Analysis: The Reality of the Femdom "Ratio"

05 Jan, 2026

The Femdom Ratio: A Meta-Analysis

TL;DR: I've collated some data that counters some of the most outlandish claims about femdom interest and dating.

I've been reading and studying online spaces dedicated to sexuality and kink for many years now. In these spaces, I often see a particular negative reaction to the idea of femdom. One of two main claims are usually made:

1. The claim that "femdom doesn't exist outside of porn" (the "denial" claim)
2. The claim that "women don't like this, it's only a male fantasy" (the "no-dommes" claim)

The no-dommes claim is the more pernicious one, because it is less easily disproven. It takes many forms but a key focus is the dreaded "ratio" of subs to dommes – the result is often to make subs feel like they are aberrant fantasists chasing a vanishingly small number of female dommes, or conversely, to make dommes feel they are being objectified by an army of horny men in search of a kink dispenser.

I've seen some crazy "ratios" suggested. On reddit's femdom community space, I saw someone say it was 100:1 in favour of men! Even mainstream publications sometimes publish similar nonsense. This article from Psychology Today has been posted a lot on reddit and elsewhere. It suggests that 96% of women into BDSM activities are subs (!!) for a femdom ratio of over 6:1 sub men : domme women.

I sensed a gap in the market for a comprehensive and (semi-) scientific review of the claims above. As far as I can tell, not many people have done this, so I thought I would collate some evidence here. I've done my best to construct a sort of meta-analysis, but there is a real paucity of good data. I'll start with the weaker internet data, and then move on to peer-reviewed studies.

All studies cited have full details in the "References" section.

Internet Data: Aella's Surveys

For those who don't know, Aella is a sex worker who runs informal studies on human sexuality. The one huge advantage her surveys have is that she has phenomenal reach – the sample sizes are great. Whether they are representative is another matter (I heartily suspect not), but in terms of raw numbers they dwarf any other kink research that I know of. An unfortunate drawback is that they don't break out by sexuality, that's a limitation we're going to have to live with.

Let's review three of her datasets: the big kink survey, the BDSM types survey, and the porn preferences survey. (Most of the raw data is not available so I have had to summarize from finalized graphs and charts on occasion).

Big kink survey: Massive sample size, it's now in the hundreds of thousands but I'm not sure how large it was when this snapshot of the raw data was taken. 12% of women fantasize about being dominant, 21% of men fantasise about being submissive. Assuming heterosexuality: ratio of 1.75:1 men:women.

BDSM types survey: This one looks only at BDSM-identified people. Most people in this sample are switches! Ratio of sub+switch men to dom+switch women (i.e. a theoretical ratio of "anyone interested in femdom") is low at 1.22:1. More men took the survey so I have normalised to sample size, i.e. assumed equal BDSM interest in general.

Porn preferences survey: This one looks at consumers of erotica only. It was striking for how vanilla the sample seems to be in general. Annoyingly, it doesn't differentiate between "switch" and "no interest in BDSM", so I have had to calculate the ratio only on participants who expressed a preference one way or the other. Cis men: 19% submissive, Cis women: 10% dominant. Ratio: 1.9:1.

Overall impression from the Aella surveys:

• Femdom interest is a minority interest but a significant one, with both "general" surveys suggesting about 15% overall interest. For reference, this is 4-5x higher than the proportion of the UK population who identify as Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual (3.3%).
• The ratio of sub men to domme women does not exceed 2:1 in any of the three surveys. For context, in these surveys, there is also a ratio of between 1:1 and 2:1 for the opposite scenario of dom men to sub women (though lower on average). This suggests there is a general top shortage which is not unique to femdom activities.

Update for 2026 - Aella has subsequently confirmed both on her blog and on twitter that her internal data shows a ratio between 1.5 and 2:1 for both F/m and M/f pairings.

Additional note: Aella has now released her Big Kink Survey data online. The weighted data shows significantly higher interest numbers than reported here - this article is pending update to include them.

Academic Studies

Most of these have the opposite problem to Aella's surveys. They have a more representative sample, but a much lower sample size. Sadly, very high-quality kink data doesn't exist! Let's do our best and analyse anyway.

Joyal et al. (2015) – This one is paywalled so I'm gleaning the summary from articles about it. Sample size: 1,500. 53.3% of men reported fantasies about being dominated sexually, and 46.7% of women reported fantasies about dominating someone sexually, so generally very high interest, much higher than the Aella surveys. Assuming heterosexuality, ratio of 1.1:1.

Jozifkova (2018) – Sample size: 673 heterosexual people from the Czech Republic. Almost half of men and 60% of women were not at all aroused by power dynamics in this sample. 8.5% of women are dom or switch. 22.3% of men are sub or switch. Ratio of 2.6:1 femdom interest. Interestingly the sub-only to domme-only ratio (i.e. excluding switches) is below 2:1 but the low sample size introduces way too much noise for meaningful analysis.

