‘They live to please me’: Why more women are making men submit to them in bed
In 2025, female domination, well, dominated — both in culture and, as it turns out, in many of our sex lives. We unpack why male submission is so hot right now (for all genders!).
In 2025, something changed — in film, at least, the strong, assertive woman was inescapable. The girlboss (or rather, the more mature She-EO) re-emerged as a cinematic trope, best exemplified by Emma Stone’s Big Pharma exec Michelle Fuller in Bugonia and Dakota Johnson’s successful matchmaker Lucy Mason in The Materialists.
Elsewhere, we found women on screen resiliently, gleefully defying gender expectations. One of the most notable instances was Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary in Sinners. As a recently-turned vampire, her lust (of both the sexual and blood varieties) leads her to spit in Michael B. Jordan’s character Stack’s mouth before sinking her teeth into his neck. In this instance, it wasn’t just a portrayal of a dominant woman — rather, it was a case of her sexuality enchanting and overpowering her male partner. In this case, pop culture was gesturing towards the unspoken sexual zeitgeist simmering beneath the surface.
I say all this because if your favourite type of moving image is porn, well, you know something that cinephiles might not: that film’s tendency towards strong female leads this year has developed in parallel to a clear erotic subtext. In short, it seems that female domination or femdom — female sexual partners assuming the dominant role in erotic scenarios, exploring this power exchange through activities like orgasm control, verbal humiliation, bondage, corporal punishment, and much more — has become the kink du jour. Stats from Clips4Sale, a platform that hosts creators selling erotic content, reveal that their top trends during the year were dominated by female-centred genres. Whether it was face sitting or giantess porn (in which the viewer gets off on the idea of being tiny or shrunk down, and having a giant woman towering over them), viewers were turned on by women in power.
Speaking to Cosmopolitan UK, platform representative Avery Martin explains that, yes, the female domination kink is growing. And while we might imagine BDSM to be centred around female submission, it’s often the reverse. “When the media thinks of kink or BDSM, they almost always imagine men dominating women. That’s certainly a significant market, but in reality, the majority of fetish consumers we see are men who want to be dominated by strong women,” Martin explains. “Our annual top ten list is filled with female-dominant fetishes like giantess, femdom, foot worship, and face sitting. Culturally, the landscape has shifted and even mainstream culture reflects that. The fetishes we obsess about now tend to be female dominant — pegging, cuckolding, chastity, financial domination, and gooning [a prolonged masturbation session in which someone resists their orgasm until they achieve a bliss-like, so-called ‘goon state’].”
Noelle Purdue, a writer and porn historian, has also noticed the mainstreaming of femdom in erotic content. “Female domination porn has always been popular, but I’ve definitely noticed it shift away from purely fetish content and into mainstream categorisation over the past few years,” she explains. This shift may well be related to the increasingly polarised public opinion on porn and its purported role in perpetuating outdated gender roles.
“People often hold guilt around consuming pornography due to sexual shame, or having internalised negative portrayals of the industry by mainstream media,” says Purdue. “While I think this is misguided, female domination porn massages some of the concerns people have over female performers being ill-treated or forced to do things they don’t want to do. Of course, the genre of porn you consume has very little to do with the quality of treatment the performers receive. The best way to consume porn ethically is by purchasing it directly from the performer, or taking an interest in the studio and looking into its relationship with talent.”
Regardless of your thoughts on porn, you might still be left wondering how these dynamics play out in real life. And if they are really that popular away from our laptop screens, in our IRL bedrooms? To answer that question, I spoke to Ru, 28, who began exploring femdom over the past couple of years. For her, embracing a dominant role in sex has been integral to achieving sexual satisfaction within the confines of heterosexual dynamics. As she explains it, there’s also plenty of men out there waiting to be dominated.
“For me, there was a recognition that casual sex with men is usually bad — or it was, until I started being really explicit about what I enjoyed. The more I did that, the more I enjoyed the dominant role,” she explains. “Switching my preferences on Feeld to being dominant was a huge surprise because I realised there are loads of men who are willing to engage in what I consider a higher quality of sexual experience. After that, there was no going back.”
