I can’t stand the word ‘domme’. It’s both stupid and pointless. The sad thing is, I understand why other women would want a feminine word for a dominant person. ‘Dom’ is really just a simple abbreviation of the word ‘dominant’, but it’s often taken to mean ‘male dominant’. Because men are the default dominant people, of course. We can’t have anyone implying that women are just as ‘really’ or ‘truly’ dominant as men are, we have to have a special word to set them apart, to remind everyone that they aren’t real doms, they’re just ‘dommes’. Someone might take a woman on the internet seriously if they weren’t forewarned that she identifies as a woman, and we just can’t have that.
Given the masculine connotations of the word dom, I understand why women would want their own word, a way to say ‘no, I’m not just a pale imitation of a real dom, I am my own kind of dominant’. I just hate the way it sets us apart. Why can’t we say male dom and female dom? Honestly, it’s not that many more keystrokes. Granted, some people are too lazy to type ‘you’ instead of ‘u’, but those people are stupid and it’s just as well that they make it obvious.
Also, the word ‘domme’ is especially pointless because it’s pronounced just like ‘dom’. If you seriously think ‘domme’ is pronounced ‘dommay’, I’m honestly surprised you’re clever enough to have gotten to my blog in the first place. At least ‘domina’ sounds different, even if it’s just as pointless as ‘domme’.
Honorifics irritate me just as much, but that’s a separate issue, and roo-roo already covered it on his blog.
I tend to use both “dom” and “domme” to refer to dominant women. I wrote something on this you may find worth a read- http://pureliquidkink.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/dominant-doms-dominating-with-dominance-of-doom/
Agreeing so much I couldn’t be any agreeinger. 🙂 (What, there’s no comparative degree of agreeing?)
I use dom as abbreviation for dominant in English all the time. Just like sub. I write dom person, or dom woman, dom man, female dom, male dom if I want to indicate sex.
Imagine people had started to write: ‘X is not switch. She’s female. Therefore switche!’
I’d consider someone calling me ‘domme’ just as rude, ridiculous and absurd as calling people ‘subbe’, ‘switche’, ‘toppe’ and ‘bottomme’. It’s saying: ‘The default of each of these is a man. We need to make sure nobody mistakes you for a man by indicating you’re whatever. You’re female, so you’re just whateverre!’ The fact that some people in the recent past felt a need to invent a gendered written version of dom, but not of any of these other words indicating kink inclinations, speaks loads about their sexist default assumptions.
Gratuitous side note:
It’s especially ridiculous when people explain the word fabrication process of ‘domme’ along these lines: ‘It’s a feminine ending analogous to French. You know. ‘Domme’ sounds sort of like femme? Cool, huh?’ – Facepalm. Come on, people. Yeah, femme means woman in French. And the language can change adjectives and some nouns to grammatically female forms by adding an e, and sometimes doubling a preceding consonant. But you know which word sounds much more similar to ‘domme’ in the French language? Yes, homme. Which means man. O ye crafty gendering English wordsmyths. Welcome to Linguabsurdistan.
‘Dom’ is really just a simple abbreviation of the word ‘dominant’, but it’s often taken to mean ‘male dominant’.
This sexist connotation, thank goodness, is changeable by language users themselves. I think we’ll watch it disappear.
I would NEVER use the word ‘Domme’, nor would I EVER create a blog using it, and I would never ever capitalise it…
Stop looking at me like that!!
Ferns
I really don’t have a problem with the distinction at all, and it seems that most female dominants are all right with the term. I personally feel that pointing out the distinction is more of a problem. For me it’s just a useful way of telling the difference. I’ve never thought about it as some kind of ant-feminism.
And I doubt male dominants would have these issues if we gave them a different term for their kink…
@Ranai
Exactly! It’s the worry that we’ll be mistaken for men so we have to have a separate word that bothers me. I just don’t understand what’s so bad about having to use context to figure out someone’s gender the exact same way we would when taking about a doctor, a lawyer, a firefighter, a soldier, a teacher, a cook, a plumber… I hope I’ve beaten my point into the ground by now.
@Ferns
I still think you and your blog are fantastic even if I give your choice of title puzzled looks, not unlike a dog trying to understand English.
@Lady Grinning Soul
Are seriously arguing that if we just don’t talk about it, sexism will go away? If the distinction isn’t a problem, then what can pointing it out possibly hurt?
Saying I’m being oversensitive is not an argument.
@Stabbity:
“I still think you and your blog are fantastic…”
*big smile* Thank you!
“…even if I give your choice of title puzzled looks, not unlike a dog trying to understand English.”
