This is, by far, the most approachable and easy-to-read guide focused on femdom beginners out there. This is, in part, because of two things:
a) The fact that the book is so short. In a small, 5×5″ square format at 112 pages long, it’s a short book. You can easily (very easily) finish this within a single sitting – which makes it extremely approachable to beginner femdoms who were otherwise looking at 200+ pages of full text to learn the basics.
b) The majority of the book is illustrated. Every page has an illustration, in fact. It’s easier to think of Sexually Dominant Woman more like a collection of helpful, femdom-focused images (like you’d find on Tumblr or Twitter) rather than an actual “book”. It is, very much, a book, and each one of those illustrations is cohesively organized into chapters – with information that progressively grows on itself. But instead of having 3-4 paragraphs (a wall of text) on each page, there’s usually one paragraph with one illustration presented alongside the paragraph.
Both of those things are SO helpful to beginner femdoms – especially those who are unsure they’re even interested in femdom – because they make the information approachable. Not only does it keep a woman from spending hours of her live reading information about a topic she’s not even sure she’s interested in (like if her husband asks her to “take charge” once in awhile), but it also makes the information so approachable that it ends up being enjoyable to read through – instead of feeling like a whole NEW thing she has to study and make time for.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Let’s start with:
What is the Sexually Dominant Woman Book?
This slender book is a 6″x6″ square, softcover book with color pages inside. The pages are an off-white, matte feel. This book doesn’t have the glossy feel of full-color pages like “How to Be Knotty: The Essential Guide to Modern Rope Bondage“.
The book is published by Greenery Press and written and illustrated by Janet W. Hardy (with a forward by Midori).
The book is 117 pages in length – so it’s a short book. The front cover says “The Sexually Dominant Woman” in very large print, so it’s not likely a book you’d want to read in public when you partner that with the semi-explicit illustrations inside of the book. But if you’re careful, you could probably manage to do so if that’s the only time you can fit in.
This book is actually an updated version from an older version of “Sexually Dominant Woman” written by Lady Green” (Janet Hardy’s old pen name). The older version of The Sexually Dominant Woman was text-only and standard-ish book sized (though still very beginner-oriented) while this version is now the interesting, square size with a fully-illustrated design.
What Information is Included in this Femdom Book?
The description for the Sexually Dominant Woman says:
“Janet W. Hardy, a dominant of 35 years’ experience and a respected author and teacher, has distilled and updated her extensive knowledge into this beginner-friendly guidebook. Everything from bondage to control to sensation to fetish – all with entertaining drawings, intro-level information, and lots of reassurance for the nervous or uncertain novice.
The perfect guide or gift for any woman who wants to spice up her bedroom play with a bit of kink!”
With that in mind, you already have a basic idea of what the information in this guidebook is going to look like: lots of very-brand-new-to-kink information.
The Table of Contents for the Sexually Dominant Woman looks like:
- About the Author
- Do You Want to be a Sexually Dominant Woman?
- What do you hope to Gain?, What’s Holding you Back?, If You Want to Go Further…
- What Kind of Domme Do You Want to Be?
- service, sensation, bondage, fetish, role-play, If You Want to Go Further…
- Fundamentals: Safety and Consent
- Fundamentals: Bondage
- restrictive bondage, decorative bondage, roleplay bondage, basic bondage principles, If You Want to Go Further…
- Fundamentals: Sensation
- impact, on marks and other injuries, on playing with punishment, clips and clamps, heat and cold, If You Want to Go Further…
- Fundamentals: Control
- Fundamentals: Sex
- Fundamentals: Fetish
- crossdressing and “forced” feminization, If You Want to Go Further…
- Putting It All Together
- Scenes to Get You Started
- general principles, a first bondage scene, a first sensation scene, a first control scene
- Resource Guide
What Do the Femdom Book Illustrations Look Like?
I’m in love, love, LOVE with the femdom illustrations in this book. They aren’t going to be art-gallery quality illustrations, but they feel very personal – like if someone sketched out a book for you in their free time and really just wanted to illustrate the concepts to help you understand things better. I really think that lends itself well to the “feels like a female best friend who’s talking to you about femdom” feel that the book has going on.
The illustrations feature a wide variety of body types and people of different colors in addition to different body sizes and gender pairings. There are larger bodies, wheelchair-sitting bodies, and bodies with top surgery scars. The style is a little minimalistic to really tell, but it looks like some characters were drawn to be in their late 60s or 70s as well. It’s a really nice variety of “bodies” – all that help illustrate the concepts that the author is talking about at any given point.
