let them eat pro-sm feminist safe spaces

Forms of Power

2010-07-11T07:36:00.001-07:00

A post here just got a very interesting comment. I'm going to reproduce it here, and then make a few comments of my own.

"Why do we condemn the patriarchy if not for the fact that it is a power imbalance? What theoretical footing can feminism have if it is not the rejection of power imbalances?"

A frame of reference I have found useful is the distinction between a "rational and temporary" imbalance of power and an "irrational and permanent" one. For example, as the parent of a child, I held a "rational and temporary" imbalance of power vis-a-vis my daughter which derived from my greater understanding and mastery of many aspects of the environment and my responsibility for getting her safely to the point where her knowledge and mastery allowed her to function independently. It was an imbalance intended to come to an end, a goal for which I bore - in my very power - a great deal of responsibility for achieving. My daughter is now in her late 20s, and we both work hard to weed out the last remnants of that old, once-rational-but-now-outdated imbalance in order to achieve the *balance* of power that is more appropriate to two adults in relationship.

The context in which I learned this way of distinguishing two types of power was that of the therapist-client relationship. As a radical feminist practicing psychotherapy, one of my main concerns was to acknowledge and play my part as one whose experience and expertise placed me in the position of having greater power in a way that guaranteed its "rational and temporary" nature. Everything I did was ultimately in the service of shifting that power balance so that ultimately my client and I would be in a relationship in which our power was equal.
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A second concept which has served me well has been the distinction between "power-over" and "power-as-personal-potency." Patriarch only has one concept of power; it is synonymous with "domination," or "power-over." Feminism (re-)introduces another form of power, that of "potency," which does not require the subservience of another in order to exist. When the personal power/potency of all parties is a 'given,' then an exploration of power-as-domination, it seems to me, can have an entirely new reality.

I honestly can't tell whether this commenter is pro-SM or anti-SM. She mentions being a radical feminist, and most of those I've met are anti-, but there's a difference between speaking of a group and speaking of an individual. So I'm not sure.

But I like the idea of "rational and temporary." When I was studying Wartenberg on power, he spoke of two different kinds of power as well. He called the sort of power that a good parent or good teacher has over a child "transformative power." His analysis is very similar to the commenter's here: this power is intended to be wielded temporarily, and intended to phase itself out over time as the child develops her own control over her life.

I like that very much as a base for talking about why healthy D/s isn't abusive and has nothing to do with patriarchy. Still, it's not perfect. Obviously, participants in consensual BDSM are not children, and most D/s is not intentionally set up to change over time. (Of course, being realistic, we should recognize that it actually will -- no power dynamic is ever completely static.) It's certainly not intended to bring about its own obsolescence. So opponents of D/s could make the argument that it's not the same thing.

The thing is, I don't think that all of us magically outgrow relations in which concensual hierarchy or consensual power dynamics exist. Yes, most of us leave school at some point in our lives, but plenty of us still learn things, take classes, put ourselves under the informal tutelage of friends. We all have limitations, things that others we know do better than we do. We all have situations in which we want to be sheltered and comforted, and to lose ourselves at least in the illusion that a more powerful loved one can protect us. We all -- I hope -- have situations arise in which others respect us as trusted authorities too, whether as wise bosses, senior members of organizations, or even just good givers of advice.

Which leads me to see power relations in which one person has more power than another as quite natural and, much of the time, rather unremarkable and boring. Hence my confusion when people of a "radical" bent want to shine a spotlight on "how power works" and throw most of it out, envisioning a more "egalitarian" (so it's termed, anyway) world.

And when we get to BDSM, or to D/s specifically, I blink. It's right to worry about the potential for abuse, just as it's right to be careful when using a knife or lighting a fire. Those things can harm you, or even kill you.

But the fact that they are dangerous does not make them so terrifying they're no longer useful. We could choose not to use a knife or a match and still live a perfectly productive and interesting life, though we might have to make some interesting adaptations. So if radical feminists want to try and eradicate as much hierarchy as they can from their lives, that's fine with me. It's just like the person who goes through some interesting convolutions because she's scared of knives. It's none of my business.

But when someone goes on a crusade against knives, saying that we can hurt ourselves with them, or mentioning that sometimes they're used in violence or homicide, that's when I roll my eyes and decide that someone's being truly unreasonable. It's not someone else's choice what risks someone else takes, especially when their own life is structured to avoid risk in a way that most of the rest of us would never do. No, it doesn't make the rest of us right that we all do the same thing -- hundred thousand lemmings can be wrong -- but the simple point that the knife is dangerous does not thereby prove that none of us should be using them.

Or that if we do use them, we should see this as a regrettable, necessary evil that stems only from the fact that our society has not yet advanced to the point where we can cut food without sharp things. That we should see enjoying cutting our vegetables as some sort of sign that we're inherently broken, damaged by abuse, or possessing "false consciousness" taught to us by a culture invested in selling us Ginsu knives.

When we grow and become adults, hopefully one tool we develop is discernment in the power relations we enter into. Some of us, of course, will not do this -- and sometimes the most fine-honed discernment in the world is useless in the face of a sufficiently charming con artist, deceiver, or abuser. But the mere fact that some of us don't have discernment, or that we can be bamboozled by the cruel and unethical, does not mean those of us who do should be told not to use it.

And that's the thing that gets me in all this, really. The society that many anti-SM people envision as Utopia is built for the lowest common denominator: no sharp edges. No matches. No knives. The poor, poor women could get hurt!

Perhaps I'm wicked for this, but I don't believe we build a successful and healthy society by choosing the maximum level of protection and telling the smartest and wisest they'll just have to suck it up and not take risks so as not to confuse the vulnerable. Protecting the vulnerable is important, but that should be done in a nuanced way. That should not be done by forcing the rest of us to live tapioca lives because someone who doesn't understand might see, might see!

That's the thing. I do believe people have some responsibility for other people seeing and emulating their behavior, but I don't think "think of the women!" is any less disgusting than the kind of "think of the children!" that forgets that thoughtful children, when engaged in deep and age-appropriate discussions of the world around them, can actually understand a lot of things.

Besides, I'm female. I don't want people protecting me because they're "thinking of me." I don't want people protecting my partner from me without, you know, at least saying three words to her first. I want a fulfilling life with my partner that includes the kinds of dynamics she and I choose for ourselves, thanks.

Irritating crap! ;-)

2010-06-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

I was just poking around the blogosphere and completely by accident came across a post from today that mentioned this blog. I'll be going about this a tad backwards, but here's the mention:

Anyways, I’ve been trying to read more anti-sexist kinky blogs over the last few weeks. As I find them, I’ll link to them in the LoGI posts, since there are some really awesome writers doing some really awesome theorizing about race, class, and gender. There are some others, though, who are incredibly toxic. It’s a dangerous world out there — really, all I’m trying to do is live.

It amuses me actually, because I'd just been posting in my own space how refreshed I felt taking a break! I suppose I am just glad to see that my and the others' words here have been useful to someone.

That said, I'm a little... concerned... about the post, even when I find myself and my compatriots lauded there. Here's why.

The post is called Crap that irritates me about kinky bloggers. Reading it, it seems to be about rather clueless kinky people who blog, all of whom are apparently heterosexual, white, M/f-dynamic-oriented, and bad writers. Problem being, it just says "kinky bloggers," as if those are the kinky people who blog:

I guess it’s a lot easier to be mad at the cuddly feminists asking you to think about consent and heteronormativity than to critique a legal and social system that mandates relationships all follow a particular pattern with a particular life cycle. That makes LOADS of sense. Here’s a secret: most feminists are too busy thinking about attacking patriarchy, questioning their own privilege, and advocating for women’s reproductive rights to worry about how much you love it when your partner flogs you.

It's made clear later that this person is kinky herself (and may or may not be heterosexual), but it sure reads in the beginning like the sort of flaky "feminism" that assumes kink just is heterosexual, M/f D/s. That assumption is, as you all know by now, the big thing that makes it so "easy" for me personally "to be mad" at the "cuddly" (lovely substitute for a swear, I'll have to use that) "feminists" who never stop prattling about nonsense that has nothing to do with me.

I've said many, many times that I find it disturbingly odd that self-styled feminists find the concept of a female top foreign, strange, or derailing. It's bizarre beyond bizarrity to me that anyone, lunatic fringe or not, in a movement that is fundamentally about shining a big flashlight on the way women have traditionally been denied power be so invested in not talking about the women who claim to have it. Even saying we don't, however much it angers or even just bores me, is a step up from total erasure.

I don't like the "cuddly" (love it!) feminists, because they erase me.

And as someone who is bisexual and currently not dating a dude and smitten with someone who's not a dude, I feel the same way about the absolutely endless, endless, endless grating focus not only on heterosexuality but on a particular kind of heterosexuality I'm not going anywhere near when I'm sticking things up submissive men.

Frankly, right now I just don't care if the straight people are linking hands and merrily skipping off cliffs together. They own the damn world; they can figure out their own damn messes.

Critiquing heteronormativity? How about the way that, yet again, gay and lesbian BDSM is handwaved away because it's absolutely imperative that we talk about straight people.

Forgive me if I suspect that's because bitching about straight people's blogs is easier than researching and honoring leather history, which is inherently. And. Unavoidably. Queer.

Then there's, uh, some stuff about badly written erotica that I don't even get because I don't know the context. And some stuff about how people stop writing dark-themed stories once they're out of their teens.

While I realize this is probably about crappy writing and being sick about it, and there's nothing worse than a crappy dark story that has to remind you how seriously it takes itself... my first reaction remains something to the extent of:

Yawn. There are plenty of people who don't read the erotica I write. Add yourself to that number, and be glad you're not hangin' around an (apparently) overgrown teen who's having fun.

Then there's uh, something about "mansplaining," which again is probably about the blog(s?) of some whiny hetero Domly Dom of Doom:

I… don’t care about you quoting your female partner’s experience in a gangbang. I ALSO don’t care about how you understand the female orgasm (like there’s only one kind!) and want to explain to me that clitoral masturbation is immature, achieving vaginal orgasm’s a sign of emotional success, and lube is for sissies. I PARTICULARLY don’t care that you fuck a lot of strippers, and because you’re a paying customer you don’t want to see those dirty skanks eat and beeee teeeee dubbss your stripper BFF agrees with you because eating in front of clients is un-fucking-professional. I mean, how NOT feminist is it to name someone else’s experience using particular politicized adjectives when you’re trying to make a point that one of the major political, philosophical movements acknowledging her citizenship rights and existence as a person is like totally wrong in thinking about her sexuality and her political ideologies?

But again, it's presented totally without context, as though "kinky blogs" were all by "mansplainers." Once again, here's the assumption that everyone talking is male, heterosexual, and dominant. Somehow, again, I sniff patriarchy. Perhaps I wouldn't if it were made clear that the lion's share of the blogs she knows of are written by people who are male, heterosexual. and dominant. But she doesn't say that, nor does she explain why she isn't self-selecting.

And I'm kind of put off by the idea that a dude can't quote his woman partner's experience in a gangbang and not be skeevy, anyway. (And considering the very specific mention of "strippers eating," this is probably a response to one gross post on one obnoxious blog, again presented as if it were an example of a common problem.)

Trust me, I understand that many dudes who waltz in to do battle with "the radfems" complete with TMI about their intense kink and off-point explanations of what makes it all okay are creepy as hell. I've seen it myself. More times than I've ever wanted to.

But I've also seen this odd thing whereby some dominant man who doesn't know the ins and outs of gender theory comments on an angry "radical feminist"'s post, and it's assumed that the mere fact that he says "But Rosie talks about how it felt this way to her, and why she wanted it, and I don't see why listening to her is wrong" is proof that he and Rosie were totally unenlightened, skipping-off-together-to-hell heteros in the first place. Ah-wha?

And then there's a "stop fetishizing pale-skinned women." Which is probably again about the crappy erotica. And yeah, if the writer has no clue why the endless focus on how sexy white femininity is is sketchy, then I agree. But you know? I don't think it's going to make pale skin any less sexy to anybody who thinks it's hot, even if their reasons are soul-rendingly disgusting.

Any sentence that starts with "stop fetishizing..." is pretty much one I'd vote off the planet.

"Be aware that this is complicated," we can keep. And should use more often. "Don't buy into racist bullshit about what beauty is?" Doubly so. "Write about more, and more varied, kinds of beauty?" Sure, though some people's erotica is just about what they find hot, however problematic. I'm not sure it betters the world to enlist people who are just having fun in some crusade to be didactic. Not everyone's a role model.

And it's said in a way that implies it also means "Don't permit yourself to think of associations that are in tons of literature and media you like when you're staring at a sexy femme who happens to be white and pale and submissive."

I'd say I'd try, but I'd be lying.

The Nature of Abuse

2010-04-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

There's a very, very old thread over at Nine Deuce's on BDSM that has recently been revived. I had been studiously ignoring it, as it pretty much repeated the same claims we've already talked about many times before. And as I've mentioned here, I'm not really as invested as I once was in coming up with detailed arguments defending BDSM from its detractors. I've pretty much settled on the point of view That those who try to lump all power dynamics into the same analysis are simply lazy, and don't really warrant the kind of argument I used to try to make in reply to them.

However, one comment that arrived in my inbox struck me both as particularly illuminating and as particularly -- dare I say horrifyingly? -- unfortunate.

Imaginary
April 23, 2010 at 1:31 PM

I really liked your post, and while I found most of the comments too triggering to read, what little I picked up is that some folks are ignoring your stance of “intertwining sex and power has never led to any good” for “stop trying to tell me what to do in my sexy times!”

Doesn’t the harm of sexual abuse come from tightly knitting together power and sex to the point where the victim can’t even tell if they are consenting or if they are enjoying what’s happening? A sexual practice that seems built on pinning power to sex just reeks of abuse. I’m not an expert by any means, but I don’t think that normalizing bondage, sadism, and or masochism helps anyone. I guess it must be addicting though, like self harm.

It's the bolded sentence that deeply alarms me. I've not spoken very much in online forums about some really creepy things I experienced in a relationship, in part because I'd rather that person not discover me talking about it.

However, I will say in the strongest language possible that the control that person tried to maintain over me had nothing to do with making me confused about whether I wanted something or not, much less convincing me that I liked being cut down. This person was very, very clear about wanting what they wanted. I was expected to provide it, like it or not. It wasn't about some nefarious plot to re-wire how I derived pleasure such that I found myself desperate for ill-treatment. My pleasure was beside the point, my lack of enthusiastic consent an impediment to someone else's wants that was annoying, not to be taken seriously. The ill-treatment was going to happen anyway.

Yes, most abusers do cycle between wooing their victims, lavishing attention (perhaps including pleasant, seemingly caring sex) and praise on them to maintain control, and cutting them down, whether verbally, physically, or sexually. But that does not mean that one comes to love being harmed, being degraded, being cut down, or being violated.

It may mean that one comes to feel one must endure those things, must "weather the storm" until one's "tempermental" or "stormy" partner "cools down," but that isn't about re-wiring how someone gets pleasure. That's about convincing her that those arguments or fights or beatings or rapes are "no big deal," are just disagreements that "get out of hand." Or that they are just punishments; if you can make a person believe she deserves to pay for her "mistakes," she will not rebel.

I will say that I have heard of situations where some people did have ambivalent reactions to sexual violence because it meant getting attention from someone they thought they "loved" (if anyone remembers Biting Beaver's anti-BDSM essay, there was some of this in that.) So I can't say it never happens. But there, it was because her partner pressured her into BDSM (unless I misremember; please correct if I do) and she was trying to be as sexually pleasing to her partner as she could. I don't think trying to please a partner with a kink is solely the province of those who identify as submissive, though these folks might not agree.

This "analysis" whereby people are made into abuse-receptacles because kinky sex exists is woeful. I can see, however, why it's appealing. It's easier to say "if only society were different" than it is to recognize the subtle cruelty of cycles of violence.

Thinky comments....

2010-03-20T19:40:00.001-07:00

Just got an interesting comment on a rather old post, so I thought I'd pull it out:

I think people who ask questions like that are taking an unwarranted shortcut--something like, "Well, we know patriarchy affects people" (true) "and we know patriarchy is based on a power dynamic" (also true) "and we know BDSM is based on a power dynamic" (true) "so patriarchy must be involved in BDSM somewhere" (wait, stop, back up a bit).

They're leaving out the step of showing that the power dynamic in BDSM bears any significant similarity or common traits to the one in patriarchy. (Possibly they assume that, as an overarching model embedded in our culture, patriarchy must have gotten its meathooks into most power dynamics that exist, but they have to prove that first, and define exactly what the "meathooks" are and how they got attached, etc.).

I have no problem believing that patriarchal assumptions have affected my thoughts about kinky things in some ways...but I seriously doubt it was the sole driving force responsible for their existence.

I also think patriarchy is everywhere, but I'd have to see solid scientific studies before I just assume it's any more "involved" with BDSM than it is in (say) cooking or photography or raising miniature horses.

I agree with that, and I also wonder whether it might be useful to bring up something this comment makes me think of. Not sure how useful it is or isn't but...

I'm reminded of reading books like Coming to Power years ago, and noticing several of the folks who contributed to that (who identified as both kinky and feminist) saying stuff like "I think everything in life is shot through with power dynamics. Life itself is a constant interplay of power: of control, of authority, of obedience, of surrender. When I make that part of my life, whether I'm 'playing' with it or doing something else, I'm acknowledging and studying and perhaps even affecting how those many dynamics of power play out."

It makes me think. At the time, I figured that the kinky folk expressing this view (and I'd say in some ways I too am one; I think power relations underlie a whole lot of human interaction at a pretty basic level) saw power as just a part of life, where anti-kink folk saw power dynamics as something sick and twisted overlaid forcibly on some more innocent state of nature.

Now I wonder if that's true. Maybe they agree that power is a part of everything, a part of cooking and dancing and talking and sex, but it's just that they think it's poison, stuffed into everything so we don't know what's natural any more and what isn't. Kind of the way there are preservatives in food.

And that... well, to go back to the commenter's comment, I'm inclined to think patriarchy is that way, stuffed bits at a time into a lot of things we do. And I don't think that's healthy. (But neither do I think aggressive methods to try and purge it work. I don't think corn in everything I eat is good, but I think it would make me crazy to try and eat nothing with corn syrup in it.)

But I'm not sure power is. I'm pretty sure interplays of power just are what they are. Yes, some of them are pernicious, and yes, all of them probably carry some risk. But I tend to think they come with interacting. I'd say "in the way dying comes with living," except that dying is unknown and often painful and scary and usually seen as negative, and I mean something more neutral than that. I mean if you live, they're there.

I can't imagine they wouldn't be in the post-patriarchy, or even in the post-kyriarchy of any kind.

theory, kink, and feminism

2010-02-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

I got an interesting comment on my recent post and I thought I should dedicate a post to addressing it, though I strongly suspect that will disappoint the person who made it. Here's the relevant part of the comment:

Trinity, I'm a little confused by your confusion, but I'll try to make my question clearer. The simplest way to put it is exactly the way you do--the question is whether "kink in some way either contributes to or follows from" the oppression of women. (Feel free to substitute "harm", "bad for", or some less jargon-filled word for "oppression".)

I absolutely agree with you that radical feminist rhetoric actually obfuscates things for people genuinely trying to think their way through the question. But to people _genuinely_ trying to think their way through that question, it doesn't render the question moot. The radfems could be completely wrong in their framing of the issue and in their arguments, but still be right in their overall stance on the issue itself--which is why I suggested addressing the question directly rather than as a response to their arguments.

I'm going to use a bit of autobiography here not because I need the question answered--I'm not trying to make this comment thread about me--but as illustrative of questions I have had. When I was first starting out in BDSM I occasionally had ND-like reactions to what I was doing. I recall looking at sites that were only a little more intense than Kink.com with my boyfriend, and being both turned on and horrified. Kink had always been part of my fantasies, but 1) my fantasies were more focused on my pleasure--female pleasure--than I think most porn is; 2) the men in my fantasies were clearly "evil", and so the issue of how to have an ongoing affectionate and consensual relationship with a dominant partner didn't have to get resolved; 3) in my fantasies I didn't have to come to a compromise between what I wanted and what a partner wanted. While I thought being objectified, flogged, blindfolded, and machine-fucked was all fine, I thought getting a facial (just an example of one of my boyfriend's interests) was horrifically degrading. Or anal sex (until I tried it ;) ). And so on.

So I read as much as I could and went on discussion boards where people purported to talk about how they were "feminist" and kinky and asked--over and over again--how to be both. And the answer was always the same: "Blah blah blah if feminism is about anything it's about being able to choose." Which I found woefully inadequate for reasons that are pretty obvious to anyone who's studied political or social theory written after 1800. I found a few answers to these questions at some point, from friends who were neck deep in the LATEST gender theory, but not anywhere else. I thought there might be some of that here.

I stressed about this a lot, and I still sometimes do. Ernest, I take your point that I haven't read the blog from soup to nuts (though I've read a fair amount) and may in doing so find much of what I'm looking for. So if there's a basic post about "how we can use theory to understand kinky sexuality in 2010 as something other than a threat to women" that I'm missing, please send a link. Thank you!

My disappointing answer is that there probably isn't a post of the sort you want, and that the reason there isn't one is precisely because I think using theory to understand kinky sexuality is fundamentally wrongheaded, if not damaging. But before I get into why, please indulge me for a moment while I talk about where I am with these issues.

When I first became a contributor to this blog, several things were going on. First of all, we started it as a way to counter some of the radical feminist rhetoric that was going around, so it was always argumentative around here.

But second, at the time that I was one of the original contributors, I was knee-deep in academia. Theory was part of the air I breathed. I left that kind of life very suddenly, jolted out of the world I knew. These days, I can't believe how different my life is. The intellectual questions that were my bread-and-butter matter very little now that I am dealing with individuals directly. It doesn't really matter why things are the way they are when what I'm trying to do is help one person get one set of results. I don't find theory particularly useful for that, even the sort of theory about social justice that would apparently be relevant.

Along the same lines, my social justice crusading is still very real and very alive, but I'm very suspicious of any theories that seek to change human behavior at its roots. I'm much more likely to be standing in front of the legislature saying "these people are doing this thing which is unjust for these reasons; fix it now!" than I am to be saying something things about the patriarchy, about white supremacy, etc. I just don't find those frameworks useful for real world change any more. I don't believe that focusing on the things I can't see lead to real world change is anything more than intellectual masturbation.

This doesn't necessarily mean that looking at particular behaviors, desires, or ideas through the lens of feminist theory is useless for everyone. It just means that's not where I am, and that's a big part of the reason that I haven't been posting very much at all. You're right: I only find myself doing so lately whether someone to get mad at, precisely because feminist theory strikes me as shockingly irrelevant to actual social change.

Also, my own personal conflicts about my kink are things I pretty much handled for myself years ago, so I don't really have much to say these days about the gnawing feeling that you're doing something wrong, whether that be sinning against your ideology, being violent, or being strange. The more I spent my time outside of theoretical enclaves, the less I worry about that sort of thing. I leave it up to wiser heads than mine whether this means I'm simply rationalizing, or whether it means I'm wise.

But now, from the point of view of someone who used to care about theory, let me talk about its limitations for a moment. I only pray that I'll be intellectual enough in these paragraphs for what I'm saying to seem worthwhile to those more fond of theoretical restructuring than I am these days.

When I was in college and grad school, I studied ethical theory. I still find ethical theory fascinating and, in its own way, useful -- though I hasten to clarify that by saying that I really don't think Kant or Mill often help us decide what to do in an actual dilemma.

The reason I still like ethical theory is because it strikes me as fundamentally asking different questions from "What should we do?" or even "What should we feel is right?" It helps us take the notions of goodness we already have and understand them or categorize them or explain how they work and why they come out the way they do. It tries to tell us why we feel as we do. And of course, as that happens, certain things will come out to be paradigm cases of right conduct or wrong, but the point is not to map morality, but rather to map its structure.

Where feminist theory, as we speak of it when we ask whether kink "is feminist" or even "is compatible with feminism," is something we turn to when we want something prescriptive. The question is "Should I do this?" More than that, the question is (a fundamentally crazy-making, IMO) "If I do this, will I have pernicious motives that I could not accurately detect or assess without the aid of theory?"

And I think that way of using theory is fundamentally ass-backwards from go. Theory systematizes experience. It may help us find meaning in experience by offering us useful ways of categorizing it. But it does not layer meaning into experience. If we require the theory to find the oppressiveness, we're putting what's a layer outward in the center.

I don't dispute that many kinky people have a vague feeling of uneasiness about what we like. That, I think, is an experience that many share. I've had it too. And I think theories around us are one place many of us -- especially young feminists -- turn to make sense of that queasiness.

And I don't want to say that there can't be something to that. That, say, a woman can't ever be attracted to dominant men because she actually feels inferior. I'm sure it's true of someone. Perhaps a lot of someones; that I don't know.

But I think sometimes it becomes easy or comfortable for us to understand the feeling through "analysis," through theory, rather than through taking hard looks at ourselves and our own needs, limitations, strengths, and vulnerabilities.

If I have to pick, the cartoonish characterization of the "choice feminist" ("Do what you want to do; that's all feminists fight for!") wins out for me over the cartoonish characterization of the "radical feminist" ("Do what you want to do, but you're oppressing women, and don't expect me to mollycoddle you") for me. But why? Isn't she shallow and stupid?

Because what even the most shallow "choice feminist" is, deep down, exhorting us to do, whether she knows it or not, is to examine ourselves for ourselves. To seek our own answers. To set aside theory if it becomes the only reason we understand our experiences as different than they seem.

Pulling out a comment

2010-02-02T13:13:00.000-08:00

This was buried in the comments in the Respect, Again post and I figured it was best to give it a thread of its own, so here it is:

greenspade said...

First of all, I feel sorry for Orlando. Wish the best for you and your wife.

I've read some comments on ND's blog, only the first ones and last ones though, too many. And I also think they're quite close minded and intolerance.

Aside from that, I have a question, sorry if this is stupid but I'm curious, this is more about the bdsm, do you really have to do it that way? Can't be happy if you're doing it without hurting or humiliating?

I think every human have their own dark sides. I myself is trying to see what my orientation is, and that's why I came across this blog. But maybe not as extreme as stuffs in kink.com. Doesn't feel anything like hatred or disgust, more like amazed, wow these things really exist, but not my things. I guess I just have the mind of a bully. But I do like some, things.

So I'm wondering if you can do it in a more 'loving' ways, because when body's hurt, the pain is the signal sent to warn you, that there are something dangerous. I think putting yourself or your partner in a dangerous condition - lethal or not - is not really good. Just wondering...

Have a nice day...

Respect again

2010-01-27T21:06:00.000-08:00

xposted from my lj

i'm too heartsick to excerpt from it... but guys, read this. please.

http://rageagainstthemanchine.com/2009/02/07/please-somebody-come-and-defend-kinkcom/

scroll down to orlando c's comment about his wife, where he says that he and his wife wanted to have kids, she got cancer, and he has been caretaking. and now they cannot have children, are looking into adopting, and are scared that if anyone discovers their kink, they won't be able to do that.

then read the comments from people who... get this... do not offer sympathy and do the decent thing which is rethink their stance or even just say "i disagree strongly with what you do, but I hope things go better for you"

but instead accuse him of using her illness to win sympathy points and question how much he respects and cares for her.

i... i just... radical feminists claim they're all about "respect for women," right, which the rest of us have sadly forgotten. but this is how they treat people.

how, ladies, how how HOW could i ever trust you to build a more caring, compassionate, and just world in accordance with a purer vision of respect for women or anyone else if THIS is how you treat people?

i know, the theory doesn't tell them to be mean. but "by their fruits shall ye know them." seriously.

research and knowledge

2010-01-23T09:17:00.000-08:00

In the comments to my last post, I've been called by an anonymous commenter on singling out Joan Kelly. I understand the anonymous commenter's feelings. But I also feel very troubled by her most recent comment, so I'm going to quote it here anyway. I hope that each of you think seriously, however, about the critique that the anonymous commenter made. These things do have a tendency to get out of hand and become entirely ad hominem, so I hope that you will think seriously about whether I'm being fair or not. I believe I am, as I believe my earlier comments are about how a certain kind of anger makes us lose sight of logic. And I believe this comment, as well, will be fair, because it's not about Joan as a person, who I actually know nothing about, but rather about the ignorance that her comment demonstrates, and why I think that ignorance is important to deciding which "side" of the "sex wars" is the right one. Here's the comment, a continuation of the discussion Bean began of censorship in Canada that is justified by radical feminist argument:

Joan Kelly
January 23, 2010 at 6:40 am

Bean,

I did read your comment, and insomuch as I could make sense of it, the wikipedia entry you linked to. Both of which you made a point of posting as if they had anything to do with what I said. They don’t. So on top of your response being, in fact, non-responsive, you also mixed in some snottiness with the “thank you try again” business.

