The structure of male submissive sexual fantasies: A review of past efforts
A review of past efforts in the exercise of describing and categorizing male submissive sexual fantasies, from the early work of Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld to Baumeister's modern research.
This is part of a series of essays that collectively survey male submissive kinks. Find the Table of contents here.
An attempt at a fresh perspective on the phenomenon of male submissive sexual fantasies has to start by surveying all the different kinks that lie at the heart of sexual arousal in the men who have these fantasies. Any study of the prevalence of the phenomenon and any proposition of a theory to explain it have to be preceded by a thorough description in the first place. Without an accurate description, any further research is doomed to be misguided.
Some researchers have attempted to put some order in the seeming chaos of the submissive fantasies that occupy the erotic imagination of some men, but their efforts fell short of a thorough description and a comprehensive categorization. These past efforts were undoubtedly hindered by the limited availability of sources. The researchers of the past did the best they could with what they had access to.
It is useful to review these past efforts before embarking on a novel descriptive survey based on the new primary sources at our disposal today. Here, I review the sources that past researchers used and I summarize their efforts, with my commentary and criticism.
Pioneers
The scientific study of submissive sexual fantasies started in the late 19th century and was undertaken by a handful of physicians who were mostly European and had diverse professional backgrounds. These pioneer sex researchers shared a common curiosity in all the atypical sexual interests of humans—the paraphilias—that deviated from what was then considered to be the normal sexual psychology of men and women.
One of these “perversions” of the sexual spirit was fantasies of one sex to be subjugated to and humiliated by the other. Several names were proposed for this phenomenon but the one which ultimately survived the test of time was “masochism”. In the pursuit of the scientific study of this phenomenon, the pioneers were severely limited in sources but the headway they made is tremendous when this scarcity is taken into account.
Early sources
The most reliable source at the time was direct communication with people who had submissive sexual fantasies—the masochists, as they came to be called. The overwhelming majority of these masochists who communicated with the early researchers were men. The subject was extremely taboo and female submissive fantasies were even more so given the position of women in society at the time.
Some of these men were patients who sought to be helped by these specialists of sexual deviations. They offered the most direct source: the clinical case history, which contained detailed descriptions of the patient’s fantasies and relevant life experiences, symptoms and maladies, and anything deemed pertinent to the case by the doctor who wrote the report.
These clinical case reports were published in scientific journals and books and circulated among the handful of researchers that were curious about the topic. These publications inevitably came to the attention of a wider public, driven by the prurient curiosity of humans in the sexual deviancies of others. Some of the readers who had submissive sexual fantasies themselves were intrigued enough to start corresponding with the pioneer researchers. These correspondents shared the details of their fantasies and their lived experience and constituted thus another source of information.
There was also the erotic literature of masochism that dealt with the themes of submission and subjugation. Prosecuted as these literary works were in some places, the pioneer researchers took great interest in them, from the stories of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, of which Venus in Furs is the only one that survived the test of time, to the multi-volume forced feminization tale Gynecocracy whose author remained unknown.
The early researchers knew that the men who wrote these literary works were putting their own submissive sexual fantasies in their fiction. Thus, they constituted an important source to be analyzed for clues as to what tickled the erotic fancy of the authors.
Some early researchers also gleaned information from what sexually submissive men requested of prostitutes in brothels. Indeed, it seemed like every such establishment in Europe had its fair share of submissive men among the clientele. In some places, the prostitutes were even instructed on how to satisfy the urges of this peculiar subset of patrons. Nevertheless, this source of information was fleeting given the stigma of the profession at the time.
Finally, researchers sometimes came across second-hand accounts of men with submissive sexual fantasies in the newspapers or had these accounts related to them by others. Although these were not primary sources, they were still useful in the description of novel submissive sexual fantasies.
Taken together, these sources were very limited at the start of the scientific study of this fascinating phenomenon. The description of the content of those fantasies was only beginning, and there was of course no hope at an exhaustive survey. With that said, a lot of headway was made, and most of it was the work of two German physicians.