I can well imagine that look…! I am trying *very* hard not to imagine it as cute (that’s not what you were aiming for, right?)!
For the blog name, “Female Dominant Chronicles” just didn’t have quite the same ring to it and I *did* want to identify it clearly as a blog by a female dominant in a ‘clean’ way that worked for me as a writer.
I don’t tend to use ‘dom’ to refer to male dominants, though, I mostly use maledom (as the counterpart to femdom). On its own, though, I’m not keen on ‘femdom’ due to my perception of how the term is so often used in marketing.
I can’t argue against the reasons why you (or others) dislike ‘domme’. They are good reasons, and solid, and I understand them. I suspect my ancient history as a dinosaur stomping the early days of the internet chat rooms has something to do with why I still like it anyway.
Ferns
I personally am quite happy with domme as a word although I can see why some women would have an issue with it. The other interesting thing to me is that I often find there are subtle pronounciation differences between words which are said to sound the same but are spelled differently. In this case, for me, the m sound in domme is softer than the one in dom. Never ‘domey’ though just like it’s not ‘oldey’ when you see olde.
OMG thank you. I’ve hated “domme”, ever since I first started exploring kink on the interwebz, for exactly all the reasons you stated. My boy seemed really surprised when I went off about it one day when he used it in chat.
I cringe every time someone pronounces it “dommay”; I’ve had to bite my tongue so many times, wanting to correct a friend who’s older and supposedly wiser.
Hey, is it too late to get in on this?
I tend to write either “femdom” or “domme” simply for the sake of context. “Femdomme” (to my way of thinking) is redundant – however, I will also write “maledom,” although it was only recently that I began to make a conscious effort to do so.
Yes, I know that doctors and lawyers and police and plumbers aren’t qualified with a gender modifier, but the context here is different. Domination is generally a sexually charged activity; if I read something by somebody who picks a context-lacking name (like, oh, the name “Ferns”, for a random example), a description of “Ferns” doing something with “my boy” doesn’t give me enough information to appreciate the story.
To put a less fine point on this, if I imagine a plumber doing something for me, it really doesn’t *matter* if it’s a man or a woman. But if I’m interacting with someone interested in domination, it makes a hell of a lot of difference to me if it’s a maledom or a femdom. Or domme.
It has nothing to do with whether or not domination is inherently masculine; rather (to me) it’s about providing a context in which to appreciate the interaction.
@Tom, I suppose this is about writing a (non-fictional or fictional) text, in which a specific dominant woman shows up? It’s fairly easy to create a written context which shows that the person you’re talking about is a woman, just like you can show all sorts of other attributes this person has, without needing to gender any adjectives. Pronouns with grammatical gender in English (she, her etc.) already do the trick.
‘Qwq was looking at the note her man had left on the table, absent-mindedly caressing it – I give myself to you, Qwq. I will be there tonight – and already her mind was busy considering what she might do with him…’
When, on the other hand, you aren’t writing about any specific person, but abstractly about dominance and submission in general: well, the whole point is that gendering interests in domination (or submission) is misleading. All sorts of individual variants of these interests exist, which don’t depend on people’s sex.
When you’re interacting with someone interested in domination, their sex makes a hell of a lot of difference to you. Yes, this makes perfect sense.
Their sex does not make a difference with regard to their interest in domination, though. Nor does this interest exist dependant on their interaction with you. Their attribute ‘dominant’ is not a special, different ‘dominant’ because the person you’re writing about is a woman.
Domination is a sexually charged activity, yes. It is not, as an activity, female or male. Neither is submission.
If using ‘domme’, you are not just gendering a person, or persons. You are gendering this specific interest of theirs. You are saying something about their interest in domination which, as far as I know, you don’t actually believe.
@Stabbity, I think there are also people who think: ‘I’ve grown so used to associate dom = male dom. I know how this association was created, which I dislike because it’s sexist, though it’s uncomfortable to reflect on it. I just don’t want to be confused with a male dom / male doms do nothing for me erotically. I can’t use dom any more. It turns me off!’
To them I’d recommend these procedures:
a) Word rescue via re-association, widening the semantic meaning in one’s own usage. Write 20.000 words of steamy hot erotica, using ‘dom’ when referring to one’s female dom characters. Preferably share. 🙂
b) Avoidance. Just use ‘dominant’.
c) Any other ideas?
@Ranai
Thank you for making that argument for me 🙂
Exactly! I honestly think my style of domination makes me more like a male gleeful sadist than a female sensual dom.