I don’t know understand which thing you’re referring to as “this facile “protection of women’s rights.”” Is the wacky obscenity law in Canada supposed to be some protection of women’s rights? Or are you saying that an argument against the wholesale promotion of female submission and masochism is a facile protection of women’s rights?

Whatever the case, my position is that arbitrarily applied obscenity laws – which, according to you, censor things like “feminist literature” but let actual pornography fly freely about the atmosphere? – are not in fact evidence of male dominance and female submission being unacceptable sexual/romantic frameworks.

Again, I live in the US. There is, to my ongoing horror, a fairly strong conservative Christian contingent in this country. The word “sex” is bleeped out of pop songs; I can’t think of another example that I just noticed earlier today because I’m fuzzy-headed on cold medicine, but there are even more benign words that get absurdly censored in pop culture media.

None of that puts any power whatsoever into the hands of kink-critical radical feminists. Especially not as regards other people’s sex lives. I don’t know what the hell Canada’s up to, but I do have a general enough sense of it to know that it, too, is not a radfem utopia, obscenity laws or not.

Lastly, it is not the fact that that billboard was in full view of children that is so disturbing to me (though I don’t fucking like that part, either); the propaganda towards legitimizing female submission and masochism permeates everything all the time – it is not being hidden from children in the first place. It may not always show up in overt BDSM-themed references (though it does so more and more, as I’ve noted), but it is the ever-present blueprint for heterosexuality.

That billboard is basically just a fucked up sign post on a destructive road. The road itself is the problem. And, I believe, it is a road that runs parallel to obscenity laws, not counter to them. Conservative culture, such as it is, in this country, proves that point over and over: the requirement of female submission/masochism and overall higher levels of social control go hand in hand, if males in power have anything to say about it. And they do. Hence my objections to all of it.

I have a serious problem here, not with Joan Kelly as a person, again, but with such a flimsy response to a discussion of actual legal precedent established through listening to Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and taking their arguments seriously. if one is going to defend radical feminist points of view, one needs to be familiar with the ways those points of view have affected people's real lives, especially insofar as legislation has been modeled on them. I find it highly troubling that Joan (and again, it's not specifically Joan saying this that bothers me, but the fact that anyone would say it at all) can write off salient facts of history because they did not happen in her country or, even worse, perhaps because she simply doesn't know about them.

I do think that somebody who wants to argue for radical feminist points of view needs to be able to acknowledge this, that it happened, how it happened, and why it happened. A person who is really interested in having an informed, thoughtful opinion, will think about the impact this has and have reasons why it shouldn't matter, beyond "I hadn't heard of that, and can't quite make sense of it."

In fact, I've had radical feminists repeatedly say to me that I simply need to "educate myself"and not even show up to a debate with them in the first place until I fully understand where they're coming from and what the social frameworks they're talking about look like. This often includes having a sophisticated understanding of "privilege" as they understand it, without which opponents are often told they're not even supposed to show up to talk ("This is not a Feminism 101 blog!") I find it rather concerning that many set the bar so high for us, and yet the bar apparently is quite low for themselves.

This reminds me of nothing so much as a conversation I had in college with another student I knew well and respected very much. At the time, I knew very little about feminism as a movement, and it just begun to learn that some feminists have problems with BDSM. I talked to this person in hopes that she could help me understand some of the radical points of view that I was having trouble digesting (a professor recommended I begin my readings of McKinnon withToward a Feminist Theory of the State. I don't recommend beginning there. Honestly, I don't recommend beginning at all without some background information about what she was getting at.)

I remember that at one point we started discussing pornography. Personally, I'd always been vaguely leery of porn, but had found when I actually looked at it that I had almost none of the objections I expected to have. I'd expected something I'd feel affronted by and carefully avoided it, and (for me, personally -- not saying anyone shouldn't be bothered!) when I actually looked, discovered something I found arousing and amusing and... not offensive at all, though I did have critiques and there was/is some I don't like.

So I ask this person about it and the first thing she blurts is "There's no cunnilingus in it!" I look at her, startled, and go "Huh. What exactly have you watched? I've definitely seen it in -- uh --"

She stops dead.

I've caught her.

She hasn't seen any.

She backtracks, protests, starts saying "Well, okay, but isn't... the focus on male pleasure? Um... er..."

I nod. She's not wrong. We discuss this, some, and part amicably if I recall right.

But I walk away stunned. She has swallowed (yes, I am being clever) what her professors and her feminist books have told her pornography is without ever bothering to check the accuracy of her sources. She has taken books and lectures that argue against Something as correct without ever beholding -- or, if beholding would be triggering or upsetting, researching, neutrally -- what Something is in the first place.

And that alarms me far more than being against Something.

That's why I'm bothered by this. Our opponents say that we miss something very huge about how culture is shaped, though they rarely have hard data. We say "what about obscenity law, and the impact that radical feminist rhetoric has had on it in this case?" and they go "Uh, I'm in the US. And I'm talking about porn!"

That's why the anger bothers me. Not because I think this one person is pissy (though the zero-to-sixtyness of it does take me aback, and I don't like it, so I must admit there's some ad hominem here too) but because it seems the anger either happens instead of, or precludes, understanding everything salient about how real people are affected.

More on anger...

2010-01-22T14:54:00.001-08:00

This is really just a continuation of the last "My, that was angry, huh..." post, but I did want to include it because I'm blackly amused, and I promised I wouldn't comment more there.

Person A mentions that yes, sometimes "anti-kink stigma" is more than a mild thing:

Bean said on Please, somebody, come and defend Kink.com. I triple-dog dare you.
February 7, 2009 at 1:18 am
The reason I don’t feel defensive when anyone critiques or even flatly condemns kink from a supposed radical feminist perspective is that to me it seems like anti-kink radfems = just about zero sociopolitical clout and pro-kink kinksters = carrying the day.

And I live in a country which has a long, long history of censoring queer and kinky literature/media and justifying it with obscenity law based in part on the writings of radical feminists.

Thank you, try again.

And Joan Kelly, whose anger I commented on in the other post, flips the fuck out, half amusingly and half scarily:

Joan Kelly said on Please, somebody, come and defend Kink.com. I triple-dog dare you.
February 7, 2009 at 1:18 am
And *I* live in a country where billboards in high traffic areas (one of the poshest portions of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California) depict male models as being in the act of over-the-knee spanking fenale models. This ad was for clothing. It is not unusual. It is mainstreamed in all kinds of ways here.

So take your references to Canadian court decisions on PORNOGRAPHY – not the sex people are having – and also take your misplaced condescenion, and go fuck yourself with both. Thank YOU.

See all comments on this post here.

Uh... so let me see if I understand this (I already know that I don't, but):

"Someone brought up a highly salient point about how anti-pornography legislation has been used to censor queers, and...

...that's off-point because there are pretentious artsy-fartsy billboard ads in California depicting OTK.

Also, I'm really angry and dropped an f-bomb, so I must be right."

Fascinating.

I can't tell whether this is ridiculous US-centrism or just Bizarro World.

My money's on Bizarro World, though.

Really, how can these people lament that they lack credence in the larger society when they adamantly refuse to make any fucking sense?

I wish I had...

2010-01-17T11:37:00.000-08:00

a coherent response to this:

Joan Kelly
January 17, 2010 at 7:15 pm

Orlando,

I feel like you must not understand what privilege actually is, to frame non-defensiveness as a privilege.

For real does everything have to go bugshit on the internet?

Maybe if my fellow perverts (and well-meaning self-appointed allies) stopped acting like there was such a thing as “non kink sexuality privilege” and stopped insisting that kink IS TOO more egalitarian and less oppression-y than what gets called “vanilla” sexuality, maybe people would be too busy going about their business, not caring what others do in the sack, to be bothered with a “wait, what? are you kidding?”

There IS something about some kinky people and their need for validation. I would add that it’s my observation that there are also non-kinky people (although god help us all it mostly seems to be fucking women) who need validation for their non-kinky sex-having-ness as well. Hence an endless supply of “I love push up bras and deep throating and it’s unfeminist for you to critique either one!” missives on the internet.

Every single BDSM related media that I’ve ever seen promotes female subjugation and male supremacy as the sexiest thing that ever could happen to anybody. The presence of other pairings – female tops and female bottoms, female tops and male bottoms, billy goats and people they like to butt off mountain sides – does not mitigate the fact that the majority of BDSM imagery is about female people submitting to male people and being hurt. The fact that people who are into BDSM may experience pleasure through sensations and experiences that other people would identify as strictly painful also does not mitigate the blueprint of what’s happening.

Someone living in a small midwest town where they can’t go out in full leathers to their heart’s content, leading their “slave” around on a leash, is no more oppressed than someone whose desire to suck cock in the middle of a restaurant is also unwelcome. And if you’re living on either coast, shame the fuck on you if you ever pretend like kink isn’t wholly accepted and even encouraged.

but honestly I don't, other than "Jesus God, someone is angry."

(Cue "you're using The Tone Argument" in five, four, three, two...)

I guess that leads in to what I want to say, though, which is that in my own little-bit-more-rad days, the thing that struck me was how angry we all were. Everything was us pushing back against a horribly, horribly hostile world. Every statement had meaning, and that meaning had to do with crushing us. Every little thing people said got exaggerated -- which I see reflected in the "wearing more leather than I'd like you to = blatantly sucking cock at restaurants" remark. Calmness and thinking things through were really not the order of the day. In fact, I lost a friend for good commenting on an article by a gay man and shrilling that he must be "a misogynist" for... I can't remember. I think wanting space for leathermen to be by themselves. Which, okay, yeah, "boys only" has a history... but there are also het women who want into leathermen's space to stare at the pretty. Letting them in is, maybe, not so Politically Importante as I thought, now.

Though I guess one could say I was still angry here, and maybe that's why I don't post much any more. I still hate it when people spread vile nonsense about kinky sex, kinky people, and even, yes, the erotic media that kinky people like (I've said it before and I'll say it again: my belief is that the fact that erotic media are far from perfect does not condemn them. Intelligent people know that not everything they see is realistic or desirable, and my life should not be forced to revolve around keeping complete morons away from porn they'll use as model or excuse.) But I no longer feel like it much matters. Being away from those enclaves, I see that such pearl-clutchers are shrill and obnoxious... but rare. Why bother?

But I still see a difference. When I was kinda wannabe rad, I jumped at shadows. Women not being invited to a party for leathermen was proof that The Man hates all women and women would never have a home in the world oh God oh God they've got us. Whereas even when I was angry as hell here and really should have just calmed down, I was reacting to something real. People "dog-daring" us to defend what we want. People insisting they knew the etiology of our fantasies. People wanting us to change.

And that to me is the difference: Are you legitimately, but perhaps a little too, mad at something concrete you see happening? Or are you interpreting what you see through the eyes of "raised consciousness," which actually, as most frequently used, means "our ideology, without which you'd see something harmless or merely irritating?"

Form and Content

2010-01-03T13:31:00.000-08:00

(xposted from my LJ)

I was perusing Scarleteen today and I came across this little bit from Hugo Schwyzer (who as many of you know, I do not always agree with, or even like, but hey) that I liked. It's discussing sexual ethics in the context of newfound Christian faith, which is not in any way relevant to me, but I feel it answers very well why people's objections to BDSM and even to D/s don't work for me:

Let me suggest, Christine, that God cares more about the content of our sexuality than he does about its form. Traditional Christian sexual ethics are often discussed in the context of what Christians can and can’t do. Some Christians will often say things like “the only form of genital contact sanctioned by God is that which happens in a marriage between one husband and one wife.” The implication is clear: if you get the “form” (heterosexual marriage) right, then the sex that follows is okay. If you haven’t got the form right, then you’ve “fallen short of the mark.”

But “form-based” sexual ethics clearly have their problems.

For example, it ignores entirely the great likelihood that coercion, disrespect, and force can take place within marriage. The Churches did not start condemning marital rape — or even acknowledging that such a concept was possible — until the second half of the twentieth century. Is a situation in which a husband demands sex from his wife against her will somehow more in keeping with the spirit of Christ than a situation in which two unmarried people make love with mutual enthusiasm? If you’re a stickler for “form-based ethics”, you bet. For the most traditional of theologians, marital rape is less of a serious sin than homosexuality or pre-marital sex, because form matters more than content.

“Content” based sexual ethics are concerned with the way in which people, in the process of being sexual, value themselves and their partners. Content-based ethics are deeply concerned with mutuality, with pleasure, and with the willingness of each partner to take responsibility for the physical, spiritual, and emotional consequences of what is done. Form-based ethics teach the Christian to ask the question “Am I allowed to do this?” Content-based ethics teach the Christian to ask “Am I truly loving — in every sense of the word — the person or persons with whom I am doing this, including myself?”

This is what I can't parse about "BDSM is wrong," even when it's phrased as "Hierarchy is maladaptive for humans and limiting and restrictive."

[EDIT: The person who made the comment linked there has mentioned that she did not use the words I'm using to characterize her position. She says below that she meant that BDSM is wrong for her personally, and that I misrepresented her views on hierarchy as well. About them, she said the following, c&ped verbatim from the comment linked above: "I can't be of help as to whether something is "bad." That's not an idiom I work within or classify things by. I simply know for myself, and for the world I envision as better than what I see we've got now, I think, at a minimum, that less hierarchy would be really helpful." I mention in the comments that I still think there's a value judgment there, but I agree with her that it's best that people interpret her own words and not mine here.]

That's form. That's "The sex (or "the relationship" in the case of outside-the-bedroom D/s) you want needs to not have these features that look like this in order to not be this, which I find maladaptive." It follows that up with an explanation of where that maladaptiveness comes from, yeah -- but so do explanations of why homosexuality is wrong in conservative Christian moralities, sometimes in great detail. There's reasons given for "bad form." They're bad, but they're there.

Saying content matters instead implies that all the answers to "form" questions like "is BDSM compatible with feminism/okay for Christians/good for Buddhists/acceptable for snails?" (okay, that last is me giggling over "love darts") will not be quite right, because they start with the wrong question: "what are you doing?" or "what are you mimicking?" rather than "how are you doing this?"

It's funny how people who usually seem to go with the content-based ("of course it's okay that I'm gay, silly!") slip into the form-based ("he wears a collar [usually not, it's too big for his neck] and called you Master once being cute? OH MY GOD!") when things are outside their comfort zone.

New Blog: Topologies

2009-12-01T12:58:00.000-08:00

Topologies is a new group blog written by three top/dominant women. Check it out.

Ooh, how did I miss this?

2009-11-27T10:29:00.000-08:00

La Phalene muses on kink and gender:

There’s a lot in this kink business to make the feminist in me froth at the mouth. And no, I’m not talking about the images of pretty girls tied up, or the way that rape is dressed up as a perfect fantasy or that rad-fem line about how many sex acts are degrading to women. Rather it’s things like the two opposing camps, the female supremacists and the people who announce women are inherently submissive, and little things about how gender in constructed in the scene and in the archetypes. This is not a different world than vanilla, it’s all the baggage of the rest of my life seen through a somewhat tasteless spooky-goth lense that dresses people up in shiny black and involves a lot of smacking.

....Both sides of the gender superiority thing construct a very narrow definition of womanhood. For a subculture where having breasts is no proof of your genetic gender, people are pretty quick to either thrust me up onto a pedestal for qualities I might not possess or put me down as a sheep in need of a firm hand. This can be pretty awkward in either respect because it’s a narrow box to shove slightly more than half the human population into.
Classically the people who believe in gynarchy say it’s because women are warm, empathetic and emotionally intelligent, bringing wisdom that will end wars. Men who say women are submissive point to their classic social position and need for protection, talking about evolutionary biology or theology, or maybe gorean psychology. They generally phrase things in terms of a yin/yang, with female deference not as an explicit proof of male superiority but part of the natural order of things, like plug into socket.

I’m a young woman, who sort of conforms to the physical proportions desired of women in my era, fresh faced, vivacious and vicious in my interests. If you talk to vanilla people, the image ‘dominatrix’ is the closest to what I am, though not a label I embrace personally, and this symbol is what people perceive about kink. I’m bossy, aggressive and I like violence. According to the gynarchists, either I fail as a woman because I raid from the masculine side of things or my superiority is so unsupported as to be a point of religious faith. According to the man-as-patriarch, this is the flapping around of an unsatisfied woman who needs a Real Man ™ or I’m a unicorn who can be satisfied with a nice fluffy ‘female’ man. Both sides are very quick to write from the perspective of how females fit into this, either above or below. I really would like to see some f-sub writing on the perspective of gender-as-orientation, because while it seems like men write in generalizations (as do the female tops who believe their own hype enough to call their gender the best) the f-subs are all writing about personal service and the closest I’ve seen to them talking about belonging at the feet of men in general is waxing poetic about service making them feel fulfilled.

So where do I, the visual spokesperson for my kink, fit into all of this? I want a master like I want another hole in my head, but I don’t want to top someone because they believe in extreme sexual dimorphism, I want it to be submission gently coaxed (or brutally conquered) because of who I personally am, with mutual respect. And not the yin/yang separate but equal role bullshit, either. Subs aren’t subbing because this is mystical; it’s a fetish where, unlike the people who love inanimate objects, luckily the object of my desire can love me back. They might be the bolt to my nut, but to work we’ll both need to be made of the same material and my perfect opposite would probably find me dreadfully tedious and overbearing. They might get off on that, but being healthy we’d end up compromising.

Love it, but even the "bolt to my nut" phrasing is too stereotypically gendered for me. *wink*

And I also still scratch my head at the dissing of femme men, too. Not sure what that's about.

But in general: Yes. Just yes.

I will be brief.

2009-11-27T08:50:00.001-08:00

So there's a new comment over at an old post of Nine Deuce's:

This whole BDSM thingy is crap. Seriously, anyone who likes being hit and cut and harmed is mentally ill. Why is it called self-harm (a horrible, life-sucking addiction to be sure) when you do it to yourself, but when others do it to you it's "liberating" or "empowering"? It's just fucking sick.

Defenders of this crap, please research abuse and coping methods for it. People convince themselves that they like abuse so they can deal with the reality of it. Victims often seek out places in which to re-enact the abuse which is probably why these folks keep coming back to it.

My only comment is "what makes you think we haven't researched it?"

Handy, isn't it, to assume ignorance on the part of your opponents? Still makes you look like a damn fool, though.

Interesting conversation....

2009-11-11T11:33:00.000-08:00

There's a guy over at Nine Deuce's comment thread here who's making some pretty damned rather creepy comments about BDSM affecting how he relates to his partners. I was wondering what you all think of him or would say to him. Some samples of his comments:

Most, if not all, of the girls I have had sex with enjoy being dominated in one way or another. Not necessarily like extreme sado masochist, but many wanted to be choked/slapped/spanked/called degrading names and such. I wasn’t into this stuff at first (for a long time I felt weird about receiving oral sex because the act was not reciprocal), but now it seems to me that girls can’t enjoy sex unless they are acting out a power fantasy. What to do about this?

How do I deal with the fact that they often want to be degraded or dominated sexually but at other times treated with respect and regarded as an equal? Sometimes immediately after she will feel ashamed or angry. It can be kind of confusing. Should I separate the two worlds and somehow just not think about it?

Yeah, I realize that, in some ways, a person’s sexual fantasies don’t make them good or bad, worthy or unworthy. On the other hand, sex is a part of the whole human being, and it must say something about the person as a whole. In day to day life, I find it difficult to respect a person who is submissive or sycophantic. On the other hand, that’s just one side of the coin. I am also bothered by the fact that I take pleasure in having power and violence.

Yeah I am making a generalization based on personal experience. I am sure there are many women who have different tastes and desires. It just has been so predominant in my experience that I’ve started to wonder where it comes from and how to deal with it in a real relationship. A female friend of mine told me she wanted to break up with her boyfriend because he didn’t “throw her around enough”. It’s hard for me to understand a girl wanting to be “objectified” (or whatever you want to call it) and then treated as an equal.

I am only speaking from personal experience. I have had only a handful of sexual partners (5). Each woman was very different from the others, but when it comes to sex they all encouraged a very strong power dynamic. I have been wondering about where this power stuff comes from. For me, sex was primarily a sensual experience and not really about power. But after having a few girlfriends I am finding that many women want to act out fantasies of rape and submission, even women who seem very strong and independent.

(please pardon me for not linking every comment.)

I'm not sure what to think. Several of these comments just... strike me as Creepy Nice Guy. Calling those he's had sex with "girls" and talking about how every woman wants something different from what he wanted, and admitting his difficulties with respecting people all raise red flags for me.

Thing is, it doesn't seem at all obvious to me that someone who can't spank someone without seeing her as a "sycophant" would lack problems relating to women if only he were vanilla. Even his description of the "sensual experience" in the last bit I quoted seems like it's all about him and what he wanted sex to be like, rather than about enjoying the sensuality together.

I actually agreed with several people over at ND's in recommending he avoid BDSM if it exascerbates a problem he already has with respecting his partner in daily life.

But I do wonder how you all feel about this. Here, finally, after the years of our saying "prove it" is an individual who appears to be admitting that BDSM makes him less likely to respect his partners. What do we think about it?

As I said, my personal feeling is that he's probably got an issue doing so anyway, even without the spanking. But I do wonder: BDSM is intense, and it definitely can be dark and play with things that aren't so sweet or fair.

I've always said doing BDSM is like using a knife or starting a fire. Most of us do these things fairly often in our lives and it's not even particularly remarkable. And, sometimes, they are the best or even the only tools available to do something we want or need to do, despite their having the potential to cut or burn us. Still, they are, by their very nature, potentially dangerous if misused.

Thoughts?

I actually can't edit the link list here...

2009-11-10T14:15:00.000-08:00

...but here's a useful link.

Orlando C is collating results from studies of BDSM and has posted them here:

www.kinkresearch.blogspot.com

Personally I'd like to, if at all possible, see links to the studies themselves, but this collation is great. From my admittedly not-thorough perusal, it looks like many of the results he cites are from the book Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures, which collected studies and articles about BDSM (and which if I recall right was originally a special issue of a particular journal, but I may be misremembering that.)

A post!

2009-11-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

I've been avoiding these kerfuffles as much as I can lately, and I think it's been good for me.

However, a few people have been clamoring for my return, so... *wink*

I did find this (a bit old, but then I haven't been around):

If a person gets turned on by random objects, animals, excrement, shoes, or whatever the heck, I’m not okay with that. That is pathological, and represents an underdeveloped consciousness. As a child matures, he becomes less vital-egoistic, and lives with a higher level of self-discipline. But in an excessively liberal society where people live in a kind of prolonged childhood, they never grow out of that undisciplined, vital-egoistic state; seeking titillation with a kind of desperate and unfree movement, addicted to excitement and adrenaline. Those who seek excitement through kink represent that stunted state, along with those who are promiscuous, view pornography, are involved in extreme sports and so on. Their consciousness is highly ‘material’, more like that of an animal, and undisciplined. Instead of encouraging these pathological behaviours, we should criticize them and create a cultural norm against them.

It's been a while since I last ran into a critique like this. It sounds a bit Freudian, doesn't it, all laced with references to "development" and filled with interesting scientific-sounding neologisms like "vital-egoistic."

Thing is, when someone resorts to words like this without even defining them, that's a sure sign that the theory behind it all is bankrupt. Nowhere does the person define "vital-egoistic," or link to any use of this term in any accepted theory. (Perhaps, if it's intended to evoke Freud, I should be saying "accepted and then widely discredited" -- for all that psychoanalytic theory was a revolution in thinking that has had profound effects on psychology and psychiatry both, quite a lot of it has been rejected, and rightfully so.) A quick Google yields only this individual's own blog as a search result for the term.

The idea that certain ways of behaving -- particularly indulging or acting on certain desires -- is a sign of arrested development is a favorite debate tactic of the intellectually bankrupt, precisely because it's nearly impossible to argue against "You're underdeveloped." All of us have our weaknesses and our demons, and all of us specifically have our insecurities and fears and secret shames in the sexual arena, too. It's very easy to hear "some part of your maturation is unfinished" and wonder how true that might be, precisely because none of us are perfect.

But it's an underhanded tactic to use that to shame someone, or to use that to set yourself in opposition to something they want, as if your disapproval can rewire desire.

Especially in a culture where sex is often deemed to be dirty in general -- a need we all have, yes, but a shameful one. Especially if one is a "pervert," at which point one is at best silly and quaint and at worst a danger, as others tell it.

Add to that the standard drivel in the general vein of

I am critical of BDSM, and do not consider it an acceptable practice merely because consenting adults participate in it. I think BDSM eroticizes violence and dehumanization, and is a logical outcome of patriarchal conceptions of sexuality as domination, destruction and ownership.

and you have, well, lovely little boilerplate. I'd be far more inclined to listen to these people if they didn't parrot supposedly-"feminist" buzzwords in such close proximity to one another. While this person probably is intelligent, it honestly makes it sound like the person doesn't know what s/he is saying at all. What are "violence and dehumanization" in this context? What counts as each? What is "domination" here, and how does consent to it affect or not affect its moral contours?

"Dehumanization" is a particular pet peeve of mine, as is "degradation," because so often the assertion that particular acts or depictions are inherently dehumanizing or degrading and this is simply obvious and anyone who doesn't see it is damaged. That's a handy thing to say, but it's not actually an argument, unless you can in fact prove either

that the words apply in the cases you say they do, or
that the people asserting that they don't are in fact damaged, and in ways that prevent them from comprehending these concepts properly.

Which I've never seen. And I've been tangling with these people for some time now.

Things That Are Just Bizarre

2009-06-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

And Obviously False, Vol. Whatevertheheck:

I don’t, for the record, think “external contact” with ejaculate for sexual purposes (or fellatio) is inherently degrading or disgusting. But my experience is that many men DO think their semen is an inherently icky, disgusting substance magically capable of rendering a woman a “freak who’ll do anything” if she swallows it or lets it touch her exterior.

I can’t remove bukkake from that narrative. (I don’t think it _exists_ outside that narrative, whereas intercourse most certainly does.) If I did find a man who had never seen any porn at all, then what in Hell would make him wake up one morning and think “Gee, I’d like to come all over your FACE, Honey,” if not a desire to degrade me?

It’s the fact that it’s the face that bothers me. In what other context is squirting something on someone’s face, or even discussing same, not insulting and degrading? “In your face!” is, after all, slang for “I just dominated you.”

I wouldn’t argue, without knowing much more about someone, that doing bukkake made that person “not a feminist.” But I’m of the opinion that a “facial” can never be anything but the opposite of a feminist act.

Uh, what? So... stuff comes out of his body... that is inherently tied to his sexual pleasure... and there is absolutely no way that he could possibly, in a world where porn doesn't exist, think it's hot to see a substance intimately connected with his pleasure and orgasm on his partner's skin?

Is this person kidding?

Or is it specifically the face she takes issue with? I don't see why that would be either, honestly, because, well, one way of having sex involves genitals and faces, and people often have that kind of sex unprotected. Ergo: at least potential messiness.

I'm not one to be excited specifically by messy faces myself, mine or others', but... does she have the same attitude toward a man (or a woman, for that matter) who enjoys having a female partner's wetness all over his face while or after giving head to her?

I do understand that there is a connection in the current culture between giving head to men and degradation. But the thing is, if she asserts that no one wants sexual fluids on their faces absent Patriarchy because it's inherently something no one would think of if they weren't Big Meanies, what does she think of cunnilingus, anyway?

It's this "never" stuff and this "things have only one unalterable meaning" stuff that simply baffles me. What?

That's it. It's not even anger any more. It's just complete bafflement.

Also, what is with the constant bringing up bukkake, anyway? I mean, sure, some people do it and more people watch films of it, but what exactly does that have to do with... anything at all? Bukkake has about as much relevance to me, for example, as scubadiving cats would.

Feminist acts and anti-feminist acts

2009-06-13T09:41:00.001-07:00

ND is up to her usual tricks.

I'm... not feeling like responding right now, really. These folks are very much a broken record about what they consider to be "antifeminist" and are not at all consistent about why they do. I know that a lot of you look to me to debunk this stuff, and I hate to let you all down. But I am really quite burnt out of the same fights over and over.

So I will reiterate that I do not think that it is possible to call someone's personal sexual life antifeminist without knowing her personally and specifically as an individual. I will also reiterate that I do not think we can call all sexually explicit media antifeminist in a sweeping way either.

And with that I will go eat lunch and pass the torch to you all for the moment.

Phantom of the Opera

2009-06-06T17:47:00.000-07:00

xposted from my LJ

Ooooof.

Phantom of the Opera teaches girls bad, bad, orful thingz!

Of course, to call it a two-and-a-half-hour musical about rape vastly understates the bizarreo-world factor of this musical, although it's hardly an inaccurate statement.

At first, I was merely staggered by what this show must do to thirteen-year-old girls. I mean, it's just utterly designed to be seductive to anyone who doesn't want to own their sexuality and is drawn to any sort of narrative of submission, ordeal or apprenticeship. I should have, in fact, been all over this shit. At thirteen, I surely would have been. And the gaggle of girls that age we saw in the bathroom surely were.

