There is no sex act that is inherently dominant or submissive. Just as there is no body part that assigns a sexual role by default. What we confuse—constantly—is mechanics for meaning.
Penetration isn’t power. Receiving isn’t surrender. What we’re reacting to is the social script of the penetrator: this body takes, that body is taken. This is most visible in how the female body is read. Femininity is culturally positioned as receptive, penetrable, acted upon—less a mode of agency than a surface something happens to.
As a femme dom, my domination often involves penetration—but it isn’t located there. It lives in the dynamic: authority, framing, guidance, the shaping of desire. There is no situation in which I become submissive simply because I’m being fucked. I’m not yielding control. I’m exercising it.
Queer people tend to get this. We have history in language: dom/sub for dynamic, top/bottom for preference. We’re less invested in pretending presentation predicts desire. That separation matters.
In many cis/het femdom spaces, the fantasy is doing something specific: it’s negotiating power that already exists outside the scene. For some cis male subs, the erotic charge is bound up in taboo or transgression; for some cis women, dominance carries the thrill of stepping into authority that isn’t culturally assumed.
Lesbian dynamics don’t always start from the same baseline. Two women may still carry differences—race, class, history, trauma, anatomy—but we aren’t entering the scene with dominance already assigned by gender alone. We begin with a closer approximation of shared social power. The pleasure isn’t in stealing authority; it’s in choosing, together, to redistribute it.
Is the body ever free of social scripting? Maybe not entirely. But it can be freer—when we separate mechanics from meaning, anatomy from intention, and inherited power from chosen dynamic.
That choice is the whole point.
