I’m a Lesbian. Now I Want to Try Something Specific—With a Man.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous!

I’ve never been sexually or romantically interested in men, beyond a handful of surface-level, intellectual crushes. Here’s the issue.

I’ve dabbled in kink to some extent—mostly as a service top to more dominant women—but recently, I’ve been fantasizing about having a domme persona, despite generally being somewhat reserved in my personal life. The thing is that I’d like to try dominating men (with women, I’d rather BE dominated), not because I’m particularly attracted to them, but because I’m interested in the power play. I’m not opposed to eventually exploring sex, but penis-in-vagina sex and blow jobs are a hard no (I am interested in pegging and potentially receiving oral sex). My question is: Is this a thing? Would anyone be into this? And how would I go about exploring a domme persona as a self-described shy lesbian?

Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication.

Jessica Stoya: So to answer question number one: Yes, it is a thing. And regarding question number two, about whether anyone would be interested, yes. Plenty of men are so interested that they’re willing to pay for it, not that I’m encouraging our writer to make this into labor.

I am basing that very confident set of answers on Chris Belcher’s memoir, Pretty Baby , and more than one lesbian dominatrix that I have known throughout my lifetime, who did perfectly well for themselves in terms of male play partners when they wanted in community lifestyle spaces, and also in terms of clients in a professional context.

Rich Juzwiak: Yes. What came to mind immediately for me was Tristan Taormino’s memoir, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten , where she talks about identifying as a dyke and having sex with men. It’s not exactly the same, but it is a thing that self-identified lesbians or dykes will have sex with men.

Rich: There are people who are so intensely into and/or curious about pegging that the idea that this would be the main feature would interest, I think, a substantial number of men alone.

Jessica: I know the world just changes, but before widespread internet access, people would feel desires, consider their desires, fantasize or daydream, and not have the taxonomical words that are most commonly used now, but a pretty well-developed five-paragraph version of their sexual desires and interests. As time has gone on, just the nature of the internet and the way information is distributed on it and how people find each other on it, a whole two generations now have come into a world being presented with checklist boxes first.