....What a completely bizarre and vaguely intellectually offensive show. Man, when this first came out, gender and sexuality scholars must have been like "happy birthday to me" -- what a goldmine of crazy!

Where do I even begin?

Perhaps with "It didn't make me any less dominant..."

I wanted to be Christine for a few months, sure.

Then I asked myself "Why shouldn't he be singing my music?" and it was all over but the shouting. :)

And of course, rather than asking whether stories like that one attract people who have D/s leanings, we have to ask the same old tired "won't people get D/s leanings from this?" question.

And, honestly, what all the stories like this about D/s-y romance taught me was not "Be submissive!" but rather "If you be your dominant self, you will never be happy. Dominance is for the villains, and the villains are always either vanquished or voluntarily give up what's presented as their only chance for companionship because they realize they can never be themselves without doing harm."

These stories do not tell you that D/s is harmless, or is awesome, and I'm always stunned when feminists say they do. These stories are very, very, very clear about erotic power dynamics' destructive potential. They have to be. It's not socially acceptable for them not to be.

It may well be socially acceptable for them to be in romance novels and such geared toward adults, but all the stories I was allowed to see as a youth? None of those said that submission ultimately leads to fulfillment. They said, as I stated above, that dominance was what made the villains hot. The villains, by definition, lose.

Submission is something the heroine experiments with -- Hell, gets hypnotized into experimenting with -- and ultimately rejects. Do you really think Christine has the same dynamic she had with Erik with Raoul?! Yeah, right.

Why, when we examine this stuff, do we ask how it will affect a child we assume to be a vanilla tabula rasa? Why don't we ever, ever, ever ask what this says to people who are already dominant or submissive? Because they usually say "Your relationships are tragedies waiting to happen." If not "You're gonna grow up to be a homicidal maniac who can never be responsible about sex and love, kiddo. Sorry to tell ya, but we thought you should know."

If y'all need me, I'll be cranking Point up to max volume (and, yes, it is about rape, and yes, that is problematic. But FFS, the guy is a homicidal maniac! It's not like the show says "woo, rape!")...

...provided I can freaking find my copy of the OCR, anyway.

Dear radical-leaning feminists...

2009-06-06T13:46:00.001-07:00

...if your big thing is fighting for the really real actual empowerment of women (rather than the icky fake sparkly "empowerfulizing" of women)... why do you always want to disempower me?

The situation of men who enjoy playing the M in relation to female prostitutes is instructive here. In a society that systematically gives men power over women, men usually have enough ability to retaliate that a female S is, ultimately, very much in their power. On this basis, John Stoltenberg has argued that sadomasochism may be liberating for men in a way that it cannot be for women in a patriarchy.

Is it just an obsession with "prostitutes" that makes you so constantly run at the mouth/keyboard about pros with only a footnote about everybody else (usually that we're so rare and it proves you right about everything)? Because I really don't understand it and, to be honest, it really ticks me off. It bothers me to see you folks so constantly insinuate that no one would be like me unless someone paid them for it.

Stop it, please.

And honestly? As a person with a disability, I am used to constant small disempowerments. It really bugs me to turn to the feminist movement and find the same thing all over again.

What really saddens me is that the actual people who write this stuff will likely never see what I just wrote. These folks are Professors, who Get Stuff Published. I'm just someone with a blog. My story matters less than the theory, and the theory says "no right-minded female would be like you unless cash were involved." Uh... no thanks to that.

(And I'm not even addressing here how disrespectful to actual dominatrices, prostitutes, and other sex workers that kind of gloss is also. Yuck with a capital Y.)

More on feministing

2009-06-02T15:33:00.000-07:00

I'm noticing that on this Feministing thread, a lot of people are bringing up how they experience kink as orientational. Basically they're saying "Hey, this isn't some random thing I decided was fun, and I can't sit here and talk myself into doing something else on Saturday because the feminists were meen bulliez."

I agree with that myself, and that is how I experienced my kinky attractions from the beginning.

But right now, honestly, for myself I've stopped caring about that almost entirely. What bugs me now is not so much that people don't get that this is not the sort of thing I can change at will, but that the way my activities should be understood seems, on that analysis, to change wildly depending on what I happen to do.

If I go to a BDSM club and play and find it dull, and then go home and have very, very hot sex that doesn't involve pain and only involves power insofar as I happen to be in a D/s relationship, do I get a pass for examining that day? If the week after that we're more interested in knives and face-slapping than genital canoodling, do I have to take my timeout to think first?

That's the big thing that I really don't get about all this. It all centers around acts but pretends not to. "I want to know why you submit" but that gets parsed, most of the time, as "I want to know why you (would ever want to) let him do that."

Which creates this really odd thing where, well, everything we do sexually gets reduced to BDSM, and gets reduced to the kinds of BDSM or the reasons for BDSM that its opponents are most worried about. Our sexualities and our sexual practices don't get discussed as wholes often at all. Kink is simply something that consumes us.

Yeah, kink is important in my life... but lately I'm really wondering what makes it so Important with a big I. It's something I happen to do. Something a little more controversial than most things I do, but why does that matter so much, exactly?

Basically, I'm at the equivalent of "Yeah, I'm gay... why'd you care again exactly?"

Pervertables.

2009-05-31T21:54:00.000-07:00

Hello! Bet you've forgotten I was even a co-host here, right? Long time no etc etc.

Afraid I don't have anything too profound right now, more practical: lifestyles of the cheap and kinky: Discuss.

That is:

After a long dry spell, am easing back into actually y'know -doing- stuff. Unfortunately my cupboard's been rather bare apart from two floggers. And the specialty stores are, well? Expensive.

So the other day I went to the friendly local hardware/miscellaneous dry goods store, and picked up:

a couple of wooden spatulas, one with slats, one without;

a long wooden brush meant for cleaning out barbecues or something;

bag of wooden clothespins;

ostrich "quill" plume.

Total cost: About as much as one small "novelty" item would've been at Good Vibes or one of the local boys' toys shops. They should work fine, too. Great thing about SF: discreet "testing" of such items against ones thigh in a non-speciality shop doesn't raise an eyebrow. In fact there was a gentleman in the aisle who was getting assistance from one of the employees fitting a chain around his neck.

Am now wondering: what else? Anyone have any ideas? Common or not so common householdy items one can use for nefarious purposes? Seriously, that store's a treasure trove if you know what you're looking for.

And one more comment...

2009-05-29T20:09:00.000-07:00

...on one of the bits at Feministing, here:

becstar replied to Lumix :

Actually I have just returned from doing a lot of research about BDSM. I didn't begin being this anti-BDSM. I researched it and talked in depth with the people involved in it. Then the longer I stayed there the more creepy their conversations got.

Women who were clearly in an abusive relationship (even outside of violence during sex) were told to accept that that is their proper position and that to be a true submissive they must learn to accept it. Other who didn't practice violence but rather subjagation were in relationships because they didn't feel like they were enough on their own.

They advocated for violence and refused to ever truly question how it is effecting them or why they desire such things. I have done my research alright, and it is precisely because of the abuse I saw within the community that I became so staunchly opposed. Perhaps you need to dig a little deeper than the happy face they put on for those outside of the BDSM community.

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I've asked it before and never gotten an answer, so here I am asking it again: where does one do this "deeper digging?"

Because I repeatedly see "You're just talking about the public face of it!" and "Stop being disingenuous!" when I try to figure out where this sordid truth comes in. I'm an eight-year veteran of the Scene in multiple locations. I've had multiple long-term relationships with other kinky people. And I am at a loss to find this rotten heart under all our... glitter? Black leather? I've no idea.

I have met some kinky people who were more interested in casual play than relationships and weren't entirely open about this, and I've been hurt by that and seen it hurt other people. So I won't say that sexuality-based subcultures don't have potential downsides. They certainly do.

But I absolutely don't see where this... shadowy cabal comes in. Maybe I'm just not 31337 enough to have met the Kinkster Illuminati, but I highly doubt that.

It's interesting to me how people who make this sort of claim always say "Look deeper," or "do your research," or "we all know it's there," but never give any names, any locales, any groups. I wonder why that could be...

Fnord.

Feministing

2009-05-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

As Kiya just posted here, there's a discussion of BDSM going on over at Feministing here.

Initially, I didn't want to comment, but the more I read of the comment threads, the more I feel I have to say something to Becstar. She participated in a comment thread here, in which she claimed not to be anti-BDSM "anymore." After a conversation with many of us, she's apparently changed her mind. Apparently she was so bothered by many of us not concurring with her stance on porn that she left, here.

I missed her inflammatory flounce somehow. If I had seen it, I would have said this then. But I didn't, so I'm saying it now that she's spewing anti-BDSM nastiness all over that Feministing blog post, including talking about how awful we are.

So I have this to say:

Becstar,

Your views are your own, of course. But many of us here bent over backwards to be kind and helpful to you. Hell, in the Facebook thread I defended you against a good friend, thinking that while you held some views I found repugnant, you were here in good faith. When you spoke of problems you had, many of us jumped to try and help you, to offer you support and possible solutions.

Is this how you repay us?

I hope you think long and hard about how you are behaving, because I find it profoundly dishonorable.

It's things like this, really, that convince me that the pro-BDSM position is not just one I hold because I want to have my selfish fun. I have seen people get heated on both sides, even mean and nasty. But I have never seen this "well, I'll kind of be here, hang out, stay relatively peaceful, and then completely go off and badmouth people who stood up for me and tried to help me" in pro-BDSM and pro-porn circles.

And the more I think about it the more I suspect that the zealotry on the anti-side is to blame. Because if you are a zealot, any time someone says "Hey, do you have figures to back your claim up?" or "actually, I'm in a TPE relationship, and..." or "Hey, I'm a sex worker, and you've left out this, this and this..." it becomes a horrible, horrible affront. Merely saying "Hey, wait, actually no" is, on the zealot's view, justifying real-world violence.

There is no room for considering any other viewpoint, because the connection to violence is instantly made and is unassailable. And anyone who would assail it is a monster, a lover of horrific cruelties.

I stand where I stand not because I like orgasms too much, but because I believe that way of thinking is downright dangerous. And, as this current fracas clearly shows, that way of thinking justifies totally dishonorable behavior, because anything that can be done in service to the Cause must be done, and damn whether it's dishonorable or obnoxious.

I stand where I do because I'd rather make an honest mistake and accidentally allow for horrors than go against my principles.

The Revenge of Return of Second Cousin Of Rape Culture Strikes Back

2009-05-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

In comments to the previous post, ggg_girl linked us this post on Feministing, where I made the mistake of reading the comment threads.

This has had sufficient useful results to produce one sane and reasonable post, which is going here; the ranty thing will be in LfG:WoaS when I have time to write it, but for now I'm writing while the cookies cool enough to be packed up.

I have had a radical revelation about "rape culture".

The primary contributor to "rape culture" is the idea that people -- particularly women -- are not competent definers of their own sexuality. That they 'really want it' even when they don't, or that they only need to be instructed to become fully sexual in the manner their instructor desires, or that their decisions about sexuality in one set of circumstances mandate that they make the same decision in different circumstances.

See the blatant rape apologist in the comments here suggesting that a woman's participation in a threesome means that any random guy can come join in. (h/t Cheshire) Rape culture.

See any number of discussions about whether "date rape" is really rape, about whether "she was wearing that outfit" is really consent, about whether someone is to blame for their assault because they didn't jump out of a car in a strange neighborhood, etc. Rape culture.

"The porn made him do it", "Men are all just naturally rapists", and similar matters -- also rape culture, and rape apologism, removing responsibility for the choice to rape from the perpetrators.

"It only shows how far the patriarchy has gone in making women internalise self-hatred simply for being born in a certain body" -- a quote from becstar in that thread -- ... also rape culture. Definitionally declaring kinky women not competent to defind their sexuality.

Discuss.

Ren, on examining...

2009-05-19T15:33:00.001-07:00

...And how could I leave out this recent gem, from our favorite loudmouthed gonzo creep, Ren:

Right then! So, I am taking a break from my mad rush to get old D there to level 50, do some poking around and reading of shit I’d missed here in bloganistan, and I head on over to one of my favorite kink-friendly haunts…

And start reading all this shit from some self righteous holier than thou facebook asshats who think BDSM is the great evil of the universe and wow, they are just so much smarter and enlightened and self aware than those dregs in black leather!

First off, I am the great fucking evil of the universe, and I will not share the honor with BDSM’ers. I don’t even I.D. as a full on BDSMer, despite having been called a creepy sadist a whole lot. Okay, so maybe I am a creepy sadist…but hey! I’ve examined that! In any event, what continues to make me smirk and want to punch people is this whole idea that the BDSMers or people into that horrible nasty degrading language or rough sex or whatever are, well, somehow more flawed that those who aren’t? I mean check it, this is choice!

(responding to Ernest)

When she requested that I be the acting administrator for this group during her absence from the country, I asked her if she would mind me deleting the trolls from the group. She told me something along the lines of “do what you want, I don’t give a shit.” So I am going to go ahead and delete you and the other trolls from this group. I am also going to delete all your posts. And I’m going to enjoy it very much.

Blah blah blah…

Know your place. –some asshat called Blaize…

Okay, now, really, right off…and as a creepy sadist I know it when I see it: “And I am going to enjoy it very much”, “Know your place”…what the fuck does that sound like to you? Holy shit, sounds like a creepy fucking sadist to me! I mean, come on, that is straight out of bad BDSM porn right there…just switch it up a bit… “I am going to fuck you up the ass, and I’m going to enjoy it very much”… “I am going to erase you, and enjoy it very much”, “I am going to mock you, and enjoy it very much”….”Know your place –(bitch, slut, whore, pathetic whelp, boot-licking plebian!) So yeah, anti BDSM Master Blaize practicing some fine creepy sadist shit right there. I mean, (s)he seems so fucking gleeful with hir position of power, malevolent too. That shit is kinda hot!

Hey Blaize, you wanna go on a date? I’m easy…and I promise to use lube on ya first. You kinda turned me on there, squid.

But hot creepy sadism aside…these fucks are a good example of why I don’t like humans. Buckets full of smug superiority, and yep, the whole idea that since there is BDSM porn, all porn is BDSM, and all BDSM is porn, and all people involved in BDSM (and all people involved in porn) must be pathetic little dupe victims with more trauma in their pasts than an entire ward of criminally insane serial killers…or criminally insane serial killers. And gods, that shit is just soooo old and stinky. Like my socks after 3 hours at the gym stinky. Until someone can provide actual vetted proof that there are more fucked up kinky people than non-kinky people, this shit needs to be shoved right back up the asses it came out of. And gads, need I mention the fucking universals?

Oh yeah, and the image they are using for their group? A nice non 2257 compliant shot from Kink.com, of a woman whose consent they never obtained before using it, and gee, have no idea how she might feel about having her image used for an anti BDSM agenda! Holy fuck, where have I seen this before? Oh yeah, out of a shit ton of meatsacks who care about women, their feelings, and do not want them to be used and exploited! Well, fuck me with a tire iron, that’s sure a great way of showing it, no?

And I do have to ask, nay, even beg (come on, give it to me, I need it!) for an answer from the oh so wise and superior and not fucked up people spouting this crap…why the grim and obsessive interest in what kinky people do in their bedrooms? I mean, if I, oh, happened to seriously rough someone up and cane their ass bloody (not that I would ever do such thing –smirk) what business is it of yours really? I mean, if said person not only consented, but did so enthusiastically, and I dealt with such person in an ethical manner (I am capable of such things on occasion), and we weren’t hurting anyone else and had a grand old time…why the fuck do you care? What business is it of yours, exactly? I mean…last time I checked, none of the kinky people I know of were standing on your doorstep demanding you put on the cuffs or flog them. Even the dudes on Craigslist or whatever are not, oh, making any of you do BDSM, right? The letters SSC do exist for a reason you know…

I mean, it just seems…creepy to me…and since I am the creepiest chick on the block and all, I have to wonder, because you know? I could care less what y’all do in your bedrooms. They are your bedrooms for a reason after all. But hell if these folks don’t seem to…well…get off going through kinky peoples metaphorical panty drawers…

Fucking pervs.

Now come on Blaize, I’ll certainly disrespect you in the morning!

I feel pretty much the same as Ren on this (aside from feeling very done with the Facebookians. I reported on them and now my duty's done, and they can come up with as many lengthy talking points as they want, really, because right now my prevailing sentiment is Really Can't Be Arsed.) I think everybody, no matter how politically pure, or sweet, they want to pretend to be, has a mean streak. We all have moments of enjoying being mean to other people, particularly if we've pre-defined those people as less than human. (Which is what this person is doing with Ernest. He's a pornographer, therefore he's Satan, therefore it's not actual cruelty to mock him, deride him, deny him a voice, and enjoy it very much.)

Now, I don't like that, in part because Satan happens to be my friend and I'm tired as hell of "you do this job, ergo you hate these people" because it's bullshit. But in other part, I don't like it because doing it means being hypocritical and giving yourself a free pass to do so because you're feeling self-righteous. What they're saying is "because this person's occupation squicks -- okay let's be generous, maybe even triggers -- me, it's totally OK for me to be cruel."

That's dangerous, folks, in a way that "Yeah, I've peered into the abyss in me, gone dancing with my own demons, and seen a sadist there, sometimes. I've reveled in it and wallowed in it, and I refuse to call it what it is not because I know when I do and don't give it rein. I'm responsible enough to do my best to control it, and when I go off and behave viciously, as any human will, I understand that the responsibility to fix it is my own" is not.

Because guess what? If it's you, if it's a part of you, you own it. You don't get to say that the devil made you do it, whether because you were tempted by evil iniquitous lust or because your politics of the week makes it a perfectly laudable act to shit on somebody who gets shit on all the damn time anyway.

Even if that means doing something as distasteful to me as, you know, apologizing to Satan.

Threats

2009-05-19T03:40:00.000-07:00

I posted this to my LJ, but hadn't posted it here, so:

From tgstonebutch on LJ:

Mollena is teaching a class on race play this Tuesday night. And has received threats of violence regarding it. She is refusing to censor herself, and has gone public regarding the threats

I understand people really not liking this, but threatening a Black woman for doing race play, simply because you disagree that it's acceptable? What is wrong with people?

I think people just don't realize, when they get into their Lists Of Reasons Why People Can Engage In Generic Kink, but Not In Scary Kink X, just how inhospitable they make the environment for people who engage in Kink X. Suzy Essaywriter may be saying "And thus I impeccably argue that Whatever cannot be reclaimed as shown by the previous twenty pages of careful argumentation," but what happens down the line is "You're so appalling we will get violent."

And what's always really bothered me about this is the whole "Oh, but I only mean it if you're a member of the oppressor group." Not because I don't think that in some places, the standards are a little different. But because it becomes very stark for some people, "you're OK and you're not." And I don't think that's a wise way to be.

I don't like it when I see, for example, "women can fantasize about being ravished, but if their partners get off on playing the opposite role, they're evil." It just makes no sense.

Similarly, there's been a bit of "Oh, I'm OK with you women discussing whatever, but when a man says the same things it scares me" in discussions at places I often mention here, and I even see it (though fortunately rarely) from commenters here.

That's something I can't get on board with. It's just never made sense to me that an oppressed person can say something and maybe even be right, but the minute it comes out of someone else's mouth, it's suddenly Wrong-O-Wrong and even Scary and Threatening.

I'm probably peeing into the wind even saying it, because it's a favorite trope of all kinds of anti-"liberal", anti-"colorblind," etc. people. I get the concept of privilege and I do think it exists, but I think there's something going wrong somewhere when one person saying X can be brave and true and someone else saying the same thing is threatening and violent.

Guest Post #2: Stoicism by cereus_sphinx

2009-05-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

This was a recent post on cereus_sphinx's livejournal. I asked for permission to crosspost it here, so here it is:

###

OK : Warning this is going to be a really rough draft. But I've been thinking about this for years and I'm finally getting to the point where I can sorta-write about it. I know - I come up with big Ideas, but it can take months/years to say them - it makes for sucky conversation. And the latest post on SM-F triggered this. Because I see one attitude in rape and the other in BDSM I guess.

One of the things that bugs me is the way stoicism gets put up on some pedestal and masochism gets dragged through the dirt.

Stoicism - going into a bad situation DESPITE the fact that you hate it for the benefit of others.

Masochism: going into a bad, dangerous, scary, difficult situation BECAUSE it's something you can enjoy or get something out of that might benefit other people.

It seems that the first one makes you a hero, the second one makes you a creep.

I can't afford to be stoic, it's like my mortal enemy. I see myself stuck in a bad situation that I don't want to be in, frozen because I should just be self sacrificing and put up with it. Going Numb. I see myself turning away from enjoyable things (that others might even appreciate me doing) because I might enjoy them and that would be sick.

Or dancing through flames, unharmed. A plant rooted in bare rock, my face turned towards the unmitigated sun, the monsoon deluge.

(Or in Dune, transforming the Water from poison into the stuff of visions ;) )

Numbness and pain, or joy.

My experience with SM and Hypersensitivity/Aspergers actually are mutually beneficial because they both show how to enjoy myself even if it means doing something different than other people find enjoyable. I can put a soft limit on sustained social interaction and noisy places (and cold :( ). I can fully enjoy 100+ temperatures. My body can perform miracles, It Comes First. No matter if what it wants is not what it's supposed to.

Guest Post: "BDSM: A Class Act?"

2009-05-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

This guest post is by Mz. Muse (I gather this is the name she uses on Feministing, but I don't know how to find her profile to link it). It was originally posted to a locked post in her livejournal some time ago, and I offered to give it a wider audience here; after some edits and tweaks, here it is.

"BDSM: A Class Act?" by Mz. Muse

I read this article about BDSM and feminism linked off a friend's journal. I ranted about it a little in his journal, but it was still bothering me in the shower this morning (and not in the way I might like kinky feminists to bother me in the shower).

So it gets it's own ranty little post. In the above article, "The Fantasy of Acceptable Non-Consent", Stacey May Fowles puts forward the theory that BDSM culture shares culpability for creating what she calls "rape culture", a culture that normalizes violence against women. Her article is well worth reading, so don't see my recap of it as a short-cut to her own thoughts. I'm responding to just one section, in which she suggests that BDSM tropes leak into mainstream pornography. Without the benefit of careful training in the BDSM community's standards of safe, sane, consensual play, Fowles believes that young men who grow up seeing images of women bound, gagged or apparently forced into sex will enact these scenes on unwilling victims instead of enthusiastic play partners.

Fowles treads dangerously close to the anti-porn feminist position that pornography inspires rape. If that were true, logically such pornography should be banned, which leads us right down the primrose path of censorship to the lovely hell of condemning ourselves and others for thought crimes. There's also the risk of hanging our allies out to dry for being too dark and dirty, as happens so often in minority rights movements, especially sexual ones. For the most part, mainstream porn doesn't turn me on, but I still feel compelled to defend its right to exist and get others off.

Fowles talks about sexual domination of women as if BDSM invented it. For example, she refers to anything approaching rape fantasy as "desires specific to BDSM". I'd venture that the reverse is true - the desire for sexual power play prompted the creation of BDSM. Violent sex is hot. People of all genders have, I'd venture, been fantasizing about it and doing it for as long as there's been sex and power.

The Marquis de Sade, in the 1790s, eroticized rape, torture and even murder. It's from his writings that we draw our word for sexual cruelty. Masochism comes from Sacher-Masoch, who published Venus in Furs, his autobiographical account of making himself his mistress' slave in 1870.

My suspicion is that modern BDSM evolved as a way to play with fire and not get burned; it's a safety code and community that lets us do the dark things our ids beg for without exposing our polite, socialized selves to the pain of becoming either victims or brutal aggressors. Knowing about BDSM doesn't make me want to have kinky sex; being human and wired that way makes me want kinky sex. BDSM just gives me tools to do it safely.

Inside Fowles assertion that "serious BDSM practitioners" can and should be allowed to do the violent, dark things that the "average young male heterosexual" can't be trusted to even jerk off to fantasies about, I think I see a hidden class issue. It's not merely that Fowles’ BDSM culture is defined as much by expensive props and $400 leather boots as it is by the rules of safe-sane-consensual play. It's that she's missing the history of sexual aggression between classes when she asserts that we live in a modern, newly created rape culture.

Fowles is looking at BDSM tropes in the mainstream porn videos distributed on the Internet and seeing the cheap, easy access to these images as a source of "rape culture". She thinks these images suggest desires and acts to young men that otherwise they'd be blissfully ignorant of.

We have a solid literary record stretching back at least three hundred years of a culture where women were expected to maintain their virtue through chastity, young men were expected to engage in casual sex, and there was plenty of kinky porn. Probably those things have been true much longer; it’s my personal knowledge of literary history that goes back only that far, not the existence of kinky porn. If "women", by which we mean middle- and upper-class women, were all going to their marriage beds virgins, who were these guys fucking?

The servants. Prostitutes. Poor girls. These are the people de Sade was routinely accused of abusing and molesting before he was imprisoned. The people who over and over again in literature and historical record are raped, knocked up, “ruined” and cast aside by men of a higher social class who would never dream of laying an improper hand on their social peers.

I would suggest that the cultural shift which has occurred in the past few generations is not the creation of a "rape culture", but a culture in which respectable middle-class women are more likely to be targeted as victims of sexual assault by their peers, and therefore one in which rape has become more visible as a problem. I would bet that women are no more likely to be raped now than they were a century ago; in fact I bet we are on average safer from sexual assault. But the breakdown in rigid class systems and rigid sexual mores creates an atmosphere where "nice girls" are at greater risk from assault by otherwise “nice” boys.

I think the responsibility for this shift could be argued to lie with the Sexual Revolution and the accompanying wave of feminism that followed it. Around the middle of the 20th century, (I am wildly theorizing) two things happened: young middle class American men (the group I think Fowles is really talking about when she refers to "average males") stopped having access to socially sanctioned targets for sexual aggression - domestic servants have become wildly uncommon, visiting prostitutes is not part of the normal adolescent experience in the States, class barriers got a lot mushier after WWII, women's rights in general have come into public awareness to the point where raping anyone is frowned on - and young women began to claim their sexual agency and independence in a way that made them newly sexually available.

We now have a culture where young men are taught to view young women of their own class as sexual commodities, while a few generations ago they would have been brought up to view their female peers as the "angels in the house" whom they might love or marry and the lower class women in their lives as sex objects who they might fuck, with or without consent. A man growing up today learns to look to his girlfriend/wife to play out violent fantasies that he might once have satisfied with a prostitute or not at all.

This cultural shift gives us a lot of great things - sexual agency! safe, sane, consensual kink! birth control! - but with it we have all inherited some of the risk that used to belong more clearly to women on the fringes of respectable society. It's not BDSM, or its watered-down aesthetic leaking into mainstream porn, that contributes to a culture of rape.

The possibly increased risk that "nice" middle-class white women will be raped by "nice" middle-class white men is a shadowy by-product of the otherwise good work of liberal feminism and the sexual revolution in giving women more sexual agency and "leveling the playing field" as it were.

We now have a more fair, just system than in the past, where any woman can be seen to be sexually available to anyone walking down the street, instead of only certain classes, races and roles of women being seen that way. Which means that more women who otherwise might have expected to live in sexual safety are exposed to situations where they might be raped.

Similarly, men who previously could have used their power to demand sexual consent from a servant, slave or lower-class woman now have to negotiate for any sexual encounter, so more of them are exposed to charges of rape where before their behavior would have been written off as "sowing wild oats" or "boys being boys".

Also, I think more people now expect to get from their partners/spouses the kind of sexual services they would once have not dared ask for, and only expected a whore to be available for. Which again means more negotiation of the kind very few of us get good training in.

It's not that feminism is a problem per se. It's just that in solving one set of problems we've created some new ones, which we can in turn solve by doing a next layer of work on sexual consent and gender rights. I think that work is well under way. But pointing fingers outside of mainstream feminism to blame kink or porn for "rape culture" is not helping.

NOTE: I was painfully aware of the specter of race as I wrote this, but didn't feel like I had the background to do it justice without a lot more research than I was going to get done this afternoon between diaper changes.

The Clean-Up Crew (Xpost)

2009-05-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

Crossposted at Trin's request.

(Semi-set off by a thread of commentary at SM-F.)

A number of years ago I was working the local polyamory group's table on Pride Day. Just talking to people, being visible, that sort of thing. I bought a t-shirt (I think it was the one with 'Sharing is a family value' on the back), changed into it in the freedom of the clothing-semioptionality on the Common that day, and just chatted with people.

At one point I went for a walk through the crowds, possibly looking for a drink, as it was reasonably hot; possibly wanting to browse through the vendors. I wound up snagged for conversation by a woman who spotted the shirt and wanted to demand an explanation.

It's been long enough that I don't remember the details of her story precisely and have quite likely replaced them with archetype, but the truth of the matter is that this happens often enough for me to have an archetype to substitute for lost details.