Krafft-Ebing
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a German psychiatrist who worked in Vienna, was the first to make a lasting impression on the study of submissive sexual fantasies. The name he gave to it—masochism—is the one that survived. He laid down his essential thoughts on the subject in his magnum opus Psychopathia Sexualis.1
Symbolic masochism
The first distinction Krafft-Ebing drew was between sexual fantasies that involved physical pain and those that revolved around humiliation by means other than physical suffering. He called the latter “symbolic masochism”, in the sense that the suffering involved is only symbolic.2
Consider for example a man who fantasizes about being whipped and another who fantasizes about being rejected by a woman. The first has a fantasy of physical suffering; the second, a fantasy of symbolic suffering through the humiliation of rejection.3
Ideal masochism
The second distinction Krafft-Ebing drew was between submissive sexual fantasies that led to attempts at enactment in real life and those that remained wholly in the imagination of the men who had them. He called the latter “ideal masochism”—in the sense of masochism in ideas only and not in action.4
Consider for example the man who simply fantasizes about being whipped and another who seeks to enact his fantasy by instructing a prostitute to carry out the whipping. To Krafft-Ebing, the first man is a case of ideal masochism.
Latent masochism
Furthermore, Krafft-Ebing hypothesized that some paraphilias that do not involve pain, suffering, or humiliation, are actually latent forms of counterpart submissive fantasies. In this “latent masochism” as he called it, the submissive motive remains hidden, unconscious to the man who experiences it.5
For example, consider a man who is sexually aroused by women’s boots but has no associated fantasies of submitting to women or being humiliated by them. According to Krafft-Ebing, this man has a latent submissive sexual fantasy. The submissive motive behind the man’s sexual attraction to boots—the desire to be subjugated to the woman—remains unconscious to the man. In other words, the submissive drive is latent, not manifest, and the boot comes to hold an “independent significance” in the sexual fantasies.6
Commentary
Krafft-Ebing reported a large number of cases of men with submissive sexual fantasies, some of them his own observations, others he cited from his colleagues. He did not, however, attempt to put any order in all the cases he observed based on the themes of the content of the fantasies themselves.
His categorization dealt with other aspects: whether the man sought to enact his fantasies in real life or kept them in his imagination; whether the man fantasized about suffering physical pain or symbolic humiliations; and whether the man was aware of the submissive motive of his sexual fantasies.
Hirschfeld
Magnus Hirschfeld was the other giant of early research into atypical sexual interests. A German physician as well, he was the one who coined the word “transvestite” in reference to the people he studied—mostly men—who derived sexual arousal from cross-dressing.
In his writings on submissive sexual fantasies, Hirschfeld approached the subject from three points of view: the characteristics that the submissive man imagines in the dominating woman; the role he wishes to play in the fantasies; and the nature of the interaction between the two parties and the acts involved.7
The dominant woman
In the preferences that men had for the woman in their submissive fantasies, Hirschfeld noted the physical characteristics, the age requirements, the intellectual qualities, the woman’s status and profession, as well as the items of clothing and the fabrics that played a role in the fantasies.
The submissive man’s roles
In attempting to characterize the different roles that men cast themselves in, Hirschfeld introduced a classification system that identified five different categories. He also noted that these categories were not mutually exclusive, that the submissive man can cast himself in more than one role simultaneously in the same fantasy.
In the first category, which he called servilism, the man’s status is lowered and he is cast in the role of the servant of the mistress or even her slave. This is a prominent theme in male submissive fantasies where the man serves the woman and obeys her.
The second category is puerile masochism,8 which revolves around the lowering of the man’s age, making him a child. Men who have these fantasies like to think of themselves as schoolboys to be scolded and punished by a strict female teacher or as little boys to a mommy figure.
The third category deals with fantasies where the man’s masculinity is degraded to make him more feminine. Hirschfeld called this category transvestic masochism because its most common manifestation is the fantasy of forced feminization where the man is made to cross-dress in female clothes.
