Are high powered people actually submissive in bed?
no, doesn't seem like it
People make this claim a lot, so I decided to test it in my survey. My total survey sample size is ~640,000, most young, ~75% female, and mostly from tiktok.
I included the statement "I am high powered, driven, successful", and asked people to mark where they stood on an agree-disagree scale.
Maybe this isn’t the perfect way to get at this question, but if there’s anything to ‘high powered people are more submissive in bed’, I’d expect it to show up at least slightly here.
“I’m high powered, driven, successful”
Males:
Females
If these questions are any indication, the popular wisdom is in fact blatantly wrong. The more people reported being high powered, driven, successful, the more they were likely to prefer being sexually dominant, with this effect being much stronger in males than females.
But maybe the popular wisdom of high-powered people being submissive in bed is less about being driven and more about a need to control things, or having control over people, or some sort of insecure drive to gain respect from others? These are less definitive, but out of curiosity I included three other questions to try to cover all angles.
”I need to feel in control”
(negative of) “I don't have very much power over those around me”
(negative of) “I deserve more respect than I get”
(negative of) "If life is a game, then I'm losing"
Need to feel in control
Males
Females
“I don't have very much power over those around me”
Males
Females
“I deserve more respect than I get”
Males
Females
“If life is a game, then I’m losing”
Males
Females
In summary,
Overall, it looks like this evidence does not align with the popular narrative. The one exception might be “I deserve more respect than I get” - but in hindsight it might be ambiguous whether this question is getting at people who rightfully deserve the respect (like being high powered) and others don’t see it, or at people who are low-powered and grouchy about it.
But besides that - people who feel worse-off in life in general, feel like life is a game that they’re losing, who don’t have power over those around them, and need to feel in control - all tend to be more submissive in bed.
Maybe some evidence for a hormone theory of submission here? Femininity in general tends to be more neurotic, powerless, and submission. If estrogen (or whatever, I haven’t looked hard into how hormones work yet) is responsible for all three, this might explain the trend.
But regardless, based on this survey data I would come away predicting that high powered CEOs are much more likely to carry that dominance over into the bedroom.
If most of the sample size is young and from Tik Tok, I don't see how this could be illustrative bc none of them would actually be "high powered" in the sense of having responsibility for and actual power over lots of people. Almost no one achieves that status til they're about 40…MAYBE in their 30s if they're very, very rare and lucky.
Anyway, classically moat studies showed that people, mostly males, into dominance or submission could get off on both sides of the coin. Just the power play was arousing. So guys into dominating 90% of the time might also enjoy flipping to the other side the other 10% of the time.
Of course, that was before porn changed everyone's views and people starting assuming that being into dominance or submission was not a rare kink in and of itself and irrelevant to most people,but a role that *someone* played in every encounter.
This definitely argues pretty strongly against "high-powered people are _more_ submissive in bed", but I feel as though that's not the version I've actually heard, which is something like "a lot of high-powered people want to give up all that power in bed." For women, this seems to back that up - given that the desirability of sexual submission is pretty high and barely changes at all across the whole spectrum of driven-ness, success, and need for control. (Even on the high end of need-for-control, women rate submission as much more desirable than dominance!)