Dominatrix

I don’t use the word dominatrix on this blog very often. In fact, WordPress tells me that this is the first post I’ve ever written with that particular title. Given that this is post number 2,334 on a blog exclusively about female domination, I find that kind of amazing.

While I generally prefer the word ‘domme’, which carries less cultural baggage, it’s undoubtedly true that ‘dominatrix’ is the word the mainstream world most strongly associates with femdom.  But do you know where the modern usage derives from?

The word itself can be traced back to the 16th century. However, the original usage wasn’t sexual or related to kink at all. It simply referred to domination in the broadest possible sense. For example, a book from 1852 referred to France’s Napoleon as having been the dominatrix of Europe. Voltaire described destiny as the dominatrix of the gods, as the gods are of the world. Cassell’s Latin dictionary from 1892 defines a dominatrix as a woman who governs or rules (e.g. a town). 

The first usage in the modern sense is a very surprising and obscure one. According to ‘The History & Arts of the Dominatrix‘ it was in a pulp paperback by Bruce Rogers called ‘The Bizarre Lovermakers’ published in 1967.  Until I came to research this post I’d never heard of either that book or its author. A year later it was used as the title of a Myron Kosloff and Eric Stanton book, and then more broadly popularized in  the 1976 porn film ‘Dominatrix Without Mercy‘. If you look at the usage of the word on Google books, it was very obscure until the late 1970’s, and then suddenly bursts into popularity through the 80’s and 90’s.

I think I’d always subconsciously assumed that dominatrix had a similar etymology as sadism and masochism. i.e. Coined by a well known author in a classic book from the 18th or 19th century.  In actuality it was given its modern twist by an obscure pulp novelist from the 1960’s.