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]