submission

A Billion Wicked Choices

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2011-06-25 21:11

Note: Finally in Molyvos, Lesvos, Greece. It's a very cool place. There's internet but not enough time to really read or post consistently. Looks like posting will be somewhat slower than usual even for me.  Summary: This post examines the peculiar assumption that if some women like being submissive in bed then somehow feminism is a bad idea.

So a New Zealand blogger, Kiwifem (who's most recent post was about handing out condoms while her partner and friends participated in a gangbang,* launched her new blog with a great post titled "How feminism gave me an awesome sex life."

So it seems two dudely pop psychologists, Drs Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, have taken it upon themselves to unleash their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (May 2011) on the unwitting public, in which they have analysed millions of women and men’s sexual fantasies, desires and practices and come to the conclusion that women are naturally submissive and feminism has ruined [ruined I tell you!!] our sex lives.

Oh christ on a cracker, not this again.

Source: How feminism gave me an awesome sex life

She cites a case study by Drs Ogas and Gaddam wherein a pseudonymous woman, "Amy," opines that her partner just doesn't always sexually dominate her the way she'd like after she's had a hard day being a powerbroker.

Now just to give Ogas and Gaddam credit, if you read the first chapter of their book (via an Amazon Kindle app on their website, A Billion Wicked Thoughts) you quickly get that their errors are more a matter of nerdily limited scope rather than knuckledragging malevolence or MRA "beta" resentment.  They're just making fairly routine was-that-way therefore is-that-way errors.

Kiwifem's retort is just... awesome.

Oh really now, feminism is the problem here? Come oooon. Feminism is not what is hindering their sex life. ‘Amy’ and ‘Max’ are adults. They are in a relationship. Presumably, they are perfectly capable of communicating with each other. All Amy needs to do is say: ‘dude, being dominated turns me on. Let’s talk about that.’ Either it isn’t Max’s thing, in which case they’ll have to work out a mutually acceptable compromise, or it is, in which case, woot, great sex coming up for both of them!

All they need to do is talk to each other.

Yup.  I'm not really here to carry a brief for whether sexual topping and bottoming are intrinsically feminist acts -- mostly because I'm pretty sure that would be like saying being left or right handed was intrinsically feminist.

Instead, as Kiwifem points out, what feminism has done is make it possible for women in particular to communicate their sexual desires, preferences, and intentions in a way that was frankly inconceivable before. (You know, that whole agency thing.)

Or, to riff on the popular phrase about consent, feminism has made possible not only "yes means yes" but also "yes means yes, and now that you mention it...!"

---

Ogas and Gaddam are actually acutely aware of the old sexual-communication status quo.  In fact that's exactly what led them to review tens of millions of internet searches: people still really don't feel comfortable communicating their desires despite "the unshaven graduate student's assurance that their answers are completely anonymous."

They're also aware that while Rule #34 ("if you can imagine it there's porn of it") is evidently true, the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of erotica and porn people look for fall into a very small range. (They report that 20 interests account for 80% of all searches that are identifiable as erotically intentioned!)  And what that suggests to me, though possibly not to them, is that old habits die hard.  As opposed to, say, 80% of old habits are hard-wired.

There's one last thing that O and G are aware of -- one that really ought to have tempered their assertions about either their recommendations about female submission or their allegations that feminism messes everything up.  And so they should have known better.  As Kiwifem succinctly puts it:

First of all, there are all the [many, many] women for whom being submissive holds no appeal. Obviously, that’s going to be terrible for their sex lives. Not to mention all the men who aren’t into domination.

And that's the last thing I'll mention that makes Kiwifem's claim that feminism provides the potential for much more awesome sex lives than either tradition or anti-feminism ever will: thanks to feminism female submission is a choice, not the fucking obligatory/traditional/gender-role status quo!

To return briefly to her most recent (at the moment) post, the one about the "gangbang" her partner arranged for another friend, there's a giant fucking difference between someone choosing to have sex with three to five relatively anonymous men and someone being forced to.  That's something

* Could somebody please come up with a better word than "gangbang?"  By all accounts they're both more complex and more complicated than the nervous dismissiveness of the name would imply.

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The Fallacy of "Forced Feminisation"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-12-15 00:15

A seriously steamed dominant female (and manifestly not “femdom”) Bitchy Jones of Bitchy Jones’s Diary explains why she shouldn’t have to explain why the BDSM practice of “forced fem,” the practice of giving men jollies by making them adopt “humiliatingly” feminine clothing or behavior is not like (as a commenter of hers evidently keeps insisting) like a Jewish person getting off on role-playing Nazi victimization.

Who has the power outside the bedroom is relevant. Taking something that oppresses you in daily life and making it your sexual power source is a valid and often useful thing to do. And hot. Taking something you use to oppress other people and then making some parody of it to stroke off some ideas you have that wouldn’t it be dirty to be a slutty women, ain’t the same thing. That’s why I can say it isn’t okay and not be oppressing the way some oppressed groups make sexual fantasies of their oppression.

It is a different thing.

Look, you know that bit in the America version [of] the office where Steve Carrell’s character takes off a Chris Rock routine and it’s horrifying? That’s the same thing. Rock takes some language and ideas that oppress the group he comes from in real life, and makes them funny. Carrell takes some ideas that oppress a group that he has power over in real life and that makes it horrifying. That’s the difference.

