Domination has literally been around since before man. Admittedly, back in those earliest incarnations there weren’t apes dressed up in nipple clamps and choke chains spanking each other over a tree stump, but even then someone wilfully accepted their position as physically or mentally submissive to a dominant partner because it made them feel good. And that’s still the basis of domination in the modern era.

The terminology is simple. The submissive half of the duo is called a sub, the dominant half is called a dom. They both get off on how their power or meekness makes them feel. A ‘switch’ fills either role. While the common portrayal of this in the media is the female dominatrix who earns
a living dominating men, humiliating them and beating them, it can be any kind of control the pair agree on.

One more thing - Some people ooh-ed and ahh-ed about Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, and how it was the first time popular mainstream culture had dealt with domination, but that’s just crap. There’s a grand tradition of D/s relationships (notice the lower-case, more submissive ‘s’, and the upper-case, dominant ‘D’) in popular culture. Chaucer even touched on the subject in The Wife Of Bath’s Tale, which is a representation of a D/s relationship with a dominant fem. And apparently so is ‘Under My Thumb’ by The Rolling Stones.