Dominants, Submissives, and Bottom-up Text Analysis: Exploring BDSM Roles Through Romantic and Erotic Narratives

ABSTRACT

Powerplay, or the consensual power exchange between “Dominant” and “submissive” (D/s) role partners, is common practice within BDSM culture. To many BDSM practitioners, their D/s role is an integral part of their sexual identity, informing not only their sexual scripts but also their non-sexual social interactions. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software was used to process 261 participants’ responses to prompts asking them to write erotic and relationship-themed narratives. Using a data-driven approach to model selection, we regressed participants’ engagement in BDSM and D/s powerplay role identification on standardized language frequencies. Stories from more active BDSM practitioners’ narratives used more perceptual words, suggesting potentially mindful, intimate, and detailed storytelling, whereas non-practitioners used more tentativeness and death in their writings. Moreover, language reflected D/s role attributes, with Dominants exhibiting ownership, responsibility, and other-focus, and submissives referencing power dynamics and self-focus in their responses. Findings are consistent with existing literature on BDSM power relationships and relate to psychosexual well-being.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Disclaimer

Other data, using the full dataset and responses from a different set of measures, have been submitted for publication elsewhere.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2022.2111400.

Notes

¹ We intentionally use “power play” instead of “power exchange” to reject the dyadic and hegemonic idea that one partner must be disempowered while the other partner is empowered. Indeed, all partners involved are consenting to negotiated power differences during play time, often regardless of gender, sexuality or relationship strategy.

² We use the traditional difference in capitalization between power play roles to symbolically refer to their innate power differences.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by left over monies from the Texas Tech University Summer Thesis/Dissertation Research Award. The funder was not involved in the conduct of the research.