And that’s not even getting started on forced fem’s prevalence in femdom enforcing shitty little ideas about femininity and submission being, like, what, fucking interchangeable, or something. Just stop. Really. If everything we do in femdom equates the ideas that femininity is what submission really is and dominance requires a cock and no emotional engagement, femdom will never stop being a joke, a sickness, a wrong, wrong thing.

Read the quote in context here.

Just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with getting your own jollies by indulging or even sharing your partner’s fantasies. Just don’t confuse that with either dominance or sadism. And for crying out loud don’t assume that’s what dominant women are “supposed” to want to do.

As I’ve mentioned in the past I think dominant women like BJ, and submissive men like Maymay, are even closer to the cutting edge of gender-awareness on this particular gender issue than mainstream or even radical feminism because they face erasure from all directions.

—-

Update: Two other points:

- One common assumption (that also drives BJ nuts) is that heterosexual “femdoms” hate men. But what assumptions should we make about men who think being forced to act feminine is to be (erotically!) humiliated?

- It’s unusual (not to mention redundant) to say “she’s a woman doctor” or, going further back, “she’s doctoress” because “she’s a doctor” is sufficient. So what does it say about gender entrenchment that we say things like “He’s a male submissive” or “she’s a female dominant?”

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Re-Examining Submission and Dominance, Re-Imaging Men

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2008-11-18 17:28

Maymay of Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed, is starting, approximately, a porn site with his sometime partner Eileen. While one might think there were already enough of those in the world his reasons for starting this one are persuasive. (All emphasis his.)

So, here’s the problem: There is not enough porn wherein submissive men are the erotic subject matter.

If you’ve read even a little bit of this blog, you’re probably already well-versed in many of my rants about how paltry the available porn is for submissive men like me (and, by extension, dominant women like Eileen). But the problem is actually two fold. One problem is, of course, that there’s simply an insanely disturbing general lack of the stuff. In fact, it’s so bad that if you Google for the three words “male submission art,” you actually get female submission links littering the first page of results.

This is actually even worse if you go actively hunting for porn with the hopes of finding erotica depicting men who are submissive. Instead, you’re much, much more likely to find erotica depicting women who are dominant. This is actually a major nuisance for a lot of people—including many submissive men, I might add.

Arguably even more frustrating that that, however, is that what male submissive porn is out there is total shit relative to the porn available for other sorts of orientations. In such erotica (unless it’s gay imagery, of course) men are portrayed as impotent, ugly creatures. That is not sexy. It’s also insulting.

He said it here.

The (already, big surprise, not-“work-safe”) site is Male Submission Art. The mission statement on their submission-guidelines page says their aim is

...to challenge stereotypes of erotica as it relates to imagery of gender-biased domination and submission. In our experience, such erotic imagery almost always contains images of beautiful female submission or “pathetic” male submission. Instead, we want to showcase beautiful imagery of masculine submissive subjects.

Read more, plus find out how to submit entries if you’re interested, here.

Since I reiterated my own frustrations the other day I’m obviously pleased to hear about this site. And I’m pleased not out of some sort of MRA-like plea that “men can be erotic too” but because interest already exists and the dysfunctionally, comically-stereotypically gendered nature of porn insures that that interest is underserved.

Since I appreciate but don’t share May and Eileen’s erotic enthusiasm for submissive men I’ll point out another distinction Eileen alludes to in several of her captions, but especially a comparatively modest one of a young man who’s just sitting on a bench counting his toes: it’s not that the man has to be actively (note that word “actively”) submissive, instead it can be enough for him simply not to be dominant!

For all the (entirely appropriate, justified, and important) attention paid to encouraging agency and non-passive consent for women it’s also important for men to get over the “no-sex” class paradigm-driven notion that (hetero) sex doesn’t happen unless men take the active role. (Even in “Playgirl” style “porn for women” men are portrayed as actively presenting themselves… submitting themselves in ways that initiate by actively inviting the observer rather than leaving space where the observer can identify as the initiator her- or himself.)

Quick mini vocabulary review: this might be a bit off-topic but since a lot of heterosexuals, men and women, like it when the man takes the lead I ought to make it clear that, as in ballroom dancing, one person initiating (“let’s dance,” “what are you doing later”) isn’t synonymous with that same person “leading” once the dance… or other activity… begins. Nor is initiating or leading the same as “dominating.” Nor does accepting an invitation automatically equal to “submitting.”

And finally, back to May’s, Eileen’s and my main point, when it comes to men submission (in either the active, the initiating, or even the BDSM sense) isn’t, and shouldn’t be, automatically synonymous with pathetic, “effeminate,” comical, impotent, or insulting. (Nor, for that matter, need submission automatically imply any of those other things when it comes to women.)

This one’s going to be a tough, tough stereotype to overcome, by the way. (It’s one place where even mainstream feminism has some catching up to do.) And while it’s sort of natural that BDSM folks would be on the cutting edge I think it’s important enough that anyone interested in intergender issues can help tackle it.

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The "No-Sex" Class and Dreaming the Just-a-Little-too-Impossible Dream

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2008-10-30 22:39


Photo “Little Spectator” by Flickr user Proggie. Used under a Creative Commons license.

[Note: Big update below — I originally, and possibly shamefully, looked at only one side of the question. —fl]

Matisse of Mistress Matisse’s Journal answers a question from a reader. Her answer’s spot on.

