In the world of sexual fetishes, crossing the political aisle is a kink

The video, posted by the 39-year-old Tampa resident under her stage name Roxie Rae, is one of dozens on Clips4Sale, an adult-video-sharing website where content creators cater to all types of sexual fetishes, including one that is rarely discussed outside of niche kink circles: political humiliation. There are people who get turned on by the idea of having their political views mocked, usually (but not always) by members of the opposing political group. Liberals desire being dominated by conservatives and called pejoratives that imply they are weak and unintelligent, while conservatives want to be mocked for supporting former president Donald Trump, among other perceived transgressions, according to those who participate in this subculture.

The underground kink community is still largely marginalized, yet it thrives in unmarked “dungeons,” at private parties (and bedrooms and fantasies) and, of course, online. Technically, a fetish is an inanimate object (say, stiletto shoes), body part (feet, for example) or situation required for sexual arousal, though it’s frequently used interchangeably with the broader term kink, which includes pleasurable, if unorthodox, role-playing (bondage, interrogation scenes, wrestling reenactments, you name it). These fantasies are pure id — base desires that trade in exaggeration and archetypes — and like-minded participants might engage in them in person, or via video or direct messages.

With political sexual fetishes, Republicans and Democrats are reduced to caricatured sexual imagery: the macho posturing of Republican politicians is flattened into pure toxic masculinity; bleeding-heart liberal Democratic men become ineffectual doormats.

On FetLife, a social-networking site for people with fetishes, there are at least a dozen subcategories of the kink that users can tag in their profiles, such as “hot conservative girls who make liberals cry.” At least four political humiliation groups, including MAGA Doms/Dommes and Libtard Subs, are also active. Outside of FetLife, BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission and sadomasochism) sites cater to the taboo turn-on with names such as Triggered Liberal Snowflake. According to those who are active in the world of kink, an appetite for this type of political role-play grew during the Trump administration.

Rae didn’t start out making political fetish videos. The dominatrix began working as a stripper at age 18, transitioning to online videos a few years later, specializing in foot fetish. Now she works full-time online, and says she earns six figures annually. About 90 percent of her work is producing other performers and 10 percent is making her own content. On X, formerly known as Twitter, where Rae advertises, she’s open about her conservative beliefs. She voted for Trump twice, although she currently supports Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Republican primary.

Rae received her first request for a political humiliation video in March 2021, from a fan who DM’d her, writing: “One of the most difficult and humiliating sacrifices to make is to vote for a Republican candidate when you’re a Democrat. If I were to surrender control of my vote to you, that would be the ultimate sacrifice.” She charges about $150 for a five-minute custom video and then resells them for a dollar per minute in length.

“It is like the ultimate way to give up total control and to be humiliated, and if you’re a liberal and you go to another liberal for that, I don’t think you’re gonna get exactly what you want,” Rae said.

While political fetishes aren’t new, they seem to be spilling into the sexual fantasies of a polarized electorate with fresh vigor.

“When Trump came on the scene suddenly, the right had a backbone, was throwing punches … it was a really aggressive dominance … and I think that’s really what had been lacking before. Because you look back at Jeb Bush, he was kind of weak-kneed, milquetoast,” said a 33-year-old Virginia-based man who goes by RightMakesMites, his FetLife user name, and is the founder of the group MAGA Doms/Dommes and Libtard Subs.

The man, a bisexual Republican whose day job involves monitoring politics and liberal media for a radio host, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he’s concerned that his workplace would lose clients if they found out he’s into kink. Although the group has only 97 members, it is a part of the larger political community on FetLife, including the group Kinky Conservatives (2,271 members), where some members discuss dominating their “libtard slaves.” On MAGA Doms/Dommes and Libtard Subs, members post requests such as, “Looking for a MAGA Dom to ‘red pill’ me, and convince me to share my wife,” referring to the pill that reveals the world as it truly is in “The Matrix.” The phrase has become popular with conspiracy theorists.

