Here’s something I’ve been meaning to blog about since last fall.
In a post titled “Authority (not in the sense you think…)” Trinity of Let Them Eat Pro-Feminist Safe Spaces said
On a mailing list I’m on, someone mentioned old school radical feminism and brought up Ti-Grace Atkinson on BDSM. I haven’t read much of her on it, just whatever was in Against Sadomasochism, and eve there I don’t remember what exactly she said as opposed to the others. But what the person brought up was her idea that BDSM exposes, lays bare, shows up in stark contrast the power dynamics under patriarchy.
And I was just thinking about that, about how at least among anti-BDSM feminists, statements and theories like those are assumed to be authoritative. They’re assumed to tell the real truth about us and what we do and its meaning.
Read the rest here, plus an early version of this post as a comment.
I’ve been reading a ton of old-school radical feminists lately (Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer) and… This could be a possible total brain fart here but I think one of the problems with trying to match theory of 40 years ago with BDSM as practiced today is that when they were writing there was no legal or philosophical basis for sexual consent. When those authors were writing their classics there was, for the most part, no such thing as dominance or submission. There was just “the way it is in heterosexual relationships.”
Now I happen to think that the work those early writers did, particularly the extraordinarily brusque (and possibly sexually submissive) Dworkin, to make “no means no” real (against resistance that still, unbelievably, has life in it) created the safe spaces for the total explosion of conscious BDSM and other forms of kink we’re able to practice today. (Consent lies at the basis of almost[**] all BDSM today.)
But! Because their work launched our contemporary understanding of the meaning of consent then by definition the classics can’t really address the post-consent environment.
To understand the new order we have to look at newer, not-yet-classic radicals.
[** Note: Most BDSM information sites have sections on identifying abusers so there certainly are some. But for the most part most domestic abusers aren’t savvy enough to bother pretending what they’re doing is D/s or S&M.]
Submitted by 1841 (not verified) on Fri, 2007-12-28 16:42.
As far as I know, it is still not technically legal to consent to BDSM activities because they are legally considered assault and, legally, one can not consent to assault. As quoted from Wikipedia:
It is, of course, difficult to have a system of law that keeps pace with social reform when such reform challenges the very value judgments made by the system of law to begin with. It is value, and the expression of that value that we are all disagreeing about after all.
[Interesting point. The *general* legal principle of sexual consent is better established. I can see how consent inside BDSM might take longer to become well understood. Thanks, Maymay. --fl]
Submitted by 1841 (not verified) on Fri, 2007-12-28 22:11.
Interesting thought, that it took the anti-BDSM feminists to motivate the pro-BDSM culture to create the SSC/RACK ethos.
IIRC, the first edition of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" included a tentative endorsement of consensual S/M.
[Interesting and not at all ironic. I remember being to shy to read the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves" because it was for by women, for women. (I had a lot of *extremely* radical feminist friends back then.) So I don't know if it was endorsed or not. I do think that some of the earliest opposition in feminism came not from criticism of hetero BDSM but from criticism of a group of lesbians who were into it. So depending on when the book first came out it might have gone either way. Thanks, Peter. --fl]