, and command with conquest (Smith et el. 2015, 160-169). Thus, when confronted with the reality of female authorityârooted in receptivity, order, and sovereignty rather than aggressionâmost men fail to perceive it as power at all. They remain linguistically illiterate before it.
For many Dominas, this illiteracy becomes a burden. They are forced to translate, to teach men how to perceive, speak, and participate in the language of Female powerâa labour that patriarchy neither recognises nor rewards. This pedagogical strain explains why so many Dominant Women in the lifestyle express exhaustion with âtrainingâ submissives whose conceptual frameworks have been shaped entirely by pornographic masculinity. The irony is that men seek female domination, but cannot yet fathom the structure of power they claim to desire.
Thus, even when the commercial Mistress appears to command, she does so in male dialect. The theatre, the costume, and the choreography all belong to the same visual regime Laura Mulvey defined as scopophiliaâthe erotic pleasure of looking at another person as an object (Mulvey 1975, 806). This male-driven model of female powerâperformed, bought, and soldâhas endured. The supposed female power resides not in the womanâs agency but in her availability to perform male fantasy. Today, the entire aesthetic of the âprofessional dominatrixâ that emerged in the twentieth century reinforces this commercial script. Boots, latex, whips, scouring faces, condescending tones, the image of worship and porntypical “Femdom” activities are not the symbols of sovereignty but of service. They exist because of male desire and for the sexual consumption of men.
References
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