Belle de Jour On the "No-Sex Class" Paradigm

Kit Roskelly has a "Kink 101" article up at RH Reality Check. The article is pitched at the perfect level for feminists who are concerned, but not deadset-convinced, that BDSM violates feminist principles. If you're kinky, feminist, and sick to death of having to argue about this issue, Roskelly's article is not for you. But if you're on the fence, it's worth checking out.

I'm not a kink expert by any means; I just like to whack my boyfriend with things, like to be whacked with things, and have attended a few kink events. Most of what Roskelly says strikes me as true and helpful; I especially like "feminism should not have a prescriptive stance on female sexuality" and "Consent is an absolute requirement of sexual interaction". You could nitpick about the safewords (you don't need to say 'red light' if you have some other way of communicating that things are going really really wrong, and you should probably agree on a safe tap before anybody stuffs anything in anybody else's mouth) but the basic idea of safewords is pretty sound. Both partners need a way to say, "stop" and be taken seriously.

I have one substantive criticism of Roskelly's article. (This criticism is not new. Trinityva, who writes at SM Feminist and The Strangest Alchemy, has made this point repeatedly; my favorites are here and here.) Twice in her article, Roskelly urges kinky feminists to be mindful of the social context in which their desires arise. But what does mindfulness entail, exactly? Are we supposed to seek the reasons for our kinky fantasies and desires? At this point, I don't think anybody really knows what causes people to have one set of sexual tastes rather than another. And if you did know what caused your sexual desires, what would you do with that information? Learning that your rape fantasies are the result of childhood trauma wouldn't necessarily eliminate your rape fantasies.

There are things in the neighborhood to be mindful of. Are you really satisfied by the kinky sex you're having, or are you doing it because you feel pressured? (And being in the dominant role doesn't mean that you're necessarily satisfied by the sex; submissive people can be very good at manipulating their partners into indulging fetishes they don't really get off on, in a way that's not reciprocal. Bitchy Jones' kinky sexism category has a depressingly large number of examples.) It's also a good idea to reflect on how your expression of your desires affects other people. Does the person next to you faint at the idea of needles? If so, it's not very respectful to play with needles right in front of them. Does the event you're organizing have pictures of naked women, and only women, on the walls? If so, you may be alienating some of the women who attend. In my experience, BDSM people are already more mindful about this stuff than average, but extra reminders never hurt.

I'm on board with mindfulness if it's meant to apply to actions. But what's inside your head is yours. I don't think feminism, or any other political position, has a claim on your fantasies.

[Hey, P! Wonderful comment and I think it's great that Kochanie plans to turn it into a separate/guest post. (I'd have offered if she hadn't.) My take on the "mindfulness" question is that, well, first of all I think mindfulness is always a good idea. But secondly I think it means not just that other people shouldn't feel like *automatically* freaking out when they see, say, stripes on someone's ass in the dressing room then neither should *we* freak out if those same stripes trigger someone who associates stripes not with consensual sex but, say, parental assault. Know what I mean? It's not saying "eww, don't do anything that might trigger someone," and it *certainly* doesn't mean "don't do anything that, if practiced non-enthusiastically in abusive and/or coercive environments, would look like assault." Instead it's more like being mindful means proactively *providing context* to onlookers so they can distinguish what one and one's partners enjoy from what other people fear or dread. An example, by the way. Because of my youth as a bartender in a fairly rough bar I get, well, triggered by gunplay. So when I went to college on the other side of the continent I wasn't expecting any actual gun *play* on campus. But one afternoon I was hanging out on a 3rd-floor activity-center balcony and a woman just beneath me shrieked "you son of a bitch," reached into her purse, pulled out and aimed a pistol at another person and pulled the trigger. And then turned and aimed at another passerby. It turned out she'd gotten the gun from the theater props department and she and her friends were clowning around. I, on the other hand, found myself with a large concrete flower pot in my hands, over the edge of the balcony and aiming at her head, and only seconds from crushing her dead, dead, dead with it. Dead! And her friend got up. So! How to process that? Was she perfectly in her right to play her scene on campus? Sure! How about my terrifyingly near-fatal unprepared reflex? Yikes! I had the shivers for days over that -- not just "I could have killed her if I hadn't hesitated" but also "If it had been real she would have killed her next victim because I hesitated." And either way I don't know what I would have said. So *that's* what I think about when I hear someone say "triggering." And mitigating that kind of conundrum is what I think Roskelly has in mind when she suggests mindfulness. Cool, cool, post, P! --fl]