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[disclaimer: I might be reading past you, given some other discussions you put forward separating this-category-objection from stuff like hotwifing or stag-and-vixen or other sub/dom-themed-but-not-matching kinks. I've tried to trim this down so it isn't a tl;dr of completely missing your point if so, but I apologize if I did in fact just miss your point.]
If you're just saying the physics, biology, and psychology aren't friendly to it, I'll agree with and go further than that. Even if you go looking for a power bottom, male or female, the relevant mucus membranes in question get tired out a lot faster than a top will get chaffed; if you go looking to get pegged, the artificiality of a sex toy is practically small fries compared to how quickly even fit women tire of thrusting; if you want to get beaten black-and-blue, it's actually a pretty big psychological ask for the person with the flogger. For some stuff, there's not even the potential for direct interplay: there are definitely women pegging tops who match pretty well philosophically with male subs, but a male foot fetish sub and a female foot domme are usually looking for entirely different things.
But I don't think "a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial" is the only, or even most common, response.
((Hell, I'm not convinced it's even the most common source of denial fetish, though it probably is top for heterosexual men.))
That class does exists: the whole self-flaggelating 'hit me because my boner is evil' thing does happen sometimes, the human pet who's about getting stuffed into a cage and ignored, the guys who are into chastity not because the denial or test makes the sex hotter but because it's about being desexualized or unmanned, the cuckolds that are only visible in the scene to make sure they're not getting off or pathetic for getting off, so on. There's some finesse about whether the influencers are 'deliberately' inflaming the kink, rather inflaming the treatment of heterosexual male desire as fundamentally unhealthy, but to be fair that's somewhere between asking about how many angels dance on the head of a pin and tomato-tomatoe sorta difference.
So I'm definitely not debating whether it's present or got that directionality, or that (most) of it is unhealthy.
I'm skeptical that it's massive, growing, or that common. I can understand why it feels that way, given the tendency for media involving this genre to end up shoved into random unrelated spaces, to be extremely off-putting, and to be hard to avoid without getting exposed to the off-putting parts.
The numbers are a good deal more complicated. That's with the caveat that statistics aren't very available or reliable, as evidenced by anyone taking Aella seriously, and what statistics are available merge stuff that's clearly inside the category as from outside. But we don't see cuckolding or male humiliation overtaking a lot of more mainstream kinks, or even weirder kinks that act as sublimation of prohibited desire for sex, on sites specifically focused around fantasy.
That's not quite the fantasy. There's a fair argument that this is incredibly 'safe horny' - it's not quite 'step on me' bad, but it's still pretty intentionally portrayed so that the man's sexuality is 'blameless' or 'victimized' - but it's still recognizing the male as an object of desire, if sometimes a lopsided or goofy one. This is not a video written from any perspective but androphilia and value-of-men, even if it's also very much not going to have the man top afterward.
That's not common, from either side. It can still be psychosexually weird: the full service sub wants to prove himself 'worthy of sex' by doing chores, human pets want to prove themselves a good boy (and get weird about those literal words) as a way of replacing or burying inhibitions, the guys who need to be bound so their second thoughts don't fuck over their boner. Hell, there's a not-undeserved reputation for het male subs as selfish because they have a sexual script centering around them and their orgasm even as they're 'worshipping' a woman in ways that require her to bend over backwards.
((Not always literally, but the figurative parts can be worse. Yoga has nothing on what a foot fetishist demands of their 'tops', and asking a loved one of any gender to hit you hard is a psychologically big ask!))
This class exists, but I'd caution that they're going to be overrepresented in both the literature and in the markets (for lemon reasons).
There's a lot of psychosexually weird stuff that favors femdom. A bound sub is 'unthreatening', and there's a lot of reasons women find that a lot easier to get or stay in the mood. Bruises and cuts and piercings are a way of making a male sub 'yours, irrecoverably', and women don't have to be so possesive as to be mentally ill to want that. Chastity can be a way of making sure everything he does, he does for you, and then after-orgasm overstimulation can get a guy to do the funnest and most attractive motions imaginable. Pretty much every pegging top I've run into frames it as a trust and vulnerability thing. A guy in an uncomfortable pose that needs you to make control the situation... needs you, that's not rocket science. A leash is a fulcrum, a blindfold is a way to drive focus.
There's a mismatch even when this comes up - just like the foot kink, these aren't mirrors of their sub variants and especially not of their male sub variants - but it's more subtle than the numbers alone.
You offer some degenerate forms of these motivations, and I recognize they exist and happen, but this is also... just kinda how relationships work?
I don't want to overstate that. Presumably someone on this planet has encountered a perfect mirror to their own desires and interests in every way. But for everyone else, a good relationship necessarily means growing to work with your partner, and making compromises to meet their needs, and spelling out compromises so they know how to meet yours.