“...my best friend is actually a very beautiful lesbian with whom I have a lot of chemistry, but who obviously would never have sex with me. She is a very materialistic girl, and I’ve found that nothing makes me happier than to make her happy and to talk to her. I actually don’t even like pursuing straight girls anymore because I’m intrigued by how she makes me feel. And of course, the fact that she’s unavailable makes her more tantalizing, but that’s one of the things I want to understand.”

if you’re just asking for my opinion in general, I’d say that just based on the situation you’re describing… you’re an emotional masochist. And that’s not a good thing.

That’s not a real psychological term, of course, and it’s not a BDSM term, either. But you’re engaging in an unrequited love/lust thing with a bitchy-but-beautiful lesbian who doesn’t return your feelings. You imply that you’re giving her money or gifts or something? And you’re not even trying to find a woman who might love you back? I call that emotional masochism, my friend. I will bet you any amount of money that the situation you’re describing is not going to end in you being happy and getting what you want.

She said it here.

Given my fondness for my theory that men indoctrinate ourselves to perceive women as the“no-sex” class, the dominant paradigm wherein women are perceived as disinterested in sex… and therefore fair game for any and all attempts to leverage it out of them, either in exchange for something else or, sometimes, by brute force. I ought to nominate Matisse’s correspondent as a classic case since he’s constructed an attraction wherein pretty much anything he does isn’t going to work. Or, if for some reason she every says yes, that he can consider the ultimate “score” of his efforts to be “worthy” enough for her. And if he had a really bad case of it then it would also make sense that a woman who was interested in him (for instance, um, isn’t a lesbian for crying out loud?) might seem too “easy” and therefore not “worthy” of his attention.

The real clue for me? He says “I actually don’t even like pursuing straight girls anymore because I’m intrigued by how she makes me feel.” Because, you know, if it was personal — just her — then you’d expect him to say something like “I don’t feel like pursuing any other girls because of how she makes me feel.” Instead the schematic qualification of “straight girls” i.e. “women actually likely to be interested in him.”

But I dunno… if I knew more than what she wrote I might be more sure. It’s also the case that a lot of people — men and women — get “imprinted“ duckling-style on one particular characteristic of their first major crush or first serious partner and then keep cycling deeper and deeper trying to recapture that feeling. Or possibly he, like more men than I think people recognize, finds obsession with an unachievable potential partner is a convenient way to avoid sexual relationships altogether. Who knows?

I do have to say Matisse is right, though, that since his dynamic with this woman really isn’t satisfiable, and since if he pursues it or something like it really does subject himself not so much to domination but abuse, he really should consider a little talk therapy to clarify for himself what’s going on.

Update: Doh! I need to get out of the house a little more often I guess. After getting the children off to school this morning I took a long walk home. Thinking about the situation I outlined last night I realized I’d been thinking way too much in terms of the letter writer and how his affectation… well… affects him. Upon reflection it occurs to me that what he really needs to get off his affection/obsession is the effect it has on the women or women he’s decided to impossibly dream about.

My only excuse is one I mentioned last night: I only know what he wrote... in other words we only know his side of the story. And inside his framing then yeah, he’s parked himself in.

We don’t know her side, however. He sees her as his best friend. Is this how she sees him? He sees her as “materialist” and any acts he performs or gifts he brings as making himself happy by making her happy. Does she see herself as materialist? Is she happy when he thinks she’s happy? He talks about wanting to be the controlled submissive in a full-time D/s withholding relationship with her. Does she see him as wanting to be controlled or as already controlling?

Again, I dunno. Since we only have his side of his story we can’t know, eh?

In the extreme case she may see him as a stalker, in which case, considering how miserable unsuccessful things like restraining orders are (“wow, now she’s really playing hard to get”) talk therapy would really, really be good idea! (And if not talk therapy then more drastic interventions would be entirely called for — my experience of the aftermaths of “successful” stalkers and their survivors is that it’s the epitome of senseless tragedy.)

But a deeper lesson might be learned if he isn’t a stalker and is instead just really sunk in the worthiness trap. Because what the ordinary supplicant sees only as striving for worthiness often appears to others as entitlement. And the suitor’s expressions of frustration? More entitlement? And why not — after all who’s usually setting the terms? “If I only do this she’ll realize…” or “Maybe if I help her move…” or even “if she only knew how I felt about her she’d…” are all setting the terms, and reward that one believes “should” slay the dragon of indifference and “earn” the longed-for kiss.

Getting back to the “no-sex” class paradigm one can see how actual women’s agency or genuine desire beyond “yes or no” would only interfere with or even frustrate the internal cycles of the male worthiness trap.

One hopes talk therapy helps with that too.

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Circumstantial Nuances of "You're Sleeping Here Tonight"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-10-20 10:42


Photo by Flickr user SiFu Renka. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Goose of , in a thoughtful meditation on negotiation in her seriously but also seriously neighborly BDSM community, asks “What do you think are the three most important (or useful) questions in a kinky negotiation?”

What do you think are the three most important (or useful) questions in a kinky negotiation?

Let me get these three out of the way: – What’s your safe word? – Do you have a ride home? – Red or white?

Her introduction here.

I’d like to mildly repurpose those into questions of overall respect and responsibility in terms of social, psychological, and physical harm done by asking or, more importantly, failing to ask.

