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Another follow-up along the same lines of dominance/submissiveness stereotype-breaking I started digging into yesterday. Bitchy Jones of Bitchy Jones’s Diary really struggles with assumptions about what it’s supposed to mean to be a dominant woman.

I am no good at being dominant. Here’s why. I have emotions. Emotions are your enemy when you want to stomp all over your partner for lame kicks. Empathy? Forget it. That’s helping no one. Remorse? Get thee behind me. Love?

Basically it’s hard enough making ‘I love you‘ and ‘I want to hurt you’ fit into the same person’s box in my brain without the entire world of femdom adding to my troubles by going out of its fucking way to completely ignore questions of love and actual adult human relationships (and essentially anything that doesn’t come up in the prodom/client dynamic).

Femdom hates the feminine: clothing and behaviours that signify it are used to degrade. [i.e. men by forcing them to adopt feminine attire or behaviors. Whereas dominant women are supposed to wear non-conventional feminine attire… like black catsuits.—fl Emotions associated with femininity – like loving and caring – are ignored.

Where is love? Truly. You tell me, in this world of kink that venerates women as it hates and grinds them down. As it worships cunts and feet and immaculate beauty? As it rejects female desire, female sexuality, cunts that aren’t framed in a queening stool like an object d’art. That is okay with the clit and it’s erectile properties and love of friction and down with the hatin’ on the vagina and its dirty ache for penetration. And where is the woman – who is me – falling in love with this man who is her dirt, her filth, hers to grind to powder and crumble to dust.

You know me and you know that when I see him like that my heart burst open like bruised fruit. Not for male submission in general, not for my kink made flesh, but for him. The actual him inside the hurt. I love the one I’m with and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

She says this, and a lot more, here.

So in other words once again the cultural concepts of dominance and/or sadism is so closely tied to masculinity, and submission and/or masochism so linked to femininity that an actual dominant, erotically sadistic, and (gasp!) monogamous and loving heterosexual woman winds up being the odd duck out. Kind of interesting, no?

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Aside: this might be an interesting place to bring up a different post, by Em and Lo of Daily Bedpost respond to a letter from a reader

[Dear] Em & Lo
 
I am a 31-year-old male in California and have been married for 6 1/2 years. Back in March, my wife came to me one night and said she would like to discuss something with me…I knew it was something serious but never imagined she’d say, “What do you think about an open marriage?” She is conservative by nature so this took me by complete surprise. I have dated her since she was 18, she is now 28, and we have two kids. She says she doesn’t want to leave me or the kids, but admits to feeling trapped — like she never lived out her early 20’s. We have discussed it over the last couple of months: she is persistent in wanting this. What are the positives of this and can it be healthy for a marriage?
 
Confused Husband

Dear C.H,

First, can we just say we love that you’re concerned, cautious and confused about your wife’s request? The cliché male response would be to immediately jump at an opportunity like this. “I can get a free pass from my wife to sleep with other women?!? Hells yes!” Of course, not all men are immune to the powerful bonds of traditional, monogamous marriage. They too can cherish the stability and intimacy that comes from dedicating your life to someone, body and soul…OR, they’re so riddled with jealousy that they couldn’t stand the thought of their wife sleeping with anyone else and would just prefer to secretly cheat behind her back so they can have their cake (they sleep around) and eat it too (their wives don’t).

For the sake of courtesy, let’s assume you fall into the former category…

Read the quote in context here.

It’s a safe assumption that most men would jump at the chance. But then, as Bitchy Jones laments, it’s also a safe assumption that dominant women don’t love men, enjoy refraining from sex enough to effortlessly deny it of their despised partners, wear 22-inch high-heels, and ought to be charging money for it since they’re “a natural at it.”

In fact extraordinary numbers of men are contentedly monogamous (even in the stereotypically promiscuous gay male community approximately half are in or would prefer to be in exclusive relationships with a single partner.)

Stereotypes matter. Unfortunately.

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Speaking of stereotypes, though, and turning to another point in BJ’s post, she addresses another stereotype about love, fidelity, and fantasies about “femdoms”

I actively reject the idea that most femdom relationships are conducted by an arch uninterested woman and a series of men who are dropped into the piranha pit as soon as they displease her.

I am still a real person in my fantasies and I care about him. Him. He is not some faceless, exchangeable nothing, he is the most desirable creature that exists. That is who I fantasise about having at my beck. Oh, I know you are going to make noises about am army, a mass of most-desirables, but my desire doesn’t work that way. I am obsessive. I have focus.

He cannot easily be replaced. And who would want a man that could?

Deep down I think this idea of the disposable submissive man is one of those ideas that looks like it is about keeping the man down, sexily in his place, but at the expense of erasing (or nonsensifying) the desire of the dominant woman.

Keen point about erasing desire, and even autonomous desire, in dominant women. (I think it’s significant that there’s a consensus among nearly all concerned, including law enforcement, that being dominatrixes doesn’t really count as prostitution.**)

Another point, though, about the male fantasy of disposability: it models the same stereotype of men that they “pay prostitutes not for the sex but to go away after.” In other words it’s a common (though not universal) male fantasy, and a dominant stereotype of them, to rack up multiple partners with as few encumbrances and complications as possible. Being “used” and discarded by a string of “femdom” women, however “humiliating,” is still about as convenient a way to move from one bed (ok, or dungeon) to the next as it gets.

My guess, though, is that outside of pro-dom (a.k.a. compensated) relationships it’s probably as complex for men as it is for Bitchy Jones.

I bring all this up, sometimes over and over, not because I’m a closet submissive (Like a lot of people I’m attentive, and sometimes quite deferential, and occasionally passive-aggressive, but far more warm to topping than not) but because, as I’ve mentioned before, I think BDSM — even more than feminism — is on the cutting edge of this kind of gender analysis. And I bring it up because while the construction of gender, and the stereotypes and assumptions that are it’s bricks and mortar, feel like jail for women like Jones, or men like Maymay, they confine all of us.***

[** In fact it might be really significant, not just from a law-enforcement perspective but from a feminist one: what does it say if male erotic male gratification carried out on a “submissive” women through penetration is “sex” but equally intense erotic gratification carried out by a dominant woman isn’t? Just curious. Also, it seems a lot like the Larry Craig-style defense that “He doesn’t count as ‘homosexual’ because he only penetrates other men.” —fl]

[*** And just to be clear, I’m not saying gender isn’t fun, interesting, or even necessary. And goodness knows I’m not saying folks should all just switch to unisex clothes and bathrooms! I am saying, though, that it’s generally constructed too small to move freely… that to really make the most of the genders we’ve got we shouldn’t have to keep choking on it. —fl]