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What is femdom? Female domination, explained

Femdom is short for female domination: BDSM in which the dominant partner is a woman. She sets the rules and makes the decisions, and her partner, by agreement, follows them. It's also called female dominance, and it covers a lot of ground, from a twenty-minute cam session to a marriage run on her terms. This page explains what the word means, how common the interest really is, and what femdom looks like in practice.

What femdom means

The word is a simple contraction: fem for female, dom for domination. Dictionary.com defines femdom as "a genre of BDSM in which a woman performs the dominant role" and dates the first recorded use to the early 2000s, which fits a word that grew up online. Wikipedia treats female dominance, female domination and femdom as the same thing, defined as a BDSM activity "in which the dominant partner is female".

Two points are worth keeping straight. First, femdom names a dynamic, not an act. Spanking, bondage, worship, chastity and humiliation can all be femdom, and so can a list of household rules, as long as she's the one in charge. Second, femdom isn't the same as a dominatrix. A dominatrix is a woman who plays the dominant role, often professionally; femdom is the whole genre she works in. Our guide to what a dominatrix actually is covers the professional side.

Older than the word

The word is young, but the idea isn't. In early 19th-century London, Theresa Berkley ran a famous house of discipline at 28 Charlotte Street, where clients paid to be whipped; she died in 1836. In 1870 the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch published Venus in Furs, a novella about a man who asks a woman to make him her servant. Sixteen years later the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing took Sacher-Masoch's name to coin the word masochism.

The word dominatrix itself has been in English since at least 1561, meaning simply a woman who rules. Its modern sense dates from 1961 and a pulp paperback called The Bizarre Lovemakers. Femdom arrived four decades later, as people started finding each other in online forums and needed a shorter word for what they were looking for.

How common is the interest?

Far more common than its reputation suggests. For his 2018 book Tell Me What You Want, the psychologist Justin Lehmiller surveyed 4,175 Americans about their fantasies. Most women, 93%, and most men, 81%, said they had fantasised about being sexually dominated, and a majority of both had fantasised about dominating someone else. His sample was large but not a random cross-section of the country, so treat the exact figures with some care.

A smaller survey that was designed to represent the US population, published by Debby Herbenick and colleagues in PLoS ONE in 2017, found that at least 30% of 2,021 adults had tried spanking, at least 20% had tried tying or being tied up, and at least 22% had tried role play. Femdom is one direction those things go in, and a popular one.

Being into it also says nothing bad about your mental health. A 2013 study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine compared 902 BDSM practitioners with 434 people who weren't, and found the practitioners less neurotic, more open to new experiences, less sensitive to rejection and higher in subjective wellbeing. The current psychiatric manual, DSM-5, doesn't treat consensual BDSM between adults as a disorder.

What femdom looks like in practice

Femdom shows up in roughly four settings, and most people move between them over time:

• Professional sessions. A paid dominatrix runs a session with clear rules, usually including no sex, no nudity and no touching her.
• Cam domination. A dominant performer runs sessions through a webcam, where everything works through her voice and your obedience.
• Lifestyle play. A couple or partners play with femdom in their private life, for an evening or a weekend.
• Relationships. She leads the relationship itself, sometimes in small ways, sometimes around the clock.

The styles vary as much as the settings. Some femdom is strict and formal, built on protocol and rules. Some is sensual and teasing. Some centres on an object or a look, like latex, leather or feet; some on words, like humiliation or praise. None of it is more authentic than the rest. The common thread is that she decides.

The femdom relationship

When femdom moves from a scene into a relationship, it usually goes by another name: a female-led relationship, or FLR. Wikipedia describes it as a dynamic "in which the female partner takes on a dominant role", consciously structured around boundaries both partners agreed. In practice that can mean anything from her having the final say on big decisions to a full-time arrangement with rules, rituals and protocol. Our guide to female-led relationships goes into the detail.

The word that matters is agreed. A femdom relationship is something both people chose and can renegotiate. Control that wasn't agreed, can't be questioned, or cuts someone off from their money, friends or freedom isn't femdom, it's abuse, and the law treats it that way: the UK's Domestic Abuse Act 2021, for example, names controlling or coercive behaviour and economic abuse explicitly. A good femdom dynamic leaves both people more themselves, not less.

Three myths about femdom

"It's rare." It isn't. The survey figures above put fantasies of being dominated in the majority of both men and women, and the most common forms of play, like spanking and light restraint, have been tried by a fifth to a third of American adults.

"It means something is wrong with you." The research points the other way. The 2013 comparison of 902 practitioners with 434 non-practitioners found the kinky group doing at least as well on every measure of wellbeing the researchers used, and better on several.

"It's all sex, and all paid." Neither. Much of femdom is about rules, service and attention, and a large part of it happens between partners who never pay anyone. Even professional dominatrices typically keep sex out of sessions altogether, which surprises almost everyone the first time they hear it.

Femdom on cam

For a lot of people, cam domination is where femdom starts. It's private, it's low pressure, and you can watch a dozen dominant women at work in free chat before spending anything. It also strips femdom back to its core. She can't touch you through a screen, so everything happens through her voice, her presence and your willingness to do as you're told.

The strip at the top of this page shows dominant women live right now. If you're curious, spend ten minutes watching how two or three of them run their rooms, then read your first cam session for the order that works when you want more.

Where to start

If femdom is new to you, start with words before actions. Learn the vocabulary in the femdom glossary, then read limits and safewords, because the most important skill in femdom isn't kneeling, it's knowing what you will and won't agree to. After that, choose the setting that suits you: a partner, a professional, or a mistress on cam. Whichever you choose, you're joining something a lot of people want and fewer admit to.