The history of the dominatrix: the word, the books and the rooms

Dominatrix is a Latin word. Dominus meant the master of a household, domina its mistress, and dominator one who rules; dominatrix is the feminine of dominator. The same root gave English dominate, dominion and domain. For centuries the English word meant a woman who rules or domineers, and dictionaries record its sexual meaning only from the twentieth century.

Domme, the shorter spelling, belongs to the kink community and is modern slang formed from dom. Mistress and dominatrix are used almost interchangeably today, and the guide to what a dominatrix is explains how the words are used now.

The most influential book in this history is a short novella. Venus in Furs, published in 1870 by the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, follows a man who begs a woman he loves to treat him as her slave and signs a contract to that effect; she takes him at his word. Biographies report that Sacher-Masoch signed a similar contract himself in 1869, agreeing to be the slave of a fellow writer, Fanny Pistor, for six months. The femdom books guide lists the novella among other books worth knowing.

In 1886 the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, a collection of case histories, and used it to name masochism after the novelist. He wrote as a physician of his time and treated such tastes as illnesses, a view that mainstream guidance has since left behind for consenting adults whose interests cause no harm or distress. The kink vs fetish guide explains the current view, and the sadism and masochism guide takes up the two terms.

By the early nineteenth century at the latest, London had houses where clients could pay for flagellation, and continental writers called the taste "the English vice". The best-documented keeper is Theresa Berkley, who ran a house near Portland Place until her death in 1836 and is credited with a padded frame that took her name, the Berkley Horse. She died the year before Queen Victoria came to the throne, so she belongs to the Georgian age, though the trade carried on through the Victorian one.

Handle the details with care. These were commercial establishments, and what survives about them comes largely from erotic books and gossip, neither of which is a neutral record. The bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee catalogued erotic books in three volumes published between 1877 and 1885, which tells us what was being printed rather than what was being done. Names, prices and addresses from that literature should be treated as unconfirmed.

In the twentieth century the image of the dominant woman moved from private rumour to print. In the mid-1940s the artist John Willie began publishing the magazine Bizarre, which ran into the 1950s and gave fetish costume and bondage a regular audience. In New York, mail-order photographers sold fetish pictures to a discreet national readership, and the illustrator Eric Stanton drew commanding women for decades from the middle of the century. The trade was small, commercial and secretive, and the record of who made what is patchy.

The look had several sources, not one inventor. Leather drew on riding boots, military gear and motorcycle jackets, and the leather clubs of the 1950s and 1960s made it a deliberate subcultural uniform; the BDSM symbols guide covers the emblems that grew out of that scene. Rubber had its own enthusiasts and mail-order catalogues, described on the rubber fetish page. Television made leather and catsuits familiar in the 1960s, when the British series The Avengers dressed its heroines in both.

Fashion followed. In 1974 a boutique at 430 King's Road, London, took the name SEX and sold fetish and bondage wear, and within a few years its customers included the city's first punks. By the early 1990s fashion houses such as Versace were showing bondage-inspired collections, and the dominatrix's wardrobe had become a reference on the runway.

By the later twentieth century the paid discipline house had become the professional dungeon: an equipped room in a big city, often run by a woman working under a professional name. The furniture became standard, a cross, a bench, a cage and a wall of implements, and the dungeon Mistress page describes that set as it appears on camera. Alongside the paid rooms grew a scene of private clubs and societies where dominants did not charge, which is why the word dominatrix now covers both professionals and private players.

The move online began with ordinary webcams in the late 1990s, and by the early 2000s paid live cam sites were established. The model that survives is simple: a free public room, a paid private by the minute, and tips. Most of a dominant's craft, the voice, the rules, the tasks and the attention, travels perfectly well through a camera. Reports at the time said that many professionals who had worked in rooms moved their work online when venues closed in 2020, and some stayed.

DominatrixCam belongs to that last chapter. It is online only: no meeting, no session in a room, nothing arranged in person. A DominatrixCam private shows you the Mistress while nothing of you goes back, and cam2cam exists only in LiveJasmin partner rooms marked ↗. The online Mistress page describes how a session works, and browse shows who is live.

Some claims in this history are solid: the Latin word, the 1870 novella, the 1886 book, the existence of Theresa Berkley's house and her death in 1836, and the dates of the magazines and shops named above. Others are plausible but thin, such as the exact details of the Berkley Horse and the Pistor contract, which reach us through biographers and writers of the period. A third group is folklore, left out here because it cannot be sourced: tidy stories about professional dominants in the ancient world, or about a single inventor of the leather look.