- What’s your safe word? – Do you have a ride home? (Prior to asking “red wine or white?)

I’m not saying everyone should become kinksters (although given the extraordinarily narrow definition of vanilla I’m not sure how many people aren’t) but I do think we might all be better off if the… well… the ethics articulated in, say, Easton and Hardy’s The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities were more widely respected.

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Forget "Boy Named Sue," How About "Girl Named Bruce?"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2008-07-01 15:36


Photo by Flickr user Niffty. Used under a Creative Commons license.

[Note: I’m on vacation in what may what’s proving be very limited internet service. I’ve been mostly relying on pre-recorded and (I very much hope!) a self-publishing posts. I’m taking the opportunity to use (limited) access here in a car-repair waiting room to try to catch up on a couple of ideas, but I may not still won’t have much opportunity to reply to comments but you’re comments are still very welcome. I’ll reply as soon as I can. You’re some of the best commenters in the blogsphere so you’re always welcome to respond spiritedly but respectfully to each other’s comments while I’m away. —fl]

Quoth the Monty Python sketch

Second Bruce: Here! Here’s the boss-fellow now!

(Enter fourth bruce with English person, Michael)

Third Bruce: ‘Ow are you, Bruce?

First Bruce: G’day, Bruce!

Fourth Bruce: Bruce.

Second Bruce: Hello, Bruce.

Fourth Bruce: Bruce.

Third Bruce: How are you, Bruce?

Fourth Bruce: G’day, Bruce.

Fourth Bruce: Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce a man from Pommyland who is joinin’ us this year in the Philosophy Department at the University of Wooloomooloo.

EveryBruce: G’day!

Michael Baldwin: Hello.

Fourth Bruce: Michael Baldwin, Bruce. Michael Baldwin, Bruce. Michael Baldwin, Bruce.

First Bruce: Is your name not Bruce?

Michael: No, it’s Michael.

Second Bruce: That’s going to cause a little confusion.

Third Bruce: Mind if we call you “Bruce” to keep it clear?
Source: University of Adelaide Library; Monty Python script for “The Bruces”

Amanda Schaffer, Slate.com’s Medical Examiner column, has a nice article debunking a pair of books in the evidently bottomless genre of “mars/venus” pseudoscience. This time by “reluctant” feminists but that’s almost beside the point. We already know that people want there to be a difference, preferably large ones, nevermind how surprisingly little supporting research there might be. (I think it would be a lot more interesting if someone would just write a book about that.)

Given the radical proposition that both men and women are people, it should come as no surprise that roughly equal numbers of men and women are anorgasmic and/or asexual. But it perpetually surprises us as much, maybe more, as the news that except maybe in childhood men and women have virtually indistinguishable verbal skills and word usage.

And therefore it shouldn’t surprise us that men and women, people all, should be equally eroticized by sensations associated with submission and masochism.

I mean, compare the difference between the following snippets, first from Holly of The Pervocracy, who says

Submission’s easy to explain. Pain’s hard. It’s not just about giving up control, it’s about giving up control and being betrayed. If D/s is a trust fall, SM is a trust fall where you hit the ground. Still thrilling, and with a competent top still safe, but… fuuuck, it hurts.

I’ve heard people say things like “masochists transform pleasure to pain,” or “it’s not pain, it’s intense sensation.” Really? Is that what it’s like for you? Maybe it is. But for me, there’s a lot of real, no-euphemism pain in the experience. Certain types of pain are straight-up pleasurable: very mild slap ‘n tickle, pain during sex, and sometimes pain that’s sufficiently severe and extended that I get a little out of my head. The meat of a scene, though, hurts me.

So why? Dunno. I don’t think it’s any kind of negative or self-destructive impulse; hitting makes me happy! I do get a little high afterwards, but it doesn’t happen every time and I don’t think it’s the primary motivation. Ascribing it to The Patriarchy is too ridiculous for words. Maybe it’s just one of those random oddities that people are born with. Like an eleventh toe.

Read the quote in context here.

As opposed to Richard of Down On My Knees who says

That people who aren’t gifted with masochism can’t grasp it never surprises me. They don’t have our special superpower that transforms “Ouch!” into something rewarding.

This afternoon I thought of one aspect that is especially obscure.

If, like me, you are a certified pain slut then pain can feel good in itself as it happens. Well, sometimes. Not necessarily when you push toward the edge. At least not straightforward obvious pleasure. I’ve yet to evolve the vocabulary for the experience.

Or not at the time. Certain pains don’t lend them to immediate gratification: a hot ointment, like IcyHot, that causes a terrifying tingle. Nor when you endure a quality or level of pain solely to please the top. The reward comes later. I remember evenings when the happy afterglow to a series of a demanding scenes didn’t kick in until the following morning.

Read the quote in context here.

Oh wait! There’s not much difference there at all is there? Oops!