The characters are dressed in various states of dress with a lot of bare breasts (of various sizes including flat-chested) and the occasional vagina or penis peeking out. Nothing looks sexualized or arousal-intending; just like naked bodies in the midst of doing a thing.
The Sexually Dominant Woman Book Review
It doesn’t take long to figure out that the book’s biggest benefit (the short, illustration-focused design) also happens to be its biggest downside: there just isn’t a whole lot of educational info in this book.
If you’re brand new to femdom, this probably isn’t much of a downside. You don’t realize much about what “you’re missing” – and are only finding your eyes opened to a whole new world of tons of new kinks and activities you didn’t know existed.
That being said, the Sexually Dominant Woman book does a really, really fantastic job of taking a brand-newbie to kink (they may not even know what a “safe word” is!) and helping them feel more comfortable with basic kink practices. The book goes from “Why would anyone do this?” to “here’s things you can realistically and easily do as a complete beginner”, adds some “here’s some other kinky things femdom couples like to do and you might like” and ends with “here are some concrete ideas to do these things in the bedroom”.
The first section of the book, which talks about why you may like these things, does a pretty good job of helping you feel comfortable if you’re into female domination – and while it does mention the common “you’ll be into femdom because your husband does the chores! lol!” trope, it isn’t focused on, and it’s mentioned as a list of other types of reasons you might enjoy femdom (like getting exactly what you want in bed or receiving nurturing and pampering).
Then we jump into the basic safety info. Janet W. Hardy does a great job with that. You get info on safe words, how to negotiate and talk with one another, and how to really figure out the “what” of what you want to do.
Then we’re onto bondage. A good chunk of the bondage chapter is really focused on the basics of safety and avoiding nerve damage. Like, the majority of the chapter. But it also talks about the different reasons people do bondage (like decorative versus restraint) as well as a few visual illustrations of how to tie various knots.
Next up is “sensation play”. For the purposes of this book, that’s a huge category that goes from spanking to flogging to nipple clamps. I really love how Janet W. Hardy spends a lot of the time talking about the items that someone can use that they’re likely to use as a beginner. She doesn’t recommend going out and buying $300 floggers. In fact, she talks about using your hand for spanking – and what candles to buy at the supermarket for wax play. The bare basics are covered here – including an illustrated visual of which areas on the body are safest for impact play.
Then we’re onto the sections about “control”. This chapter feels like it gets a bit meandering (we’re somehow talking about age play and how to find your inner dominant in the same chapter, but it’s a really neat idea. If you’re interested in any form of power exchange or power exchange roleplay, this chapter has some good “role” ideas – and it also exposes you to the less-common ones like ageplay or pet play too.
Nearing the end, we have an entire section on “sex”. I actually loved how this entire section was framed. One of the more common questions I tend to get is whether you can still have penis-in-vagina intercourse if you’re a “femdom”. Janet W. Hardy manages to give you that answer (yes, obviously) and give you a bunch of tips about how to enjoy various sex activities while still adding a bit of “dominance”. (I’m still not a fan of this idea that every sex act must require the woman reasserting her dominance, but for a 101 femdom book, that works out fine here.)
Next we have a section on “fetish”. I’d say this was probably the weakest section of them all. It just mentioned that fetishes don’t need to be all-encompassing, and it mentioned some types of common fetishism. I imagine it’d probably be reassuring if you were worried something was “wrong” with your partner, though, so it does provide a bit of helpful knowledge.
We end the book with a section about crafting your own scenes. Hardy provides an entire question-list you and your partner should talk about before doing your next scene (this might be my favorite page in the entire book. Gold-level info) then moves into describing a few beginner-level scenes you can try to do. They’re a bit too basic (and described in just one page of info) to be too helpful, but they give you a jumping board of things to consider. (and that type of need for femdom scene help was why I started my BDSM Scenes Step by Step series).
One of my favorite features of this book is the “If You Want to Go Further…” headings at the end of every chapter. These headings are interspersed throughout the book and feature recommendations for other kink books that Janet recommends reading if you want to gain more knowledge about the topic she was just talking about. (It also includes really cute hand-drawn illustrations of the book cover which makes me smile). This is one of the biggest ways the book makes up for its very-basic kink advice. It gives you the resources to expand your knowledge as soon as you want to.
So, let me ask you this:
Are you trying to buy your wife or partner a book about being a dominant woman that would help her dominate you?
Are you sorta-interested in being a dominant woman but on the fence?
Are you interested in being a femdom – but find everything overwhelming and terrifying and don’t know where to start?
