For Fuck’s Sake, Dany is a Goddamn Domme, Can We Stop Denying It?
I’ve been promising this post for a while, and since this isn’t a high school term paper, I’ll launch right into it.
Dany is kinky as fuck. She can swing either way but leans dominant. This is not designed purely to titillate the audience, but rather it’s an integral part of who she is. The show devotes most of her screen time in two early episodes specifically to her discovery of this side of herself. Only after she discovers and acts on this side of herself does she become a leader. This is culturally important because unlike most other female characters on TV with sexually dominant streaks, she shows emotional complexity, vulnerability, and other dimensions to her sexuality. She sends the message that it’s okay for a woman to have these tendencies; that it does not make her a bad person, or erase all of the other aspects of her personality that make her a woman. Consequently, it sends the message to men with complementary inclinations that it’s okay to be attracted to dominant women, and gives them an example of some of the positive traits they should look for in potential partners.
There are a couple of scenes where it’s so obvious that if you don’t pick up on it, I simply can’t help you, and you might as well just stop reading now. Here are just a handful:
Even if you know very little about BDSM, these scenes pretty much beat you over the head with it. Dany enjoys a good grovel, and examining penises at her leisure, even if she has to order carry-out. But this is just HBO “sexing it up,” as HBO likes to do. It actually goes much deeper than that.
I run a blog that promotes femdom-themed Game of Thrones fanfiction, and I know I will be accused of reading things into scenes that aren’t there. So to show you I’m not a crazy, drooling pervert, below are all of her scenes from S1E2, and the first one from S1E3 (closed captioned so you don’t need sound). If you watch them all sequentially, you’ll see this side of her come out clear as day.
To put this in context, Dany in S1E1 is passive, scared, and miserable. Viserys and Illyrio marry her off to Drogo, who treats her like a piece of meat. Her second-to-last scene is S1E1 is her wedding night with Drogo where he rips her clothes off and she starts crying. The last scene is her getting fucked from behind, also while crying, while Drogo shows her basically no emotion at all.
But here’s her first scene in S1E2 that involves dialogue, when her awakening begins:
It’s never said outright, but it’s clear that she’s beginning to sense that her dragon eggs are more than just novelties. Most people probably picked up on that, at least on their second time through the show. But look more closely at the conversation.
They start out talking about dragons and Dothraki mythology. Dany is half-listening, half staring at the eggs. Then Irri says, “moon is goddess, wife of sun.” (As in, powerful female figure; also what Drogo ends up calling her as a pet name)
Immediately after that, she looks over at the eggs one more time, then kicks out everyone but Doreah. The conversation then goes more or less as follows:
Doreah: I’m good at fucking, you know. Viserys hired me to fuck him on the regular. Being in touch with your sexuality can give you quite a bit of leverage over a man.
Dany: [giving no fucks about Viserys]: Teach me how to fuck good so I can get some leverage on Drogo.
Then she looks back at the eggs. There’s a connection in her mind between learning about her sexuality, and the eggs. They’re both calling out to her. They’re offering a taste of power, which she’s never had before now.
The next scene is Doreah “teaching” her as promised:
The lesson here is four parts:
1) It’s all about eye contact (which, if you’ve ever watched Dog Whisperer, is also how animals establish who’s the alpha). In fact, even if you give the greatest blowjobs in the world, that’s still nothing compared to what you can do if you know how to shut a man’s mind off with your eyes;
2) don’t be passive, get on top;
3) “make him like it” if he bitches about it; “don’t make love like a slave”; and
4) fuck what most women do [i.e., submit to your husband and don’t worry about getting what you want out of sex], you’re not most women.
Also, and perhaps even more importantly, notice what Dany does when Doreah tells her to get on top. She pauses for a second, and then once Doreah’s guard is down a bit, flips herself on top so quickly that Doreah (a professional sex worker) is taken aback and gasps. Dany looks down at her, almost like she’s thinking about going further but restraining herself, lest she get carried away.
Yes, professional sex workers get paid to act more impressed than they really are, so she’s a master of the disingenuous gasp, but Doreah has no incentive to do that here. Dany’s not a “client” in the traditional sense. Doreah is Dany’s “Syrio Forel” in this context, and if anything, if Dany was doing a shitty job, Doreah would have just come out and said it. For a girl who seconds earlier was doubting whether she could ever do anything like this, it’s dramatically out of character. Something ignited in her after Doreah encouraged her to assert herself, and put Drogo’s needs second to her own. (In fact, that’s probably the exact opposite of what Dany was expecting from the lesson.)
Dany likes being on top, and wastes no time demanding that of Drogo. This is the very next scene:
“Girl on top” doesn’t necessarily equate to “female dominant BDSM.” Plenty of people fuck in this position who aren’t into femdom. But it’s not about the position in itself. It’s notable for two reasons:
1) Dany wants to “look upon his face,” i.e., to be able to make eye contact with him. Because she realizes the importance of eye contact. In fact, eye contact is what makes Drogo stop trying to simply rape her.