Which brings me to a point Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon brings up (all emphasis mine, but note especially the bold text)

Not too long ago, a friend of a friend joking-aggressively asked me while we were out and about what the difference between misogyny and sex is.  Mind you—-we were sober.  So I kind of blinked at him and was like, “Come again?” I know the game Bait The Feminist, but this one didn’t even make a lot of sense.  He tried to clarify, but it wasn’t helping.  I kept thinking he was trying to imply that feminists think straight male sexual desire itself is somehow anti-woman, but he knows that I can’t possibly think that, so I was confused.  Later I thought about it and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt—-maybe there are men out there who really do struggle to find a way to desire women that doesn’t have a backlog of misogyny and resentment towards women.  God knows that our culture doesn’t do much to help men out in this regard, and in fact encourages men to resent women for being desireable, and to rectify the dissonance between feeling vulnerable towards women because you desire them and feeling superior to women because of your social station by making the act of intercourse a symbolic conquering of the female body.  In case that sort of heady language is confusing, a good deal of porn simplifies things by making women choke on cocks, look generally uncomfortable, get double-pronged in painful-looking ways, get spat upon, and get called names like “slut” and “whore”. 

Read the quote in context here.

Here’s the deal. You can’t look at Holly’s post without recognizing that there’s some foundation to all the popular tropes of androcentric porn: women women really, even really really get off on pain even though it just hurts. I’ll go even further and say that anyone who denies, for instance, Holly’s experience or fails to support her is denying not only her sexuality, or her gender, but denying the radical proposition that she’s a person. So for someone to say I’m denying, or disputing, or disrupting, or disrespecting those women who get off on pain, humiliation, and submission, no matter how “extreme” I could in all fairness accuse them of deliberately misreading my position. (Not that I would, of course, I’m just saying I could.)

But here’s the other deal. You can’t look at Holly’s post next to Richard’s virtually identical post without recognizing the deep truth of Amanda Marcotte’s post: Women have no monopoly on masochism, men are equally equipped to be enthusiastic masochists and bottoms, no more women than men overall are masochistic and/or subservient and yet… the bulk of popular porn in terms of downloads, in terms of rentals, in terms of “most favorited” on upload sites like YouPorn or RedTube, in terms of “have to see it to believe it” blooper sites specializing in sexual and nonsexual pratfalls… are about hurting, humiliating, and dominating women to one degree or another.

In keeping with the Monty Python sketch at the top I’m tempted to call it the “all women are named Bruce” fallacy. And, while we’re at it, the “no men are named Bruce” fallacy. Except, of course, that someone would point out that no women are named Bruce, and that not that many men are either.

One might be excused, however, for assuming that a disproportionate number of porn producers, let alone consumers, are named Bruce.

It would certainly explain the data better than the next 80 best-sellers claiming men and women are from such different species it’s a miracle of both Church and Science that we can interbreed at all.

[Note: Note also the thuggish homophobia mocked in the Python sketch. Although note also the not-too-veild colonialist contempt by Englishmen for Australian erstwhile colonials.

Also note: I highlighted the text in Marcotte’s post, “I kept thinking he was trying to imply that feminists think straight male sexual desire itself is somehow anti-woman, but he knows that I can’t possibly think that…” Yeah, that would have confused me too. Most feminists I know really don’t think straight male sexual desire is anti-woman. I think that would actually be *anti-feminist” attitudes towards straight male sexual desire are anti-woman instead. After all they’re the ones who think men are just so flipping superior we can ruin women just by touching them with our pee-pees. All the more reason to prefer feminism, eh? —fl]

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Perspectives On Penetration

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2008-04-24 15:34

So following up on my previous post about assumptions about BDSM-dominant women and the “no-sex” class, I said I thought one reason most standard male fantasies** about sex with “dominatrixes” is that genital contact is either withheld altogether (orgasm denial is a perhaps suspiciously-under-the-circumstances popular theme) or it’s doled out fairly grudgingly after being “earned” through feats of humiliation, pain, or expense. And even then the male sub is often “permitted” to have his orgasm without contact with her (or at least sexual contact with her*** — there’s a bit of a cliché in written porn that the sub ejaculates into on, say, the dom’s shoes.

Via the startlingly interesting Almost Magic of Sometimes Almost Magic, Bitchy Jones, who’s a little sick of life in the “no-sex” class pigeonhole, raises an obvious objection:

One crucial thing was over looked in this race to elevate women to bossiness. To escape the oppressive tyranny of PIV sex and let women be in charge. They failed to notice that it wasn’t being penetrated itself that was submissive. It was just that all femininity was equated with submission – that everything a woman did in sex had been made to look as if it was a priori submissive.

But there is no way that such simple basics – being the hole or the plug – are on their own submissive or dominant. It only has further meaning in context.

Sometimes it feels like femdom is a big mirror. You hold it up to the world and you see all kinds of yukky beliefs reflected by and clear. Like that bit in the Snow Queen or something.

But that’s the fact. Way back in the past when they invented misogyny they decided that women were lower status and thus had the low status role in sex. He had the mighty phallus – she had the dirty needy hole. You can see how femdom later thought, hey, lets flip this shit. Let’s make the guy be called slut for wanting and be filled. But those things aren’t really submissive. Having something pushed into your body that feels amazing is only submissive because someone decided that the female role in sex was a submissive one.

You don’t need to put the guy on the bottom because he is the bottom. It misses the fucking point. Fucking. Which is the point. Which feels good. Which doesn’t have an innate power exchange embedded in it.

Really. It just doesn’t.

Much as it is a big shame for those of us who like temporary sex-based status difference pretences, sex, done right, is pretty much fun for fun. It’s equal. You cannot humiliate someone just by fucking them.

Emphasis mine. Read the rest of Jones’s post here.

“Having something pushed into your body that feels amazing is only submissive because someone decided that the female role in sex was a submissive one.”