Then “The Sexually Dominant Woman” by Janet W. Hardy is for you.
If you have any bit of sexual practice under your belt (whether as a dominant or submissive) or have attended a few kink events, you’ll probably find a lot of this information to be too beginner level for you. (Over 1/10th of the book is just spent explaining why someone would want to be a dominant woman – and if that’s okay) I’d probably recommend some of the other books in my upcoming Femdom book list to expand your knowledge.
This book is a gem for what it is (honestly) and will currently be my most recommended book for husbands to give their wives – or for brand-new people with femdom interest who want to know how to do things.
(If you’d like to try some femdom advice before getting a book, consider checking out the advice I have here including BDSM advice, BDSM scene outlines, and my BDSM audio education.)
(Note: I generally recommend trying to buy your books outside of Amazon if you can. Maybe at a local kink event? In this case, I can only seem to find this book on Amazon or eBay – even the publisher doesn’t sell direct. I’ve seen it at kink events for sale, though!)
UPDATE AUGUST 2021: The below review is written over one of the earlier versions of the Sexually Dominant Woman book. Since some people still own this older version or may be looking to see how the new version compares with this older version of the book, I’ve left this review here in its entirety. This original review was written on August 25, 2010 (about 11 years ago!), so forgive me if it’s not up to my current quality.
The Sexually Dominant Woman is “A Workbook for Nervous Beginners”. This super-short book focuses on providing basic “how to” kink information for a dominant woman who’s interested in femdom – but isn’t sure what activities to include, what options are out there, and what safety information. Essentially, if you’re a woman who’s curious about femdom and being in charge – but at a bit of a loss as to where to start, the Sexually Dominant Woman book is a surprisingly great start.
Something of note is that this book isn’t actually a workbook. Maybe it’s just how I was brought up, but when I hear the word “workbook”, I assume there is going to be questions or spaces to write in answers. There isn’t any of that in here. It’s just a regular how-to book – no questions or anything of the sort included.
The book is pretty short. Even if you include the fact that it only has 83 pages, this book has very-large page margins that mean only 3/4-ish of each page is covered in text – in addition to the wide spacing between text lines. This means that you are getting probably about 50 pages worth of actual text. I easily finished this book within an hour.
The short length isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not only does this mean you can slide through the book easily, the super-short length isn’t overwhelming. You can sit and read this on a couple free hours on a weekend and have a good idea of what to do – unlike some of the other, more-detailed femdom books that might take a couple week’s of dedicated reading. Since each one of the chapters is also focused on a specific kink, you can flip to your chapter of choice, get it read, and have actionable advice ASAP.
This is one of the bigger “downsides” of more comprehensive femdom books – in order to really understand everything about a kink and a power exchange dynamic, you’re talking hundreds and hundreds of pages and lots of hours. The “Sexually Dominant Woman” by Lady Greene flies past that by ignoring a lot of the “why” and a lot of the background that isn’t relevant to safety. Instead, sentences are short, all information is straight to the point, and everything within this book is constantly focused on providing functional information for a woman to use to have kinky sex with her partner – literally right now.
If you are really, really curious about female domination but honestly don’t want to put in the time to read a full book, this is a good choice for that reason. However, if you are sure you are interested in femdom, I’d recommend checking The Mistress Manual instead because it includes a lot more detail. As a random note, I have a hard time faulting the book for this – yes, it’s a little “brief” by today’s standards, but if you look at her references in the back of the book, she doesn’t reference a single other How-To book about female dominance. This is because there weren’t any! This is probably the first female-dominance book that was ever placed in “popular” publication. There’s now a couple of other books that are better choices than this one, but this was one of the first.
The writer, Lady Green (Janet W. Hardy) does a good job with the actual writing. The book is extremely understanding, doesn’t assume that you are too scared or anything to do Domination, and approaches it from a factual level than appealing to emotions. If you are looking for a book to “baby” you by telling you it’s okay and everything, this isn’t it. It basically says “Many guys like this. You are okay if you like this. This is how you do it.” It spends a lot more time on the actual how-to than on the why. Which, for a book of this small size, is the best way to go about it. The author does do a great job of keeping the information, short, succinct, and to the point, so it’s really hard to get bored of the book because the topics are so short.
The chapters vary in length, but honestly, most of the chapters are about two pages long. Others go about as long as ten pages, but for the most part, the chapters are really, really short. There are 13 chapters in this book as well as the appendix – which is a lot to fit into 13 chapters.