The fourth category, zoomimic masochism, groups all the fantasies in which the man is abased to an animal state. Examples of these are the fantasy of being treated like a dog or a puppy, a pet to the woman, and the fantasy of being ridden by her like a horse or a pony, on the man’s back while he walks on all fours.
The fifth and final category is concerned with fantasies of the man’s objectification, that is to say his reduction to an inanimate object. Hirschfeld called this impersonal masochism. The common fantasies in this category are the use of the man as a footstool on which the woman rests her feet, and his use as a human carpet over which the woman walks.
The interaction and the acts
Hirschfeld noted the different aspects that characterized the submissive man’s interaction with the dominant woman as well as the acts involved. These characterizations, as will be seen in what follows, do not form an elegant classification system. They seem to have been simply a compilation of various observations of Hirschfeld’s.
First, the submissive man and the dominant woman connect on the basis of a power dynamic. Second, they often use correspondence as a medium to communicate as the submissive man derives pleasure from writing his fantasies out in letters and reading the replies he gets from the woman. Third, the two parties have a special style of communication in which the woman addresses the man informally and often insults him while he reserves the highest respect in addressing her, often adorned with the usual honorifics of goddess, mistress, etc.
As for the acts imagined to occur between the two parties, these include the man’s desire for a strict education from the woman, his desire to do degrading work for her, and his yearning for her to deprive him of his liberty.
Hirschfeld sought to divide some imagined acts of submissive fantasies according to which of the five senses they elicited. The sense of touch, for example, was reflected in the submissive man’s craving for physical sensations of pain and his desire to be flagellated. The stimulation of the senses of smell and taste was reflected in the man’s erotic excitement in the humiliating acts of sniffing and licking disgusting body parts and of being soiled with filth. The sense of vision was excited by scenes of cruelty and suffering and the anticipation of danger.
The German pioneer also noted some men’s exclusive preference to be in the bottom position in intercourse with their partner (a position called the succubus position at the time) and their inability to perform in the top position (the position considered normal by the standards of the time, the incubus position). He attributed this to masochistic inclinations.
Masked (latent) masochism
Hirschfeld also discussed the possibility that some sexual interests were latent forms of submissive fantasies, what Krafft-Ebing had called latent masochism. Hirschfeld referred to this as “masked” masochism.9
Automasochism
He also drew one more distinction in masochism to account for self-inflicted acts of suffering. Indeed, in seeking to enact their fantasies of pain, some men inflict it on themselves. For example, a man can spank himself and derive sexual pleasure, possibly sustaining in his erotic imagination the image of his discipline by a domineering woman that administers the spanking. Hirschfeld coined the expression “automasochism” for such acts that are self-inflicted in the course of sexual arousal by submissive fantasies.10
Commentary
Hirschfeld was certainly the first to closely examine all the different facets of the submissive sexual fantasies of men. He had a deep understanding of this phenomenon and his description of it is undoubtedly the most complete and the most insightful of his time.
Hirschfeld’s classification system for the different roles that the man can take in submissive fantasies was the first piece of the puzzle in investigating the content of the fantasies. Some of the material in his attempt at classifying the acts involved according to which of the five senses they elicited was the second piece. This was truly the first effort in organizing the ideas, themes, and acts that formed the content of the submissive sexual fantasies of men.
Nonetheless, Hirschfeld fell short of proposing an elegant system that comprehensively describes all the richness and variety of that content. He, like Krafft-Ebing before him, was limited in his sources, and therefore could only have an incomplete knowledge of the submissive sexual fantasies of men. But even with this limited knowledge, his insight was penetrating and his work truly remarkable.
Unfortunately, the monograph in which he expounded these ideas, the Sexualpathologie in three volumes, was only translated to English in an abridged edition that eliminated all the fascinating discussion of the various aspects of submissive sexual fantasies.11 It is therefore no surprise that his classification systems were forgotten by later researchers.
