Sub

What is a sub?

Sub is the scene shorthand for the submissive side of a BDSM relationship: the person who hands control to another. The word is a clipping of the English submissive. It is a label people give themselves, not a finding someone else makes about them.

How the word sub is used in practice

As a calling card. Almost never as a description.

Here is how it usually sounds: someone writes in a profile “sub, looking for a dom”, or says during a conversation “I’m more sub than switch”. In both cases it announces the direction they want the evening to run, not a list of what they enjoy. That becomes clear the moment you ask further: two people who both have “sub” in their profile can be looking for opposite things. One wants to be commanded and no hand on her skin, the other wants no orders at all but the heaviest flogger in the closet.

The shorthand has fully taken hold on this site, by the way: the word appears here 177 times, and exactly once in a different sense, in a legal sentence on the terms and conditions.

Where the word sub comes from

From an abbreviation habit older than the scene.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists sub as a noun with twelve meanings: a subaltern officer, a subject of the king, a subscriber, a subordinate, an advance on your wages, a substitute, a topic of conversation, a subscription, a submarine, the subway, and a subcontractor. The BDSM meaning sits at number eleven, with its oldest citation only from 2004. All the others are older, some by two centuries; the linguist E. Wittmann described sub as early as 1914 as one of the standard clipped English words.

That makes the shorthand younger than the thing it names. Where the Dutch onderdanig goes back centuries by way of onderdaan (subject), sub is a usage of the last few decades, born because people had to tell each other online, in two letters, which side they were on.

Why people call themselves sub

Because it is short, and because it brings company.

People who first put the word on themselves often describe it as a relief: it turns out there is a name for something you thought was yours alone, and it turns out there are others who share it. That is the honest pull of a label. It also saves a half-hour conversation at every new introduction.

What it does for you depends on who you are. For someone who makes decisions all day it is the chance to make none for a few hours. For someone who finds it hard to be cared for, it is a detour by which care does get through. For two people together it is above all a starting point: the label says which direction things go, and only then does the real conversation begin.

The label does nothing. It solves no problem you did not also have without a label, and it does not turn a partner who does not listen into a dom.

What the label sub does not say

“Sub means you do whatever is asked.” No. It only says which side of the line someone stands on. What you do and do not want, and the word you use to stop, come out of a completely different conversation.

“If you’re a sub, you’re also a masochist or a bottom.” That does not follow, and empirically it is not the case. In the Journal of Homosexuality, Julie C. La Corte ran a cluster analysis on 236,353 completed BDSM Test profiles, and the outcome is that no binary split and no single spectrum works as a way to sort people into these roles. At least two dimensions are needed.

“So anyone who sometimes wants to go the other way is a switch.” That is not automatically true either. In Archives of Sexual Behavior, Hannah L. Tarleton and colleagues studied 1,104 practitioners, and alongside 264 people who place themselves exclusively on the dominant side and 369 exclusively on the submissive side, they found a group of 78 people with roles on both sides who still do not call themselves a switch. So the label and the behavior measurably diverge.

What I see myself

I am Victor. I have worked in BDSM for twenty-five years and have a background as a psychotherapist, and I get this word more often as a question than as a statement: “am I actually a sub?”

I don’t ask then whether you feel like one, but what happens in your head when someone makes a decision for you that you could have made yourself. That question gets an answer you can use. The word is a door, not a conclusion. And I notice that the women who avoided the label the longest can usually speak about it most sharply once they finally use it, because they have thought about it longer than someone who took it up right away.

What you can do yourself

• Add one sentence about what you mean when you use the word. “Sub, and I love orders but not pain” prevents more misunderstandings than an hour of chatting.
• Ask someone who calls himself a dom what he means by it before you meet. Two people with the right labels can still end up facing opposite ways.
• Treat the label as something that can change. Don’t carry the word to a next meeting as a promise, and feel free to revise it.
• Don’t let the label decide your limits. Being a sub obligates you to nothing you have not said yes to beforehand.

More on being a sub

• Submissive is the full page about the role itself, with the research into who does it and why.
• D/s explains why that s is written small and how power exchange works.
• La Corte’s article is technical, but the core finding is useful to anyone: one scale is not enough to describe these roles.

Where this fits on this site

If you don’t yet know whether this word belongs to you, that is not a problem to solve beforehand. On a BDSM date the first thing you do is talk about what draws you and what doesn’t, and no label has to sit above it.

Sources

• Alignment Beyond the Binaries: The Relationship Between Expansive Gender Identities and Flexible BDSM Roles in a Large-Scale International Sample. Hannah L. Tarleton, Jennifer M. Davis, Alana Schuerwegen, Wim Huys, Elise Wuyts, Kris Goethals, Violette Coppens, Manuel Morrens & Brad J. Sagarin, Archives of Sexual Behavior 55(3), 1279–1289, 2026. International sample of 1,104 practitioners. Provides the distribution of 264 exclusively left of the slash, 369 exclusively right, 393 switches, and the group of 78 people with roles on both sides who do not call themselves a switch.
• “Classifying D/s Profiles Without Prior Assumptions: An Application of Cluster Analysis to Social Data”. Julie C. La Corte, Journal of Homosexuality 70(8), 1549–1584, 2023. Cluster analysis of 236,353 BDSM Test profiles. Provides the empirical evidence that no binary split and no single spectrum yields a workable typology of people into these roles, and that at least two dimensions are needed.
• sub, n. 1. Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, digital edition. Provides the twelve meanings of sub as a noun, with the BDSM meaning at number eleven and its oldest citation 2004 (L. Redhead, Peepshow), against citations from 1756 for the subaltern; and the reference to E. Wittmann, “Clipped Words”, Dialect Notes IV(ii), 1914, where sub already appears as a standard clipped word.

Related terms

• Onderdanige. The Dutch word for the role that sub is the shorthand of, with the research around it.
• Dom. The shorthand on the other side of the slash.
• D/s. The relationship in which those two shorthands get their capital and lowercase letters.
• Bottom. The label that often coincides with sub but points to something else.
• Service sub. The self-naming that signals it is about service and not about pain.
• Submissive. The word in full, and why in plain English it means something slightly different.