There's a significant discrepancy in what gender prefers sex in the morning or evening. If you're in a het relationship you're more likely than not going to end up not matching on that. It's nothing that gets spelled out on online hookups, or tested by matchmakers, or shows up on people's bumper stickers, or in Seinfield. Often it's not even something that's an explicit discussion. It's just something that's gotta be handled.
Kink mismatches don't have to turn into something broken. The median form of #2 probably doesn't look like a big heart-to-heart conversation filled with therapy speak, but the boring 'hey, could we try X', 'doesn't tickle my pickle, but seeing what it does to you is kinda fun' is actually pretty enjoyable from the latter perspective, and while it doesn't necessarily turn into liking the kink on its own, for some people it can. The median form of #3 might not be 'real' domination in the same sense as someone that someone who had Feelings from the first time they saw a cartoon character tied to a railroad, but there's a lot of male subs for whom 'I order you to go down on me' is a not-that-briar-patch moment and it's a perfectly reasonable exchange for them.
That's not just or even primarily a sex thing. What's the Proper way to load a dishwasher? Because if you live with someone long enough, you'll pretty quickly find that there's a million ways to do it wrong. Does the responsibility for cleaning out the laundry lint trap fall on the person removing the clean clothes, or the one putting in dry ones? I'd never have tried FFXIV if my SO didn't get me into it and probably never would have liked it without that had anyone else tried; that doesn't make it bad. (The same SO also liked Alien: Prometheus, so we can definitely declare that Pavlov is definitely not mind-control here.)
Yeah, especially the central cases, will agree here. It's not the only motivation for kink, but it's definitely a major part and probably in the top three for femsubs (and I could believe it beats masochism-as-learnt-response and submission-as-permission-structure).
I'll quibble that most 'breeding' as a kink is more about primal and unprotected sex (to the point where 'no pregnant, only breed' is a snowclone). 'Free use' is typically more about sublimating the need for explicitly saying 'yes', but they're desperately afraid of that for traditionalist, status, and feminist reasons, too. There's a literal women-as-livestock version, but it's not particularly common.
((I think pregnancy kink and 'stuck' kink are probably overrepresented as a woman's extreme kink? But they're pretty far from top-ten as extreme women's kinks go.))
But my bigger objection is that I don't think it's fully about fear, or at least fear alone. There's a lot of people who have complicated feelings about motherhood and have a impregnation kink, but it seems like the overwhelming do need to have at least a complicated feeling on the matter; with fear and some other consideration, even if not a consideration you'd ever want to go with. If you just hate it, even the more fatalistic women just have backup plans.
Yeah, that's reasonable, and I agree. You don't get vore fantasies from a healthy perspective about what sex should be, or need to tie down your romantic partner to sate your anxiety from a centered and stable mindset, (or, to self-criticize like orientation play if you have a healthy relationship with your own identity). There's a lot of kinksters that are coming to kink from a fucked up place, or get there and find that they're among mad people now and have been for years.
I just don't think they're necessarily a self-abnegating or sexuality-abnegating fucked up place.
I actually would say that the signs of the growth of this genre don't come from fantasy-focused sites -- they come from traditionally-vanilla sites where these kinks are gaining significant ground. As more and more men are addicted to pornography, which inherently includes the experience of watching a different man have sex with a woman, there's a strong current of shame and self-contempt that I see growing in the water supply. Coupled with the increasing sex gap and loneliness crisis, what's happening is that increasingly men feel that the possibility of sex is above them, that women in particular are 'above' them, beautiful but untouchable, and this psychosexual viewpoint, combined with porn, is corrosive.
When I say "influencers" I mean something more like "onlyfans creators" and "pornstars"; a growing genre of pornography, even softcore, is "woman berates you on camera for your inability to have sex with women," which as a sign of the times is something along the lines of the rivers turning to blood. Onlyfans creators are starting to turn to this, because the demand is there, and guys who pay onlyfans creators for the 'privilege' of indistinguishable nudes seem to me to have a sense of profound sexual inferiority, which belittling and humiliating femdom can and does exploit. The problem is that shame is being eroticized and sold back to the ashamed for profit.
I don't doubt that these kinks make up only a small percentage of the active, long-lived, and well-practiced fantasy scripts in kink communities, but my concern is about the metastasis into vanilla or mainly-vanilla spaces, where I believe these kinks do real psychological damage and contribute to significant shame.
I'm not so vanilla as to be totally prudish, but I admit that reading this part made my skin crawl.
I guess reading about pure femdom gives me the same kind of heebie jeebies as when vanilla women read about maledom dynamics -- the whole thing just rhymes with "someone's being abused here, something bad is happening, get away from this as fast as you possibly can" in a way that strikes me pre-cognitively. I also don't know that I'd describe "I've cut you so you're mine, irrecoverably" as a not mentally ill cognition, but I guess at that point we're entering Szasz territory of debating what a mental illness is, and at the very least I simply believe that kind of thinking reveals a level of possessive that I can't pre-cognitively differentiate from predation. Your examples so alarmed my unconscious threat-detection system that I went into fight or flight.
