(Content Notes: D/s, gender dysphoria, fetishizing femmes, forced feminization.)

Let’s talk about gender and femdom!

Femdom, for the unfamiliar, is the title typically attributed to female-identifying dominants (or acts of female domination) in order to distinguish them from the abundantly male narrative of the D side of D/s. (D/s being Dominance/submission or Dom/sub, a consensual and pre-negotiated power exchange relationship or dynamic between people of any genders.) Not all women who identify as dominants use the term, of course, but it does promote visibility in a community that – like everywhere else – doesn’t always like to give women their due.

But not all femdoms are women. In my incredibly queer (and likely unpopular) opinion, femdom can be embodied or performed by anyone with relevant inclinations, including those whose gender is fluid, elusive, or nonexistent. And I assert this as a nonbinary person who is sometimes a femdom.

Being a switch, I enjoy occupying both sides of the slash. And while my dominant dalliances aren’t always femdom, it comes up enough that I feel pretty comfortable claiming it as part of my hobbyist kink identity. (Hobbyist for now, anyway; it’s been steadily inching into other areas of my life as of late.) This might seem weird, since the prefix is presumed to denote gender (which I only occasionally identify with), but it… suits me, sometimes. I feel a kinship with it.

Femdom has never been limited to just women wearing high heels and stepping on men’s balls (though that’s great too.) It’s diverse and multifaceted. There are butch lesbians who watch with pride as their babygirl polishes their boots. There are tender femmes who lovingly guide their husbands through daily life. There are women who keep their girlfriends in chastity, enbies (nonbinary folks) who like to leave lipstick kisses over fresh bruises, and genderfluid goddesses who strut before captive audiences with a flared-out fan to hide their smirk. It’s dominance that thrives in spite of society’s denial of your power.

There is so much I could talk about here, but I think for now I’ll stick to two specific gender-related aspects of femdom that I love: the power of the prefix, and weaponized femininity.

The Power of the Prefix

My domspace (the headspace one occupies while in a dominant frame of mind) varies depending on a number of factors: where my unpredictable gender pendulum is swinging, what my submissive partner is looking for, and what feels most exciting creatively for a scene. I’m used to a lot of codeswitching in my day to day life, so I’m not surprised my D/s tends to be just as reactively fluid.

I’m a sadist, so a lot of my doming involves (consensual and pre-negotiated) pain and humiliation for my sub. But my doming also hinges on the drive to craft a fantasy space, establishing temporary absolutes that define our play bubble. I am in charge; you belong to me; these are the rules of our dynamic; this world is now the only one that matters. It’s satisfying in the way that specificity and inflexibility have always been satisfying for me as an autistic, but it’s also affirming because there are so few areas of my life where I’m in complete control.

Femdom specifically gives me the power to define how my submissive perceives me. I don’t have to be a woman to be a femdom, but the prefix implies some manner of related or adjacent identity. When my partner submits to me, they’re submitting to a femme, or a goddess, or a mxtress, because sometimes that’s how I want to be seen, and sometimes those are the parts of me that my partner wants to serve. And I get to define that as part of the space we share for our session, without the dysphoria I often feel outside the bubble.

There are other words I could use – and sometimes, I use those words instead. Author Jess Mahler suggests “enbydom” in her post I’m Not a Femdom (Anymore?), wherein she details her lack of comfort with femdom as an enby. Dom itself is technically gender neutral. But those aren’t always a comfortable and accurate reflection of how I’m feeling.

Bottoming to Femdoms: Weaponized Femininity

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been attracted to dominance dressed in femme themes. There are a lot of other ways femdom can manifest (as I mentioned before), but for the sake of keeping this piece concise in scope, we’re just going to talk about my thing for femmes.

Though my baby clothes were of the garish pink variety, I’ve never felt especially comfortable with femininity or confident in my ability to embody it. Part of that is gender dysphoria, part of it is lingering anxiety about seeming predatory as a masc-leaning DFAB person, but a lot of it is the uncomfortable sting of jealous ignorance. I am in awe of femmes who deploy such care and skill into crafting themselves. And I’m terrified of them, in that ‘I hope you spit on me’ kind of way.

Submitting to femmes gives me the space to feel all of those things. The jealousy, the fumbling lust, the disconnect, the worshipful appreciation – all of my anxieties about being inferior are reshaped into the temporary trappings of my position, dismissed with a safeword or the reassurance of aftercare. Kink is not an adequate replacement for gender therapy, but it’s still an outlet.

And some of my most vivid submissive fantasies are forced feminization scenarios, wherein femmes of various genders and aesthetics gang up on me and try to pretty me up in all the ways I can’t seem to manage on my own. I can be their doll, freed from the responsibility of defining how I present or even identify.

Depending on how I’m feeling, my position in these fantasies goes one of two ways: I’m eventually appreciative, because I’m finally able to be ‘one of them’; or I’m angry and humiliated, because I’m being wrestled into things not meant for me. But even in my fantasies, these are just negotiated scenes with enthusiastic femdoms, ways to work through my shit through kink.

These Are Just My Experiences

As our collective understanding of gender becomes more nuanced, so must our definitions of experiences we’ve deemed binary. And honestly, femdom beyond the binary already exists. It just isn’t talked about much.

But it’s important to note that these are just my thoughts, based on my experiences with femdom and my relationship with the hot mess that is my gender. Not all nonbinary people experience gender the way that I do, let alone feel the same way about kink. Furthermore, while I tried to provide context for what femdom and D/s dynamics are, the scope of such subjects is too broad to be contained in a dozen blog posts let alone one. So don’t let this be the total sum of your reading on any of the topics I discussed in this post.

Are you an enby with a complicated (or maybe not so complicated) relationship with kink? Wanna collaborate on a future post? Hit me up in the comments or through email via bettybutch@yahoo.com!