She was a lesbian who had been, briefly, in a relationship with a married bisexual woman. She had been told that the woman's husband expected to be involved in their relationship as a matter of course, at least as a jacking-off observer, and, further, that if said husband was unhappy with the way their relationship was going, she would be dumped without a second thought. She found the interaction understandably disappointing and frustrating, and because she had been told that that was a perfectly normal way of conducting polyamory, widely accepted within the community, was more than a little pissy about the entire thing and, I rather suspect, wanted to know why the assholes were invading her Pride event.

About half the resulting conversation consisted of me assuring her that no, it didn't have to work that way. That everything they'd said about how that's what polyamory means was a lie, in fact, by the simple fact that plenty of people don't do that sort of thing. Much of the rest was talking about what I do, in matter of fact terms, peppered with more assurances: no, I don't expect everyone else to do it that way. No, I don't think that I'm a better person because of this. No, my way isn't What Polyamory Means either, it's just what I do. No, it doesn't bother me that she wants a monogamous relationship, I think that people should have the sorts of relationships that work for them.

I think, though I'm not sure, that we parted with her somewhat baffled by the weirdness of humanity, but at least familiar with the fact that the poly community consists of more than entitled bisexual women and the creepy voyeurs they're married to.

Another time I got into a throw-down fight that I don't think escaped beyond the bottle of the poly community with someone who wanted to create an organisation claiming to speak for the interests of polyamorous people - that was not actually about polyamory at all, but about a certain left-anarchist set of politics that he assumed was the reason people were poly, because who would have multiple relationships who wasn't interested in Breaking Down The System and proving the superiority of their liberationist worldview? I hammered on consent, that he did not speak for me unless I gave him permission and I explicitly denied him permission, and that no, I was not interested in subscribing to his newsletter until he snarled about evil reactionaries who had destroyed his happy fluffy vision of what Polyamory Was All About and were just there to subvert Teh Movement and probably didn't have more than one partner anyway and finally, blissfully, shut the fuck up. I hope he took his sooper-speshulness somewhere pleasant so he could be superior in a more congenial environment.

I get aggravated by the whole thing. I write about pretty much this thing when I wrote about the word 'lifestyle', pointing out that some people hook into Gor Is The Way What I Want Is Okay and try to universalise it, as well as, from the flip side of that particular kink perspective, the people who have an ideology of universal female superiority and abuse any woman who doesn't agree. Hell, I explicitly drew attention to someone making up just-so stories about an anti-BDSMer once upon a time, because someone claiming to be on my side being a fucking hypocrite does me no favors.

And this is the thing. My polyamory, my kink, my religion, my whatever else, these do not make me sooper-speshul. To the extent that I may be sooper-speshul, it's because sooper-speshulness is my birthright as a human being, and expecting everyone to bow down before it is unrealistic; if we were all bobbing and genuflecting to the sooper-speshul all the time we'd never get anything done 'cos there just isn't the time. Yeah yeah yeah namaste but the onions still need hoeing.

A couple of weekends ago I got into a long conversation about sex and power and individual choice and similar matters, and among the things that came up was using kinkspace to recreate and reprogram a trauma. And there was a story of someone who did this on a second date, which horrified all of the kinksters (and everyone else for that matter) in the room, even (perhaps especially) those of us who had done some sort of work of that sort in a controlled environment with trusted partners. There were discussions with people who had been interested in BDSM until they ran into someone who used it abusively, who wanted assurance that their perspectives on the existence of abuse was justified. There was exploration of what it meant to do power exchange sex in the context of an ethic that does not tolerate the bending of the head to accept shackles from the outside. (And I did not talk about the time, in a similar context, that I said I refused to submit my life-force to an ethic that required me not to do d/s, that I was too settled and secure in my power to put up with being lesser like that.)

There are no cure-alls and panaceas; there are only people working out what works for them. I can scream my story into the void all I want, but I have to take care to not drown out the stories of others, the people who do it differently. Monocultures die in plagues.

I've spent too long cleaning up spaces that have been damaged by people selling their social and sexual snake oil. "Take this, and your problems will be solved!" "This is the way the best people do it!" "This is just the way things are!"

In the memory of that confused and hurt woman at Pride, who went away maybe a bit more confused but also maybe a bit less hurt, I will always strive to be part of the cleanup crew.

Facebook, Vol 2

2009-05-09T12:19:00.000-07:00

A while ago I posted about the "Sex-Positive Feminists Critical of BDSM" group on Facebook.

Not having a Facebook (still) and not wanting one (still), I'd left it at that and had no idea what they were, or weren't, up to. I must admit that I'd expected them to get bored fast; many BDSM-related blogthrashes die quick.

But now I notice Ernest Greene commenting that they're apparently still going strong, and exhorting us to keep challenging their views.

ETA: Looking at her page again, I do not think Harmony's "throwing down a gauntlet." I wrote this assuming I'd missed her doing so, but perusing more carefully I find she's saying she wants a "safe space" free from debate. I have strong critiques of the whole concept of "safe space," but that doesn't mean I'd crash people's meeting.

I leave this up as is because I do think it's easy to see the provocative pictures and text on the main page as a challenge, and because I stand by what I'm saying in the post. However, I wanted to note that I wrote it as if Harmony wanted a fight. I now see that she didn't, and people might assume from reading me that she does. It's only right to apologize to her for that, so: I'm sorry for not checking more thoroughly whether that was so.

Here's Ernest's comment:

I'm starting to feel like a troll for challenging every lie and distortion I read on Harmony's little hate log, but Facebook is seen by millions and I think it's important for us to rebut being trashed in such a high-profile venue.

I hope some others here will have a look at the latest affronts and weigh in with some solid counter arguments and positive examples.

Harmony continues to throw down the glove in front of us and I think we need to pick it up. There are readers out there who are conflicted about their BDSM sexuality and they require our support in the face of the ugly misrepresentation of who we are and what we're about that this group promulgates.

So I had a brief look, and decided to say more.

I don't know if Harmony and her little club know about this blog, and if they do, whether they'd be the sort to read it or avoid it, but on the off chance:

I'd just like to ask why it is, Harmony and others, that what we do matters so much to you. We know your arguments so well we've got most of them memorized. It should be pretty clear that your being "critical" of what we do and enjoy is not going to convince us. Similarly, we've learned from the many reiterations of these conversations that we're not all that likely to convince you that your "theories" are old, removed from reality, and not supported by the admittedly small amount of data presented by studies of those who practice BDSM.

So I've got to wonder: what exactly is your goal? It might be to sway those in the middle, if you can. It might be to assert, in what you feel is a deluge of pro-BDSM feminism (I would call it, at best, BDSM-tolerant feminism, myself), that some of you do still loudly and proudly hold the opposing view.

But it really seems odd to a lot of us on the pro-BDSM side of the aisle. There is quite a lot of lurid description. There's even a pornographic image on your website, albeit with a line through it. While there's been frank discussion here of quite a few kinks, and we've not hidden from talking about things in detail, we're not the ones putting a gagged, bound, naked woman on our welcome mat.

So my challenge to you is just this: Do you have more to say than simply lurid recountings of what we like? Can you talk about those of us who are survivors without using the sort of maudlin language that dehumanizes us, but titillates those who want to see us as people with tragically maudlin stories?

(Examples of this:

The desire to dominate, degrade, and hurt others usually comes from a person’s own psychological wounds. People who are into BDSM are more likely to have been abused [corroborating data conspicuously absent], especially during childhood. And abuse teaches victims that relationships can only be hierarchal, can only be between dominator and dominated, abuser and victim. Or even without abuse, the experience of living in a racist patriarchal capitalism is enough to teach these lessons and do psychological damage.

....These people are in serious need of healing. They are in serious need of understanding that power need not be about power imbalance; that there is such thing as healthy power that is shared in relationships of equality; that you don’t need to have power over someone else to have power within yourself.

....As with the desire to act in the role of the dom/sadist, the desire to act in the role of the sub comes from psychological wounds. As mentioned, those into BDSM are more likely to have been abused, especially in childhood. And even if they were not abused, the experience of living in a racist patriarchal capitalism is enough to do psychological damage and to teach us that relationships are by definition hierarchal.

....Given the psychological wounds and previous traumas that people carry into BDSM, the presence of “free choice” should be critiqued, even if the presence of “consent” is not denied. “Free choice” is an idea promoted by ultra-libertarians and post-modernists who don’t recognize the profound impact that society, culture, and our personal life experiences have on shaping everything about who we are. Does the victim of child sexual abuse, who has been taught that she is worthless and that her sexuality is degraded, freely choose a life as a prostitute or porn actress?*** Does the war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder freely choose to drink to oblivion everyday?

Is it at all possible for you to treat people who have been abused as people, Harmony, rather than as damage-objects? Is it possible to treat our desires and wants as legitimate, or do only people who have never been victimized get to be unsullied?

For all that you rant about setting up hierarchies, you are creating one here. The untouched people for whom "free choice" is critiqued less, and those of us who have had our choices destroyed by someone else's exercise of the agency we don't get.

Why do you have this need to talk down to us, Harmony? Why set up the hierarchies you do? If you're one of us, and you truly believe you have less of a self than people who have never been hurt, I feel sorry for you. If you're not, and you savor the idea that those poor people who've been hurt are below you and have less authentic choices than you, I call bullshit on you saying you're "anti-hierarchy."

You are not a serial killer! Or a rapist!

2009-05-02T09:45:00.001-07:00

I lol'd:

Part of me thinks it's a joke, and part of me thinks it's a terribly sincere confused person.

What say you, Internetz?

Transgression

2009-04-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

I'm getting into a bit of discussion in the comments to my post "Facebook" on the topic of "transgression."

In that post, I use the dreaded T-word to describe part of the point of my recent post "Roaring."

People don't like that. They don't like that at all.

It's a hot little buzzword in feminist circles, and it's usually said derisively. It's supposedly something ignorant people do. Young people, who fancy themselves rebels and aren't actually resisting anything. This is contrasted with real work for social change, which as described is less flashy, less attention-grabbing... and, perhaps most importantly, less personal. Transgression is something someone does to be shocking; revolution is for the good of the People.

Commenters to "Roaring" are, therefore, quite displeased with me for using the T-word to describe it. On the one hand, I'm pleased they consider my personal story politically important enough that they'd cough and sputter "You? Transgressive? Oh, honey, you're much more intelligent/important/interesting than that!"

On the other, I used the word for a reason. I intended to get people thinking -- and it seems I failed.

I wanted to say "Yeah, this has those personal elements of that disgusting T-word all over it. I'm not just talking about how F/m dynamics don't fit the cozy thirty-year-old 'radical' 'feminist' 'theory.' I'm also talking about having fun. Fucking with people's heads. Laughing and defying their expectations."

I'm saying, in "Roaring," not just that that can be important, but that it's also fun. That it turns me on. That it makes me laugh.

I'm being "the fun kind." I'm letting myself be, despite the gasps and tremors even from my allies.

I'm doing so to make a point. And that is that just as the personal can be political (and I'd encourage everyone to actually look up Hanisch's work and get a firm bead on what that phrase actually means, as it's very often misused), so can fun be. So can very personal and rather selfish kinds of "rebellion."

Not because feeling daring, by itself, changes the world...

...but because it's only people who feel daring enough who would try to change the world in the first place.

If we really want shock troops eager to take down the Patriarchy, it's very odd that certain feminisms have so little interest in those troops' morale. "Activist burnout" is common. "Blogging burnout" is more common still.

And perhaps this is just my strange brain making odd connections, but I think the constant de-emphasizing of pleasure, the constant aping of "...not the fun kind" as though that were in fact a point of pride, has something to do with it.

No, feminists should not be "the fun kind" if that means "backing down when things get ugly."

But if not being "the fun kind" means we don't get to take pride in our defiance, laugh about our defiance, omg she's gonna say it get off on our defiance, we're not gonna last long.

Yep. I'm "transgressive." For those who want to toss tomatoes, the line forms around the corner.

Take your best shot.

Violent Content

2009-04-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

This is silly rather than serious, but I figure the regular readers of this blog will find it hilarious.

Video, from The Onion: Should We Be Doing More To Reduce the Graphic Violence in our Dreams?

Facebook...

2009-04-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

I am not on facebook.

Nor would I want to be.

But here are some comments about this little group here, "Sex-Positive Feminists Critical of BDSM."

First up: if you link Melissa Farley's horribly outdated little "Ten Lies About Sadomasochism" in all seriousness, I'm not so sure I'd consider you sex-positive, really. Haven't you got anything more recent that doesn't, y'know, include the heavy-handed hint that we kill each other?

(We kill each other, but you're not for outlawing what we do. Logic, yours would be stellartastic!)

Second, I've gotta ask why it is that on so many anti-porn websites or anti-SM websites there's a big honkin' image of some really hardcore stuff with a big NO sign drawn over it.

If that's something you think no one should see... why d'ya do the equivalent of painting it on your front door?

Third:

"Members of this group are critical of BDSM not because they are religious fundamentalists, but because they are fundamentally opposed to the idea that domination and abuse are sexy."

How can you be opposed to "the idea that something is sexy?" "Sexy" is not something absolute; even the most staunch "social construction" type admits that, in my experience. Even if "sexy" is highly culturally determined, "sexy" is in part something that happens to us. Fantasies arise in us unbidden. Even if things are often sexy to us because of the way we're raised or the environment we're in, sometimes things "are sexy" regardless of our opinion of that. Hell, you all admit that yourselves.

I've met many an anti-SM person who admits to having tried or having enjoyed BDSM. I can think of more than a few people who've given it up or "are critical" of it from "a feminist perspective," but who still fantasize about it. I can think of a few who have all that critexaminey and still do it.

Being against the idea that something "is sexy" is like being against the idea that something makes people sneeze. Good luck with getting it to "not be sexy."

(They could of course mean that they don't like cultural norms of heteromance that say women are supposed to swoon over strong men, but if that's what they mean, picking on BDSM is an utterly bizarre way to address that.)

Fourth and Last: I notice a link to something labeled "Transgression For Its Own Sake Not Radical; Depends on the Content."

Now, I've just admitted in my last post (which no one commented on; did I frighten all y'all away?) that I find transgression sexy, and that I do think that losing control is frightening for many men, and that that makes me feel powerful. So I can see how they'd say maybe I shouldn't be talking.

Except that why is it that they always think we're saying we're "radical" for it? I've written reams about how I think the whole concept of "getting to the root" is actually deeply flawed. There is no root, there is no "radix" to hunt out and yank free of the ground. There is us. Our own faces, our own greed, our own shame.

It is not a carrot, single and obvious and orange. It is a tangle of hatreds, some that have names we readily believe, like "misogyny" and "racism." Some that only few of us see or acknowledge: "ableism," "transphobia." Some that we have no names for, because we still consider them as normal as breathing air.

If the process of eliminating them is uprooting, it does not take a search, a getting-to. The getting-to is easy. The getting-to is looking in a mirror, beholding your flaws, and vowing to live better. Theory is not needed for this. Honesty is, and a willingness to listen.

I am not radical. Calling me insufficiently radical is like noting I lack blonde hair, expecting me to come back swinging and spitting, enraged at the slight.

Roaring

2009-04-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sure, I can do that.

I've talked about this before. A lot, honestly.

But here we go. People who don't like me, or what I do, or my people, I have a challenge for you all, and I'm all hyped up on way the fuck too much aggrotech right now (and oh my Goddess, does it feel good) and have no problems throwing down the fucking gauntlet. So:

Where exactly is my gold star from the patriarchy?

Come on now, where is it? Your eternal refrain since 1987 has been that I'm a colluder. Okay, tell me some shit.

When I laid there awake at night wondering when the second bath of hormones would come, the ones that would make me into what people told me a woman was in mind rather than just in body, eager to spread and be covered and entered and give myself over to the hairy, muscled, smelling thing called a real man, where was it?

Because to hear you all tell it, the hell no, I will not that screamed out of my soul and all the fantasies that came out of that, many of them cruel and violent? That's all collusion, the norm with reversed polarity.

When I was hungrily reading stories about demon bitches with foot-long, razor-sharp nails, tearing rapists to shreds from the inside (yeah, meaning there), where was rape culture's representative telling me I'd gotten it... right?

That's the thing I never got. I never understood why feminists would think of me as the enemy, when part of what made me is revenge.

Do you all really think I don't know the world I'm waking up to? Do you really think I don't know it in my bones, the rhythms of it pulping me half to death?

Do you really, really, think I don't live in the same world as you?

Bend over. Dress up. Wear frills. Perfume yourself. Always let him make the first move.

You really think I heard that and licked my lips and said whatever you say, baby? You really really really honest to Hell think that for reals?

You really think I sat there going maybe I'd get more attention if I pouted like a magazine and added a whip?

You really don't think I want to make that compulsory conformity asshole bullshit bleed?

You really don't get that part of what I'm getting off on is doing that?

You really think sitting around drawing up charts about who should fuck and how is scarier to Dude Nation than I am?

Open your fucking eyes.

Race Play

2009-04-10T20:58:00.001-07:00

You all need to go read this, here, right now. A frank discussion of race play between two Black people. Start at Part 1 and read the whole thing in order.

I do not have snazzy, witty commentary right now. I have some things floating in my head, especially as a white kinky person who dated a Black kinky one (in big letters I announce loudly that we NEVER DID RACE PLAY and did not have any kind of D/s relationship in either direction), but every time I try to write them down I rethink them.

So I'll just say that I do think it should be read and thought about. And that it especially should be read by the folks who seem to think that race play is always white tops' idea.

Sex, Intimacy, Connection, and Critique

2009-04-09T17:41:00.001-07:00

Roy Kay has an interesting post up at his LJ on the "radical feminists vs. BDSMers" dustups that happen now and again in blogland:

There is an additional obliviousness about one of the chiasmic differences among BDSM communities – whether or not sex in properly even involved in BDSM. Yes, there are a lot of BDSM practitioners who really and truly fuck – and have sex in myriad other ways. However, there is a contingent which absolutely insists that sex is a frivolous distraction from the True Deep Relationship formed in pain, submission and other elements.

I personally don’t concur with this view. I mean, I AM one of those hyper-frivolous sluts that would take a pass on the whole deal if it didn’t get me and my partners’ orgasms, preferably many of them, on the road from interest through excitement to exhaustion. But the truth is that some people are quite the opposite, and that BDSM is wholly NOT about the sex – it’s about the emotional connection. Somehow this is another aspect they prefer to be oblivious too. Maybe it’s because its too close to the emotional connection they feel in keening against those outside the RadFem community.

I commented to him there with this:

I'm not entirely sure this would actually be convincing to them, though. I think they're concerned about the whole idea of valorizing power relations, and so I think they might respond that whether or not power play causes orgasm is not the point.

I don't think "She's my slave, but I don't fuck her" would get anything like a "Oh, well, that's different then" from these folks.

To further expound, I do think that one part of what worries them is "orgasm as a powerful reinforcer," which you see in a lot of anti-pornography feminism as well. On such a view, coming to something means associating that something with a flood of happy brain chemistry, and this is uniquely suited to making you want more of the something, sometimes against your own better judgment. (I think here of some comments in the anti-pornography documentary The Price of Pleasure, wherein a guy who uses porn describes how he has orgasms to porn, but feels dirty and ashamed and sullied after doing so.)

So if you have nonsexual D/s, you remove The Pavlovian Pitfall -- so Roy has a point; what about when that's gone? Doesn't that invite the possibility that it's not merely swoony infusions of serotonin that keep some people desiring to serve and valuing serving?

I think that's a good point, but I think we need to say more. The obvious question that comes next is "what does it mean to value serving?"

And the thing is, as I've said many times, I don't think kinky people should be required to justify our desires. But I do think "radical feminists" of this stripe will want to know what people get out of service. (And will probably dislike some answers to this question. Then again, so do I, and I'm an unrepentant pervert and dominant to boot.)

The thing is, though, that instead of this meaning "All you subbies have your assignment, dears: prove that what you get out of service is worthwhile and the meanie radfems might leave you alone. You just haven't examined enough!" I think this means something else.

I think the burden of proof is on the anti-BDSM folks. To them I say:

You already have our stories written down for you. You've had them since the publishing of Coming to Power, even all neatly wrapped up in feminist contexts. It's you who are not defending yourselves. All you can say when we say "Prove that our stories are meaningless in a feminist context" is some vague, lukewarm old politics you haven't heated enough on your stoves. It's cold and it's old and there might be some mold. Why are "trends, not anecdata" so popular with you, when you don't explain these "trends" with reference to anything like scientific studies?

The few times I have brought up data from studies -- usually the ones in Powerful Pleasures -- they haven't gotten any comments at all, not even very obvious criticisms of methodology! Hell, usually I'm the one saying "Here's the data, though of course this and this don't quite tell us what the researchers wanted, because of that..." What is up with that, exactly?

Really, if you want to be taken seriously as speaking in some Objective, Observing Voice, unlike the partisan people who are swayed by, uh, doing something because they like it, you need far better methods of data collection and collation.

"Lifestyle"

2009-04-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure at the moment if I ever linked this post of Kiya's, on the word "lifestyle" and what it means to call a subculture a "lifestyle." Perhaps I have and my memory is murky.

Still, I wanted to do so "again?" because of something she says that I think is quite relevant to the endless bickering about whether or how BDSM is inherently sexist/creepy/badevil:

And there's a dangerous, nervewracking thing -- the fact that sometimes people hit the lifestyle stuff, with all of its attendant nonsense, and wind up believing that they have to have all the crap additional stuff to be whatever they are -- all the trappings and dancing around and all the other stuff that they'd only be interested in because it legimates their identity. I saw a discussion recently about Goreans, and a number of people who got into that whole subculture with all of its sexist baggage and mediocre prose because it gives them a structure under which it's okay to be kinky. If the only way one thinks it's okay to, say, be a female submissive is to go do Gor, then by all that is good and holy they will do Gor, and even the weird shit will be critical to defending it, because it's the only way that's acceptable to embrace that identity.

This, I think, gets lost in a lot of discussions. Feminists of a certain stripe see Gor, and see the people of all genders who go "We discovered Rebecca truly thrived as slaveslut #46, and so it must be true that Norman was onto something with that 'women are really slaves inside and feminists are ruining women's happiness!' thing," and think that must be what we all think somehow.

When, really, we have to consider what may be going on with Rebecca more complexly than simply "she's a sexist colluder" or even "she's acting out her programming." It's also possible she wanted to submit all her life, and was told by people around her that good women (perhaps even "good feminists") no longer prostrate themselves before men.

If the first group of people she finds who allow her to act like herself and to have sex she enjoys (because, yes, orgasm can be a powerful motivator), tell her "you ran into such trouble because those other people just don't understand what it is to really be a woman," she may agree gratefully with them rather than use her brain.

We, whether "we" means "kinky feminists" or "radical feminists suspicious of BDSM in the first place" might not like this, but the phenomenon is not unique to sexist people. (I think here of discussions I've had with anti-porn feminists wherein it became obvious to me that they hadn't seen any porn, ever, and were content to let Dworkin or their professors tell them what it contained and what that meant.)

If what an anti-SM feminist wants is for Suzy Slavebelly to understand that women are not inherently subservient... would it not likely be more productive to say, rather than "your lifestyle is antifeminist," something like "You're very happy satisfying your 'slave belly,' okay, but what about women for whom such an idea is not only foreign but offensive, upsetting, even triggering? Why see 'slave bellies' as something all women have, rather than something of yours?"

I've never been able to figure out why the aim of such feminists is, apparently, not just telling off the people who universalize creepily but also getting those of us who are perfectly aware we're uncommon to admit that we're making some kind of mistake.

Dworkin

2009-04-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

xposted from my LJ

I posted to my LJ the other day about re-reading Dworkin, and I was just thinking that I want to say more about that. As that post mentions, what I chose to re-read was a few snippets available online from Intercourse. (Yes, I realize that re-reading excerpts is not the same as re-reading the book itself. Yes, I did read the whole book, about a year ago. Yes, I freely admit I do not remember it very well, because I found it rambly and off-point often, and yes, I admit that this means I don't know it as well as those who love AD do.)

I wanted to mention that because I think, as someone who is female and a sexual top, I have an interesting perspective on heteronormativity and on the acts often expected in it. I too have noticed the laser-precise cultural focus on penetrative sex involving penises, particularly PIV, as "real," as particularly fulfilling, and as "counting as sex" when other things do not.

(Interestingly, the penis seems to be the important, er, part. I've even had one friend tell me that my penetrating my partners is "anal play," where his penetrating his would count as "anal sex," because he has a flap of flesh I lack. WTFLOLZ.)

So the idea of this book is honestly something I really like. I still remember an old therapist asking me, before I was ever sexually active, "what using dildoes would mean to me." My response, "it seems like it would feel good to be inside somebody," was insufficiently introspective, and I was asked again what it "meant."

I was a marked case, and there was something unsettling or confusing or to be worked through about my desires and feelings. I countered asking if she would ask a male patient why he'd want to penetrate his partners, or if "That would feel good" would count as an answer from him. Sometimes I'm clever. ;)

So the idea that a woman -- a feminist legend -- would examine and question heteronormativity and its focus on PIV is actually awesome to me. Despite not liking Dworkin much most of the time, I remember feeling (once I'd learned that her point was not "all penetrative sex is rape") like I'd probably like the basic idea of Intercourse, because I've had those same questions about the norms and the standards and what they mean all my life. How my mental state and healthiness has been judged has even occasionally hinged on them.

The thing is, I was profoundly disappointed by the book. Take a look at this:

What does it mean to be the person who needs to have this done to her: who needs to be needed as an object; who needs to be entered; who needs to be occupied; who needs to be wanted more than she needs integrity or freedom or equality? If objectification is necessary for intercourse to be possible, what does that mean for the person who needs to be fucked so that she can experience herself as female and who needs to be an object so that she can be fucked?

The brilliance of objectification as a strategy of dominance is that it gets the woman to take the initiative in her own degradation (having less freedom is degrading). The woman herself takes one kind of responsibility absolutely and thus commits herself to her own continuing inferiority: she polices her own body; she internalizes the demands of the dominant class and, in order to be fucked, she constructs her life around meeting those demands. It is the best system of colonialization on earth: she takes on the burden, the responsibility, of her own submission, her own objectification.

Now, I understand and admit (though I suspect some may, even after reading this sentence, say I don't) that my perspective as a female top who usually fucks men is not what she's talking about. I understand that I look at this through odd, nonstandard eyes, and that doing so fundamentally means not responding to the original point in the way intended.

Still, seeing that sentence I bolded, right there at the beginning of a paragraph, introducing its main idea, is familiar and unsettling. "What does it mean to want this?" is the same question I was asked. If asked of men, of lesbian women, of straight women who've rejected heteronormativity radically only to discover that they like to be fucked and miss it when they refuse it for politics -- in short, of anyone but those who blindly follow heteronormativity because they know no better or fear censure for defiance -- this is the therapist's question to me, in reverse.

How is it useful to ask what a bottom's needs "do to her," "mean to her?" What begins as "What does this social expectation mean?" somehow turns into "what have you done to yourself, darling?" In the second paragraph, it's said right out: she takes the initiative in her own degradation.

Oddly enough, I thought feminism was supposed to stress not how women "victimize themselves," but how men have traditionally victimized them and continue to do so.

It's just sad to me, because rather than an exploration of "Where did the social expectation that females are women, that women are hetero bottoms, that being fucked is more satisfying for hetero bottoms than clitoral orgasm, and that this is kind of degrading and weird and makes men 'the boss' come from?" it becomes "How have you been harmed by having a need?"

It's not the desire that's harmful, it's the compulsory scripts.

Why is this so hard for people to get? Why is calling my partner a degraded dupe (male bottoms get this all the time, thanks, and it's not progressive at all, and I'm not sure "I meant to be talking about women, so you're derailing, unicorn" excuses you when you actually worded it as "what does it mean to need this done to you?" and only later add "in order to feel female") okay, suddenly?

Why can't we put the blame on the system, not the people who happen to have orgasms doing the things the system says are cool?

Definition Check

2009-03-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

Okay, yeah, it's kind of one of those trainwreck fascination things that I keep coming back to or something -- every so often I reload that Feministing thread and see what sort of weird stuff has come up so far.

And I've come to the conclusion: what I'm talking about when I say "BDSM" is not the same thing that a lot of people over there are talking about when they say BDSM. Witness this comment from becstar, quoted in part:

I think society does teach people that BDSM with sub women is the *only* way to go about sex. [...] Things like spanking and cumming on women's faces have been taken out of BDSM territory and been normalised which I think is where the danger starts.

I'm left with a strange void between what I've understood as BDSM and what other people are pointing at. Especially since, as a female submissive, it has been very clear to me that the sort of sex that I want is not acceptable, not normal, not what I should be doing; especially since I have heard other kinksters of various orientations and preferences express the same feelings.

Spanking and BDSM? I know from a couple of spankos I've seen talk about this that a lot of people with that particular kink prefer to distance themselves from BDSM, being Not Like Those People. I have also seen quite a few of them talk about getting sexual responses to corporal punishment as children from the physical sensation. Far from being a gateway drug - to steal a silly concept - it seems to be one of those things that may or may not fall into the BDSM category depending on who's counting.

