The feminist future of straight sex: Femdom vs. patriarchy
Both sex and society in general are built on the assumption of male domination. What if we turned it around?
Sex in the future will see a “femdom renaissance,” as both men and women will be driven to bang out the problems of patriarchy through kink practices.
Femdom, for any innocents who may have happened to wander by this sexy corner of the internet, is a portmanteau of “female domination,” as opposed to “maledom” which is the “default” of sex under patriarchy.
In parts one and two, I discussed the transformative power of consent culture to undo patriarchal control and create safe spaces where women feel free enough to get a little disinhibited with our sexuality. Today, I’m going to talk about that transformative power when women are allowed to be in complete control, and why it’s nothing to fear. Because you know, you just know, that some dude is gonna say, “But that’ll be a matriarchy, which will be equally as bad!”
Is matriarchy real? Should it be?
First off, the idea of a historical matriarchy per se is itself contested. While there are historical and extant examples of matrilineal societies, these are more egalitarian cultures in which men and women share power. Men are not excluded from positions of power, and in that sense they arguably aren’t “matriarchies” in the first place. So sharing power with women leads only to a more egalitarian society, everywhere we find it; The Scary Thing doesn’t happen. These societies are not utopias, they still have problems, but they deal with those problems more equitably.
Secondly, femdom is simply not a plan for structuring society. It’s a reversal of traditional gender roles in a scene, which is largely done for personal exploratory reasons (like most kinks) and not as a deliberate microcosm for all society (and no, the bedroom should not be a microcosm for all society, GTFO with that normative nonsense).
What femdom is for is to create a space where a woman may be dominant, forward, aggressive, perhaps violent (even gentle domination can sometimes be surprisingly violent, as long as the energy is gentle, for instance with a lot of soothing and sweet encouragement to accompany the agonizing pain). It’s also a space where a man (if present) may be submissive, receptive, vulnerable, perhaps even outright weak (you’d be surprised how much of a turn-on it can be for a big, strong, intelligent man to be reduced to a begging lump of whimpering helplessness by overwhelming pleasure alone).
It’s also a way to explore the assumption or abdication of responsibility: some guys like being chained up, just so they don’t have to make decisions. On the other hand, one woman I dated decided to take a turn with my strap one day, and after about fifteen seconds of wild thrusting, she had to stop and catch her breath and said, “Wow! Consistent motion is a lot harder work than it looks!” Switching roles gives you perspective.
For the same reason, my neighbor who used to run a dungeon for a decade or two has told me that she’s a bottom at heart, and domming was just what she did to pay the bills. For business reasons, her public-facing personality had to be HBIC at all times; but after closing things down for the night, she often turned to her right-hand man for a quick tune-up, and in her personal life she’s a very girly girl.
In short, all forms of power exchange are a way of escaping and/or reversing our typical roles, entering into a limbo space where The Everyday Order Of Things is suspended, so that we can purge our frustrations and process our wounds. Kink is intimate, kink is healing, kink is deep—any longtime practitioner can tell you this—but the public perception of kinksters is still highly stigmatized. In the future, that’s going to change.
Normalization and acceptance of kink
We’re already seeing the change, for example in the rise of the Poe’s Law-invoking “breeding kink.” Like, kinks are paraphilia, they are non-sexual deviations from straightforward procreative bangin’. “Breeding” is, by definition, straightforward procreative bangin’ itself; it genuinely is the default against which all “proper kinks” are defined. I hate to gatekeep like that, because there are no Identity Police; that way lies fascism. I'm just saying that no man was ever scandalized by having a breeding kink with his wife.
Even so, I can’t get too up-in-arms about this quotidian bit of semantic ignorance, because in the common parlance, “kink” has become so normalized that we no longer think of it as a paraphilia, but as a mere turn-on. It nevertheless remains that for straightforward procreative bangin’ to turn you on is the most vanilla thing possible, but what it shows is a broader cultural acceptance of kink at large. That is an undeniable cultural shift showing up in everyday speech.
For these reasons, I strongly believe that the future of femdom is going to be one of normalization and mainstream acceptance, and soon it will be just as normal for a guy to be thirsty for a good pegging, as it is for a gal to be thirsty for a good breeding. And this shift will be highly politicized, which I will get to after a few brief asides.
First, femdom doesn’t have the generational sexist baggage that maledom has, which makes it a less problematic space to explore and play. There are still female abusers, and there are problematic things to unpack in any scene, but by and large femdom isn’t subject to a lot of the problematization that maledom is. This is just a consequence of the fact that sexism is the methodology of male supremacy.[1]
White supremacy is a social order with white people in charge, and an ideology that says this is how it should be. When white people who buy into that ideology (largely because the social order it creates is of benefit to them) are confronted with anything that defies that social order and ideology, such as miscegenation or Black Wall Street, it triggers cognitive dissonance: this shouldn’t happen, but here it is. When this cognitive dissonance is resolved with anger at the social order being defied, we get racial animus; because this racial animus is motivated by white supremacy, it is racism. In this way, whatever supports or advances or maintains white supremacy is racism; and anything that dismantles white supremacy is anti-racist, even if it happens to include racial animus flowing in the opposite direction (the oppressed are morally allowed to hate their oppressors, whereas oppressors’ hatred of the oppressed just reinforces the status quo).