She looks him in the eyes and tells him what she wants. Physical size, cultural gender norms, previous experience all go right out the window, and suddenly this short little girl is telling the most powerful man in a thousand mile radius, “if you want to fuck me at all, you’re going to fuck me the way I tell you to. I don’t care how big or important you are, this is how it’s gonna be.” (It’s an even bigger deal in the books, where she does it in public, so the whole khalasar knows who’s in charge.)
2) This is the first time in the entire show that Dany asserts herself in a meaningful way. Before this, it’s all about gritting her teeth and finding a way to get through the pain while men take advantage of her–both during sex, and in life in general. Over the course of the whole series, Dany’s character may show many flaws, but “not assertive enough” is certainly not one of them.
It’s not a coincidence that her assertiveness starts to show itself not after the dragons are hatched; not after Drogo dies and she has no choice; but rather, after the scene where she starts to figure out how she finds sexual satisfaction.
But the assertiveness goes beyond the bedroom. Here’s her next scene, in S1E3:
Four scenes ago, she was basically a prisoner. She was getting raped by her own husband, who took it as a given that that was simply his right. Now she’s stopping the whole khalasar “until I command otherwise,” because she saw something that offended her, and wanted to see what was going on. She then proceeds to establish herself as the true heir to her dynasty after Viserys gets curb-stomped by one of her bloodriders.
But here’s the culturally significant part: the thing that offends her so much is slavery. In fact, it offends her so much that she takes a detour from conquering Westeros and spends at least a year trying to outlaw it in an entire region. And what does she do when her bloodrider offers to kill Viserys, then strongly suggest she have his ear cut off to “teach him respect”? She shows him mercy.
Why does this matter? Because BDSM is so commonly associated with the notions of the “master (or mistress)/slave” relationship, and “punishment.” And while that may be all well and good in people’s fantasies, and while many people engage in BDSM “scenes” where those themes are front and center, there is a difference between roleplay/fantasy and reality. Viserys was a very naughty boy in that scene, and in so many other stories, a sexually dominant female character could easily have killed or tortured him. In fact, they probably would have done it themselves, rather than let someone else do it, and the strong implication would be that they got off on it. And they almost certainly would have no problem with slavery, in fact they’d probably enjoy having slaves of their own.
But Dany isn’t most sexually dominant female characters. She is a specific rejection of those tropes. She’s not a temptress, or a villain. She realizes that there’s a difference between having her way and turning people into property. She understands the importance of giving people a chance to change their behavior before inflicting pain on them. She’s not a sadistic, sex-crazed caricature of a “camp dominatrix.” In fact, later in the series, she takes one of the best-known symbols of the dominatrix stereotype–the whip–and casually tosses it into the dirt and rides away.
Because Dany hates whips. Whips are corny and trite. Whips are what the woman used in Venus in Furs back in the 1870s. Whips are what comic book illustrators gave female superheroes in the 1970s, when they wanted to accommodate the demand for more women who weren’t damsels in distress, but also make sure those women were still seen by the majority of readers as sex objects.
It’s no coincidence that the show devotes four consecutive scenes and all of her screen time in a whole episode to Dany exploring her sexuality. It’s no coincidence that what she ultimately finds is that she likes being in charge. And it’s no coincidence that her sexual awakening is tied both metaphorically to her dragons, and literally to her emergence as a leader in her own right; not merely as someone else’s wife or sister.
What does this mean for her inevitable relationship with Jon, or the overall “end game”? Probably not much! Dany is (lamentably) never going to walk Jon around Winterfell on a leash. She won’t kill the Night’s King by putting a cigarette out on his tongue. Jon will not miss the climactic battle because he can’t get Dany’s foot out of his mouth. Jon has some sexually submissive traits of his own, which I’ll address in another essay, but the reason Dany as a Domme matters is for the “real world” messages it sends:
1) Yes, women actually are into this; it’s not just professional sex workers.
2) It can be a critical aspect of your personality.
3) But it’s not the be-all-end-all of your personality–Dany still has plenty of insecurities, makes plenty of mistakes, and struggles with plenty of challenges that have nothing to do with sex. As does anyone else.
4) BDSM is more complicated than hurting people for fun, and ethics are an extremely important part of how you practice it.
5) But if you do practice it ethically, it does not, in any way, make you any less of a good person.
I hope, as someone who didn’t learn those lessons until years after I started working out my sexuality, that Dany’s character will lead to more like her in the future. And I hope that future femdom-inclined people will learn those lessons much earlier, and not have to go through years of shame, trying to “fix” something that wasn’t broken, lying to partners and myself, and truly toxic relationships that I did before I found someone to spend the rest of my life with.
(Lastly, here are the above scenes, all in one video, if you want to watch it sequentially without commentary. I promise you, you’ll notice it just as clearly.)
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