Ejaculation on the face? Well, maybe I'm totally isolated from BDSM norms, but I never heard about this practice at all until I encountered the Porn Wars. And because porn is totally outside the scope of my sexual interest and experience, it just never much occurred to me. (I have an ex who had a hard time orgasming from coitus, which tended to mean he got himself in the eye occasionally, though.) I mean, it's not even on any version of the Purity Test I've played with, and since the long Purity Test versions frequently include scat and incest I'd expect if this were so mainstream it might have gotten a mention on one or two versions.

The closest thing to mainstream-culture BDSM I can think of from my childhood is an episode of Cheers. Seriously. For those who aren't familiar with Cheers, its basic plot orbits around a misogynistic horndog trying to pursue a woman who isn't having any of that. In a bar, in which Wacky Sitcom People come to get drunk. In any case, Sam (the horndog) and Rebecca (one instance of the woman) were, at one point, in an elevator, and the subject of risk-taking sex comes up. Sam is, of course, all for, and thrilled that Rebecca is showing some kind of interest; she takes a scarf, ties his hands to the handrail, and he's panting with excitement that not only might he get the woman, but he's getting the woman kinkily; she pulls down his pants, and he's thrilled; the elevator stops, she gets off and leaves him there, because she still can't stand his entitled ass.

I'm not so sure that it's a good display of the ubiquity of female submission, though. Maybe a "he'll settle for sex, but exciting sex will be more thrilling for him" cultural datapoint. But she was dominant, she was in control, and she said no - leaving him nonconsensually exposed and quite vulnerable. Which was, I am pretty sure, not his kink.

And so I turn it around, and look for things that I'd file as clearly BDSM in the mainstream. And I don't see them. At least, not outside the Signs That Someone Is A Dangerously Depraved Serial Killer or something on Cop Show Glurge: Dead Whore Version. Bondage more serious than tee-hee a silk scarf or cheap fuzzy handcuffs? Culturally marked 'creepy'. Impact play? Culturally marked 'abusive'. Slave contracts? Mocked publically when they come up in the news, otherwise unheard of.

"Naughty schoolkid" roleplaying situations and similar stuff get played for laughs on sitcoms - in that 'Who could believe someone would really do that?' overdone kind of way. It's something like the kinky equivalent of flaming queer comic relief. Lacy lingerie is normal stuff (and one's occasionally considered a little pervy if one doesn't fancy it), but black or red lacy lingerie is a sign of dangerous dominatrix tendencies which are, again, played for mockery.

And I have never, not in any mainstream medium, seen any treatment of kinky submission. Bottoming maybe (and mostly as a joke); coercive, abusive situations, including those treated as normal by some people, those show up on the news. But to talk about anything remotely approaching the stuff I do in pop culture requires the sort of language used to talk about drug use -- and gets spun in the same pejorative way.

So I'm left wondering where the hell the BDSM is that some people are finding so prevalent. Because I'm so not wherever they are.

Examination Burnout

2009-03-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

A post by Kiya on this "examination" meme, so wonderful that I reproduce it in its entirety:

I was reminded of something by this post, and it's stuff I've mostly found too raw to post about, but I feel like writing a bit now while it's in my head.

I've written before about "Just Say No" culture and sexuality. What I haven't talked about was the way denial-and-examination culture intersected with my inner kinks.

When I was an elementary school child, I started building an understanding of my sexuality as it was at the time. I had very separated experiences of physical sexual pleasure and romantic attraction - it had not occurred to me that these were related - but I explored both as best I could. I was aware that my experience of romantic attraction was somehow related to "grownup things" like marriage and families, but I recognised (consciously, even) that that was something I would figure out when I was older; for now, there was the boy, and I could beat him at wrestling.

Once my fantasy life had developed into fiction rather than fascination with the boy, and once I had grown enough of it for my sense of physical pleasure to get tied into my sense of attraction, they took on a structure of extreme power differential, often with bondage aspects. I was never ashamed of these fantasies, or, as I thought of them, the stories I told myself when going to sleep; however, I knew, bone-deep, that I could never talk about them.

I never have.

(Think about that for a moment. I have never talked about those fantasies in more than generalised referents, themes and content.)

I knew that if I told anyone about them, they would try to figure out what was wrong with me. I didn't know words like "misogyny", but I knew that I'd have the concept thrown at me. I knew that I'd be treated as sick and wrong, because Good People don't have thoughts like that. I knew that I would never, ever be able to express these things; at least on that last I was wrong.

And as I became aware that these things were things I should not express, I became aware of the idea of examination. I had an obligation, I knew, to figure out where these things had come from, that they could be excised. I was a sleeper agent of the oppressor, my sexuality out to subvert everything that women could achieve, and I had to cure myself. There was no support for this - it was still unspeakable horror - but it was clear that the wrongness was something that I would be expected to purge before I was an adult.

Guilt started to creep in around the edges. The fantasies became even more secret, because there was this edge of belief that I should not be that way, that I should be someone else, someone more loyal, more diligent, more compatible with the universal goals that I had been assigned on the basis of my sex, class, and race. I squelched the impulses in my more conscious mind, leaving them only the release of the nighttime stories, giving me dreams of the taboo-breaking man who might love and own and honor me despite the shackles of surrounding culture.

I was an emotionally isolated young adolescent, full of need and loneliness and hunger and wanting to explore the concepts of sex and not knowing how. Nothing in the world around me had ever given me any understanding for figuring out what I wanted or how to implement that safely; I was still half-consciously aware that what I wanted was Bad anyway, so figuring out how to get it was unthinkable.

It didn't go away, of course. And sometimes these things come out in badly sublimated ways. Hook a loop of fear-paralysation into a mind frantically denying its need to surrender, bait a touch-starved, curious adolescent with affection from a pretty older boy, and watch a psyche fragment into a perfect rape victim and a panicked, impotent observer. Respectful and loving submission was unavailable, unthinkable, unallowable, so all I had was deer-in-the-headlights capitulation, where my sexual drives and my terror and his unceasing pressure conspired to shove me into a closet in my head.

And maybe, with a little more examination, I might guess that this is one of the real reasons that I have never really been able to forgive myself. Because, after all, if I didn't have those wicked, shameful desires, then maybe the combination of mental lockup and pressure wouldn't have been enough to get my psyche fridged. It can't really be his damn fault, right? He just happened to luck into that siren song of unacceptable woman-hating sexuality. And I can't hold it against him, because he stopped short of rape in the end, when he saw that I was broken. (I can't even write 'that he'd broken me' and feel honest, right now.)

This was not ... the only time I fell into that pattern, though it was the only time it was assault. I had an abusive vanilla relationship that hit my submission buttons around music until I hit a wall and threw him out of my life. I had a relationship with someone who was deeply uncomfortable with my submission, and so like a good little subbie and a good little woman I stifled it again to make him happy. I had other issues. And I worked on it until I came to a place where I could return to childhood and refuse to be ashamed.

Where does it come from? I don't give a damn. And not giving a damn is not just a political position about the unworthiness of the question, but me fighting back against the investigation of myself for which fruit of Original Sin was why I deserved to be nearly raped before menarche.

If the message had been that I needed to figure out how to deal with these desires in a sane, reasonable, and balanced manner, if it had included discussion of consent and how to set boundaries, if it had been anything other than "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?! WHY ARE YOU A FREAK?!", maybe things would have been different.

Why am I like this? If my established answer isn't good enough, fuck off. Why am I a freak? Welcome to the edge of the map. The Antipodes, where men walk upside down.

Examination and Lost Tempers...

2009-03-24T21:16:00.000-07:00

One of the commenters over at the recent Feministing dustup came over to my LJ recently and commented on the critiques of examination that we presented in this post. She says:

Hmmm. I'm a radical feminist. Just to get that out there. What me and others were saying, the majority of us, was that to act as if your sexual desires are not susceptible to influence is...well, it's a bit odd to think that things just shut down once sex is involved. Most of us aren't saying (I speak for me, oh hey, I'm 'danielle' btw, SarahMC and RachelWY) "this is a bad desire, you're not a feminist for it" but "looking at where a desire MAY HAVE come from is not harmful, it's not "intruding into your bedroom" etc. If you say "no, I don't feel like that's something I want to examine about myself right now or ever" alright, nothing wrong there. Or even "no, I don't think it is" is cool. But "it is definitely not, and you even trying to have a discussion about it is not good" is where it gets ridiculous. If you don't want to participate in the discussion, don't. If you don't agree, say so, but do it in a reasonable way (I'm thinking of the "you're an idiot!" comment). The only thing I take issue with is "sexual desires are NEVER EVER even slightly influenced by the patriarchy."

I've been trying to be patient; I've seen a lot of good come of it recently, and I do think it's better when we can to engage rather than go off.

But this evening I just wasn't in the mood:

On the Feministing post and in this thread currently, and in countless threads over at SM-F and elsewhere in the past, we have explained why we feel that this line of thinking is inherently intrusive. If you don't feel up to a thorough study, at least please thoroughly read this post and its comment thread.

I'm not asking you to agree with us that it is intrusive; I'm just asking you to give serious thought to why we might feel this way. Far too often, radical feminists see us get angry with the "examination" demands and conclude that we are just thin-skinned, or selfish, or particularly absorbed in pleasure.

This ignores that these discussions have a history, and very often it is a history of directly telling BDSM people we are sick, wrong, confused, and brainwashed, if not a history of directly telling us that we behave inappropriately. Or even that we're so corrupted we ought to end our own lives.

Please do so not with the idea in your head that we just don't understand what you're really saying and that if we could only see how you intended it, we wouldn't be bothered. I've written academic papers on the sex wars; I know "BDSM is patriarchy writ in women's braaaaaainz!" like the backs of my hands.

I still believe that the idea that we have never examined our desires -- or that if we have, we must simply not have done so in a feminist enough manner -- infantilizing and a tactic some women use to shame others.

I still believe that in some circumstances, not asking why is dignity-preserving, and/or an appropriate response to the presumption that you must justify yourself in a way not required of others.

While I know that radical feminists often claim to interrogate non-kinky sex, lesbian sex, and other sex they often hold up as less damaged than BDSM, the fact remains that I very rarely see posts or essays devoted to such.

Which is of course not to say that I never see them. Often when I do, they're quite interesting. But it seems there's a much greater proportion of "Hey BDSMers, have ya thought about this? I know I asked six months ago, but I can't seem to remember your answer!" than there is "I've often wondered where my desire comes from *interesting personal blog post ensues*..."

Think of what these demands mean to us, when we've heard them come with language like that I've linked.

Then ask yourself why we might be unreasonable about acknowledging that we might maybe kinda be sorta influenced by patriarchy maybe.

Which is actually not anything I saw anyone over at that thread deny. It's the way it's phrased not as "are some BDSM fantasies shaped by patriarchy?" but rather as "is BDSM itself the end result of some distorting patriarchy-thing that takes good sexuality and warps it utterly?" that gets my goat.

And "don't tell fairy tales."

Fuck that: my life is mine, and my life is real, and I've never asked anyone to like it.

From previous abuse I am sure as shit accustomed to being told that what I think's going on is make-believe, and I'm not twelve any more and sure as shit not going to stand for being erased like that now.

Reclamation

2009-03-24T08:46:00.001-07:00

A totally awesome post by Garbo in Paint.

[W]hat value does identifying as a feminist hold for me?

Most significantly to this issue is my status as a sex worker. But there are others: I am also submissive and enormously enjoy activities defined as "degrading" by many feminists. I am practically disinterested in sex that does not involve these elements. I am also High Femme: my personal presentation is entirely oriented around a construction of feminity I have actively pursued. Yet that makes it sound so cold - I have unpacked it thoroughly, but I love it. It's a desire in me as natural as taking a glorious deep breath of air in the bush on a mild spring day.

I am generally non-monogamous (here, my preference is simply for what best suits me in the particular relationship - I don't rule out monogamy, but I don't want to be bound by the assumption I will always want it).

I am an ally to people of colour, people with disabilities and trans people. I have no mental illness (that I'm aware of - my history with psychs has basically consisted of me running the other way) but I am not an emotionally/psychologically well person and while I function pretty highly, it does impact on my life to varying intensities.

I am obsessed with my looks and my age. I like to be well-presented, I love makeup and it's a rare day I'm not in heels. I buy into body image BS, love to work out and have some fucked up ideals about beauty and perfection.

....And I find that it is the very fact that my politics and my personhood so often are diametrically opposed to theirs, that is the reason that I continue to cling to the "feminist" label, and to feel that it's really important for me, as an individual, to do so.

In fact, one thing I really want to begin to be vocal about, is my identifying as a radical feminist.

For me, there is nothing so infuriating that such a wonderful sounding pair of words: "radical feminist" has been co-opted and tarnished by people consumed with hatred.

It's long been my opinion that sex work is the last true test of radicalism. Someone can name themselves the most out there and passionate activisty activist for whatever their particular cause is, and you hit them with the "I'm a sex worker" bomb and suddenly you find out how far their politics go.

In my opinion, I am a radical feminist. In being a sex worker and a submissive and a Femme in particular, I am consciously inhabiting spaces that have routinely been used to oppress, deny and stifle women and I am unpacking them even as I revel in them. I am taking behaviours and lifestyles subject to all sorts of ridiculous stereotypes, particularly around depicting women as disempowered and passive objects subjected to the patriarchy, and demonstrating how I am not stifled or held back by them; how I am in fact, empowered by them.

I can see where these aspects of identity have been subjected to patriarchal construction and dominance over time and yet my life in inhabiting those identities is not subjected to the same. They are not affectations - they are utterly intrinsic to who I am - and yet they are conscious. They are owning.

To me, this is radicalism.

To defy societal - whether patriarchal or "radfem" - expectations in my identity whilst inhabiting that identity is radical. Because it rejects the either/or approach - that I must deny who I am, suppress and stifle it - or I am a victim. Or a bad feminist. Or anything else.

....And I KNOW. I know sex workers have been marginalised and ostracised and stigmatised and often treated like shit and abused and dismissed and reduced and I know women have long been edged into confining expressions of feminity and I know that heteronormative gender roles have long protected abuse and control and expressions of violence against women. I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and examining these things, and taking a stance against them.

And in KNOWING all these things, and knowing that I have other choices and yet I make these ones - these ones that are not so much choice as they are simply being true to WHO I AM as a person and possessing it in defiance of what expectations others ascribe to it or in spite of being told that I shouldn't, that I am conscious and active in my expression of them and refuse to compromise my very personhood to either conform them to stereotypes/established boundaries or completely eliminate them from my life...

... how is that not radical?

Examination

2009-03-23T11:36:00.000-07:00

Over at my livejournal, I'm collecting personal stories, and links to posts about, the whole radical feminist view that kinky folks should "examine our desires."

The project began because I wanted some references to cite to a commenter at Feministing, Nerdisms, who was asking me why I and some others think that "examine your desires" can be a badgering tactic. I wanted some stories to cite to explain some people's cynicism about the whole "examination" idea (though I'm also perfectly happy to see stories from people who think it's a good idea, too.)

I think I may have driven Nerdisms off, but I still think it's useful to collect people's stories in one place, where they can easily be linked.

I decided to ask for people to post them to my LJ rather than here, because I'm actually not the owner of this blog, and it's actually easier for me to archive things if they get posted at my own blog.

Anyone care to add to this project? Anything, from "I felt badgered by such and such a conversation," to "I thought examining my desires was useful and came up with this" is welcome.

Feministing

2009-03-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

There's currently a discussion of BDSM over at Feministing. Someone asks whether her submissiveness can be consistent with her feminism, and gets this reply, which I was glad to see:

A good step towards accepting your sexuality for what it is may be to unpack it a little bit more. I want to quote you back to you: I'm a very assertive and driven person in real life so it's just really hard for me to accept how much I sexually enjoy giving up control and power.

I'm going to come back to the first part, but first let's focus on the second part of the sentence: I sexually enjoy giving up control and power. YOU give up control and power. In the real world, power and control are taken from women in an effort to make them submissive. In your sex life, as convoluted as this may seem, you are in power because you make the choice to give up power. Your boyfriend (yay for him) engaged in this because you (still in power) asked him to engage. As much as the sex play is about you "giving up power," in reality you are still the one in control.

It's not entirely what I'd say, myself. I'm less a fan of back and forth about who's "really" in control as I am of the idea that

choosing something is different from it being chosen for you, and
being able to end an interaction is different from being part of a social structure you probably can't alter all by your lonesome.

That is, however, more an issue of wording than of substantive disagreement.

Most responses are supportive, with a couple people (rightly, IMO) pointing out that many women are submissive to men and that it may be worth considering whether patriarchy has something to do with this. (My opinion: Yes, but it is also true from what I've seen that submissive people outnumber dominant ones in all cases, so we should be sure to take this into account before deciding that this is entirely because of the Pat.)

The usual debates begin a bit further down, with this comment from laughingrat:

I don't particularly mind being the lone voice of dissent here, and the rhetoric about this subject is often so skewed that it might give other dissenters courage to think or speak freely if they see someone else's remarks.

We live in a society that is based on domination and submission--the brutalization of one person or group of persons for the benefit of another. This is called "patriarchy." Nothing we do or think is free of patriarchy; everything we can currently imagine or act is done within the context of patriarchy. D/S in the bedroom, fetishizing torture of the body or spirit in the bedroom, is by definition happening within and saturated by patriarchy.

Do what you like in bed, but please do not tell fairy tales about it, and don't tell me it's "feminist" to hurt or inflict hurt, to dominate or be dominated, because it's not. If we had no patriarchy, if there was no overriding, hideous system designed to subjugate some and elevate others, I might be inclined to believe that BDSM is a positive behavior--but then, if we had no patriarchy, BDSM would not hold nearly the fascination it does now. Without patriarchy, the so-called "submissive side" of our personality, taken for granted as being natural because we can't currently imagine the possibility of life without domination and submission, would simply go away.

We're all familiar with the polarization that, sadly, comes next.

I don't really have much to say that I haven't said already. Funny how this discussion always seems to re-tread the same ground over and over. But, for anyone who hasn't seen my response to arguments like these, needs a refresher, or just would like to read it again:

There's a persistent confusion among anti-SM feminists where they assume that all pro-SM feminists assert that BDSM is feminist, or that doing BDSM means engaging in a feminist act.

Some of us do say this, believing that one of the ways patriarchy controls women is by pressuring us to put men's sexual desires before our own. On this view, BDSM is feminist because any woman exploring her fantasies and desires is rebelling against a social standard that tells her that her sexuality does not belong to her.

Others, including me, are asserting not that BDSM is inherently feminist, but rather that it is consistent with feminism. Personally, I don't think my kinks are any more feminist than brushing my teeth is -- but I also do not think that they are any less feminist than brushing my teeth is.

Oddly, a lot of anti-SM feminists don't seem able to even entertain the possibility that some actions are neither feminist nor antifeminist.

I don't believe any of us can assert what sexualities would look like in Utopia, and I think it's really arrogant to assert that we know what they would look like.

I also think that the logic that BDSM will someday disappear is based on flawed logic.

For one thing, a lot of BDSM is about physical sensation. I don't think that masochism has as much to do with social dynamics as it has to do with how people process physical sensation, how much endorphins a particular individual produces in response to stimuli, how much she enjoys endorphin highs, etc.

For another, I think that the idea that all D/s traces back to unjust social dynamics is flawed, or at least needs to be argued for more robustly than I've usually seen it argued for. While I don't doubt that some D/s fantasies involve them, I don't think all do. Every adult was once a child, and every child was both nurtured and limited/controlled by parents or caretakers, and probably by teachers as well. I don't think it's any kind of stretch that some humans might sexualize this, and I don't think no one would in Utopia either. Even, yes, if Utopia had a lot less hierarchy in it.

The thing that most annoys me about the way this conversation always seems to follow the same well-worn grooves is the endless refrain that we "haven't examined." I just wonder, if that's the case, what exactly people think this blog is for.

As I have, again, said many times before, I get the impression that many anti-SM people are actually saying that only reaching the conclusions they have counts as real "examination."

The difference between them and me is I couldn't care less if someone who really was pressured by society or by trauma into submitting gives it up and is healthier for it. Whereas these people sure do seem to care a lot whether others of us, who assert that our own personal stories are not the same as theirs are, keep doing it or not.

(Or, to be fair to those anti-SM feminists who consistently bray "I'm not telling you what to doooooooo!" as if that were the issue,"sure do seem to care a lot whether others of us keep defending it from their critiques.")

I'll end quoting a comment from hope that I think is completely brilliant and right on, so we don't all have to walk away mad:

While I know that this is a fairly common radical feminist view, it is condescending. To say that if there were no patriarchy then BDSM might be okay, but without patriarchy BDSM wouldn’t exist is essentially saying that BDSM is never okay. Additionally, saying that without patriarchy all social power imbalances would disappear just seems a little silly to me. Not all power dynamics are bad, what about parent/child or teacher/student?

That being said, calling laughingrat an idiot is not a helpful way of furthering discussion. I think that part of the problem is that kinky people are very used to being treated badly for their kink. I’ve been told that being submissive and feminist are fundamentally incompatible more times than I can count. I’ve heard that if we just “examined” or “questioned” our desires we would see why they were wrong. I’ve heard that I am sick and disgusting and that my lover is abusive and a rapist and should kill himself. And this has all come from feminists.
....Again, I’m fairly confident that the majority of submissives are male, not female. I am also really sick of hearing that feminists who are sexually submissive don’t question or examine where their desires come from, we do. I’ve been examining my desires since I started having them when I was a child; I still don’t know why I have them. I wasn’t abused as a child, I didn’t start having submissive tendencies after being sexually assaulted, and I grew up in one of the most progressive feminist towns in Massachusetts. I also don’t know why I’m queer, but most people (especially feminists) don’t seem to need me to question that quite as thoroughly.
....EGhead [who said "I think it would be beneficial for people to stop their BDSM practices; not necessarily beneficial for them, but beneficial for society as a whole."] doesn’t think anyone necessarily needs to change, just that it would be better for society if we did. The (hopefully unintentional) subtext of this is that, since this is a feminist site and most feminists care strongly about bettering society, submissives are selfish for putting their sexual desire before the good of society. Which, interestingly enough, sounds a lot like some very un-feminist sentiments about female sexuality in general. I sincerely hope that this was not intentional on EGhead’s part.

Pain and Life

2009-03-10T13:30:00.001-07:00

It seems the conversations at Nine Deuce's on BDSM are trickling to their end. A good thing, on all counts, but I did want to respond to this. That thread basically discusses whether pain can ever be a good thing, including whether "pain play" is an acceptable term or an oxymoron. I'll give an excerpts from one of Laurelin's comments to make it clear, but I don't want to dwell on quotes. Those who want the whole story should read the entire thread.

It is not the pain from exercise that is good for you- that’s just your muscles complaining that they’ve been worked out. Now it may be a good sign for your health, but the pain is *not* what is good for you, the exercise is. BDSM fetishizes pain itself, says pain is good, can be good. Pain is not good for you, even if it is a sign of having exercised well, it in itself does you no good. It is the body’s warning. And it goes without saying (or should!) that exercise pain is itself a different feeling to pain from injury.
I know BDSMers use the term ‘pain play’. That doesn’t mean I accept the phrase as valid. I don’t. Pain is not play.

My only answer is something very personal. I don't pretend this is science, or even that I or my opinions on this are all that usual.

I've been through hell and back. Chronic pain is a daily occurrence in my life. I'm scarred and torn and put back together.

And what happened when all that occurred? Dissociation. Psychic death to spare myself the agony. Numbness. Pulling away from everything, and incapacity to feel.

Nerves are working or they aren't. What do they do when they work? Signal pain or signal pleasure.

Pain and pleasure are a package deal. Pain and pleasure are what you get when you choose to live.

Some people seem to think the choice in life is between pleasure and pain. It's some great battle, demons arrayed on one side, howling and charred, and angels rising sun-kissed on the other, wings glistening.

And when Patriarchy falls or when trauma releases its hold, Pain will die and life will be soft and pure for always.

I don't see it that way. I know how to kill pain, and the same off switch that kills pain kills pleasure.

When I chose the long process of healing rather than staying numb or suicide, I chose it all. I chose pain and pleasure as a package deal.

I chose to live, and choosing to live meant choosing to feel.

There is no magic land where life is free of suffering. Refusing to allow it to ever have positive significance is fine if it helps you, but that doesn't make it go away.

Pain and pleasure together have a name.

It's not a difficult name. It's not a strange name. It's not even a multisyllabic name. It's a nice and short little name that feels good in the mouth and on the lips and tongue.

That name is life.

On Asking (And Not) Asking Why

2009-03-03T11:06:00.001-08:00

This comment from McStar deserved its own post (bolding and some paragraph breaks mine):

Wow, it feels like I had to leave the party just as I was getting involved, and now I've missed out on all the interesting stuff ;) I'll see if I can catch up...

I think the real problem with the whole 'question/examine your desires' trope is that it's suggested for the wrong reasons, done by the wrong people and done in the wrong ways. I completely agree that our society shapes the sorts of questions we ask and the ways in which we ask them. The whole thing is very reminiscent of all those appalling pop-psychology 'scientific studies' on male/female behaviour which SOMEHOW always seem to produce results that support the gender-biases of the scientists and their culture-at-large.

In an ideal world, we would be able to wonder where aspects of our sexualities might have 'come from' without being expected to reach certain conclusions, or having our personal conclusions disregarded (like when some kinky types say that we regard kinkiness as a natural/inborn aspect of our personality), or feeling uncomfortably aligned with bigots. Take for example the question of whether sexual orientation (speaking purely in terms of which gender/s a person is attracted to) can be discovered to be caused by nature or the family or society as a whole or whatever combination of factors. That could theoretically be a fascinating line of enquiry into the workings of human sexuality which could teach us a huge amount about how our minds and personalities are formed. What it usually is in actuality is various groups of people picking the position that fits best with their own personal prejudices, finding or creating supposedly unbiased research to back up that position, and then trying to yell their position louder than everyone else. And sadly the loudest yellers are often the homophobes.

In a mature and unbigoted society, it wouldn't work that way - we would be able to think and talk about sexualities and potential effects of society/nurture/nature on sexualities without our own stupidity and bigotry getting in the way. If everyone worked a bit harder at disregarding their own stupidities and biases, maybe these discussions would be productive and interesting. Maybe we'd come up with some new and fascinating hypotheses about society and sexuality. Sadly, the whole idea of 'questioning your desires' has been hijacked by bigots and fuckwits like the internet radical feminist gang. Leaving other (hopefully) more open-minded people thinking but hang on... why can't we think about why people are kinky without all this ignorance and these preconceived notions of what kinkiness equals? why can't we think about why people are kinky because we personally find it interesting? why is a random internet person demanding to know why we're kinky and then informing us that whatever we may personally think, it's actually because the patriarchy is being evil in our heads? *flail*

Reading comprehension:

2009-03-02T12:05:00.000-08:00

Jenn fails at it.

She's angry with me, and others, for supposedly saying that BDSM is an oppressed sexuality in the same way as homosexuality is:

Over in a post on the blog of Nine Deuce—a fellow rad fem—a couple of fucking idiots have decided that the distaste some have for their sexual practices is akin to oppression, in specific, the oppression of homosexuals.

Yeah, no.

If you’re having sex in a manner completely consistent with the dominant idea of gender roles, you honestly can’t call that oppression. Perhaps if you were madly in love with two people, who were in turn madly in love with you, and you couldn’t recognize that relationship legally like most couples, I might be tempted to call that some sort of injustice, given that it defies the usual heterosexual one man one woman shebang.

Unless, of course, those three people really wanted to throw down and insinuate that criticism leveled against them is exactly like the oppression of homosexuals.

Let’s get this straight: the oppression of homosexuals is exactly like nothing else. There are other forms of oppression, obviously, but all of them are experienced differently—sometimes in an intersecting fashion with other oppressions—than the oppression of homosexuality and all of its flavors such as transphobia, homophobia or denial of bisexuality.
....Sexual practices and fetishes are not oppression. This includes things such as BDSM, pedophilia, foot fetishes, water sports, and fur-suiting. The post that inspired this philosophical examination of oppression featured various practitioners of BDSM or a “BDSM lifestyle” insinuating that the questioning of their fetish was analogous—identical or at least relevantly similar—to the hate speech and oppression of homosexuals. What this asinine proposition ignores is that while practicing BDSM may meet some of the conditions of oppression, it obviously does not meet all of them, or even most of them.

I will freely admit that back in 2007 I openly questioned whether anti-kink sentiment and the clear bullshit that results from it (Spanner, the recent anti-porn law in the UK, Paddleboro, loss of jobs, loss of child custody, etc) could be seen as oppression a couple years ago.

I no longer think so, though I still do want the clear definition of what oppression is that I ask for in that post. Particularly, I want a clear idea when something can be considered "systemic" and when it cannot. I don't think prejudice against people considered sexually deviant is encoded in culture the way anti-gay sentiments are encoded in much of religion, but I also don't think it's a random one-off either. It's not like one person randomly hating someone for having buck teeth. But there's no Exodus International centered around us either, so what is it like?