As for your recommendations for people who think ‘dom’ = ‘male dom’, I think my favourite is b). After the inconvenience of typing ‘dominant’ a few hundred times, I think just about anyone would give up and abbreviate it to ‘dom’, and in the process I expect they’d lose the association with male domination.
@Tom
Actually, female dom (or maybe even fem dom) is fine with me, as long as we also say ‘male dom’ when we mean a man and only use ‘dom’ alone to mean a non-gender-specific anyone. I can see how reading a story and finding out halfway through that the top/dom isn’t the gender you thought they were would be jarring enough to throw you out the story, although I think it would be harder to conceal a character’s gender than to reveal it with English’s gendered pronouns. My beef with ‘domme’ is the implication that female domination is a fundamentally different and therefore lesser thing than male domination.
My beef with ‘domme’ is the implication that female domination is a fundamentally different and therefore lesser thing than male domination.
And I do understand that in genedering a word, we often use a Latin diminutive suffix. Having learned my grammar rules in the 60s and 70s, it’s difficult for me to unremember them, but keep in mind that many of us use those terms *without* thinking of them as different, or indeed, diminutive; it’s just a convention that no longer (if it ever really did) carry no inherent meaning.
That said, I want to point out that we don’t genderfy the term “submissive,” except once in a great while I’ll run across “femsub” or “malesub” – but it’s so rare as to be almost nonexistent. I argue that it’s because “submissiveness” actually is seen as inherently feminine … which is really the same argument (in reverse) that you’ve been making here. So, I’ll concede that you have a good point in objecting to its continued use.
Which brings me back around to something I started writing a few months ago: the terms dom and sub are so loaded with incongruous connotations that they are almost meaningless in our current BDSM culture, and that we – as a group – might be better served in looking for a new syntax to describe whatever the hell it is that we do.
Of course it’s not pronounced “dommay.” It’s “due me” – I thought everybody knew that. 😉
I use domme, but I’m not married to it and could probably be talked out of using it. But:
1. I like having a distinction – I identify as gender queer but I don’t want to be mistaken for a male dominant (even when I’m feeling rather boyish). Domme provides at least a little bit more info about me, though nothing close to the whole picture.
2. “Female dominant” – although grammatically correct and not problematic in itself – is too close to “dominant female” which is a phrase that really chaps my hide.
3. I am too lazy to write out qualifiers.
Since there is no distinction in speech, I tend to use “dominant man” and “dominant women.”
I don’t mind the dom/domme much. To me it is a reference to French grammar where this is quite a standard way to distinguish between male and female. All their nouns are female or male (la/le) or have a female and male form.
However whomever came up with doumay as a pronunciation is somebody that tries to look interesting and educated, yet has never learned a word of French.
@ Tom, Yes, exactly. I’ve yet to come across anyone who calls women ‘subbe’ and ‘switche’, because sub and switch is gonna get them mistaken for men.
Whether people use these or new, different words for kink inclinations, there’s no (non-sexist) reason why the attributes by themselves would designate a default sex in addition.
Heck, in my language we have three grammatical genders for nouns and adjectives used attributively. I don’t know why anyone with a native language that doesn’t have similar complications already built in would want to load themselves with the trouble for super extra special words.
@ Stabbity, I think it ties in with what you mention here about the perception of ‘man submits to woman’ stuff as precarious. As if were a labile molecule that needs to be kept in a vacuum, because as soon as it’s exposed to an atmosphere of everyday interactions it would dissociate and change back to a default ‘woman submits to man’. (And never mind anything that isn’t hetero, which has no place in this simple model.) Cue all the anxiety about ‘How do we do X without her becoming un-dominant / him becoming un-submissive?’ about all sorts of everyday relationship stuff, from being friends and holding hands and taking care of each other, to having sex in such-and-such ways without any SM gadgets.
In tune with one of the meanings of your blog name, there was some conversation on this on Beej’s blog. It’s very nice to see more and more people refecting on and freeing themselves from these assumptions, and it’s enjoyable to have conversations with so many people who have no interest in constructing ‘man submits to woman’ as super extra special, labile and precarious, but perceive it as one part of the many variants of human sexuality and relationships.
I agree. In that you have an entirely valid point that its a stupid word for most, especially as in many cases it makes it seem like a female dominant party would be somehow different and possibly lesser in some eyes than a male dominant party. However I have no problem with a dominant person wanting to use such a word personally because they like it for whatever reason, to each their own. Heck if a dude wanted to call himself a domme, I’m not going to get in his way either.