RightMakesMites said he thinks interest in these fetishes reflects divisiveness among the parties. “Politics just suddenly got more intense,” he said. “The difference between Republican [and] Democrat was no longer the difference between Nixon and Kennedy. It’s now night and day in many people’s minds … then the kink follows as being more intense. And it’s only going to get more divisive from here, unfortunately, especially with the election year coming up.”

He said he came up with the idea for the group after he received messages from a handful of users all asking for the same thing: “I’m liberal, leftist and proud, but I really want to be dominated by a conservative.”

Nearly all of the group members merely want to text their fantasies to him, not act them out. One man who wanted to meet up (but changed his mind) described his fantasy as wearing a Trump dog collar (sold on Trump’s campaign website) and being walked by RightMakesMites around Walmart to pick out a dog bone.

One member, a 34-year-old man who lives in Peoria, Ariz., said he “was always drawn to submission [and] being dominated, being told what to do.”

The Democrat, who works in the auto-insurance industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears his family finding out about his fetish. He said he discovered political fetishes on a BDSM social media website a couple of years ago. “A lot of [the content] was liberals submitting to conservative Republicans or MAGA or being ‘red-pilled’ into supporting and worshiping Trump,” he said.

He got turned on, and it surprised him because “before the Trump era started, I never once thought about politics as being sexualized,” he said. “Domination from a political party and a[n] ideology that I can’t tolerate, made it … way more of a turn-on.” In particular, he liked the fantasy of a dominant man stealing his wife from him.

Although he has a number of fetishes, this is the one that he considers the most extreme. “I’m very, very, very much a liberal and if friends and family were to have any clue they would be shocked,” he said, adding that his wife doesn’t know about his fetish. “Of all of the porn that I partake [in], I would be the most ashamed and embarrassed if someone were to find this.”

In one dream scenario, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert force him “to vote straight red Donald Trump.”

Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, spent two years delving into the sexual fantasies of more than 4,000 Americans, resulting in the 2018 book “Tell Me What You Want.” According to Lehmiller, some Democratic and Republican respondents reported fantasies involving politicians, including those from across the aisle. “[Fantasies] tended to center around [male] politicians who kind of had these sexual reputations,” he said.

And so Republicans with Democratic fantasies lusted after the likes of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Democrats, on the other hand, pined for Sarah Palin.

“When you’re fantasizing about a specific politician, you’re fantasizing about a powerful person, somebody who has some status, and authority, and so that just kind of lends itself naturally to having a dominant-submissive fantasy,” Lehmiller said.

Although Lehmiller conducted his survey before the Trump administration, one woman in his study mentioned Trump as part of a fantasy about having sex with people she finds repulsive, which also included Osama bin Laden and Hells Angels bikers. (Humiliation can be part of the appeal of political fantasies for some people, Lehmiller said.)

“As people have become more polarized politically, it’s become more of a taboo to date or have sex outside of your political party affiliation,” said Lehmiller. “When you’ve got this kind of growing sense in the public that it’s taboo … that can make it all the more enticing.” According to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey measuring opinions of Americans who are “single and looking,” most Democrats would not consider dating a Trump voter. Republicans, meanwhile, were split about evenly on whether they would consider being in a committed relationship with a Hillary Clinton voter.

Mark Thompson, 61, first got into political fetish when he was a 17-year-old Marine stationed in California during the 1970s. The former Young Republican was browsing a swingers’ magazine at the local adult bookstore and spotted an ad from a straight couple seeking a conservative “alpha male” to dominate the wife. He sent them a letter, enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope for a response. Months later, it arrived.

“That’s how it all started,” he said in a recent phone call. “They were a very liberal couple.”

But Thompson was taking a huge risk. “If I’d been found out, I’d have been discharged dishonorably as a section B,” he said. Still, he was an active dominant throughout his military career, serving in the Marines from 1977 to 1998.