I don't know, but I don't find "zomg this is appropriation, and in saying that I'll totally ignore that you're queer too!" a useful tool for determining the borders of oppression.

I doubt, however, that she found and read that post on oppression and kink (there's no link in her post to it, anyway), and since then I've recanted the view that I'm sure BDSM people are oppressed, giving explanations like this one as why:

“Additionally…you get fired for BDSM, but you are unlikely to get actually murdered over it. I don’t think the church has ever got round to condemning BDSM as a threat to humanity either. Though, that’s simply a matter of scale.”

Oh, yeah, I agree. I don’t think anti-SM sentiment has congealed into oppression. I do think it’s still wrong and bigotry runs rampant, though.

I’m not a big fan of the idea that one is either TRULY OPPRESSED or JUST WHINING. It’s not a binary.

So now we've got someone wasting thousands of words on something nobody's saying. WIN!

Prurient Imaginations!

2009-03-01T09:32:00.000-08:00

Part 2 of my response to "Nine Deuce, You're A Homophobe!" Part 1 is here, and should provide context. Let me know if you need more, readers.

I wanted to quote in its entirety a comment by ND's reader Jenn, defending ND against the claim that her rhetoric sounds more than a little like that homophobes use to condemn gays and lesbians.

As this fag can attest, I’ve never once thought of you as a homophobe. Quite to the contrary, comparing my sexuality to all sorts of hipster nihilist shit that people might engage in whilst fucking—like foot fetishes, fursuits, BDSM, or golden showers—just offends the ever living fuck out of me. And I detest people that try to take the legitimacy of the gay rights movement and twist it for their own use.

This entire culture is structured upon the oppression of gender roles and the model of a patriarchal two gender family. Tying someone up and fucking them or licking their feet is odd, but it’s hardly challenging the status quo in a fundamental way. Loving someone of my own sex, displaying approperiate affection in public, and wanting to marry her or raise children together makes even the most liberal of straight folks a little uncomfortable. That’s because these actions directly oppose the heteronormative patriarchal roots of present society. They reverberate throughout my entire life, and affect so much more than what I do between the sheets. The reduction of homosexuality to just another kink is delusional as fuck. Refusal to adhere to the standard gender binary is not just something that you take out of the closet for sexy time, it’s a badge of shame in a world who classifies non-heterosexuals as the “other”.

If your BDSM is to the point that you feel that you should have the ability to walk your sub through the mall naked on a leash, and then call the inability to do so “oppression” on par with the dirty looks I earn while doing something as innocent as holding a partner’s hand, then you are a delusional fuck without a shred of rationality or perspective. Honestly, I don’t give a shit about the ability to have sex with someone of the same gender in public or engage in heavy petting. Straight couples can’t do that either, and I’m certainly not against that.

Sexual and gender identity is just that, an identity. It’s not an expression of sex in a place where sexuality is inappropriate. Walking a naked chick with nipple clamps into Macy’s is a blatant and inappropriate display of sexuality on par with straight couples fondling each other’s genitalia in public. Holding hands with another woman while I pursue the racks at Dillard’s is not obscene.

Seriously, if you cannot separate distaste for the blatant display of another’s sex life from genuine bigotry and hatred of someone’s identity, grow the fuck up. You’re like those PETA assholes who think that wearing KKK robes in public is an approperiate way to protest the abuse of animals. If you can’t defend your own movement without undermining another, just shut the hell up and go back to your dungeon.

The thing I want people to notice here is how she takes us to be asserting that we ought to have a right to do BDSM in public.

Not just that, but she seems to think we want the right to walk around naked in public -- something I've never seen queer folk assert that they should have.

(Yeah, I know, old-school '70s gay lib had a lot more shock elements to it. But I don't think even they ever said "It's discriminatory not to allow us to walk around naked in public. They were intentionally being provocative.)

Which only proves our point further. This sort of lurid fantasizing is exactly what homophobes do. Someone says "I should have the right to marry whoever I wish," and this is translated in the bigot's mind into "Give him that, and he'll be rutting like a pig in the middle of Main Street."

If said homophobe is particularly vile or clueless, he may add "With our kids."

Looked at from a distance, it's actually a strangely irrational phenomenon. Someone says "Hey, stop speaking viciously about people like me" or "People like me shouldn't be at risk of losing our jobs, especially when we're scrupulous about the closet" and someone starts screeching about "nipple clamps in the mall."

I don't know what it is, and I probably shouldn't do too much armchair psych here. But an initial guess is that it's a way of projecting "bad" sexuality outward. It seems to be "I'm not extreme; I'm within some acceptable parameter. Anyone not like me, however, is ridiculous and obnoxious."

It seems to me to be a way of talking about extremes -- a way of saying "nipples and Main Street" -- and disavowing identification with them. "Oh, I would never think about such a horrible thing. Except when condemning those people over there. Who aren't me. Did I say I'd never think about CLAMPED NIPPLES ON MAIN STREET? Well, of course, I never would. It's those people over there who'd CLAMP NIPPLES ON MAIN STREET."

While our BDSMy reader just sits there going "Main Street? You're weird."

Tired now...

2009-02-27T21:38:00.000-08:00

...and really rather more inclined to write stories, daydream, or sleep than bother with this stuff,

but here's Nine Deuce's latest. A rebuttal to the claim from some on our side that she sure sounds an awful lot like Anita Bryant.

(On that topic, I can't possibly recommend this post from Natalia Antonova more highly.)

I wouldn't go that far, but I do think that there are some similarities between the kind of asking why that she recommends we do and the kind of asking why that that Freud fellow did, years ago.

I think that as long as we're questioning, we get to also question who's bidding us ask why, and what standpoint the question privileges.

And I think ND is an unusual white knight for "homosexuals", given that she's never said she's queer, yet feels right at home telling kinky queers we're being inappropriate. If she's straight and she's telling us which of us count, that's an age old tactic o' The Oppressor right there.

But I've said all this already in the post that I linked, so onward and upward, my friends.

She talks about uneasiness about kinky parents there, too. She started off pretty damn offensive about this, suggesting no kid should "be around BDSM" as if every kinky parent wanders through the house in a corset and five-inch heels muttering "Slave! Attend me!"

but seems to have backpedaled to "I just don't like the idea of M/s people letting kids know too much about their dynamics."

Now, of course, the idea that just because someone likes kink she parades it in front of her children is vile sewage masquerading as a point. It's the same old same old: those deviants who flaunt it, what will they do to the children?

But what happens if we take her backpedal more seriously than it deserves?

Here in my safe-ish space I'll admit it: I've seen some people claim that their dynamic is OK for their children to know about, as long as they're not fucking in front of the ten-year-old. I've met people who've said they call their partner "Sir" in front of the child, acting as if this is a huge sacrifice because they'd prefer to call him "Master" everywhere and they deserve a cookie for stooping to What Society Requires *siiiiiigh*.

Some people defend this kind of thing by pointing out that it may not wind up all that different from raising their child in a traditional household. And there is some point to that, I think. I don't like the idea of such households myself and think they're probably messed up, but I don't know that any and all traditionalist parents fuck up their kids. I don't feel comfortable asserting that.

But I do feel uneasy about the people who seem to think that not having sex in front of the kids but keeping the power dynamic really obvious is enough. I've heard people say "As long as we also tell little Julia that some households are woman-run or egalitarian, it's all good" and... I'm not convinced.

I mean, I do think some people have naturally dominant or submissive temperaments, and I think kids can pick up on that. So I'm not saying "Don't act like yourselves." But I do think "Daddy is Sir, but Mommy's not Ma'am" sends a message, and I think that's not appropriate.

I know plenty of wonderful kinky parents. But I also have seen kinky parents behave in ways I find deplorable.

So... yeah, I think ND says deplorable nasty shit most of the time. And I think saying that you know that because someone is kinky, her common sense about what's appropriate for her child goes out the window is utter bullshit, and vile and downright evil.

But yeah, no calling daddy Sir for little Vicky either, folks.

Holy shit.

2009-02-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

Now, yeah, it's a flame war. Flame wars get ugly.

But I have to say that this is absolutely, horrifically vile.

Nine Deuce on exactly why people lose their jobs for being kinky (aren't we glad we've got her to tell us)?

Stop comparing your situation to the plight of homosexuals. And stop comparing my arguments to those of asshole homophobes. There is something to the idea that M/f BDSM fetishizes women’s oppression, and you aren’t going to take attention from that by setting up a false and easily discredited analogy.

Why are people getting fired for being into BDSM? Ever heard of sexual harassment? Talking about sex at work isn’t cool, whether you’re straight, gay, into BDSM, or celibate. It’s just not appropriate. And to be honest, if I were a parent, I’d be concerned if my child’s other parent were into BDSM because I wouldn’t want my child exposed to it. It’s absolutely ridiculous to think you ought to have the right to normalize that kind of behavior in front of children who haven’t got the critical thinking abilities to understand what’s going on.

We all know that the vast majority of child molesters are straight men, which has been shown in study after study. I’m asking the questions about BDSM because what I’ve seen on a lot of websites amounts to serious emotional and physical abuse, and because I have, whatever you guys want to claim to the contrary, read women’s writings about being upset and frightened by the treatment they receive. The fact that I’m not yet convinced that what you’re into is cool and meshes with feminism doesn’t make me dishonest, it just means that I’ve yet to be convinced that black is white and up is down.

Wow. Wow. So... kinky people get fired because they sexually harass their co-workers.

Stupendous.

I'll be sure to ask my boss exactly how turning in the reports is sexual harassment.

You know, there's a reason I go by "Trinity" and such online. There's a reason only a small handful of people know my real name.

News flash: It's not because I like the names.

Wow.

I'm... stunned.

"Go kill yourself" was a rhetorical flourish. What's this one?

And done with this person, I think. That kind of cruelty doesn't come from people who are worth talking to.

Curiosity, again

2009-02-26T09:45:00.000-08:00

I'm betting the answer to this question is no, especially since "On Not Asking Why" has garnered so many positive responses, but I'm curious:

Have any of you out there reading this blog ever decided not to engage in certain kinky activities because they go against your principles?

Have any of you examined your desires and decided that any of them clearly result from patriarchy or other oppressive systems? If so, has this affected what you're willing to do, or is it something you don't think matters?

I ask because one thing I've noticed about the current "examination" kerfuffles is that while most of the pro-SM folks say either

"I tried that and it yielded nothing useful," or
"Why? How have you made sure you are not invested in a system that posits that we are deviant and therefore require explanation, while you do not?"

there are always one or two who say that they continue to examine, or that they seek a way to examine that works for them and isn't accompanied by hostility.

However, I rarely see people on our side who value examination commenting here. McStar, Ren's anonymous commenter, anyone else: are you here?

Can you explain why you feel examining is useful? If you're someone who wants to examine and seeks examination discussions from the pro-SM side, what is it you're looking for?

On Not Asking Why

2009-02-24T08:55:00.000-08:00

This began as a comment I posted at Nine Deuce's. I've noticed that several kinky people there are agreeing with the idea that "examination" of the sort proposed over there is wise.

I don't want to tell people not to do something if they find it useful, but I also have to say that I have a problem with that.

McStar said "It’s quite fair, and potentially very interesting, to question why people desire certain acts, and in what way their desire is influenced by patriarchy."

I responded:

I don’t think so, McStar: I think patriarchy also affects what we ask “why” about.

We’ve already been through the social period where homosexual desire needed a “why.” Because the question was asked, and seen as relevant, answers arose. Bad answers, answers that suggested that something had gone twisted and faulty in the development of GLBT people: domineering mothers, absent fathers, women being allowed to do rough and tumble things, or even to read and study.

The assumption that queerness must be socially constructed, could not be innate, led to these “answers” being found.

I don’t ask why people desire BDSM because I see the same pattern of assumptions here. We start from “normal human desire doesn’t look like that, or at least wouldn’t if the world weren’t so fucked up” and then from there the explanations we look for inherently make reference to the desire we’re asserting as “natural” (or at least as “evident when women are Free.”)

The question itself, as it gets asked in these sorts of discussion, has its answer — and its condemnation — inherent in it.

I do not ask, because it would be like asking “What happened to make some people left-handed?”

I do think it's worthwhile to think before you do something you're uneasy about, whether because it makes you uncomfortable or because you feel it goes against your principles. And I don't think it's a good idea for kinky women who really do feel that their kink and their feminism conflict to try it. I agree that people often do, and often should, think about things they're unsure about before doing them.

However, I staunchly maintain that "How did the patriarchy make you kinky?" is a loaded question. If you take it seriously as a question, you can't answer it with anything but "This desire of mine is linked to patriarchy because _____."

And I don't think such leading questions are likely to lead to anything useful. I'm sure they often lead to unproductive guilt, but how they lead to good feminism or thoughtful BDSM I don't see.

The question we should be asking, "Why are people kinky?", doesn't have enough patriarchy in it for those who've already decided "patriarchy" has to be somewhere in the answer.

But of course, if patriarchy really is in the answer somewhere, surely we'd find it anyway.

So why does it have to go in the question? What do people fear so much that they hang with deathgrips on to leading questions?

(Actually, "Why are people kinky?" is bad too, for the same reason "Why are people gay?" is bad. It presumes that because most people are not kinky/not gay, this makes them a strange deviation that needs explaining away. Really being fair would mean asking "Why is it that some people are kinky and others are not? Why do the numbers break down as they do?")

Devastatingyet on Asymmetry

2009-02-24T08:26:00.000-08:00

Regarding the current blogosphere kerfuffles, here's Devastatingyet on a very common and odd phenomenon: the insistence that both submissive women partnered with men and dominant women partnered with men do BDSM only to please their partners:

Yes, everyone and their kinky mom is posting on this topic. Earlier I posted this comment:

Earlier in this thread, the question was asked, why would anyone want to be a slave?

My boyfriend wants to be a slave in his personal life. Since he hit puberty it is the basis of every sexual thought and feeling he’s had. Who the hell knows why?

He’s also a clear-thinking, sarcastic, independent-minded, regular person who wants to do fulfilling work, having relationships with friends and family, and so on. And like anyone in a relationship, he has to balance those things.

We talk all the damn time about how things are going, how we both feel, how/whether things are impacting his life. And then I go treat him like an object and he lights up with joy and begs me for more. And we keep talking and fixing what isn’t working.

The male-dominant, female-submissive relationships I’m familiar with seem to work the same way.

to which I got this response from Delphyne:

“My boyfriend wants to be a slave in his personal life.”

Luckily for him he’s got a woman on hand to meet his needs then.

Female subs talk about keeping their masters happy, now you are doing the same from the other direction. The one constant is that it is the men who have to always be pleased and appeased by the women in their life.

Anyhow looking at your blog it appears he also enjoys beating you up, so it isn’t the same dynamic of most of the female subs here who have relationships with male sadists. Although just reading through it apparently you have to wait until he wants to switch back, so it appears the control still lies with him.

This highlights what is, for me, one of the most frustrating aspects of this debate: the lack of belief, on the part of radfems, in any possible symmetry between men and women. Some of them believe I am different from the mandoms in that

I am obviously doing this to please Joscelin, while mandoms are not in the game to please their partners. (Indeed, in the same way I am trying to please Jos, submissive women are also trying to please their male masters.)
Joscelin is in control of who dominates whom.
Joscelin and I sometimes switch.

Point #2 is simply wrong. Both times that we switched, I initiated switching. Both times, we explicitly agreed that either of us could initiate switching back (with the understanding that the other would agree) for any reason. One time, he initiated the switching back, and the second time it was me.

Naturally, Jos could end the d/s part of our relationship. He could withdraw his consent from my domination of him. I could end it as well. I’m comfortable saying that this is true in all healthy relationships (d/s or otherwise).

Point #1 - that I am in this to please Jos - I doubt is more true for me than it is for your average mandom. Because of our fucked-up patriarchal culture, it may be true that there are more femdoms doing it to please men than there are mandoms doing it to please women. Women are trained by the culture to please men, and I think men are often more in touch with their own sexualities. However, that “average” difference doesn’t mean that, in any given relationship, it’s the man dragging the woman along. I certainly know submissive women who want more dominance from their partners, seek it out, feel bad about being pushy, and wonder whether certain things are done merely to please them. (I don’t know many mandoms, so I can’t really comment about their experiences, but I’m sure many are pretty much like me - kinky, sadistic, happy to be in control, and also pretty well motivated to please their partners.)

Point #3 is…strange. I’m not sure which combinations of dominant/submissive male/female are most likely to be switches. I know plenty of both sexes. For a lot of us, kink is kink, and it’s hot (if not to the same exact degree) from both sides. I know other men and women who don’t switch.

You simply can’t make yourself heard in this conversation. If a mandom says he pleases his partner with dominance, or a submissive woman says she’s pleased by her partner, then they’re lying or the woman is confused, or in denial, or experiencing “Stockholm Syndrome.” (I guess those female submissives who intentionally seek out d/s relationships do so because they’re confused, and then they get into these horrible abusive relationships, and then they learn to like them because of Stockholm Syndrome. Kind of complicated compared to the idea that they just seek out what they want and then get it, isn’t it? But whatever.) If I say, “This is all right [not abusive] because my partner likes it and thrives on it,” then it’s just a sign that I’m doing it all for him.

I understand that not all radical feminists believe this sort of thing, but... is it any wonder I'm generally wary of people who use the label? It seems these folks are wedded with all their hearts and souls to the idea that women cannot have their own preferences and identities at all.

I understand -- and agree with to a point -- the idea that oppression can invidiously affect some of our preferences and choices. But I really don't get this idea that therefore we apparently have none (or at least, have none until feminism has dictated them to us.)

What does accepting such a theory get us? How does it help us, materially, in the really real world not made of pixels, to further the interests of women as a class?

Who does it liberate?

I'm still waiting for an answer on that one. Apparently if you're not already in the club you're too stupid to understand the clear and obvious way this seriously furthers feminist aims in the real world.

Most. Awesome. Comment. Ever.

2009-02-22T17:29:00.001-08:00

rachelcervantes, who has been watching the current BDSM-and-feminism kerfuffle and thoughtfully examining her own feelings about it, had this to say over at Ren's recently.

Some members of the BDSM community have been generous with their time and willing to disclose personal, private things to me in my pursuit to understand. I still don't get it and likely won't, but I'm a lot closer than I was. I'm beginning to get a glimmer.

Is it harmful to women? Possibly. So is smoking, various drug usage, the patriarchy (yes, I dare use the term), smog, and capitalism.

However, I'm seeing something disturbing in blog-land regarding this issue. First, let me state, up front, that the age-play thing creeps me out. I will also say unequivocally, loudly and repeatedly, that any sexual activity involving children is wrong and age-play gets a too close to that for my comfort. No, I'm not saying that age-players are pedophiles, although likely some are. Hell, some ministers are pedophiles too, for that matter. I'm saying it gets too close for my comfort level.

Now, having that out of the way, the thing I’m seeing in blog-land that is disturbing is that BDSM folks are on trial. They are being drawn into debates where the judges and juries have rendered their verdict before the trial began. I’m judgmental, too, we all are. Everyone has issues that we’ve decided are wrong and that’s as it should be. After all, deciding what’s right and what’s wrong is part of having a moral code, ethical standards.

But the kinky folk are called out to defend their practices. It’s not for the purpose of understanding or “helping.” I’m not sure what it’s for, really. If BDSM women are indeed victims of the patriarchy, one would assume those who recognize and are concerned by such victimization would want to extend help, understanding, support, all of those things that might assist a victim in escaping her abuse. That is NOT what I’m seeing.

Ok, being redundant here, the whole thing is disturbing. So, while none of this is my business in any way, I’m feeling a need to suggest the kinky no longer engage. What you are doing is not illegal, not involving children or animals (which would fall under the rubric of illegal, of course), not damaging (directly, anyway) to anyone other than the participants (who deny that is the case). It’s your business. All I want to say is that you don’t HAVE to allow yourselves to be on trial like this.

Redundant again, I know it’s none of my business. Just saying, you know?

Wow. That made my week.

(There's another Big Apology, this one from radical feminist blogger CJ, over here, which is similarly awesome.)

And her description of what's going on is spot on, in my humble opinion.

"So humanly, humanly..."

2009-02-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

Renegade Evolution, weighing in on the current blogthrash:

As the latest bit of the BDSM wars seem to wind down to the inevitable stand off, as they always do, and I continue to try to pick through the rubble seeing if anything even remotely useful or educational or insightful has come about from this latest skirmish there is one thing I’ve really noted this time.

Sure, I’ve seen it before, I am sure I will see it again, but it is really, really standing out this time. That thing? The outcry- sometimes made with reason, sometimes with an attempt to appeal to empathy, sometimes made with resounding rage- on the part of BDSM participants to be seen as…

Human.

Not deluded, not programmed, not victims, or trapped, or insane or stupid, not pathetic, not wicked, not weak, but human.

Like everyone else.

And you know what? Humans? All of us? We’re flawed creatures. Every last one of us. Kinky people are no more or no less flawed than any other human being walking the face of the earth. They are no less imperfect. What they do in the bedroom does not make them any more (or any less) broken or messed up or duped than any other person out there. They are humans, like everyone else, flaws and all, and what they want, what they demand, and what they deserve is to be treated as such.

How hard is that to grasp? That kinky people merely want the same consideration and treatment that is accorded to other people? Flaws and all? Their sex lives make them no more or less so. But it is due to their sex lives they are so often treated subhuman, lesser than, as if they are alien or other…and of course, far more flawed.

....We all have our issues and less than charming quirks and battle scars and bullshit. Each and every one of us. We are all humans- but damn, we are all very, very different. And I do not understand why that is such a hard thing to recognize, to realize, to accept as perhaps the one actual universal truth out there- and thus, we are all going to like or be into different things. And whatever those things might be? Well, there is no guarantee, no promise, that the reasons we are into whatever has anything to do with being flawed, or whatever flaws we have. There is no way to say, without doubt or question, that the reason a person is (or is not) kinky is because…woo, they are messed up!

And even if it is- that is no reason to treat them in some way less human than thou. There is no promise that those kinky people are any less intelligent, self-aware, self-realized, thoughtful, stable, or anything else than thou. And the vibe that gets sent out that somehow, because they are kinky, they are? That crap needs to stop, it is infuriating, it is dehumanizing, and further more, it is entirely possible it is bullshit. Pure and simple. There is no promise of any of those things, and further more, no reason.

There is also no reason that I can see for such a need for all of us to be the same. That, a world where we are all the same, uniform in thought and desire and whatnot? Fuck, if that does not sound like a horrible, dreary, boring place to me. It sounds like a nightmare worse than any one I’ve ever actually had. Short version- I find it incredibly, bone chillingly terrifying. That idea is so alien, so horrible to me that I get queasy just thinking about it- and all that goes with it. It creeps me out, and I am pretty dang creepy. That’s saying something. I would rather have us all being here, our flawed, diverse selves, than be in a world where everyone and everything are the same.

But I would like us all be able to see each other as humans, worthy of basic human respect, and all marked by flaws and differences and strengths and what have you, and see a bit…okay…a lot more tolerance of those sorts of things. I’d never force someone to be kinky against their will, suggest they need some sort of reeducation or whatever to make them how I am, make them like the things I like…I don’t understand why other people think doing the reverse is such a grand idea. Or, that it is even something that is wanted or needed. I by nature am real uncomfortable of doing things for other peoples own good, the whole I am my brothers (or sisters) keeper thing… eww, just, eww. And you know, it is not as if myself, or other kinky people, have not examined, do not examine, are incapable of examining because we’re blinded by our selfish, selfish orgasms or whatever…we have in fact done those things. And we’ve come to our own conclusions. Those conclusions make us no less human.

Thanks, Ren.

...whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

2009-02-19T07:39:00.001-08:00

I really should just walk away from the bizarro, but I had to preserve this comment for posterity.

Delphyne, on why going to seminars and demos at BDSM groups is a bad thing (would she rather us all just fly blind? Great idea):

As for education, every second BDSMer I seem to come across claims to be a sex educator. You lot are always going on about how important education is in BDSM - for example it was one of the main apologetics for the guy who did the BDSM 101 thing. Trinity even attends seminars on it apparently. That’s a hell of a lot closer to indoctrination than anything I’ve seen in feminism. Let’s also not ignore how reinforcing a message with pain is one of the top tricks in the brainwashers’ arsenal. I think everything you claim to be true of us is actually true of yourselves.

There you have it, folks: Learning how to do things is actually indoctrination.

I don't even know what to say in response to that it's so completely ridiculous.

Does theory come from experience?

2009-02-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

Over in the continuing blogthrash at Rage Against the Man-chine, ND calls someone out for giving personal anecdotes and no discussion. Basically, the person described her scenes and said "how can you call this wrong?" ND didn't like this one bit, pointing out that she's debating about feminist interpretations of BDSM as a whole, not talking about particular personal experiences.

My response:

ND,

While I understand your frustration with the personal anecdotes and agree that they don't count as argument, I also think there's something particular that this disconnect brings out:

One side is saying that personal anecdotes do count, because the personal experience is all we've got. "What BDSM means," on such a view, is just what commonalities and themes can be found in thousands of personal stories. It's whatever reasons for it, activities, and explanations are most common, most appealed to, most important. On this view the only way to come up with "what BDSM is about" is to read as many stories as possible (or, failing that, to come up with a sound method of selecting samples) and discover what you find.

The other side -- which you're on -- says that a theory that makes no reference to actual experience can and does explain it, and therefore individual experiences are irrelevant and beside the point.

But my question is: what makes the theory itself one that we should accept, then? As I understand it, radical feminist theory itself arose from practices like consciousness raising, which was lots of women in groups sitting around describing their experiences, noticing commonalities, and coming up with theory that explained those commonalities and how to work to fix the problems that showed up over and over in the lives of many women.

Now, I wasn't around in the '70's, so perhaps some second-wavers/radical feminists who were can correct me. But my question is: What exactly happened? Why does theory now trump experience, when commonalities in experience were precisely what led feminists to determine that sexism wasn't just a personal matter, but rather a political one?

It really confuses me.

Principles and Pleasures

2009-02-15T13:34:00.001-08:00

Something I said in a comment thread, wrt the endless "Examine your desires" refrains:

I'm not saying "go wildly against your principles if it brings you momentary pleasure." I am saying "hey, if you're kinky and kink is against your principles because you analyze consensual hierarchy and nonconsensual hierarchy similarly... why not think about why there's no room for you to do what you want, rather than stressing your anti-hierarchy principles?"

I mean, for all they say people like us "don't examine" it strikes me that they have a real blind spot with regards to "examining" how they can fight the good fight AND enjoy life. Why is the question always "must I jettison this pleasure (or indulge it guiltily when I can no longer resist its pull)?" and not "how can my pleasure and my principles coexist?"

I really do think one thing that oft goes unexamined is our cultural history of mistrusting pleasure... especially sexual pleasure. US-ians, at least, are the ideological descendants of Puritans as much as we are anything else.

By that I don't mean that "radical feminists" of a certain stripe are prudish and that's that.

By it I mean we all are programmed as much to mistrust desire and pleasure as we are to believe in the patriarchy.

Minute of Perfection: Fight Club and Submission

2009-02-13T07:46:00.000-08:00

Another excellent link on the recent SM and feminism debates

Minute of Perfection: Fight Club and Submission

Before I went to college, I considered myself a feminist and I was pretty passionate about it. I thought feminism was about how to fix the wage differential, overcoming the glass ceiling, helping women get out of abusive situations, and raising social consciousness about the way our culture is oppressive to women. In college, I learned that it was really about replacing a patriarchal definition of my body and sexuality with the feminist one. Oh, and that the huge majority of my sexual interests were really just reinforcing the patriarchy. I had to start talking seriously about whether or not all heterosexual sex was rape and whether or not I should be a lesbian as a matter of political/social obligation. Also, I wasn't devoting the majority of my freetime to feminist activism, so I wasn't doing enough and was really complicit with the patriarchy.

It all became too much when I had to start listening to professors and others who obviously had never tried being in a full-time BDSM relationship, or maybe anything beyond looking at a few websites and being horrified, about what my sexual interests really meant in relation to the patriarchy. Well, fuck that.

At the same time, I felt very much like me backing away from feminism and being unable to give up the joy that many aspects of BDSM give me was a symptom of moral and personal weakness. If I just wasn't so selfish, or so sexually oriented, etc. then I wouldn't need this. I still felt like there was something deeply wrong with our society and the way patriarchy limits choices for everyone. It reinforced me feeling like a whore, or a slut, etc. except these terms now became synonymous for "tool of the patriarchy" for me. As much as some might talk about rape, or victimization, or whatever, I wasn't being raped. I enjoyed all these sex acts that were obviously horrible and evil, loved them to the core of my being, so I must be evil, as complicit in the patriarchy as those who would oppress me. I began to feel like learning to accept patriarchy and anti-feminism was the only way to be happy and I felt very confused.