Modern day
Since the days of the pioneers at the turn of the century, there has surprisingly not been much effort in the classification of submissive sexual fantasies. It seems like the question of the description of the phenomenon ceased to be interesting, and most of the published work was by psychoanalysts who were consumed in the fairy tales they spun out of thin air. Nevertheless, interesting new sources were becoming available.
Modern sources
In the late 20th century, the sexual liberation in the west led to the proliferation of sex clubs that catered to what came to be called sadomasochism, or S&M for short. That subculture provided a source of information for researchers interested in the phenomenon of submissive sexual fantasies.
A plethora of books was published during this period, containing detailed descriptions of the practices that went on in those S&M clubs, gleaned from first-hand observation, second-hand accounts, and personal interviews with the club members. That kind of research was fine for the study of that particular group of people as a subculture, but it was not useful in furthering the scientific understanding of the phenomenon of submissive sexual fantasies.
The phenomenon itself is mental in the first place: men in the general population have submissive sexual fantasies, and it is only a small minority of them that participates in S&M clubs. Expecting to study submissive sexual fantasies through the practices of S&M clubs is akin to trying to learn more about the human relationships of college students through the study of fraternities. The problem in both cases is that of a biased sample.
In parallel with those societal developments, the job of the professional dominatrix evolved and these elusive women became more readily available to researchers for interview. These women exclusively catered to the satisfaction of male submissive sexual desires for a living, and they therefore knew something about what those types of men desired.
The problem lies again in the degree of representativity of that sample of men who have recourse to the services of professional dominatrices. It is also biased. Most men who have submissive sexual fantasies in the general population do not frequent dominatrices for gratification. As those services are expensive, only those men with the requisite resources can afford such a luxury, and only a minority of this minority decided to actively pursue such activities.
Another development that facilitated research into submissive sexual fantasies was the rise of sex magazines like Penthouse and Playboy. These magazines allowed readers to submit anonymous letters of their erotic fantasies or alleged sexual exploits, and some of these magazines reserved sections exclusively for themes of domination and submission.
These erotic letters were interesting to peruse under the assumption that they truly originated from readers who were putting their personal sexual interests in writing. As a source, however, it was still limited by the same problem of bias. Nonetheless, it was the source that Baumeister relied on in his investigation of the content of submissive sexual fantasies.
Baumeister
In the late 20th century, the American psychologist Roy Baumeister took an interest in submissive sexual fantasies. In a series of publications, he studied the phenomenon and advanced his own theories of it, culminating in the writing of a book that compiled all that research.12
Three essential features
He proposed three elements at the core of submissive sexual fantasies: “receiving pain; relinquishing control through bondage, rules, commands, or other means; and embarrassment or humiliation”.13 Baumeister observed that one of these elements had to be present in sexual masochism but the three were not exclusive. Indeed, submissive sexual fantasies can and often do incorporate two or even all three simultaneously.
In this simple categorization, Baumeister went on to describe the submissive sexual fantasies of men and women, basing his research almost exclusively on erotic letters submitted to a sex magazine. Aside from his initial distinction of the three essential features of pain, loss of control, and humiliation, he did not attempt to put any order in the fantasies he compiled.
Commentary
Baumeister is undoubtedly the only one to make a dent in the study of submissive sexual fantasies since the time of the pioneers, but it seems that he was not very familiar with that obscure early research. Every researcher knows about Krafft-Ebing’s description of masochism in the Psychopathia Sexualis, but it is very rare to find in the literature someone who cites Hirschfeld’s insightful work, and Baumeister is no exception.
In his defense, however, the circumstances were not favorable in his time: he worked in the 1980s in the age before the ease of access afforded by the internet and the tremendous efforts of digitizing old books. Even if Baumeister knew about Hirschfeld’s work and could somehow get his hands on it, he would still have had to contend with the language problem—assuming he did not speak German—as those interesting parts of Hirschfeld’s work were never translated into English.
Perhaps even if he were acquainted with Hirschfeld’s classification system, Baumeister would still have contented himself with his reduction of submissive sexual fantasies to three features. In any case, it is certain that submissive sexual fantasies have a structure that is more complex than that. Such a structure is better described by a finer classification system, one that is conceived in the same spirit as Hirschfeld’s.