Chapter 1 is “Could you Be a Sexually Dominant Woman?” which is a small checklist of things that the author thinks you need to be a Dominant woman. I think this list is pretty much useless because it includes six questions that are pretty basic things. Either way, it’s still there. Chapter 2 is “How Did you Get this Book?” which basically addresses your concerns if your partner gave it to you because they want to be dominated. Chapter 3 is “What is Sexual Domination?” which basically explains that it’s BDSM – but not the harmful kind – it’s kind and loving.
Chapter 4 is “Styles of Sexual Domination” which is about a page long and includes the “three” styles the author is going to address – role-playing, sensation play, and helplessness (bondage). Chapter 5 is “Playing with Helplessness”. It basically includes info on why someone would like this kind and what types of objects you can use for bondage. It includes a rope tie, has an illustration about how to do it, and talks about where on the body you can and can’t do bondage. Chapter 6 is “Playing with Roles”. We get information on some of the more popular roles such as “Mistress/Slave”, “Teacher/Student” and what the basic premise of each roleplay is. Chapter 7 is “Playing with Sensation”. This chapter basically covers the different types of sensation that can be given. Since it’s so short, I really do feel like impact-toy sensation really got the shaft – yes, that’s not the only sensation there is, but it is the one that most people associated with BDSM, and thus, will attempt – whether they have the safety info or not. It covers genitals, cock rings, nipples, upper back, buttocks and thighs.
Chapter 8 is “Winding Down” which is basically just a chapter explaining why it’s important to sit around after a session and relax. Chapter 9 is “How Will you Feel Afterwards?” which really just answers the chapter title’s question in one page. Chapter 10 is “Tips for Physical and Emotional Safety” which touches on what items you should have around during play, why negotiation and safewords are important, and what negotiation questions should be asked.
Chapter 11 which is “A Basic Session” is my favorite chapter of the book because it’s so unique. Why? Because this is a step-by-step guide on what you should do on your first session. It includes what to say, what to do, what to make him do – it’s basically perfect, and this is something I’ve never seen in another guide. I remember when I first started doing BDSM, I searched online for something like this only to come up short. This is really the shining part of this book in modern standards. It’s really thorough and if you want to do a scene but are nervous, this will make things much easier.
Chapter 12 is “Some Notes for your Submissive” which is basically three pages of describing how a submissive could make their woman want to Dominate them more. (Pampering, being understanding, etc.) Chapter 13 is “Tips on Finding a Partner”. A small section is mentioned about the internet, but considering this was published in ’98, that doesn’t surprise me. The section is pretty useful, but it’s much more of a “What to look for in a partner” than how to actually find a partner. Like understanding what you are looking for and looking for someone who can hold a conversation and not just play. The Appendix just basically mentions how you can continue your FemDom journey and mentions some of the big-league helpful BDSM books like SM 101.
When I said “In modern standards” earlier, I mean to compare it to today’s standards with femdom books. And you know what? This book doesn’t compare well. I’m sure it was a shining star back when it was first published because the internet was filled with crap information, and this book provided a great source. But now, when the internet isn’t half-bad for good info and when there’s other femdom books out? This one really pales in comparison to other options out there.
Surprisingly, no matter how short this book was, it always included the proper safety information. That made me happy. Even if there was only a paragraph about something, two sentences were devoted to how to not harm someone. So despite this being a really quick read, newbies are definitely getting the right safety information.
This femdom help book is a regular-sized book – about eight inches tall and five inches wide. The book was published in 1994 and updated with the second version in 1998. The book is written by Lady Green and published by Greenery Press. I can’t find an updated version past 1998 – but in 2021, I don’t see any glaring information that’s wrong despite the 13 year gap. The book has 83 pages, so overall, it’s a pretty short book. The front of the book shows an illustrated picture of a female’s boot as well as a naked male’s foot and has the title in large letters. The backside says “For the Woman Who Wants to Take Charge and the Man who Wants Her To”, so probably not a good book to take out in public. However, if you can hide both the back and front cover as well as a couple of pictures in places in the book, you could easily read this in public – it’s just the cover that would give it away.
Overall, though, this is not a book I’d probably recommend unless you a woman who wants to learn about Female Domination but has a very, very limited schedule. The book may have been an amazing resource 12 years ago, but with other books available now, I think this one is lacking in the detail that most books could provide. However, if you are really just barely curious or have a really limited time schedule, the short, basic-facts-only approach could really appeal to you. For most women, though, I’d recommend The Mistress Manual much more highly.
First Post Originally Posted: August 25, 2021.