A typical scene more recently involved him tying a woman on a St. Andrews Cross and asking her, “Were you even thinking at all when you voted for Joe Biden? Do you think he’s telling the truth? Are you that stupid and ignorant?”

Still, Thompson isn’t a Trump supporter. “I hate Trump … he made fun of POWs from Vietnam,” he said. Thompson prefers DeSantis for now, although he’d be open to playing out a Trump fantasy, “depending on how naughty the scene is.”

It’s not just Democrats fantasizing about being dominated by Republicans. It sometimes works the other way as well.

A 60-year-old man, known by his fetish persona Master Black Satyr Dragon Wolf, unexpectedly became a political fetish dominant when a 22-year-old straight-identifying college student responded to his Craigslist ad seeking a BDSM partner.

“I want to be punished by a person of color because I voted for Donald Trump,” the student wrote.

“You know how Mr. Spock raises his eyebrow in ‘Star Trek’? That’s what I was doing when I [saw his response],” said Wolf, who is Black.

The student, a fraternity member, told him he was pressured to vote for Trump by his friends and family. “He felt guilty and he felt like being punished by me would make amends,” said Wolf.

Wolf had been in the BDSM community for about three decades at that point. He’d seen nearly everything. “Nothing surprised me until that,” he said. A few days later, the student came over to Wolf’s Houston-area house, where he knelt, placed his hands together “and asked me, ‘May I receive punishment from you, sir?’” Wolf recounted.

Wolf responded in the affirmative, pulling down his pants to spank him. “I will tear your a– apart if you ever vote for Donald Trump or any other stinking conservative Republicans. I’ll let you go into moderates. But if I hear Trump or Cruz or even any member of the Bush family, you’re not going to sit down for days,” he told his submissive.

The student called upon Wolf a few days later. Wolf spanked him again, this time chastising him for volunteering for a conservative candidate. “I punished him for denying us our rights [and] preventing women from having abortions,” he said. After the scene was over, they played PlayStation 3 and ate pizza.

During the final session, Wolf and a friend dressed up as Democratic politicians in suits and had the student wear tighty whities emblazoned with the words “Republican slut boy.”

“We said nasty things, like ‘privileged White bastard,’” Wolf said.

Some conservative men who like being dominated prefer to be humiliated for supporting policies that hurt the working class.

A 39-year-old adult-video producer who also performs under the name Brandon Areana specializes in playing a character she calls “Ivanka Tramp.” In one Clips4Sale video, she wears a long, silky blond wig, heels and a lacy white dress. “I was lucky enough to be born a Trump and every red cent that my family has stolen and has manipulated out of the American people belongs to me, and I will not have it taxed at some unreasonable level to help those less fortunate,” she declares. “Does that excite you thinking about all of these underprivileged, undereducated people in need, suffering further for our benefit?” she asks, flipping her wig and uncrossing her legs.

Areana’s Ivanka Tramp videos are a hit with conservative men. After posting them, her inbox fills up. “This is my most taboo, embarrassing kink,” they tell her. “It’s very embarrassing to be so turned on by being mocked and coyly made fun of about all the things you hate,” Areana elaborated. They also don’t like “women like myself making money off their kink,” she said. She charges about $23 a minute (nearly twice as much as her nonpolitical videos) because some sites ban her from reselling them, and said her clients include government workers and high-level business people.

“[They] have access to just about anything and everything they want in life due to their status and their money … so they’ll pay a little bit of money to have a girl … make a mean video poking fun at their small conservative [members],” she said.

Unlike in the non-fetish world, where most Biden and Trump supporters have few friends who vote for the opposing candidate, in the fetish world, political opposites mingle. And if you are into political fetishes you may become, ironically, more open-minded to the opposing side’s views, according to RightMakesMites.

“If you’re going to effectively dominate them, you have to know kind of why they hate you. So if you’re sitting there, thinking, ‘Oh, Trump has the answers on everything. How could anyone possibly think otherwise?’ Well, you’re not gonna be a very good dom of a liberal,” he said.

Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.