This study is more valuable for the comparisons it makes with previous studies.

It compares against a previous study by the same author with a higher sample size (2006, n = approx. 1400). This one finds the same proportion of people not aroused at all by power dynamics. But super interestingly, it actually finds a ratio of less than 1 for sub men:domme women. Men: 13.8%, Women: 19.8% for a ratio of 0.7:1. This study is interesting because rather than asking whether participants identified as dominant or submissive, it asked them to click on which picture aroused them most out of a femdom and maledom image ("neither" and an image depicting same-sex acts were also options).

Both studies average at about 15% general interest as previously seen in the Aella data.

There is finally consideration of a prior survey by Dutch authors (n = approx 1000) which considers only BDSM participants. This one finds a high interest in femdom (approx 25% for women, approx 50% for men) for a 2:1 ratio.

Holvoet et al. (2017) – This study was on a representative sample of the general population in Belgium (n = approx 1000). This study questioned participants primarily on acts rather than self-identification (i.e. "I have fantasized about my partner kneeling before me" rather than "I identify as dominant").

The study found high interest in BDSM activities in general, though few participants identified as BDSM practitioners.

• 21.8% of men fantasized about submissive acts and 41.0% had actually practiced one, for a total of 62.8% submissive interest.
• 18.8% of women fantasized about dominant acts and 40.2 had actually practiced one, for a total of 59% dominant interest.
• Total femdom interest around 60% (!!) and pretty much equal ratio (1.06:1).

Like in the second Josifkova study (2006), testing specific acts or relationships rather than BDSM self-identification resulted in a surprising gender ratio (equal in this study, female-weighted in the other). Both of these studies also showed low to no difference in preference between femdom and maledom activities. This implies that either (1) many women have a negative perception of femdom as a BDSM practice (possibly associating it with leather/dominatrix jokes common in TV and movies) and prefer not to associate with it, or (2) they don't realize the acts they enjoy and practice could be considered femdom.

Update for 2026

Since I wrote the original post, I've read three extra studies which are relevant to this article. Two of these are not specifically about "BDSM" but rather "rough sex" – or deregulated BDSM, if you will – which I still think are pertinent for our purposes of exploring general sexual behaviour inside and outside the BDSM community.

Herbenick et al. (2025) – Very large sample size (n = 9029) and a nationally representative sample of US adults. Focused on a selection of rough sex behaviours (as opposed to fantasies) – namely, hair pulling, biting, face slapping, genital slapping, light spanking, hard spanking, choking, punching, name-calling, and smothering.

It's useful because it separates out by gender, age, and sexual orientation (though frustratingly, not all at the same time… some of the analyses are limited to gender+age only, others to gender+orientation).

Since this is a study of actual behaviour (as opposed to desire/fantasy) we can't calculate an accurate ratio from this data alone. But it certainly illustrates that femdom practice is in no way rare; shown below is the reporting rate of femdom behaviour for heterosexual men and women, and then a comparison again the reporting rate for maledom behaviour.

The age data (undifferentiated by orientation) implies prevalence of all rough sex acts is much higher for the under-40s than the overs.

One other notable thing about this survey: the orientation data shows that participants identifying as heterosexual were way less kinky than bisexual or homosexual participants. Only 6.3% of heterosexual men and 13% of heterosexual women had ever been choked – that rose to 21.3% for gay men, and 55% (!!) for bisexual women.

Sharman et al. (2024) – Decent sample size (n = 4702) of Australians aged 18-35, contacted via online survey. This survey is specifically about choking and strangulation during sex. The full data for this survey isn't available in the article, but trends by orientation seem to roughly follow Herbenick et al (2025), with heterosexual participants showing the lowest strangulation rates and bisexual women again reporting the highest. Prevalence in general is much higher, owing to the younger demographic.

For prevalence of strangling in the femdom direction among heterosexual participants, we see a fair gap between men and women. I'm not sure why this would be – perhaps there are a smaller number of chad dommes working their way through the subs of Australia, or perhaps it is bisexual women strangling the men? But limited to strict heterosexuality, 38.9% of straight women report having strangled a partner, and 50% of straight men report having been strangled.

The study also measured enjoyment of being strangled (as a mean of a Likert scale). Straight women: a mean of 3.28 score for "enjoyed strangling". Straight men: a mean of 3.34 for "enjoyed being strangled". So among practitioners, we have an equal enjoyment ratio, suggesting this isn't just because male subs are pressuring their partners into femdom activity.

von Andrian-Werburg et al. (2023) – Study with a "diverse" sample of n = 1338 heterosexual and bisexual participants from Germany. However, the sample is not representative – it was a convenience sample of internet users.