....I thought of all the things I'd done for my Master. How happily I'd done them. Without shame in the moment, so proud I'd overcome all difficulties and obeyed. Still, there's a swelling of pride knowing that he thinks that I've been a very good girl. Those moments of trust, laying open before him, cradled in his arms like a child ... supplicating for his guidance, suffering for him as a sacrifice for my devotion. So happy and full of love and pure, unadultered joy. In those moments, though, it doesn't take long for the self-hatred to follow. What sort of creature am I that nothing would make me more happy than obliterating my will and my desires, my physical comfort and selfishness, completely in another? Is someone who wants to consent to giving up ownership and control of themselves really even human? If so, then I'm totally fine with not being human, don't want to be. But ... My mother's voice, asking "Where did I go wrong? How could you want these things?" A 'friend' saying, "Independent thought is the foundation of what makes you human, the responsibility of being human." A blog going on about the invisibility of "almost rape" ... but I sort of like the feeling of being "almost" raped, of feeling like it's beyond my control completely with someone I love. Not wanting to, and being taken, of feeling my self and my will stretched out and pliant before him. His voice telling me how beautiful I am, the pleasure and steel in his eyes and he pounds into me, over and over. Feeling myself give over to him completely in those moments and loving it. Feeling so affirmed, so happy. But ... what does that mean about me, that my greatest act of happiness and affirmation is submitting completely to another? A male other, no less, as a female. In a patriarchal society.

Letters from Gehenna: The World on a Slant: The Shareef Don't Like It

2009-02-11T21:55:00.000-08:00

Kiya from Letters From Gehenna has collected an amazing compendium of links related to the latest dust-up in the feminist blogiverse.

Letters from Gehenna: The World on a Slant: The Shareef Don't Like It

I'd comment myself, but it's time I should be making sleeps, and I'm not sure there's much more to say, really. A lot of the people in these conversations are just absolutely rock-bottom certain that BDSM is inherently abusive and no one truly consents to it.

In the face of such faith, brilliant enough to blind some very intelligent eyes, what is there to say? I'll continue to tell my story; maybe some, eventually, will listen, and not run through the same set of grooves in her head.

My last comment

2009-02-09T22:07:00.000-08:00

on this BDSM and feminism dust-up.

Posted here, though I have no idea if it will make it through mod:

"And my answer is this: If people like you would show some compassion and stop using hate speech like “kill yourself” — and would start considering that the way you talk about BDSM is influencing real people who feel real shame and real despair — then

(a) kinksters would be less likely to entertain thoughts of suicide — or commit suicide,"

The thing is, Clarisse, that I honestly think some of these folks think it's good that we think of suicide.

I don't think anyone in here is actually saying "Go kill yourself" and meaning it.

But I do think that people are saying the world would be safer and sparklier and better if we were not in it.

They wouldn't hand us the guns or the pills -- most people aren't that cruel -- but as long as our despair is not directly their doing, they don't care. They don't see us as fully human.

Until they do, this won't get anywhere. We can talk about how alienated it makes us feel, but until they accept that we are no less people than they are, our stories of nearly killing ourselves will be amusing to them. They will laugh at our weakness, and that will be that.

It won't ever occur to them that it's the same despair that drives the gay youth to believe she should be dead. In fact, the comparison will offend.

Until we are people to them, this is nothing but dark fun.

Nope.

2009-02-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

All right, so the conversation at Nine Deuce's has turned to kinky porn.

Specifically, to kink.com, a rather famous/major producer of the stuff.

I'm not sure how deep I want to delve into this, here. Personally, I am not at all anti-porn. I think that even when the industry is full of abuses, it is an entirely unproductive move to attempt to dismantle it. And if, as many anti-porn feminists claim, you're not for directly dismantling it, then you're just talking -- sitting around with your friends, enjoying the titillation of outdoing one another with your professions of disgust.

And personally, I have a couple of videos from MenInPain on this computer. So I might be biased. (Defensive, I guess they'd say. Then again, they DID claim F/m doesn't matter. Immunity: It's FUN.)

But, that said, I do understand many women's wariness of pornography. BDSM pornography, with its depictions of pain and domination, can only compound that wariness. And I don't mean to imply that anti-porn, pro-BDSM people aren't welcome here; they are.

All that said, though? This, here:

This shit ain’t revolutionary, it’s so fucking obvious and stupid that I’d laugh if it didn’t look so much like RAPE. If you have that kind of dark side, it might be best to leave it unexplored. Or kill yourself (if you’re the customer, that is).

Is NOT ON. It's just not.

Not when people with stigmatized sexualities DO kill themselves. I considered it more than once myself, for the record.

Not that this would make me, mind you. Even at my most insecure and unstable, some fool on the Internet thinking she's the snark queen for saying something like this would never have pushed me over the edge.

But it's inappropriate.

Notice that my saying this does not mean I think she should be forbidden from saying it, or that in Utopia she wouldn't say it. I'm not one for that either. I don't think it is productive to say to someone that there's a problem with her venting her dark desires -- in this case, that people she's frightened of (the maledom boogeyman in the dark) die, in droves.

Because people can and do have those feelings. Those feelings are part of what we're discussing, here.

Instead, what I object to is the way this is used: one, as a demonstration of her skill with rhetoric, and two, as a way to rile other people up politically.

That's what disturbs me. Reading the sentiment that I should die used as a rallying cry.

Diving Back In

2009-02-04T07:42:00.000-08:00

I've been gone a while. I've really taken a break from SM-and-feminism debates, and I think it's been good for me. But recently, possibly due to a new anti-SM post up at Nine Deuce's blog, people have been showing up and commenting here. So I figured I'd return, and say some things.

First, start up the zamboni in hell please, because I actually think that there's a Point hidden in all the stuff that has me wincing as I read. To wit:

But what does all this talk of separating D/s in the bedroom from real life, of taking “safe, sane, and consensual” as one’s creed, of female subs being empowered by the emphasis on consent really mean? Methinks the Sisters of Mercy fans doth protest too much, that someone is pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining. I read 400+ e-mails from men interested in a young woman curious about submission, I looked at a shit-ton of BDSM porn, I went to a BDSM club, I read tens of thousands of words on BDSM-related websites, and I didn’t feel very safe or sane when I got done, nor did I feel like participating in the shit I’d seen or read about would make me feel particularly empowered.

While how safe or sane I feel reading websites is probably rather different than how safe or sane she does, I think she's spot on here. We do a lot of protesting and apologizing here in BDSMland for what we want and what we do (and, for some of us, who we are). We do a lot of insisting that, as ND points out, "safe sane and consensual" means we never get hurt. Means we never find asshole partners. Means we never mess up negotiations in ways that are Not Good for us.

Which is all, as she points out, bullshit.

Which brings me to the difference between these sorts of feminist and us, or at least between ND and me.

I believe that risk is a part of life, and I believe that sometimes things are important enough to someone that she can and should choose to take them.

She recommends scrutiny, for reasons she considers particularly feminist and I consider pretty bad:

When considering sexual matters and their relationship to the general misogyny that pervades our culture, I generally pretend I’m a justice in the Supreme Court of Gender Issues and apply the ol’ strict scrutiny standard (albeit my own modified version of it). Sex, as it has been used throughout history as a tool of domination and as it is the locus of the negotiation of gender roles and a large majority of our social behaviors, requires close analysis. If I’m going to give a sexual practice a free pass and the Nine Deuce seal of approval, it’s got to meet three criteria:

First, I ask myself whether women are ever hurt as a result of the practice under consideration. If the answer is yes, the practice has not earned immunity from examination and analysis.
Second, I ask myself whether those who engage in the practice ever do so out of a hatred of women. If so, it’s up for discussion and judgment (a nasty word for those with po-mo leanings, I know, but a necessary one nonetheless).
Finally, I have to ask myself whether the practice would occur in a society that wasn’t characterized by male supremacy and the hatred of women, both of which tend to manifest as the mixture of sex and power. I’ve got a really impressive imagination (I invented unicorns), so if I can’t imagine a sex act having the power to excite in a post-patriarchal world, I get a little dubious.
If a sex act fails to meet any of these three criteria, you can expect that I’ll be questioning the fuck out of it, and BDSM really blows it on all three.

I don't think these criteria are good ones. I don't think feminism is about figuring out what sorts of nefarious anti-woman things men have in their heads and, armed with Knowledge, tripping warily through the minefield. I think that makes feminism about men in a funny way, about men and about fear, when it's supposed to be about women and about becoming more free. (And yes, self-styled "radical" feminists may not like that word "free," thinking it means "at liberty to make dumb choices." As a matter of fact, I am using it that way. Let's see them sour faces.)

But having walked away from this discussion for months, and feeling so much the better for it, I don't want to talk about that now. I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about this pervasive sense that feminism is about protecting women from making bad choices by Letting Them Know, through blog posts and essays and books, through warnings and theory and the slow spread of fear, What They're Getting Into.

I'm not for that any more. She's spot on: SM is risky and dark and it means looking into who you are and what you want and finding the spaces where that's not so pretty. The times when you want something no one is supposed to: abasement, exaltation, pain, fear, shame. That's not pretty -- well, no, it's quite pretty. But it's not tame.

It can and does engage all sorts of ugly things, because it draws on anything and everything, and doesn't run. Does that mean that sometimes, male dominance shows up, flaws and history and violence and all? Yes, it does. It even means that some women romanticize that, crave it in their head. In most cases, it will be stripped of social meaning ("I want to be his slave, but I want equal wages at work"), and that's what we mean when we do the "It's only in the bedroom" style insisting. In some cases, though, some people really do buy in to the idea that submission is what a woman is for -- including some women. When we say we're not like those people, we're disavowing that, saying that fantasy doesn't, in the end, trump reason.

Rightly so, IMO. There are people out there into ANYTHING who go overboard, and suffer for it.

But that doesn't really answer 92, and those like her. Their point is that women's submission to men, however bounded, just is frightening. Particularly to someone who doesn't have similar interests and whose deepest passion is a witty, cold, "radical feminist" rage that gets her a rapt audience.

Which it should be.

The disagreement isn't over that. It's over the place of the frightening in our lives. It's over whether you think people should dive into the frightening, or whether you're waving signs and trying to forcibly haul them back out.

I know where I stand on that.

Which is why I stick up for female subs the same as I stick up for me, despite that I've heard a fair amount of the same bullshit that she sees as epidemic.

Living means taking risks. It also means being wise about doing so, which is what all the "SSC", all the "limits", all the "I'm not 24/7", all that stuff, whether well-conceived or nonsensical, is about.

Risk management. Not risk elimination.

But someone coming up to me and saying "Isn't BDSM emotionally unsafe [for women bottoms living in patriarchy]?" is like someone coming up to me and saying "Don't condoms break?"

Not my place to decide whether someone else should panic and run because her boyfriend's might.

Two Ways Of Coping

2009-01-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

Over at an old thread of Ren's, I got into a conversation recently with Rachel Cervantes, who had this to say about her visceral squicks about BDSM:

I had this to say, which may get me into trouble for that "oh oh you must have been AB-UZED!" thing (I was, though that's not the particular trauma I'm describing here), but eh. If people don't get that being changed is not the same thing as being broken, I really have nothing left to say to them:

Trinity and Ren...sorry I missed this. It's a good question. What makes me uncomfortable is cruelty. I cannot separate inflicting unnecessary pain from cruelty. Also, deriving enjoyment from infliction of pain is very troublesome for me.

I've seen far too much pain and cruelty. It just hurts. It hurts me whether I'm involved or not. I know that may be over-identification, perhaps even intrusive. Then again, maybe not. I’m not inclined to analyze why it is painful to me, but one thing is clear: A lot of people have been victimized throughout humankind’s history. An unfathomable amount of pain has been inflicted needlessly. Small cruelties are on a continuum with huge cruelty. I’m not equating small with large or gigantic; but it’s on the continuum. I cannot separate unwanted pain from “voluntary pain.” Intellectually, I see the difference. Emotionally, no.

I’m not trying to “defend” my position, only explain it. And since we’re talking about feelings, my reactions will not be logical. That’s as it should be, I think. If emotions were logical they’d stop being emotions and start being cognitions.

After writing a lot of words, it seems I’ve not answered the question. Right now it is the best I can do. The idea of BDSM makes me anxious, very much so. Do I condemn it? I don’t think so. But I don’t understand it.

Rachel,

Your feelings are your feelings. If something makes you anxious, it makes you anxious. You're not alone in that, and you're not in bad company either. Your feelings are your feelings, and I don't believe anyone should shame you for them.

From my observations, though (and all they are is the observations of one person, not some grand undeniable conclusion), people who've been through horrible pain deal with it in two different ways.

Some are like you: just plain hurt by it, suffering from it, overwhelmed with compassion and wanting to wipe it all out and make the world... soft and soothing and gentle after such horror.

And then there are people like me and some others, where what happens is... different, and they actually end up fascinated by pain and cruelty to an extent, and to want to play with those emotions in a controlled way. They don't like real, senseless violence, but they do have an interest in that side of humanity.

I don't know how to explain this in general, but I also think it's why some people like violent video games, aggressive music, horror movies, dark dramas, whatever.

And I don't know how to explain how it happens, other than how it happened to me. And that was that before my trauma as a teen I was one of the other kind, the kind like you. I couldn't watch horror movies or even, really, listen to heavy metal, or... anything.

And then the trauma happened, and everything I thought I knew exploded and broke. And the painless Utopia in my head that I ran to didn't comfort me any more, because it suddenly seemed horribly, horribly fake. I tried to flee from my pain and it caught up with me.

And the only thing that I found that enabled me to heal was to let myself feel all the emotions I had inside me then -- including pain, anger, the desire for revenge. I had to turn inward. I had to experience my pain and see it as a worthwhile thing, a worthwhile part of me.

And that changed me. That showed me that pain isn't all bad -- that it's part of life, just as pleasure is. That knowing myself meant experiencing my pain.

But if that's true, then how can I really be intimate with someone, really be close to someone, if sex and cuddling and togetherness is all scrubbed clean of suffering? It just doesn't make sense to me any more, because that whole way of looking at the world doesn't make sense to me any more.

Yeah, some things in life just feel awful... but I'd rather believe that my pain means something beautiful than that we're just put here to suffer and die and at least there are some laughs along the way that maybe balance it out, sort of.

Pain, Sex, and Scientology

2008-12-28T07:40:00.000-08:00

As I do every now and again (because it's both funny as hell and gives interesting information on successful mind control techniques), I've been reading some pages on Scientology. I found a document here called "Pain and Sex."

I found it interestingly relevant to our usual discussions because, although it doesn't come from anti-SM feminists or anti-SM conservatives, I think it reveals something interesting about mind control that I do see mirrored in some of the anti-SM writing, particularly the strongly theory-oriented radical feminist stuff.

Here's the mighty mighty LRH:

There are two items in this universe that cause more trouble than many others combined.

One is PAIN.

The other is SEX.

One should know more about these things.

They may have applications but they are used by destructive beings in great volume to cave others in.

....Pain becomes a lock on a being's abhorrence for misalignment of his own electrical flows. It is a lock upon unconsciousness which shuts off knowingness.

Sex is a lock on and perversion of the "joy of creation" which involves a whole being and expands him, but by using just one wavelength, sex, this can be perverted and he contracts.

When pain enters a scene, a being withdraws, contracts and can go unconscious.

When sex enters the scene, a being fixates and loses power.

Destructive creatures who do not want people big or reaching -- since they are terrified of punishment due to their crimes -- invented pain and sex to shrink people and cut their alertness, knowingness, power and reach.

Thus, you see people who are "experiencing" either pain or sex introverting and not producing much.

Pain and sex were the INVENTED tools of degradation.

Basically, if I properly understand this mutilated English (my poor language! I'm sure it safeworded paragraphs ago!), what he's saying is that pain and sex distract us from Serious Business by taking control of our consciousness and making us unable to "produce much."

Which, at least in terms of sex, is that same old line: Sex is unimportant. Sex distracts from the Important Things -- in Scientology, "clearing the planet"; in various feminisms, fundamental and far-reaching sociocultural reform that radically changes the social status of women.

Don't fuck, PRODUCE! How dare you waste perfectly good time getting off that you could spend changing the world?

Don't enjoy yourself, that's individualism, and we've gotten beyond that foolish white male delusion!

It's very close indeed.

And then there's the pain bit. I think in the Scientology case it's more of the self-helpish veneer they have: We're promising you that if you give us just a little more money and time you won't experience pain any more. It won't bog you down, bother you, upset you. No more tears.

Which there isn't really an analogous phenomenon to in the groupthinkier forms of radical feminism. Radical feminists of this stripe often pride themselves on pain to a degree that would make a masochist green: They're not the fun kind, and don't you forget it.

While you're enjoying the approval of your masters, laughing and getting wet and partying, they're up to Serious Things which are Eminently Serious Business. They're forcing themselves to hold it together through a porno movie so they can adequately Theory, and weeping great tears and risking horrible flashbacks to do it. (I do think this is actually the truth in a lot of cases. Personally I think it's an oddly ungratifying form of masochism that's probably not good for people, but what would I know, I like sex too much :)

(Speaking of, here's what he has to say about us specifically. It's charming indeed!)

Believe it or not, a being can be so overwhelmed by either [sex or pain] that he or she becomes an addict of it. Priests become flagellants and cut themselves to pieces with self-whipping. Torturers drool over pain. Lovers are very seldom happy. People do the most irrational things when overcharged with sex, and prostitutes use it as a knowing stock-in-trade. Combined, pain and sex make up the insane Jack-the-Rippers (who killed only prostitutes) and the whole strange body of sex-murder freaks, including Hinckley*, and the devotees of late-night horror movies. Under the false data of the psychs (who have been on the track a long time and are the sole cause of decline in this universe) both pain and sex are gaining ground in this society and, coupled with robbery which is a hooded companion of both, may very soon make the land a true jungle of crime.

Go into an asylum or a prison and look at the increasing institutional population and know what you are looking at. In the main, these are pain and sex addicts, decadent and degraded and no longer capable. They were sent on that route down through the ages by the psychs and here they are still in the psychs' hands! And do they get well or go straight? Oh no. Whether in prisons or insane asylums they just get worse. And the psychs in both places rub their bloodied hands as they turn their products loose again upon the remaining population! It's no accident. And the stocks-in-trade of psychs are PAIN and SEX. They will even tell you it's "natural" to steal!

....They [pain and sex] are the most-used tools in the campaign against beings in furthering the general goal of those creatures whose sole ambition is destruction. The universe does not happen to be either destructive or chaotic except as such obsessed creeps make it. Statements it is otherwise are just more false data from the same suspect "authorities"....

But I do think there's a connection here too. Pain and pleasure are fraternal twins after all -- they're both words that apply to sensation and emotion, and the sensations are bodily responses. They're not conscious. They're the gut reacting, and the gut reacts to things that seem off to it. Things feel nice that people tell us aren't so nice. Things raise our hackles sometimes despite people assuring us those things are good for us.

Controlling these basic responses -- controlling pain or controlling pleasure -- is controlling the beings who feel them.

And radical feminism of this sort, while it isn't invested in battling pain, is certainly invested in controlling pleasure.

Pleasure is suspect from the get-go. As I've already discussed, it distracts one from Serious Business. It drives one to look at, want, savor things and experiences that go against the theory, that have been branded "Bad For Women."

Think about all the emphasis on examining your desires. The statements that "oh, we'd never demand someone give up her pleasures, but we want her to be aware of where they come from." If we say we already are aware, or that we've uncovered that their sources are benign or even positive, we're told to do it again, as if we're faulty computers that never quite properly executed some complex subroutine.

There's one answer, and it's that certain pleasures are out of bounds. While many such "feminists" recognize that these pleasures aren't avoidable, indulging in them requires regular confession and purging, proper purification after soiling oneself with the pleasures of the fle-- er, Patriarchy.

I may get laughed at for this, but I really am beginning to think that sadomasochists -- not the real people, the actual participants in certain sexual activities, but rather Those Who Love Pain as an archetype, paradoxical and irreducible -- frighten this subset of radical feminists and frighten Scientologists for the same reason: because they resist these forms of control.

Of course any given kinky person will be more or less resistant to mind control. I've gotten deeper involved in culty groups before than I want to admit, and my pain fetish wasn't a good defense. But the archetypal sadomasochist is something different: someone who knows and seeks her own pleasure, someone who explores her pain and its sources through unflinching experience.

Someone who seeks pleasure and isn't afraid of pain cannot be controlled, cannot be roped in by an ideology that rests on the fear of sex or the fear of pain (or its twin.)

She is free, radically and wildly free... and therefore she is the ultimate Enemy.

The Anonymous Avenger Strikes Again...

2008-12-14T07:43:00.000-08:00

My last post was a response to an anonymous commenter who posted an excerpt of an interview with Audre Lorde, who claimed that SM reproduces unjust social power dynamics.

The adorable thing struck again with a comment to that post, this time sticking to a rather famous -- and similarly to the Hanisch, usually ridiculously misquoted -- quote from Lorde: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

As I'm one who'd never disappoint trolls who don't seem to fully understand what they're quoting (I shall cuddle her and squeeze her and call her George!), here's my response to that one too.

First, as with the Hanisch, the "master's tools" quote is very often taken completely out of context, so... here's the real context, an essay about how women of color are excluded from feminist conferences.

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.

The context, then, is not one of personal introspection, of looking into oneself and weeding out the influence of the patriarchy. While she does, in other places (such as the quote from Against Sadomasochism in the previous post), tell us that such introspection is important to her feminism, it's not what she's talking about here. She's talking about how social patterns are reproduced, yes, but she's talking about them being reproduced in the structure of feminist community, a community which claims to have a commitment to anti-racism, yet can only spare the most paltry tokenism for women of color.

To take the phrase so wildly out of context and make it a comment on women's personal lives, entirely removing the statement on race relations of which it is a part, is, more often than not, an example of the white-feminist arrogance it was written to combat. I do not know if cuddly little George is white or a person of color, but I do know that I have seen women of color lament the way this essay is reduced to one sentence and the context is lost, allowing people to use the sentence to judge any opponent for bad politics for any reason.

Now, here is the context in which the "master's tools" sentence occurs. (It's a long excerpt, but I feel it needed to give the true picture of Lorde's oft wildly misunderstood point.)

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

...As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Again, it's not that she wasn't against SM; yesterday's quote shows that she in fact was. It's not even that she wouldn't have agreed that doing SM is copying the erotic style of "the masters"; she's clear that she does think so.

It's that, as she herself said in the interview George quoted the other day, the SM issue is a diversion. The erotic is not what she's talking about here. Yes, she does make it consistently clear, that she does not divide a woman's personal choices from her political stances. She believes that the things we focus on, give our attention or energy to, at home or in bed or with our families or friends, directly impacts all we do.

But to say that she's talking about, for lack of a better word, the aura of our bedroom practices when you're quoting an essay about the representation of voices of color in the larger feminist movement is to twist her words. It's to plaster them onto your issue as if her agreeing with you about sadomasochism and feminism is more important than race issues within feminism, when she herself said in what you quoted the other day that it emphatically is not.

If George is white, she's doing something I strongly suspect Lorde would vigorously protest: removing the essay from its racial context, deeming the race issues less important than correcting some other white girl (i.e., me) on her sex life.

Audre Lorde, Carol Hanisch, Sadomasochism, Free Love, and Feminism

2008-12-12T07:43:00.000-08:00

This one is going to get long.

An anonymous commenter responded to yesterday's post with a quote from Audre Lorde, ostensibly to explain exactly what radical feminists' opposition to SM actually looks like. I responded in comments there as well, and then figured it would make a good post of its own. So without further ado, here's the Lorde quote and my responses, taken from the conversation in comments here.

Interview with Audre Lord [sic; it's "Lorde", anony] on MediaWatch http://www.mediawatch.com/wordpress/?p=18 [The interview was originally published in Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, edited by Robin Ruth Linden, et. al. Pp. 68-71.]

Leigh: What about the doctrine of “live and let live” and civil liberties issues?

Audre: I don’t see that as the point. I’m not questioning anyone’s right to live. I’m saying we must observe the courses and implications of our lives. If we are talking about feminism then the personal is political and we can subject everything in our lives to scrutiny. We have been nurtured in a sick, abnormal society, and we should be in the process of reclaiming ourselves, not the terms of that society. This is complex. I speak not about condemnation but about recognizing what is happening and questioning what it means. I’m not willing to regiment anyone’s life. If we are to scrutinize our human relationships, we must be willing to scrutinize all aspects of those relationships. The subject of revolution is ourselves, is our lives.

Sadomasochism is an institutionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships. And, it prepares us either to accept subordination or to enforce dominance. Even in play, to affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, is empowering, is to set the emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship, politically, socially and economically.

...Sadomasochism feeds the belief that domination is inevitable. It can be compared to the phenomenon of worshipping a godhead with two faces, and worshipping only the white part on the full moon and the black part on the dark of the moon, as if totally separate. But you cannot corral any aspect within your life, divorce its implications, whether it’s what you eat for breakfast or how you say goodbye. This is what integrity means...

Those involved with sadomasochism are acting out the intolerance of differences which we all learn: superiority and thereby the right to dominate. The conflict is supposedly self-limiting because it happens behind bedroom doors. Can this be so, when the erotic empowers, nourishes and permeates all of our lives?...

I do not believe that sexuality is separate from living. As a minority woman, I know dominance and subordination are not bedroom issues. In the same way that rape is not about sex, s/m is not about sex but about how we use power. If it were only about personal sexual exchange or private taste, why would it be presented as a political issue?...

The linkage of passion to dominance/subordination is the prototype of the heterosexual image of male-female relationships, one which justifies pornography. Women are supposed to “love” being brutalized. This is also the prototypical justification of all relationships of oppression-that the subordinate one who is “different” “enjoys” the inferior position.

The gay male movement, for example, is invested in distinguishing between gay s/m pornography and heterosexual pornography. Gay men can allow themselves the luxury of not seeing the consequences. We, as women and as feminists, must scrutinize our actions and see what they imply, and upon what they are based.

My responses:

Anon,

I'm not sure if you posted the Lorde because you agree with it, or simply as a way to explain to us exactly where radical feminists are coming with this stuff. (I don't need the education; Against Sadomasochism, from whence that quote comes, is actually on my bookshelf already.)

[ETA: I think it's also important to look at the very end of the interview, wherein Lorde mentions that she sees the SM issue as far less pressing than others within the feminist movement -- a bit that I note Anon leaves unquoted:]

First, we must ask ourselves, is this whole question of s/m sex in the lesbian community perhaps being used to draw attention and energies away from other more pressing and immediately life-threatening issues facing us as women in this racist, conservative and repressive period? A red herring? A smoke screen for provocateurs? Second, lesbian s/m is not about what you do in bed, just as lesbianism is not simply a sexual preference. For example, Barbara Smith’s work on woman-identified women, on “lesbian” experiences in Zora Hurston or Toni Morrison. It is not who I sleep with that defines the quality of these acts, not what we do together, but what life statements am I led to make as the nature and effect of my erotic relationships percolate throughout my life and my being? As a deep lode of our erotic lives and knowledge, how does sexuality enrich us and empower our actions?

[With which I totally agree. My disagreement with Lorde is that she sees SM as unavoidably leading to bad effects. I don't. I think it leads to understanding what power means for us, as well as allowing many of us to experience a mode of living less focused on selfishness and ego than modern American society is. I think such experiences are a powerful, and important, corrective for many people in an ego-focused, "me me me" society. It's not about subordination. It's about distance from the ego.]

"If we are talking about feminism then the personal is political and we can subject everything in our lives to scrutiny."

As much as I respect Lorde (Sister Outsider? On my bookshelf too.), I'm gonna have to say she's doing what many feminists do, and misinterpreting what Carol Hanisch had in mind by the phrase.

Here's Hanisch's essay.

First, what it was referring to:

For this paper I want to stick pretty close to an aspect of the Left debate commonly talked about---namely "therapy" vs. "therapy and politics." Another name for it is "personal" vs. "political" and it has other names, I suspect, as it has developed across the country. I haven't gotten over to visit the New Orleans group yet, but I have been participating in groups in New York and Gainesville for more than a year. Both of these groups have been called "therapy" and "personal" groups by women who consider themselves "more political." So I must speak about so-called therapy groups from my own experience.

The very word "therapy" is obviously a misnomer if carried to its logical conclusion. Therapy assumes that someone is sick and that there is a cure, e.g., a personal solution. I am greatly offended that I or any other woman is thought to need therapy in the first place. Women are messed over, not messed up! We need to change the objective conditions, not adjust to them. Therapy is adjusting to your bad personal alternative.

We have not done much trying to solve immediate personal problems of women in the group. We've mostly picked topics by two methods: In a small group it is possible for us to take turns bringing questions to the meeting (like, Which do/did you prefer, a girl or a boy baby or no children, and why? What happens to your relationship if your man makes more money than you? Less than you?). Then we go around the room answering the questions from our personal experiences. Everybody talks that way. At the end of the meeting we try to sum up and generalize from what's been said and make connections.