For women and queer people, practicing femdom in encounters with men can also be a way to work through memories of sexual trauma and violence. This is the case for Sarah*, a queer person in their early 30s who first began exploring domination when they moved from Dublin to London. After exploring the sex party scene in their new home, they began to explore lifestyle domination, a type of domination which expands beyond the bedroom. This might entail having submissives (‘subs’) who cook or clean for you, pay for your bills, or are available more consistently to support your life and needs. For many, there isn’t a traditionally sexual element — Sarah’s submissives, for example, have their genitals locked in chastity cages.
Speaking of their entry into the world of domination, Sarah explains how they have found the process cathartic. “I was completely taken by the concept and the subversion of pleasure and power that came with it,” they explain. “Things sort of took off from there once I started exploring these dynamics. I was drawn to the transformative and healing nature of a healthy Dom/sub dynamic as someone who has past sexual trauma with men.” For Sarah, who also plays with women and queer people, dealings with men are often an exercise in asserting their personal needs both in and outside of a sexual context. “The male subs I use are locked in chastity; when they’re with me I hold the key, and they understand that their pleasure is not important. My submissive’s are service and pleasure subs. They live to please me and make my life easy.”
But what do the submissives get out of it? As someone who’s previously written about my own experiences of being topped, bossed around, and spanked by tall, hot, tattooed women, I can tell you that, well, it’s super hot. When it comes to male submissives, it’s undeniable that part of the appeal to femdom is the role reversal — especially when we look to the broader social context, where the Andrew Tates of the world push regressive gender ideology consumed by millions of men.Speaking to dominatrix, educator, and podcast host Eva Oh, she points out that submission allows men a chance to let go, even when the wider world is pushing them to be in control. “Male submissives get to relinquish power, they get to lean into their surrender,” she says. “There’s a lot of pressure for men to identify with being the subjugator, as being the one who is in charge of an experience.” In Oh’s experience, this change in dynamic is like releasing a pressure valve — a chance for them to feel a release from the weight and burden of gendered expectations. “You know, at the end of a session, some of them cry: they just feel a release,” she adds.
This is something I’ve witnessed myself. As someone who briefly began dating cis men after years of lesbianism in my late 20s, the primary vehicle for these encounters was kink — especially verbal humiliation of male subs, riffing off of and eroticising the shame they felt for their masculine privilege (making my male sub wank off while mansplaining the off-side rule is an exchange that will forever be burned in my brain).
For Purdue, the pop culture fascination with femdom goes hand-in-hand with a similar interest in male submission — or, at the very least, the constant social media time dedicated to the likes of the soft, deferential ‘performative male’. “I think this rise in overt popularity that we’re seeing is less about female domination and more about male submission, particularly when we view it alongside terms like ‘cuck’ becoming popular outside of porn subculture,” she explains. “As for female viewership, the submissive man has become an object of desire, with sex-symbol celebrities like Jacob Elordi or Pedro Pascal being called ‘babygirl’ and ‘princess’ and edited to be blushy or shy-looking.”
However, speaking to Ru’s sub — also 28, who wishes to stay anonymous — his interest in domination isn’t consciously tied to politics or to gender. Rather, he describes it as his ‘sexuality’ and details the joys of being desired and seen when entering into a mutual kink dynamic. “It’s my sexuality, really — I love to please and I love to be loved whilst pleasing. There is something incredibly alive-feeling about feeling so desired, if you’re submitting to a Dom who is free to enact all their emotions and desires on you, and something very liberating about honestly exploring your own,” he explains. “The idea of being owned, having all your desires, kinks, emotions, and vulnerabilities seen and enjoyed by someone you’re attracted to, is unbelievably erotic and validating. I’m glad my Dom and I can be honest about what we find hot if we’re in a consensual dynamic.”
For him, the idea of femdom having a moment in 2025 doesn’t quite ring true. Instead, he thinks we’re simply becoming more conscious of what we want — and more open about expressing it. “I’d say that rather than femdom tying into a wider social shift, it’s that the Overton window [social issues considered ‘acceptable’ by the public at a given time] about normal sexuality has shifted, or maybe we’re all more open about where the baseline of kinky sexuality has always been,” he says.
With many of us becoming more literate in our own kinks, perhaps 2025 was just the year we had the vocabulary to start exploring our in-built desire to fuck around with gender roles.
*Name has been changed
Credit: Cosmopolitan