This is a slightly odd one and I won't spend too much time on it. The main focus was not on prevalence of BDSM interest but on the "clustering" of different sexual fantasy types. However, there are a couple of interesting findings in here.

This sample of both men and women fantasised more about tying someone else up than being tied up themselves. For women: the rating average of a Likert 1-5 scale was 1.98 arousal for the active/dominant fantasy, and only 1.49 for the passive/submissive fantasy. Men showed the same dominant lean but to a lesser extent (1.97 D vs 1.72 S).

When measuring actual behaviour, the ratios held but the women reported notably lower real-life experience (Men: 1.59 D/1.39 S; Women: 1.40 D/1.27 S).

Enthusiasm for BDSM acts across the whole sample was clearly low.

Conclusions

Femdom definitely does exist outside of porn. In its strictest BDSM sense there seems to be a floor of around 15% of the population interested. When defined more loosely in terms of sexual acts rather than role identification, this balloons to half or more of the general population. Interest in femdom-directed "rough sex" seems particularly high in younger generations.

The gender ratio is nowhere near as extreme as depicted and there may not be a disparity at all. When defined in a BDSM sense, the ratio tends to hover between one and two subs for every domme. With the loose definition, the ratio basically disappears entirely, or in one case (Josifkova 2006) goes into reverse. The data shows that the proportion of switches has been way underestimated which confounds things further.

Additional Personal Thoughts

A ratio does exist, but it should be more properly known as the "top shortage" that also exists in gay/lesbian communities as well as maledom dynamics. I don't believe the BDSM community is the best place for anyone to find a partner and especially not submissive men. Higher male willingness to get involved in BDSM as a community (and general libido) means that the maledom top shortage is masked, and the femdom top shortage is amplified.

It's more useful to view femdom as a bunch of related acts rather than an identity. There also seems to be far less stigma attached to individual sex acts and fantasies than to "femdom" as an idea, which I strongly suspect is related to negative mass media depiction.

References

Academic Studies

Joyal, Cossette & Lapierre (2015)
Joyal, C. C., Cossette, A., & Lapierre, V. (2015). What exactly is an unusual sexual fantasy? Journal of Sexual Medicine, 12(2), 328–340. DOI: 10.1111/jsm.12734
Link

Jozifkova (2018)
Jozifkova, E. (2018). Sexual arousal by dominance and submissiveness in the general population: How many, how strongly, and why? Deviant Behavior, 39(9), 1229–1243.
Link

Jozifkova & Flegr (2006)
Jozifkova, E., & Flegr, J. (2006). Dominance, submissivity (and homosexuality) in general population: Testing of evolutionary hypothesis of sadomasochism by internet-trap-method. Neuroendocrinology Letters, 27(6), 711–718. PMID: 17187017

Holvoet et al. (2017)
Holvoet, L., Huys, W., Coppens, V., Seeuws, J., Goethals, K., & Morrens, M. (2017). Fifty shades of Belgian gray: The prevalence of BDSM-related fantasies and activities in the general population. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 14(9), 1152–1159. DOI: 10.1016/j.jsxm.2017.07.003
Link

Wismeijer & van Assen (2013)
Wismeijer, A. A. J., & van Assen, M. A. L. M. (2013). Psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 10(8), 1943–1952. DOI: 10.1111/jsm.12192

Herbenick et al. (2025)
Herbenick, D., Fu, T.-C., Chen, X., Ali, S., Simić Stanojević, I., Hensel, D. J., Wright, P. J., Peterson, Z. D., Harezlak, J., & Dennis, B. (2025). Prevalence and demographic correlates of "rough sex" behaviors: Findings from a U.S. nationally representative survey of adults ages 18–94 years. Archives of Sexual Behavior. DOI: 10.1007/s10508-025-03245-9
Link

Sharman, Fitzgerald & Douglas (2024)
Sharman, L. S., Fitzgerald, R., & Douglas, H. (2024). Prevalence of sexual strangulation/choking among Australian 18–35 year-olds. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 54(2), 465–480. DOI: 10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y
Link

von Andrian-Werburg, Klopp & Schwab (2023)
von Andrian-Werburg, M. T. P., Klopp, E., & Schwab, F. (2024). Fantasy made flesh: A network analysis of the reciprocal relationship between sexual fantasies, pornography usage, and sexual behavior. Journal of Sex Research, 61(1), 65–79. DOI: 10.1080/00224499.2023.2170964
Link

Internet/Informal Data Sources (Aella)

Aella — Big Kink Survey
Raw data

Aella — BDSM Types Survey
Link

Aella — Porn Preferences Survey
Link

Other Sources

Psychology Today article
Scott McGreal, "Unique—Like Everybody Else" blog, February 2015
Link