Can We Please Stop the “Subs outnumber Dommes” myth? The ratio between subs and Dommes is a lot closer than many claim.
It’s all too frequent that there is someone who will harp on about “the ratio” – how there are 10, 100, 1000 sub men to every Domme – how is anyone supposed to have a chance?
What if I told you, the actual ratio between subs and Dommes is 1.6 sub men to every Domme?
You wouldn’t believe me? Would question my source?
What is that, you ask? Why. Someone used data scrapers to get statistics from Fetlife users.
Now, it’s not perfect – but the closest we’ll get to more accurate figures.
HOW THE DATA IS OBTAINED
To firstly explain the dataset that had been used.
The scraper looked for profiles that were ‘active’ i.e. appeared to have been online in the past month. This is good because it disregards the whole dormant arguments. However, will exclude some in error, for example if someone has logged on but only used closed groups, DMs, or friends-only posts. It may also include someone who sent a friend request months ago and has only just accepted.
But also, if someone was a Mistress, and then stops using Fetlife, they don’t stop being a Mistress.
It also doesn’t include people who have deliberately downplayed their role, for example subs who are really switches but don’t wish to have ‘be my Domme’ messages.
The other issue of course is that roles on Fetlife are user-defined.
There are, for example, 20 profiles listed as Male who have their role as Mistress. I’m not one to judge but it suggests this is to troll or in error.
However, we could assume the majority of the 4547 women who list Mistress as their role are not trolling, or in error.
The other thing of course is that the community doesn’t start and end with Fetlife and there are many people who are not on there for assorted reasons and that doesn’t negate their Dominance/submission/etc.
However, you could use the whole figures as a “we surveyed 313,128 people who were on a kink website and here is what they told us….”
And that IS a large dataset. One good to find the ratio between subs and Dommes.
BREAKING DOWN THE HIGH LEVEL FIGURES
The top level of course is by gender.
56.8% (179,419) are listed as male 36.4% (115,194) are listed as female.
The rest is a much lower percentage. While not insignificant – the other figures are much lower.
While 56.8% versus 36.4% feels like a big gap – in reality it is 1.55 men for every woman. Not a huge ratio.
Of course this ‘ratio’ narrows further if the guy was including people who were trans in their interests, or any form of feminine-presenting gender-non-conforming.
For the sake of this post I’m going to work based on profiles listed as Male versus profiles listed as female.
Getting into sexuality can also be a little messy.
So as this is going to have a cishet bias (sorry!) men who are straight, bi, heteroflexible, pan, flux are 166,411 (92.7% of men) women in the same are 105,967 (91.9% of women) this does drift slightly, so for any woman who is likely to be interested in men, it is 1.57 men who are likely to be interested in women. But this isn’t yet the ratio between subs and Dommes.
SO WHAT IS THE RATIO BETWEEN SUBS AND DOMMES?
So now to the crunch.
Surely at this point particularly sub guys are going to be assuming all the women are subs.
I guess at a simplest – male subs – 16133, Female Dommes 5854 – now that looks like a 3/1 ration – but there are 4547 who prefer Mistress to Domme, and that comes back in to 1.6
Of course it might be of course sub guys prefer slave so let’s add these up.
Men who are: Switch, Sub, Slave, Bottom, Brat, Masochist is 55163
Now this leaves off things which could also suggest they may enjoy sub play including Ageplayer, Sadomasochist, Kinkster, Hedonist to include those brings it to 89080
Women who are: Switch, Dom, Master, Domme, Mistress, Top, Sadist is 34208 (1.6 men to every woman based on list one)
and if we add things which could suggest they enjoy Dominant play – Kinkster, Fetishist, Sadomasochist – 44659 – then and only then does the ratio between subs and Dommes become 2 guys to every woman.
So no matter how much I try, try, try to get a combination which proves a ratio – without dishonestly omitting people I cannot make the ratio between subs and Dommes any ‘greater’ than 2 to 1.
You also can’t adjust “they might not be interested in men” without also adjusting the men who might not be interested in women – and the closeness of those figures barely moves the marker. The ratio between subs and Dommes remains pretty static there.
I guess perhaps the other one is when you get into how many are already in a relationship, are mono/poly/etc but then this applies to men also. That is a difficult variable but doesn’t negate the volumes.
THE FINAL ARGUMENTS
So this leaves guys typically with just one more argument.
“They all want money, to sell on OnlyFans, blah blah”
First off, if someone is (also) a Pro Domme or has any form of selling account, this does not negate if they are Dominant or not. A Dominant who works professionally does not reduce the ratio between subs and Dommes.
Perhaps a slight issue is that data is unavailable for how many accounts are, for example, commercial.
However this is something which is likely to *feel* worse than the reality.
So for example people selling are more likely to be posting more often.
If you send a lazy message to 100 people then people not interested might not reply, but people going “We can chat on OnlyFans” might.
It would be interesting to have this data, but again, wouldn’t negate the above.
And guys will argue again “they’re not really Dominant, just acting that way for money”
Which then is like, big sigh.
With two points. Like, are you really submissive (etc) or does just the thought of women doing certain things to you make your dick hard? Because maybe the problem here is that you present as submissive but everyone can see you’re not.
Or, I dunno. If you went out, met a nice lady, then opened up about fetishes or fantasies and she was like, “Oh, that could be fun”. Maybe you like leather and she has leather gloves she doesn’t mind using during sex.
Or she doesn’t mind the idea of you dressing up. Or she’s open to (and enjoys) you worshipping her feet – and so on.
Is she “really a Domme”? Does it even matter?
But before I go way off topic, this is the big issue that guys will spend a lot of time arguing someone is “not really” a Dominant in order to discard the actual figures in front of them (good old ‘No True Scotsman Fallacy’) without actually assessing if they themselves are really a submissive?
The reality is there is nowhere near the shortage of Dominants that some men like to claim. The ratio between subs and Dommes doesn’t really exist as a gulf.
That they can’t ultimately get the play they crave, does sound like the real problem can be found within. Luckily, I do have some advice.
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