See! That’s what I’m talking about! We can talk all day long about gender equality in the workplace, in public life, at home, and even in relationships but we gotta talk about what gender equality means in bed too. Because while sex isn’t the most important thing about gender relations (and yes, I’m aware that sounds sort of ironic) it can be a pellucid little reservoir of unexamined gender-superiority assumptions. Might as well start airing it out.

And it’s not as though failing to look at this stuff has no consequences. Like the conceptual blinders that kept early primatologists from seeing that female rhesus monkeys initiate 80% of sexual contact, much of our rhetoric, many of our assumptions, the lines of discourse we permit ourselves, even avenues of medical research and treatment (while I’ll get to in a couple of posts) are affected.

Hands don’t “submit” to a pencil when we pick it up. Mouths don’t “submit” to the ear of corn when we bite into it. Then neither do vaginas “submit” to penises any more than penises “submit” to vaginas. So…

...what other “facts” are we just pulling out of the air? What are the consequences? It makes sense that people like Jones — women who are BDSM power-exchange dominants — can be pretty cool resources.

[** Just to be clear, I’m perfectly aware that men and women who practice d/s may have far more nuanced relationships. —fl]

[*** When there is sexual contact with her it’s often something to do with the “ordeal” of forced oral sex. Which seems like a funny kind of “ordeal.” —fl]

[*** Hat tip for the link to the startlingly interesting almostmagic of Sometimes Almost Magic. —fl]

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Category Metrics

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2008-04-20 08:51


Photo by Flickr user perplemaggie. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Appropos the previous post, if it’s not irrelevant that we’re drawn to or distanced by partners of a certain gender, or roles higher or lower on a power gradient, or height, or age, or ethnicity, or social standing, it should be irrelevant when they’re not our partners.

In other words you can look at (using some of DevastatingYet’s examples) whether the sub who breaks down is male or female, or whether the 24/7 dom who cuts a sub with a kitchen knife (!) is male or female; or whether, as Calico notes in comments to that post, whether a sub who’s forbidden to speak is male or female or, by extention, much older or younger than the dom; or whether, as Sex Geek puts it, “forced feminization” of a male partner is just hot or highly gender-problematic; or when, as Eurosabra put it in a comment, it’s a coincidence or a problem that on an “SM-“lair” in his area “which advertises itself as ‘invite only’ on one of the public boards, the guys only want to do SM pick-up with wingmen who are already somewhat relaxed, stylish, and socially adept.” And looking at those you can draw conclusions about whether or not they’re relevant if it’s not your relationship. And if it does seem relevant then what?

The point being that a way to measure how close we are to DY’s ideal, or to measure what needs to be moved to get there, is by how much or how often any of that is relevant.

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Categories, Hyphenation, and Gender Assumptions

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2008-04-20 08:41

Ok, so I’ve been trying to figure out why Sex Geek’s posts about male vs. female dominated “domestic discipline” and insecure or inappropriate dominants was resonating for me. But then a comment on one of my polygamy posts from Dw3t-Hthr got me thinking.

She said

The fact that every discussion of polygamy I’ve seen assumes that it will be polygynous, as if women are incapable of desiring multiple partners, is one of those things that I get Sarcastic about on occasion. There’s a lot of “women are the intrinsically monogamous class, only men will have an interest in polygamy if it’s legal, thus polygamy will exploit women by giving them all fractional men” subtext of a lot of these discussions.

She said that here.

Which helped crack a little more ice on my gender “windshield.” So as I usually do when I get comments I followed her links back to her blog Letters from Gehenna where she’s got this great post about categorization.

The thing is, these things aren’t descriptive to me, stuff like “M/f” or “F/m”; they don’t seem to describe systems where those just happen to be the relationships those people have, but rather something where it is important that The Person Of One Sex Is Dominant, and The Person Of The Other Sex Is Submissive. It’s a particular gendering fetish, and it’s not one that I share; it’s not one I want to be involved with, either. (“Your kink may be okay, but I’ll go over there now.”)

Read Dw3t’s post here.

And she, in turn, was responding to a post from DevastatingYet of Devastating Yet Inconseqential about gender, power, roles in BDSM

In my ideal world (which may or may not be possible at all), set gender roles would not exist. People would not view women and men differently on the basis of sex. Things like femininity and masculinity would be for play, for hotness, and many people would have no need of them. It would be the same way with power dynamics – nobody would be presumed to be stronger or better than anyone else, and people would only use power dynamics for play, like we do in bdsm. In this fantasy world, I don’t think I’d feel any different about male and female submissives, unless my idiosyncratic sexuality just made one hotter than the other.

But we don’t live in that world, and I do see them differently. And it’s a strange and complicated thing that I have a hard time fully understanding about myself.

...

This relates somehow to my own confused relationship to being submissive. I love to feel submissive in a scene, but any presumption of submissiveness from even a scene partner turns me off. (One guy told me I didn’t seem like a brat. It really rankled me, given that “brat” assumes there is some kind of legitimate power structure that I shouldn’t rebel against.)