The other part to unpack is that all forms of bigotry have a common root in misogyny. Before patriarchal tribes and cultures colonized and oppressed each other, they first oppressed their women. This was done by casting difference as deficiency: women are not strong enough, not detached enough, not serious enough, to make the “hard decisions” required of leadership. (Let’s leave aside that matrilineal societies tend to harmonize competing interests, in contrast to the zero-sum mindset popular among patriarchal authoritarians, and which of those is actually “harder” to do well.) This creates infantilization: the Other must be kept “in their place,” with force if necessary, “for their own good.” This justification for the subjugation of a culture’s women, once accepted, is easy to copy-paste onto entire cultures deemed “inferior” to one’s own: you see, we have to conquer them, to help them, and civilize them. Indeed, early models of evolution showed women and black people as “less evolved” forms of white men.
So patriarchies started by subjugating their women and then patterned future conquests on that subjugation. These subjugating ideologies are upheld by many small individual acts of prejudice, based on a perceived violation of the “natural order” given by said ideology. While race and sex are different axes of oppression, the underlying mechanism is the same. So in the same way that racism is the methodology of white supremacy, sexism is the methodology of patriarchy. ↩︎
Second: don’t worry, fellas—this isn’t gonna be ladies getting our rocks off at your expense (I mean, it will sometimes, if that’s what you negotiate for). We’re much more about mutuality—and that will work in men’s favor. We’ve got feminist male influencers like Cyzor, Speech Prof, and Professor Neil, extolling the virtues of healthy masculinity to men in their own lingua franca, and gaining popularity as they translate feminism into everyday praxis for men.
As men become healthier, and women are able to be more trusting and open, we’ll see a lot of what men say they want in terms of women making first moves, paying for dates, taking sexual initiative, and so on. But it's going to be on men to make this healthy shift as a demographic, before women start reciprocating as a demographic. Before that, individual trust will still need to be established first.
Third, polyamory is having a bit of a moment, and while this is going on, safe and healthy straight men will be highly in demand. This will make it a great time to be a dude who has dealt with sexual hangups, can handle jealousy, and is emotionally supportive rather than clingy or controlling. Feminism started liberating women from patriarchy, and that work is ongoing, but men still haven’t really started freeing themselves from patriarchy in a similar way—so as men continue to do that important work, those who do will find a large population of women who are positively ravenous for physically safe, emotionally healthy men.
The bedroom as a microcosm for society
Femdom is, by many measures, the most basic of kinks (some might say it’s light BDSM, or even just “biting,” but still). It’s also the most controversial. It's the butt of jokes lampooning a feminist future of anything, as if letting women sit at the table inevitably leads to full-blown matriarchal high-protocol BDSM suffused into everyday life. This might be hot to some, I guess, but it’s not actually what any form of feminism is about (except the weird supremacist feminisms, yuck). Yet look how wildly men scream in protest when discussing a woman’s sexual agency:
This cultural shift will be highly politicized, because many men do want the bedroom to be a microcosm for society. Guys like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson think that every relationship is supposed to be suffused with maledom, along with all other aspects of society. To such men, the bare fact of women feeling free enough to claim our own autonomy and initiative in the bedroom is a complete breakdown of the social order.
It’s like when right-wingers accuse left-wingers of “wanting to destroy America,” and we reply that we only want to destroy intersectional systems of oppression artificially imposing a racialized and sexualized hierarchy of privilege, and they shriek, “That is America!” To their minds, America is for The White Man, and changing that is destroying America.
Similarly, the manosphere has internalized the belief that women's sexual liberation will spell doom for society, because part of how they define society itself includes “men controlling women.” If that's not happening, then it's not “society” per se, it's more like Primordial Chaos. You need more Principled Order, or your whole culture will fail in the struggle for domination and hegemony.
Primordial Chaos vs. Principled Order
It's another mechanism of societal control: take sexual pleasure out of everyday life, reserve it for those who have demonstrated Societally Approved Success Indicators, and gatekeep it behind procreative marriage. Even then, it should only be done at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reasons. This leverages sexual desire for capitalist ends, funneling straight people into productive marriages based on satisfactory adherence to gender roles rather than, say, on authentic compatibility. These rushed, quickly-consummated marriages are then exploited for a steady supply of workers who can be pitted against each other to compete for “opportunity,” in order to prevent them from unifying to overthrow their oppressors. It's class warfare.
And it's Puritanically pessimistic to boot. It's anti-pleasure and anti-fun and anti-joy. Procreation is a duty. God said to be fruitful and multiply, not to have lots of lovey-dovey sex. Don't believe me? Take it from toxic manfluencer Andrew Tate:
These woman-hating, joy-disdaining, duty-obsessed bores are just shilling for capitalism at the end of the day, because they profit from fueling the so-called “Male Loneliness Epidemic” by telling impressionable men to make themselves grist for the mill of their corporate overlords, and this will prove their worth to women (if they do it successfully enough against a society of other men on the same grindset). And don’t do anything stupid like listen to women, by the way. Listening to women is gay; they want to drain your Masculine Essence to make you easy to control!
The sad fact is, that’s half-true! Sexual liberation from misogynistic patriarchal hegemony will break down traditional gender roles, and thereby make the populace harder to control. And to these toxic manosphere chuds, that’s Game Over.
Of course, certain enlightened gentlemen will be only too eager to submit to female control to have their Masculine Essence drained, especially in service to sexual liberation. That’s where we’ll pick it up in the fourth and final part to this series!
