Friday 7 March 2008

Latest News: Female Tops Are Still Unicorns

So when my sex life flags, I should do the one thing that renders me less interested in sex than in watching paint dry.

Who'd have thunk it?

(This post is a figment of your imagination. Dominant females, as we all know, don't exist, though people play them for pay. Sightings of actual dominant females in the Bermuda Triangle someplace are still being investigated, but should be regarded with the same skepticism as Nessie or El Chupacabras.

Some who listen closely while reading this message during a full moon have said they can hear the faint sound of rabid headdesking, but it's most likely just the wind.)

12 comments:

Octogalore said...

I saw your post over there, about why the dismal prediction for long term hot sex, and your hope that it's doable. Married/partnered people have less sex, on average, for reasons apart from sex drive or finding each other less attractive, I think. It's just having less time, due to workload and sometimes family demands.

So the sex you do have can be very hot after, to take a not-so-random example, seven years, it's just one of many thinks you'd like to have more time for. Like washing your hair, seeing movies, even having adult conversations. IMO, having more than 24 hours in a day would be a more targeted solution than traditional gender roles.

Anonymous said...

Dominant behaviour from men is the default sexy, huh?

As a woman with a dominant sexuality, growing up, this default assumption is presented to you aaaaaalllll the time. In vanilla surroundings. Just the usual sexism. And you know that it is not true for you.

So I think many dominant women learn to distrust people who presume to prescribe what is sexy. And many dominant women shun BDSM groups because there, too, are people who tell us what we ought to find sexy. It is part of what makes many BDSM groups so unattractive to female dominants.

Trinity said...

thank you liah. yes. exactly.

one person over at vinnie tesla's where I linked is claiming the opposite, and it's BREAKING MY MIND I TELL YOU.

here

i'm guessing that person is a very submissive woman (on first read, I thought dominant man, but the user info suggests a woman) who has been looked down on by "feminists" who do the egalitarian sex schtick thing.

which also sucks, yeah, but it doesn't follow from that that dominant women are the norm. they're not.

Dw3t-Hthr said...

Haven't chased back to look at the comments, so I'm probably fiendishly out of context, but I want to respond to this:

which also sucks, yeah, but it doesn't follow from that that dominant women are the norm. they're not.

The message I picked up somewhere along the way was not that dominant women are the norm, but a sort of differently fucked-up, "We don't like it that you're a pervert, but if you've gotta be a pervert, you need to be a top or you'll be considered a traitor."

(And the thing is, I bet that if I were a dominant woman rather than a switchy sub, I'd have gotten the subtext, "We don't like it that you're a pervert, but if you've gotta be a pervert, at least know your place and get on your knees" itching away in my brain. Because the critical thing is "We don't like it that you're a pervert", really, and the metamessage about what's acceptable sort of follows from there.)

[ Hrm. Got a weird error. Let's see if this posts ... or multiposts, for that matter. Bah. ]

Trinity said...

"The message I picked up somewhere along the way was not that dominant women are the norm, but a sort of differently fucked-up, "We don't like it that you're a pervert, but if you've gotta be a pervert, you need to be a top or you'll be considered a traitor.""

Oh yeah, and I figure that's what this person meant, but the way she said it was "everyone expects women to be dominant" and that's very not true. The truth is that women can never get it right, no matter what. I can think of several lectures I got as a teen wherein I was told that if I did so little as dared to take the lead rather than waiting for a guy I crushed on to ask me out, he'd decide I was a slut and good for nothing more than sex.

There are very strong messages that say that women are not supposed to take the lead ever. Yes, feminism has fucked with that a tad -- and yes, I do gather that that's frustrating for *some* submissive women who look back with nostalgia to the (probably romanticized/fictionalized at least a little) days when men never felt afraid of or bad about dominating them.

But there is an odd tendency among *some* submissive women to ridiculously overgeneralize that, a sort of "feminism ruined culture and made M/f unthinkable" that involves totally ignoring that F/m isn't unthinkable either.

F/m is a joke, a laugh, or an erotic experiment, as far as I can tell. It's not the new vanguard, fiendishly supplanting normal women's nice little kink.

And why? Because kink is not accepted anyway. Or if it is, it's accepted as fun, as branching out, as spice -- not as part of who people are.