I can understand this, and my point in the post was to assert that this is essentially what I think is the not-broken version of femdom. I suppose it's just a prior, or a psychological heuristic, for me that a woman who autonomously, on her own, developed the kink for domination is not the sort of person I would feel safe around. I also think #3 is much sadder than you're giving it credit -- it's not about "wanting oral sex and demanding it," but genuinely sad stuff, like a woman whose reddit post I once saw talked about how her husband calls her ugly and she was looking for "male submissives whose task it would be to praise me highly", which is all kinds of fucked up no matter where someone lands on kink.
In general, I find desires for domination to be deeply uncomfortable, and again I just can't differentiate them from predation. I can understand the masochism-pleasure-pain thing, and I can understand the "obedience as permission" thing, but what I find incredibly hard to understand is sadism. I hope I never understand it.
I do resent to an extent the fact that women I've dated have pushed me to accept those kinds of kinks, and it's a consistent thing for me that romantic, slow, intimate sex is what I enjoy and is memorable to me. Rough sex just doesn't even feel like sex to me, in a way that's hard to describe.
And I guess, to put it bluntly, "I enjoy the part of sex where I'm blindfolded and flogged," makes about as much sense to me as "I enjoy the part of the football game where the pitcher throws the ball at the batter" -- just seems like a category error.
That's fair, though in turn it's harder to get serious numbers. PornHub-Straight has a cuckold category, and it does beat VR porn... but it's a third the size transgender stuff, a fifth the size of public sex or squirting, and half the size as explicit watersports. And that still has a bunch of stuff that's not actually excluding the male sub from having sex with his wife, nevermind berating it.
It's also hard to separate popularity from prominence. I don't know much about the het side of OF, but last I looked one of the biggest personalities on the gay side was feederist kink. This is a weird, (literally and physically!) unhealthy redirection, to the extent I can understand it... and it's also incredibly rare as something people actually want, and afaict isn't something you can get trained into. It just naturally favors concentration, both because feedes are rare, and because the nature of the kink favors multiple feeders. That's still bad, but it's bad in the way Jackass is bad, rather than because it's trying to hypnotize people. If it weren't for the inevitable anorexia or bulimia, it'd just be dumb.
Unfortunately, I can't find even bad numbers on OF kink breakdowns, so I can't really speak to or against it in deeper detail.
That's fair. They are weird kinks, and I tried to pick ones that were weird in the specific way you're motioning around, rather than, say, omorashi.
Do these things strike you as wrong because of their motives, because of the degree of possessiveness, or because the actions don't fit your sexual register? Most women I've met into this sort of marking aren't especially possessive (for women, damning with faint praise as that might be by gay standards). Male impregnation kink (uh, straight or gay) can focus around the exact same 'we're together forever' now thing, as can just the 'fingernails down back' kink, or even people who get really worked up over giving hickies. Are couple's tattoos or piercings bad because they're Szasz-adjacent, or just because they're trash?
Those sort of situations exist, and they are sad, and there's a lot of variants on it. I just don't see the recovery as the sad bit, necessarily. The initial abuse is sad. Maladaptive coping mechanisms do happen, and they are bad as a tautology, and those are sad.
Getting off on a merely weird coping mechanism feels more... nonoptimal? Inefficient? Getting into relationships where 'value my appearance' or even 'don't call me ugly' is a sexual ritual rather than just room temperature is a limiting factor because a lot of guys will genuinely find that goofy, but it doesn't mean you can't also have it as the room temperature outside of the bedroom (or the scene), either. But the asshole ex-husband caused the damage; this is just the repair work.
If you have this coping mechanism, it's worth admitting and spelling it out, both to yourself and to potential partners. It is a limitation. Even small stuff can be enough of an ask, and some forms are a lot more invasive. That's true of a million things, though.
That comes into a difficult spot, because there are some useful notes to show ways domination can be different from predation, or how healthier (or at least more sub-friendly) forms of sadism look, if sometimes weird ones that are far away from what you see as sex (or far away from what is sex, thank you fucking machines), but I don't want to throw them out if they're going to be actively harmful for you.
I can empathize with the division: even as someone that likes subbing, it doesn't take much that doesn't fit the scene to break the mood, and I've experienced it. Dunno if it's as rough for me as for you, but it's definitely a difficult situation, and actually pushing back can be uncomfortable.
Not wanting a single drop of it's absolutely fair, and honest, and something you can and should draw a thick red line around. Just because someone has these kinks doesn't obligate you to try them out, and even if someone has these kinks for sympathetic reasons, that doesn't mean anyone has to try them out.
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