Read DY’s post here

And that in turn prompted a commenter named Sallo to say

To use a non-bdsm example, when I hear women take a very conservative, traditional sex-role, one-step-removed-from-barefoot-and-pregnant position on marriage or women’s role in society in general, I do blame the patriarchy. It’s not that I doubt that the woman actually does in some sense want that life, but I assume that it is because she has absorbed these views from her (male-dominated) religion, family, or other source. It’s not impossible that this isn’t something that some women would just want for their own reasons, so I am inaccurately lumping them all into some kind of category of the (however mildly) brainwashed. This is quite unfair to those women who have thought things through at a deep level and still want that life, but the alternative is unclear. Taking it at face value that women want what they are willing to say publically that they want, or want the lives that they are living (through some kind of revealed preference thing, as though their choices have not been constrained all along) – that just seems too close to rationalizing and excusing the system.

I don’t immediately see why moving this into the realm of sex changes the analysis significantly.

Read DY’s original post here, then scroll down to comment #3

And that’s where… from Sex Geek, to Dw3t, to DevastatingYet, a lot of this starts to click.

The thing about categories is it’s not irrelevant that we’re drawn to or distanced by partners of particular sexes any more than it’s irrelevant that someone’s tattooed or not if those qualities are something that turn us on. (That’s just orientation.) But when we tie things together it gets complicated. Like… ok, like it’s fine if someone says “You’re tall, can you reach that?” But if they say “You’re a tall man, can reach that?” then it’s kind of creepy because WTF does gender have to do with reaching something?

And just by the way, if it’s weird walking around hyphenating categories that shouldn’t be hyphenated, like female-submissive, then it’s even more problematic to embed it even more deeply by just assuming “Dom” means both male and top.

And look, I don’t mean to sound so flipping privileged and/or narrow-focuesed that I think all of society should be transformed just so we can have better sex. The beneficial consequences of de-linking categories of gender, orientation, race or ethnicity, age, status, class, and power rather obviously go way beyond sex. This is however, a sex blog and therefore as long as how, why, how often, and with whom we have sex remains rather the elephant in the room I think it’s ok for me to dwell on it.

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The body doesn't lie

Posted by Kochanie | Tags:
Sat, 2007-11-10 09:29

“What do you think?”

Late afternoon on a sodden November day. The weak light steps aside for evening, and a reflection slowly emerges in the office window: a woman, seated on the sofa, attired in a dark business suit, pale stockings, high heeled shoes, hands resting on an open book balanced in her lap. I cannot see her face because she has no head. Her image has been guillotined at the throat by a venetian blind.

Apt metaphor, I thought, as I turned away from my reflection in the glass and looked at the woman sitting across from me. A mother of ten and grandmother of many more, she was wise, calm, and looked like a woman half her age. I owed a great deal to this woman, my therapist, who guided me as I grappled with the abuse of my childhood. She had taught me that the memory of betrayal, pain and fury were not neatly stored in the brain, but written in flesh, soft tissue and bone. And with her help I hoped to reconnect my head to my body.

We had spent the session discussing sexual fantasies, the fantasies and writings of other women because I was too uncomfortable to speak directly of my own fantasies. The fantasies I questioned came from the book I held in my lap, Erotica: Women’s Writing from Sappho to Margaret Atwood. In that volume I found the bloody prose of Angela Carter, a gang rape scene described by Pat Califia, and the veiled sexuality in Christine de Pazan’s account of the torture and martyrdom of virgins, whose resilience left their executioners weak and exhausted.

I never told anyone that these scenes — violent, intense, bloody, degraded — were what took me to the edge in a way no lover ever did. I assumed they were the remnants of the abuse, so that no matter what I had accomplished in my career, no matter how polished my appearance, the damage, the humiliation would always be there.

But when I found images that resembled my own fantasies in the stories and poems written by women, including some who were avowed feminists, I found the courage to ask my therapist the questions I had been avoiding. Was it possible that so many writers experienced abuse, the germinating seed for these violent images? She assured me that men and women who had never experienced any form of abuse fantasized about rape, bondage, and blood play. The images of violence, force or humiliation were not markers for abuse, whether experienced in childhood or adulthood.

Even if these disturbing images could be considered normal, why did they appear in stories and poems authored by women who were reputed to be feminists? She replied that this question of sexual fantasies, fantasies of dominance, submission, and sado-masochism, was the cause of an angry debate among feminists. Some believed that these fantasies were the result of the oppression of women, and even if a woman did not personally experience sexual or physical abuse, violence and degradation were so prevalent in our culture that these images were inescapable. To eliminate this violence and cruelty, women and men must consciously seek to eradicate their own dark urges, including the expression of these desires in art, fiction and cinema. Other feminists argued that the need for violence, blood, dominance or submission was hard-wired at birth. It was part of human nature.

Then I asked, “Is it possible to change such violent desires, to make them politically correct? What do you think?” She did not answer immediately, but looked directly in my eyes and said, “No, the desires, the fantasies are what they are. They cannot be changed. What you can change is how you choose to express these desires.”

And with those words I began to reconnect my head to my body.

Ten years later, I remembered that conversation when I encountered the work of another woman, a psychiatrist who is also a sexual submissive. She writes under the name of Yaldah Tovah, which in Hebrew means “good girl.” Based on her own experience and those of her analysands who are sexually submissive, Tovah has written several essays on the psychological profiles of submissive women, differentiating those who are psychologically healthy from those suffering from personality disorders.