I will say this though in defence of the pronunciation misconception crowd. I have met many people from other regions who pronounce it out loud wrong and add an “eee” or an “aye” type sound at the end. generally its because that’s what they were told out loud by the people they met when they entered bdsm culture in their respected region or setting. This tends to be how I find misconceptions spread. Much like pronouncing a planet the same as someones rear end. Thankfully the domme misconception hasn’t spread as far as the Uranus misconception. Sidenote; we really do need to improve the reputation on that planet.
Well done.
Now let’s take the next step and replace the word “femdom” for exactly the same reasons.
I understand the sentiment, and I echo it to some extent. But I also use many of the terms described disparagingly here because I find they are descriptively accurate. I could write “female-led power-based relationships” but “FemDom” seems a LOT easier and less redundant when I have to use SOME term to describe my topic several times in a paragraph.
Moreover, I tend to use the terms “FemDom” and “malesub” in my writing because I often am attacking the mythos that has been built around those terms. It isn’t the words that bother me, after all, it’s the stupid misconceptions and connotations that are tossed around with them. Just like I often write about being “Christian” to attack the overwhelming cultural attitude about that term being owned by right wing nutjobs who want to turn the clock back five thousand years.
Having said all of that, I don’t think I often use the word Domme – usually I use FemDom (yes, with the double capital letters…because I just think it’s prettier that way). But I generally think that people should be able to be called whatever they enjoy being called. Not to invoke the Jabberwock, but if we start calling dominant women “Staplers” and submissive men “staples” then we really are back at the same point, are we not?
I tend to refer to myself as a Dom. If I want to be specific I tend to use “Femdom, Maledom malesub, femsub. If I’m not feeling lazy, then it’s the expanded form of those words. I was speaking with my current submissive a few months ago about the the “Dom” debate. He was like, “Why does it matter? Call yourself whatever you feel comfortable with. You’re still Lady Donovan to me.” And so I did. I dubbed myself a Dom. And I let people have Domme as well. I care more about the person, not the title they choose to given themselves, as long as it’s not so far-fetched and inaccurate as to cause complete confusion to anyone they’re trying to communicate with, but that’s another topic. =)
Lady D
Yes. Exactly my thoughts.
Summed up, my point of view: there shouldn’t need to be a diminutive form of “dominant” for females.
I think you’re seeing misogyny where it doesn’t exist. It’s analagous to the Alligator and the log story. Sometimes we SEE what we WANT to see. The origin of the terms Dom and Domme have their roots in BBS systems (the precursor internet). Historically everyone used the word Dom (for dominant). The masculine and feminine forms evolved for simplicity’s sake to reduce confusion in the text-only BBS world. It does NOT have roots relating to which sex a “REAL” Dom ought to be. Assuming this is like assuming that the Americans are primarily Satan worshippers because we say “HELL-o” for phone greeting instead of “Heaven-o”. The word hello, has NOTHING to do with the afterlife. It was an abbreviated greeting used by the early telephone inventors for testing purposes. It just ‘caught on’. Yet, google Kleberg county Texas. They outlawed the word hello, dogmatically ASSUMING it was Satanist. This rant about Dom & Domme is just as silly as those misguided churchies.
Fail. First you say originally everyone used the word dom, then you say that masculine and feminine forms evolved to reduce confusion on BBSs. So, uh, where’s the masculine form of the word dom? Oh that’s right, there isn’t one.
If you want me to publish any further comments of yours, you’re going to have to say something worth the harddrive space on my server. Repeating yourself with more mansplaining douchebaggery is not going to do it.
Well, there is after all some amount of difference between male personnel and female personnel, and most people of whatever orientation or biology relate to males in a somewhat different manner than they relate to females. Thus, if one is identifying one’s self, particularly in our lifestyle, part of that identification tends to include gender of self and so if part of the identification is “I’m a dominant, no really, see it’s right here on my business card” then it also includes male/female/variation thereof. The major problem with “domme” as the proper way to for one to identify as a female-who-is-on-that-end-of-the-leash The problem with dom/domme is not so much that it distinguishes male from female as “it ain’t good English.” Most people think it’s French, which is why they pronounce it as if the last e was a long a, even though it doesn’t have the accent mark over it as it would if it was pronounced that way in French; it doesn’t have the accent because it isn’t a French word at all. It’s actually Portuguese honorific for a titled or elite woman, equivalent to the Spanish dona (which has a tilda over the n). But then, why quibble, since people routinely use the words “dominant” and “submissive” to describe who they are, and these words are actually adjectives not nouns.
So… what you’re saying is that you have nothing useful to add and I should close comments on this post?