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.