A common dilemma for a person who is submissive or dominant is finding a partner who understands and can complement one’s sexual nature. Many people have not even recognized their proclivities as valid, but believed that these urges to dominate or be dominated were unhealthy, peculiar and thus tried to ignore or override them. The end result was often a long-time relationship with a man or woman who could not understand or accept his/her partner’s true sexual needs.

For the man or woman who is fortunate to know and accept the validity of his/her need to dominate or submit, the challenge is finding a partner who is honest about his/her own desires. Today, there is an abundance of information describing BDSM lifestyles. In some circles, dark sexuality is not merely accepted; it has become fashionable. Kink has become trendy and, some people will claim they are dominant or submissive to appear more sexually adventurous. But their performance, and it is only performance, cannot maintain or endure the delicate balance of power, fear and arousal. And so the genuinely dominant or submissive partner feels cheated and frustrated.

How then can a man or woman determine if a partner is truly dominant or submissive? Tovah claims that the answer lies in what she terms “signal fantasies.”

In contemplating early roots of “kink” I have come to consider the role of early sexual fantasies, and their significance.
I believe that some people have particular kinds of sexual fantasies that hold enormous power to shape not only their sexuality, but also their lives. I call these fantasies “signal fantasies” because they call attention to an overriding psychosexual need, which can be so determinative of behavior that they define identities and shape lives.
Fantasies such as these are typically masturbatory, begin very early in childhood, as young as 3 or 4 years of age for some, remain fairly fixed over a lifetime, and are the “efficient” fantasies, the reliable ones, the ones that bring its creator to climax more quickly than any others.

The body doesn’t lie
.
These fantasies are the ones that get a person who has them reliably wet, reliably hard, every time. They are the fantasies that play in the mind during sexual activities too far afield from them to be satisfyingly arousing. These are the fantasies that when encountered in literature, in the movies, online for the first time, shock the person who is unfamiliar with the power they hold, and usually disturb the person to some degree with that power…

The earlier these fantasies appear, and the more reliable and efficient they are, the more they have been fixed over a lifetime, the greater the degree of necessity to live them out for real satisfaction. Those people with the earliest, most fixed, most intransigent signal fantasies can be considered to be “hard-wired” for the behavior.

You can read her entire essay, “The Significance of Fantasies,” here.

According to Tovah, if a person is “hard-wired,” i.e., if her fantasies arose early in childhood, she must determine where her potential partner’s desires are on the spectrum of dominance/submission, hetero/homosexuality, or sado-masochism:

A hard-wired female submissive will never be truly happy with a non-Dominant man. To put it simply, we love differently. A gentle, non-Dominant passive man will never be able to keep a profound submissive happy. His gentle, giving, passive lovemaking will leave her to turn to her fantasies of force, authority, bondage, and pain to carry her through her their sexual acts.

Is this true? Can we see beyond the defenses we constructed out of shame and timidity throughout our lives and look back to childhood to see our true sexual nature? Based on my own experience, I would say yes. Would I choose the same lovers or partners if I did not suppress my need for sexual submission and ravishment? Probably not. This is not to say that there was no sexual attraction, or that these men did not possessed other excellent qualities. It was unfair to pretend to be what I was not to avoid ridicule. Unfair to them and to me.

Other men and women have also claimed that their desires for pain, spanking, etc. have remained unchanged from their childhood years. In a discussion forum, one woman gave this description of her earliest fantasies:

Let me preface this by saying I’m not a crackpot or a co-dependent kook. I’m a married professional woman in my late-30’s with a life-long spanking fetish. The earliest spanking fantasies I can remember occurred when I was around six. I remember thinking how much I would fancy being spanked by David Brinkley. Go figure.

According to Tovah, the games children play are often stagings of these signal fantasies.

Some young submissives play “house” in which they manage to get themselves spanked by baby Dominants. Some children are insistent on playing “cowboys and Indians” because of the tying up part of the game. Others, bold little creatures, are determined to find playmates for a game of “Master and slave.”

There are often feelings of guilt and shame about feelings that differ so widely from what the child observes around him. In an article at the Taken In Hand site, one man described a childhood game that revealed his true sexual nature, as well as his fear and confusion about his sexual arousal:

When I was a young teen (not sure exactly how old, about 13 I think), a fairly attractive girl was at our house one day. She was slightly younger than me, and frankly, not that interesting to me. Being bored, and looking for something to do, we played various games, one of which was to see if we could do a Houdini and escape from being tied up (with an old necktie, of all things). I quickly realized that being tied up was something I really hated, and was soon free – probably from the sheer adrenaline of the mild state of panic being so helpless put me in.
But then it was her turn. As soon as I tied her up, I found myself incredibly turned on by the exchange of power. I didn’t understand why I felt that way, or why it scared me so, and so I forgot about the whole thing. For a few years.

There are some who believe that, with patience, dominance or submission can be learned. I disagree, with one exception which should be the topic of a separate post. Unless one is awakening a sexual nature that has been buried for so long, what a person will learn is ritual or protocol. His/her performance will lack intensity, the same quality that makes vanilla sex memorable. IMO, the intensity of BDSM is derived from the eroticism of power, which can be expressed sexually or nonsexually. Difficult to fake on a consistent basis. Far better to be an intense vanilla, than a poor imitation dominant.

And if you are in doubt, could there be a more reliable litmus test than this?

The body doesn’t lie…Overpower a submissive, or set her to service, and she will be wet. Present a submissive posture to a Dominant, and he will get hard.

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