Trinity said...

er, is unthinkable too. losing track of my negatives

Dw3t-Hthr said...

I'm thinking, y'know, that it wouldn't be possible to construct that sort of clever metamessaging if one tried.

I look at it and go, "Wow, no matter what kind of kink one's into, the message that one gets is 'ennnnh, it'd be maybe acceptable kinda if you were into the opposite of what you want'."

Anonymous said...

Feminism (of a kind) did mess with my head at 13, when I was having femsubby desires (or at least bottomy ones) and trying to reconcile them with all those nice Germaine Greer and Susan Faludi books. I never stumbled across any pressure to be dominant, though. Maybe I read the wrong books :)

There's a longer muse on this on my blog (search for "I blame radical feminism" and you'll find it...)

Trinity said...

Quoting resilientlight's blog entry:

"The other thing that influenced me was my Mum's 1970s radfem books, which explored patriarchal sexuality a LOT for a concept they claimed to detest. I paraphrase: "Our culture portrays male sexuality as a mighty phallus ploughing masterfully through everything in its path. This particular text is about the strong male plunging headfirst into the at-first-unwilling woman, seducing her by force... and this writer believes in the powerful male principle cutting a swathe through yielding females... and this poem implicitly states that the man who takes a virgin in a sense owns her..." As the reader, you were supposed to inwardly boo at this, so my reaction was embarrassing. "Mmm," I'd be thinking, "that sounds good to me.""

HA!

Silly response: Would you like your shiny new internets in red, yellow, green, or metallic tangerine?

:D

Serious response: Actually they do that to tops too. I don't know if you ever read anything more specifically critical of SM than Greer or Dworkin, but a top thumbing through certain essays in _Against Sadomasochism_ will find herself called things like "sadist/rapist." And there's a truly awesome old article by I think Sarah Hoagland(?) wherein she says things like "Let's think about the sadists. That's simply not the right way to treat a Lesbian."

(gotta love those separatists and their insinuation that we can't treat "Lesbians" cruelly but anyone else is apparently fair game.)

So yeah. There's really a lot out there that can fuck with your head, and I think it all really does come from generally deeply screwy attitudes toward sex in the culture.

"And guess what the main associations with sex are, in teenage fiction? That's right, conflict and fear. The authors of teenage books, either out of conservatism or covering their own arses, seem to write this stuff on purpose to scare teenagers away from sex. There is hardly a single book on happy loving teenagers having good sex"

YES. Honestly my reaction wasn't to like that but to hate it :) Once I figured out I was kinky it was very much a sort of "well, this is a form of sexuality that is above all that" (yes I now know that's not true.)

Because well, vanilla people's angsty sex lives are the topic of every sitcom ever, most books, etc. It's like "wow, you people put up with a lot of pain you don't even like for sex that seems pretty boring. How about putting some of the pain/dramatic emotion/power struggles you aren't actually managing to avoid anyway/intensity *in* the sex, and not whining so damn much?"

:)

Trinity said...

Oh, and I inwardly booed at that stuff and was actually very frightened of men because of it.

But I wasn't frightened of men because they wanted that so much as I was because *I* wanted that, and men were bigger and stronger, and if they really were assholes about it who didn't much care about consent...

...well, not only would I not get what I wanted, but they'd probably especially relish destroying the usurper, right?

I was TERRIFIED.

But not for the "men love power an women are nice" reasons, no.

Trinity said...

Oh, and... what's wrong with heteronormative? Is it that you don't like it as a word, or some kind of problem with the concept that our culture expects heterosexuality and this expectation is reflected in a long list of cultural norms?

Because yeah, lingo is an issue, but I think when we don't like lingo that refers to things that seriously impact groups we're not part of, we need to be careful. And it doesn't sound to me like you're bi/queer/etc, so I'm a little leery there.

Anonymous said...

How do the radfem Cheap Runescape Moneyblog owners realize that hundreds of terrible keyword phrases are coming from adult men, anyhow? I recieve lots of evidently out-for-porn Bing gets also; about 50 % are usually doing some fishing pertaining to chop, that i'm prepared to guess in which several Buy Diablo 3 goldor perhaps nothing of such are from men's searchers.