Today
Given that sources of information were very limited in the past, it is no surprise that there has not been much success in thoroughly categorizing the submissive sexual fantasies of men. In fact, it seems that after Hirschfeld, nobody even thought it worthwhile to conceive a structure in the seeming chaos of these fantasies.
The most successful effort, ironically, is still the first one: the classification systems of Hirschfeld in the early 20th century. Therefore, we have to pick up where Hirschfeld left off. We have to reclaim his work from the forgotten pages of history and bring it up to date to the present.14
Today, new sources are at our disposal with the internet. By drawing on this material, great strides can be taken in the scientific study of the phenomenon of men’s submissive sexual fantasies. This is what motivated me in undertaking this project of exhaustively describing and categorizing these fantasies.
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The line art in this essay’s card is by Georgian artist Dorian Chelios.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. (1965). Psychopathia Sexualis. Translated by Franklin S. Klaf from the twelfth German edition. Stein and Day. (Originally published in 1886.)
“At any rate, there is a whole group of masochists who satisfy themselves with the symbolic representations of situations corresponding with their perversion [...] in which the acts desired and planned by the masochists have a purely symbolic character [...].” Ibid., p. 106. Emphasis in original.
Dimitri von Stefanowsky, who described masochism some years before Krafft-Ebing, calling it “passivism”, also drew the distinction between the mental and the physical forms. Stefanowsky, Dimitry. (1892). Le passivisme. Archives de l'anthropologie criminelle, 7, 294–298.
“In [ideal masochism,] the psychical perversion remains entirely within the spheres of imagination and fancy, and no attempt at realization is made.” Krafft-Ebing, op. cit., p. 107.
“Such cases are numerous in which, within a fully developed circle of masochistic ideas, the foot and the shoe or boot of a woman, conceived as a means of humiliation, have become the objects of special sexual interest. Through numerous degrees that are easily discriminated they form the demonstrable transition to other cases in which the masochistic inclinations retreat more and more to the background, and little by little pass beyond the threshold of consciousness, while the interest in women's shoes, apparently absolutely inexplicable, alone remains in consciousness.” Ibid., p. 115.
Krafft-Ebing only settled on “latent masochism” in later editions of Psychopathia Sexualis. He had initially used the expression “abortive masochism” (abortiven Masochismus), where “abortive” is meant in the biological sense of “not fully developed”. This carries a slightly different connotation from “latent”. Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. (1890). Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia sexualis: Eine medizinisch-psychologische Studie. Verlag von Ferdinand Enke. p. 7.
Hirschfeld, Magnus. (1918). Sexualpathologie: Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende. Zweiter Teil: Sexuelle Zwischenstufen. A. Marcus & E. Webers Verlag, pp. 237–251.
In naming these categories, Hirschfeld actually used the word “metatropism” instead of “masochism”. His view was that men’s sexuality was naturally active and women’s sexuality naturally passive. This normal state, he called “sexual tropism”. Masochism—sexual fantasies of humiliation and suffering—was therefore an exaggeration of the female nature to be sexually passive. As such, a masochistic man had a reversal of the sexual tropism, hence metatropism. In this text, I stick to the word masochism to avoid confusing the reader.
In the original German, Krafft-Ebing used “abortiven” then “larvierter" while Hirschfeld mostly used “verkappter”.
Hirschfeld, op. cit., pp. 190–191.
The only translation I know of is Hirschfeld, Magnus. (1932). Sexual Pathology, Being a Study of the Abnormalities of the Sexual Functions. Translated by Jerome Gibbs from the German. Julian Press. (Originally published in 1917–1920.)
Baumeister, Roy F. (1989). Masochism and the Self. Psychology Press.
Ibid., p. 3.
As I was not familiar with Hirschfeld’s work at first, I arrived at my own classification system independently. It was only in retrospect, after discovering Hirschfeld’s forgotten work, that I realized that he had already contributed in the same direction and that he had many of the same ideas.