I believe at this point, and maybe for a long time to come, that these analytical sessions are a form of political action. I do not go to these sessions because I need or want to talk about my "personal problems." In fact, I would rather not. As a movement woman, I've been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing, and in general pretty much in control of my own life. To admit to the problems in my life is to be deemed weak. So I want to be a strong woman, in movement terms, and not admit I have any real problems that I can't find a personal solution to (except those directly related to the capitalist system). It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I've always been told to say.

So what she's talking about, actually, is not the idea that women must carefully examine their personal lives for false consciousness. What she's doing is defending the work of C-R groups as political rather than personal, because they focus not on being therapeutic rap sessions for "messed up" women, but on doing political work together. It's not about whether issues are personal or not (though the implication is strong that what's considered "personal" is affected by patriarchy, I'll grant that), but about whether a certain kind of group meeting can be considered to "count" as political work. It's a response to "Why are you talking for two hours when you could be lobbying?", not a response to "Why do you have sex that way?" or the like. In faaaaaaact....

The groups that I have been in have also not gotten into "alternative life-styles" or what it means to be a "liberated" woman. We came early to the conclusion that all alternatives are bad under present conditions. Whether we live with or without a man, communally or in couples or alone, are married or unmarried, live with other women, go for free love, celibacy or lesbianism, or any combination, there are only good and bad things about each bad situation. There is no "more liberated" way; there are only bad alternatives.

....When our group first started, going by majority opinion, we would have been out in the streets demonstrating against marriage, against having babies, for free love, against women who wore makeup, against housewives, for equality without recognition of biological differences, and god knows what else. Now we see all these things as what we call "personal solutionary." Many of the actions taken by "action" groups have been along these lines. The women who did the anti-woman stuff at the Miss America Pageant were the ones who were screaming for action without theory.

As I read this and the other quote, she's actually vehemently denying that being for or against particular "personal solutionary" things is actually good political work, because it sidesteps the real problem, which is not that women choose one thing over another, but that all possible choices have been stunted in some way or another.

One more thing: I think we must listen to what so-called apolitical women have to say---not so we can do a better job of organizing them but because together we are a mass movement. I think we who work full-time in the movement tend to become very narrow. What is happening now is that when non-movement women disagree with us, we assume it's because they are "apolitical," not because there might be something wrong with our thinking. Women have left the movement in droves. The obvious reasons are that we are tired of being sex slaves and doing shitwork for men whose hypocrisy is so blatant in their political stance of liberation for everybody (else). But there is really a lot more to it than that. I can't quite articulate it yet. I think "apolitical" women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say "you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle," we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of "apolitical" women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don't want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds.

[ETA: There is also this:]

Of course there were women within New York Radical Women and the broader feminist movement who argued from the beginning against consciousness raising and claimed women were brainwashed and complicit in their own oppression, an argument rooted in the sociological and psychological rather than the political.

Also, I disagree with Lorde's analysis of play, there. To be fair, I don't think that we remain completely unaffected by the things to which we turn our attention. At the same time, though, play is an important part of the growth and socialization of youthful creatures, whether human, dog, cat, whatever.

But small humans' play is very complicated. The simple fact that one finds a child playing a certain game of make-believe today does not tell us what she will grow up to be like tomorrow. I liked pretending my Barbie dolls were rock stars. Am I a musician? No.

There are other games that I played with them that more closely paralleled what I grew up to be. Sure. Like I said, we're not totally divorced from what we do for fun. But that doesn't mean that we can look at what someone plays with and read off who she is, unless we have more information.

[ETA: And I think getting that information will tell us what we need to know about what the play, whether a child's game or an adult's SM, means or doesn't mean. How does it relate to how she sees herself? Is she trying on a way of behaving that's foreign to her as a kind of personal exploration? Is the adult woman submitting or dominating because she feels she does the opposite in her regular life, and seeks balance? Is she expressing something she believes is essential to her character? If she is doing this, is she doing it because she looks down on herself or others, or is she reflectively involving herself in a relationship where her personality is valued? The answers to those questions are what strike me as important. On the question of whether SM itself, as some monolithic Practice, is better or worse for women or others than Vanilla, as some similarly monolithic Practice, I'm inclined to agree with Hanisch's analysis of all alternatives as just as bad (or as good -- I'm not so pessimistic) as one another. I also don't believe that either SM or vanilla activities are any kind of monolith, so theory based on seeing them as such is unavoidably flawed and therefore bad.]

I am, however, guilty as charged about believing that hierarchy is inevitable. I don't think this because it's so damn sexy I'm willing to put up with patriarchy, though.

I believe it because every time I've gone into a relationship expecting there to be no power dynamics, I've found myself ripe for other people's manipulation. I know how to handle someone with authority behaving in a way I don't approve of: challenge her, renegotiate our ranks if possible, or leave.

But I've had much less success in situations that were supposed to lack power dynamics. It was a big thing in my family as a kid, that no one should "want power" or "be selfish." Which yeah, sounded nice, but it left a lot of room for people to manipulate others and, when called on their manipulations, to say "You're crazy. I'd never do that."

I've seen the same thing when I've been in relationships that would supposedly be especially relaxing or healthy because "no one had the power." It's very easy for "the power" only to refer to some kind of rank ordering, and for people who are skilled at manipulation to turn that into, "Oh, you're not outvoted, sweetie, you're just wrong."

Especially when there's a specific ideology that the accuser can point to: "Oh, you want that? Well, but that's bad feminism, honey! Oh, don't get so upset, this is just about liberation!"

I think that the idea of ending hierarchy is nonsensical and dangerous [at least as I've so far seen it presented] because it doesn't include plans for ending manipulation and emotional abuse. [If it did include such plans, though, I'd likely dismiss the whole thing as a pipe dream, so make of that whatever you will.]

Selfishness: How They Getcha

2008-12-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

I'm still following the conversations over at Nine Deuce's critiquing BDSM. I've noticed one theme popping up lately in the comments that I wanted to highlight and address.

That is the idea that it's not wrong to do BDSM, but that it is selfish in a morally critiquable way.

These folks subscribe to a certain "radical feminist" critique of BDSM that suggests that it perpetuates male dominance over women. So if someone does it, well, they're not going to call the Feminist Police, but they are going to say "Hey, maybe you could pay less attention to your own orgasms, and more attention to vulnerable girls who may get the message that men's power is especially hot."

Some examples:

Octavia:

I think I understand why radfems tend to just stop commenting, go away and silence themselves out of frustration. It’s because these arguments always come down to personal sovereignty for these people, and we’re not allowed to discuss anything pertaining to a person’s choice. The problem is that ‘choice’ doesn’t = ‘feminist’ just because you say it is. People are no longer wishing to look internally in order to understand larger social constructs. For the last decade, in all other movements (such as environmental conservation) we’ve used mottoes like ‘think globally, act locally’. But once you apply that same reasoning to feminism, and ask individual women/men to examine their choices for the good of the entire sex class, suddenly ‘UR OPPRESSIVE’. Why have we become SO self-centered?

Nine Deuce 1:

It’s sort of like a conversation about single-payer health care between a Democrat and a Libertarian. One side is about the big picture and the other is about individual interest, with the Libertarian being unwilling to consider the implications of the bigger picture lest he be forced to admit that his stance is myopic and might have effects outside of those he experiences directly. I understand people’s not being into hearing me disapprove of what they’re aroused by, but that’s not the point. The fact is that mingling sex and power is inherently problematic in a hierarchical society and it directly affects our ability to ever dismantle patriarchy. I’m not saying that means I have the right to tell people not to do something, but the fact remains that there’s a problem.

My response, attempting to remind all that the Libertarian's selfishness (if we agree she is wrong; I do) and the BDSMer's selfishness are orders of magnitude different:

9-2,

With all due respect, I don’t think they’re similar at all. The presence or lack of a health care system, and the details of coverage and what one must do or have to get health care, affect the welfare of the citizenry obviously and directly. It’s nonsensical to say that individual interest trumps the good of the uninsured, because it’s obvious how they’ll be affected.

In the case here, we’re talking about a personal behavior choice. While it’s true that we disagree about how much “people doing BDSM” affects society as a whole, I don’t think it can be at all disputed that whatever effect it would have is tiny compared to the effects of one health care system versus another.

Nine Deuce 2:

Trinity - Libertarians with money (who usually have insurance) think their best interests are served by our not having a single-payer system because they believe having one will cost them money. They’re all about individual choice and responsibility when it benefits them and refuse to admit that what they do as individuals is connected to a larger system of phenomena. It’s an each-man-for-himself thing, which is naive and selfish. And the same goes with “sex-positivism.” The counterargument to radical feminism is always personal choice/liberty, and it’s always made from the “I get off on this, and anyone telling me that I have to consider the fact that my choices take place in a larger context is trying to oppress me, and is therefore just as bad as the patriarchy itself” position.

You all can already see how I respond to these critiques: I think that even if BDSM reinforced patriarchy, a person's consensual sexual activity does not have anywhere near the social effects that choosing a single-payer health care system would. Objecting to the "selfishness" of a person who chooses to explore her sexual fantasies rather than reform them strikes me as just as important, socially, as objecting to the selfishness of the person who doesn't cover his mouth when he coughs, or something -- unless there is some clear sign of serious disease vector there, it just plain hardly matters even if we accept that there is risk.

(I actually don't think that BDSM reinforces, reifies, or copies patriarchy either. I'm tired of people making my relationships invisible because I am not a man, and then claiming they are feminists. But that is for a totally different post.)

What I want to do here, though, more than I want to talk about exactly where the argument train derails, is to talk about the technique here.

This is designed to make people feel guilty. "You're being selfish" is the kind of ad hominem that is going to work particularly well on people who:

commit themselves to social justice/social equality, which feminist or feminist-friendly people do
know they have social status that is undeserved and that others don't have, which the typical feminist blog audience is probably swimming in: likely white, likely middle-class, likely from what's called the "first world," etc.
support left-wing politics and causes, which are usually centered around at least the idea of minor self-sacrifice to help others less well-off
are anti-capitalist, or at least for a moderated and "socially responsible" mixed capitalism, which is another cause/ideology that feminist or feminist-friendly people often believe in

When someone says to the Libertarian 9-2 references, "You're being selfish," it likely bounces off. There's whole schools of thought, like those that look back to Nietzsche and Rand, that claim selfishness, individualism, and the like to be virtues, both personal and social.

But many feminist-leaning folks are idealists who want to help those less fortunate, and want to do it by trying to eliminate social disparities. Many such people feel that they're not doing enough to help. (I did, until I took a job working for disability rights. I'm totally comfortable now, knowing I'm not "selfish" but rather devoting my career itself to doing my part. And no, I am not giving more details. I am not out.)

This is perhaps exascerbated by what I'll call the "endless" quality of some feminisms and feminist activism. "We'll march until we stop rape," for example. Or "We need a new, egalitarian social order," where just about every existing way of bringing this about (legislation, liberal political reform, etc) is rejected as not enough of a radical change. It's easy to feel we just aren't doing enough when our best friend is assaulted the day after TBTN, for example.

So when someone comes along and says "You're selfish because you do BDSM" or "You're selfish because you are sex-positive" or "Doing SM is fine, but if you defend it, rather than seeing it as a tragic blemish on your soul due to trauma, you're selfish" it stings. It rubs salt in those wounds.

And for many people, it's easier to get the salt out by "examining," by "purging" for a while, or by taking on the "Woe is me, I'm kinky but wish I weren't" attitude than by volunteering at the rape crisis center or the soup kitchen, or taking the low-paying job at the nonprofit, or whatever have you.

But the thing is, going along with the bullies for however long you do it has no more or less effect on society as a whole than you doing something totally different with a consenting partner. Your "selfishness" is only a black mark on society if it leads you to do things that affect society -- and one more drop of water in the patriarchal ocean, even supposing these folks are right, is not that.

If the selfishness jibes sting, that may mean you should "examine" your life. It may mean you really do want to do something more than what you're doing. (It may not; like I said I think these people are bullying, and bullies raise discovering what stings to an art form.) But if this is the case, it's not your sexuality you should be looking at. It's your footprint on the world. Do you volunteer? Do you do activist work? If you do, is it the kind of "endless" marchy stuff, or things with clear-cut outcomes? If the former, is that OK with you?

Getting people thinking about their footprint on the world is good. Doing that with the intention of shaming or feeling superior -- which is what these folks are up to -- is just stupid, and not worth getting stung by anyway. These folks rarely let us all know just what they are doing to better the lives of the downtrodden themselves, after all.

Oh no, they must be sellll-fish! But at least their "radical feminist" theory isn't. Thank the stars for that.

Conversations

2008-12-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

In my past posts, I let you all know about some conversations going on at Nine Deuce's blog about BDSM and feminism. Some of you joined in there, some people came from there to here, etc.

I thought I'd let you all know that I got into a conversation with the woman I posted about here. (Looks like, for example, she did leave the Scene, but still does BDSM.) We moved the conversation over to my journal, here and here. I thought some of the folk here might want to see it.

I'd post excerpts to avoid possible linkrot, but it's a bit long.

Details From Someone Who Left

2008-12-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

I've posted several times that when I see narratives from ex-BDSMers, they tend to leave out a lot of details. I've said that I hoped someday to find someone who was willing to say, not only, "I got out, and I'm glad I did" but be willing to say what group she left, and go into specifics about why.

Well, I've found such a narrative now. I'm not going to specifically quote it here simply because it seemed the person wanted some measure of privacy, and I don't want people finding its text here and behaving in harassing ways or anything.

(I don't think any of the regulars here would do such a thing, but there are a lot of spam-harvester types out there on the WWW, and I'd hate for this person to find her personal stuff re-posted somewhere random or even hostile simply because gods know who picked it up.)

Here it is, though. There are some things in it I question (most notably the idea that endogenous endorphin "highs" can lead to the same sorts of addiction that taking exogenous drugs can), but for now... it's someone's story, and it's personal, and no, not everyone has a wonderful, leather-pride-flag-waving hootenanny of a good time.

http://rageaga instthemanc hine.com/2008/11/29/bdsm-the-sex ual-equival ent-of-being-into-renai ssance-faires-part-3-some-of-the-data/#co mment-3971

In less awesome news, there's also this one, yet another example of the stuff I think *isn't* very productive.

TOPIC TYME: Where do people think this "subspace substitutes for intimacy" thingy comes from?

Personally, I think that subspace and domspace can feel very intimate, and can sometimes lead people to think they're closer than they really are. We play with vulnerability, and being or becoming vulnerable is something people usually don't do until they trust you.

So I do think casual play runs a certain degree of risk. A bottom might let himself be vulnerable because the idea of it makes him hard, then think afterward "Whoa, I let my guard down, and it was great. Therefore I know I can trust you."

And that may be true in that he can trust the top for play, for a good time, for emotional safety while on the cross or something... but not that he's ready for a relationship, because they don't know they're compatible.

So yes, I do see that and think that's real, and an issue... but I think that the idea that this really messes up people's idea of intimacy is a stretch. Among people I know, most of us worked out pretty quickly that there are many different kinds of emotional connection, and that the emotional connection of a close relationship is not the same sort as the kind you have over the spanking bench.

And for me, as far as aggression goes... I think I was a lot more aggressive as the staunch sort of feminist than I ever was before or since, though I don't doubt that some people out there top out of vindictiveness, nastiness, or joy that they've found someone who consents to basically let them toss tantrums.

It's not been most of the people I know, though. The vast majority of other tops I've met are awesome people to talk to and learn from, IMO. It's like anything else -- it takes discernment to know who is your peer and who is immature.

Thoughts?

Wow.

2008-11-30T18:03:00.000-08:00

This guy "Spartacus II" apparently has an entire blog dedicated to mocking BDSMers.

Er, okay... whatever tickles your pickle, guy?

BREAKING NEWS: Tops Are Horribly Violent People. Film at 11.

2008-11-30T07:55:00.000-08:00

....all I've got to say to this one:

There’s much I could say at this point, but I’m sure nobody wants to read through 10+ paragraphs of pure bile. I’ll just stick with saying that anyone interested in being a BDSM dom probably fits the same personality type as those who staffed the camps at Belsen and Auschwitz. Torture is torture by any name.

is that as I understand it, assuming that there was such a personality type is wildly misunderstanding what actually happens when societies justify evil through systematic campaigns of dehumanization.

Interviews/Studies

2008-11-29T21:18:00.001-08:00

I'm about to head to bed, but random websurfing led me to this little study of SM, and I thought you all might like to read it.

It's nothing new to most of us I wouldn't think, but it's a fun brain snack. :)

And I'd love to see if Nine Deuce's promised posts in her anti-SM series include things like it.

I wouldn't have such faith in most who style themselves radical feminists, but although I find Nine's snarky manner eyeroll-inducing, she seems to have a far better eye for nuance than many of them.

Role-playing?

2008-11-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

I'm too tired to say much about this, but (as I said over there):

On tons of anti-SM websites, posts, and blogs, I run into this idea that SM is about "role-playing," that people who are into SM really get into acting out corny roles.

Honestly, as an eight-year veteran of the Scene, I find this rather odd, and I wonder where it comes from. I tend to see a lot more of people just straightforwardly doing stuff than I see setting up elaborate role-playing.

So, uh... where's this idea that we're all "role-playing" come from exactly? It doesn't seem to me to quite square with reality, tbh.

Really, "the sexual equivalent of Renaissance faires?" Where on earth am I supposed to get that kind of free time?

ETA: Also, didn't we do this already back in '06?

Personal Stories

2008-11-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

I originally posted this over at my LiveJournal, as an answer to AngryScientist's "what motivates sadists?" over here. He doesn't seem to have been impressed with my story, but I thought some of you might be interested in it, especially as it does talk about gender norms and how they've affected me. Anyone else care to share?

My Story, Version Eleventysixish

As far as my own perspective, exactly what made pain-for-pleasure sexually exciting to me, I don't know, although I was attracted to stories with dominance and submission as themes (usually female over male, but sometimes the reverse. I'd probably have enjoyed stories about same-gender setups too, but these were rarer for me to find when I was a kid) since I was a very young child. I know that some feminist theories suggest that this is not necessarily a matter of personal nature, as patriarchy gets to us from early ages, but I honestly doubt that it is fully a product of nurture in my own case. (This does not mean, as some assume, that I take it to be fully ingrained/biological. It only means I question the idea that social construction is ALL of the story.)

I, like many girls, also got the clear message that I was expected to be fulfilled by submission to men, swooning over their masterful demeanor, etc. As a girl trying to "be good" under patriarchy, I often felt that my desires were "backwards" and worried that something was wrong with me.

I've also, as a person born with a disability, had a rather medicalized life from birth. I do not think this made me attracted to pain in some way that "broke" me, but I do suspect that some of the curiosity I have about the limits of the human body, and some of my lack of fear of things that hurt, stem from having experienced a lot of invasive things that demonstrated to me how the human body responds to a lot of stimuli and also how it heals (better than one might think!)

I honestly, because I connect my kinks and my disability in my head, feel that people who argue that people are interested in consensual sadomasochism must be "damaged" or "broken" by culture or patriarchy are using a similar logic to those who argue for the medical model of disability. I can't separate the claim that my mind is "broken" and I experience bodily pleasure in the wrong ways from the claim that my body is "broken" and functions in the wrong ways. I don't know whether you do or don't subscribe to the social model of disability, but I've never understood how people who do could be anti-SM. In my mind, SM is a product of how I experience the world, and my disabled body is a large part of that.

For me, dominance and SM are times when my body can not only be graceful (I actually find, and I don't know why this is, that my movement is least impaired when I'm topping) but also times when my body can express power. That's very heady given that all my life I've been told that my body made me weak, inferior, dependent. To be the one in control, and to have obvious physical manifestations of that, like physically controlling what sensation someone under me feels, is really intoxicating given all that.

Also, I think that everyone has a dark side. This isn't to say we're all evil, it's just to say that I've never met anyone who hasn't had the occasional violent urge or forbidden desire. For me, one of those forbidden things is anger -- which I think is common under patriarchy. Women are expected to be nurturing and quiet, not aggressive and claiming. And being kind and nonviolent is definitely a good thing to be, and not something I'd want not to be. It's just that I don't always feel kind... and I don't think any human does all the time.

I mean, even look at radical feminists again. Someone like Twisty enjoys being angry and snarky and mean, for fun. She doesn't mean she wants to destroy men, but she does seem to enjoy saying things in biting ways. For me, sexual desires to be cruel are similar. They're not who I am most of the time, but they're things I feel sometimes.

Having a partner not just accept but eagerly desire to "play with" the cruel side of me, enjoy not only sexual stimulation I give but *pain* I give is really fun to me in part because it's very radical acceptance. I do these things that are supposed to be scary and hurt, and instead of recoiling, he gets hard/she gets wet and begs me for more. It makes me feel that any part of me, whether socially acceptable or not, is worth loving.

And I think there's really something to which emotions are "forbidden" that feminism can and does have a lot to say about. Women are expected to be "nice", quiet, demure, nurturing, put others (usually men) first, etc. SM gives me a space where I can be greedy, insistent, impolite, harsh, and not Put The Guy First by default. It's exhilarating to let that go, and to know as I do that it not only is OK with my partner, but is also sexually exciting to him (or her, though I primarily involve myself with men, in part I think because I kink on reversing the patriarchal default. And no, before you ask, I don't think that just because I do so in bed this "empowers" women as a class. It's just a lot of fun.)

Many men I've topped have said the reverse is exciting for them: that patriarchy expects them to be cold, in control, not "soft," not "feminine" or having any traits associated with the "feminine." When someone like me consensually mock-"forces" them to submit, that allows them to experience and express things patriarchy tells them not to. For a lot of them this is a very emotionally powerful experience, and it makes me feel gratified that they trust me enough to experience a richer and more full palette of human emotions around me.

Some of this I'm sure doesn't apply for heterosexual males who enjoy the dominant role, but I'm sure some of it does. I've heard many a friend of mine talk about how cool it is to do something to a woman that is "supposed" to be bad and mean, only to have it send her into sexual ecstasies. I've heard many of them say they like playing with the forbidden, too, whatever that's been in their lives.

The men who answered Fortuny may or may not be this type of person; I suspect a lot of them were assholes with anger issues. But I don't think that means one can draw conclusions about BDSM from them, either.

Finally, I note that you wanted people on your thread to address your friend Jen's story.

I do think that such things can and do go on in some BDSM circles, and that they are bad things. What I question is how common they are. In many of them that I hear, the woman is isolated from the larger BDSM community. Either she's not involved at all and BDSM is just something hubby brought home, or the guy gradually isolates the woman from the larger community by asserting that she's worth more to him or more serious or more loving if she's more completely submissive. This is an abuse tactic and a recipe for disaster, and it's not something most people I know have any patience with or support for.

I am, however, not one of the folks who say BDSM has to be time-limited "play" to be healthy. Personally, I'm in a relationship with some small, very minor D/s rituals in and out of bed. I think this sort of setup, where the power roles exist but are faint and fluctuate, is common, but for whatever reason is rarely talked about. Also rarely talked about are the many people whose relationships begin as play-based but evolve into more serious D/s because that's what the submissive partner, rather than the dominant one, wants.

OMG YAY OMG

2008-11-27T10:05:00.001-08:00

I was going to post something serious and thoughtful right now, but, well, uh... HOLY SHIT!

I got an email from someone who told me she found this site hunting around for resources on SM and feminism, and wondered just how easy it was to find... so, well, here, let me show you:

(1:03:39 PM) trinityva: but wow, is sm feminist that easy to find
(1:03:48 PM) trinityva: maybe i shou;d see how far up on google ha
(1:04:02 PM) lugalzagazzi: Hee! Let me know ;-)
(1:04:21 PM) trinityva: omg
(1:04:22 PM) trinityva: omg
(1:04:24 PM) trinityva: #1
(1:04:25 PM) trinityva: ...
(1:04:31 PM) trinityva: *falls over dead from yay*

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sm+and+feminism&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=

OH HELL YES.

(ETA: It's not #1 for "sadomasochism and feminism", but it is also #1 for "s&m and feminism" as well.)

Unmasking

2008-11-26T16:14:00.000-08:00

xposted from my lj

I left a comment earlier to this post on BDSM; it doesn't show up. I'm not sure if this is aggro-moderation or "I'm home for the Thanksgiving holiday," so I don't want to kick up a fuss. But I will post what I posted there here:

AngryScientist,

Before I say anything else, I’d like to ask you this: You seem to be suggesting that female sadists are totally beside the point, but wanting to know what it is that makes some men have the fantasies they do.

Would you, or would you not, then, be interested in hearing about how I see my own involvement, or am I beside the point because I’m not a man? Personally, I don’t think my fantasies or activities are all that different from the men I know who have similar fantasies and do similar things, so I’d think I could answer your questions too, but you seem to think the mere fact of my being female makes everything… different? Irrelevant?

Personally, I tend to think that discussions that say “Men who have or wield sexual power matter; women who have or wield it are odd plot points” are a bit… off. It seems to me to replicate something very patriarchal: as a woman, you have no power, so you are not worth talking to or thinking about.

But if you feel that my situation or my psyche is so different from a man’s that my saying anything is silly, let me know and I’ll leave you to your discussion. :)

There's another post that hasn't yet made it through moderation here.

The thing that intrigues me particularly about all this is the way that these posters seem to think they're "unmasking sadism," as if they've come across some new fact about SM or those who do it that makes their analysis a good one. When, as far as I can actually tell, the thing at the core of it is basically the same old

refusal to take people who do BDSM at our word when we talk about endorphins, or play, or negotiation, or whether we see D/s as "egalitarian" (some do, I don't) or "fair" (I do); and
anecdote by one poster/about one friend who was duped by someone using extreme, poorly-negotiated D/s to abuse or harm, by making the claim that "serious slavery" or "true love" or "being cool enough for me" involved never being permitted one's own life, interests, or personal growth, with
no discussion at all of how common such a story is, or in what subgroups within BDSM it is common or uncommon, or whether and how we can determine whether it is representative or not.

(okay, okay, in this case there's also "My buddy the dominatrix was a mean drunk, and I didn't believe her when she said she wanted out of sex work." I don't know if I read that right, but is she seriously saying there that because her friend was mean, the friend must have been dominant and therefore enjoyed work she claimed she wanted to leave? That's how I read it, though I hope I'm missing something obvious.)

I'd really like an "unmasking" that tries a little harder, ~~guys~~ ~~gyns~~ guys -- didn't realize he was male.

A Finer Point On It

2008-11-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Some people that I respect mentioned that my last post struck them as universalizing in a problematic way. They mentioned that for some people BDSM can be unhealthy or maladaptive. they wanted to be sure that I wasn't getting ahead of myself comparing into anti-SM theory to the theory behind conservatives recommending reparative therapy for gay people.

So I want to make this perfectly clear. I don't think that SM is wonderful for everyone at every point in their lives. I do believe that some people use SM to self harm. I do believe that some people bottom or submit because they believe that they are inferior or unworthy. I also believe that some people use sex and sexual pleasure, whether from SM or from non SM sex, in ways that are unhealthy for them.

However, I believe that this is all beside the point. Look, once again, at many of the reparative therapists' reasons for objecting to what they call "The gay lifestyle." They often cite such behaviors as promiscuity, drug use, partying, and shallowness as reasons why such a lifestyle does not ultimately satisfy the people who participate in it. People are actually looking for a lifetime monogamous relationship that is deep and intimate.

The problems with this are twofold. The first problem is obvious: not everyone wants monogamy, intimacy, or relationships. The second problem is different. For many people, the party circuit is indeed unsatisfying. However, this is not what being gay is about. A gay man may enjoy those things, but he may not. Being gay only means that he is attracted to other men, not that he will embrace particular social behaviors or not.

And I think a similar confusion is going on when people say "Wait, Trinity! You have to acknowledge that for some people, SM is an unhealthy fixation." no, I don't, because my point is not whether SM is always wonderful for everyone, but whether a particular sort of social constructionist theory captures what the SM experience is about for everyone.

It does not. Yes, for some people SM is a maladaptive coping strategy. But this does not mean that SM sex is fundamentally about self-harm, any more than sex, as a whole, for all humans is about self-harm. I'm sure we've all met someone who we at some point thought was using his sexuality in a way that was ultimately damaging to him. But very few people would say that he needs to give up sexuality. That therapy designed to make him asexual is wise.

I do think that some people who do, and enjoy, SM are not orientationally sadomasochistic. (For example, some try it only because a lover suggested it, but find they like it. Some value being sexually "adventurous" and see trying SM as one part of this. And some, yes, may try it because of pressure, or low self-esteem, or trauma.) I also think that some subset of these people who are sadomasochistically active may be so because they are dealing with an unresolved issue or problem rather than because it is actually good for them. SM may be a horribly bad idea for these people, and giving up SM may, therefore, be a positive step for them, in a way that I don't think "praying away the gay" can ever be for anyone.

However, this does not reveal anything about SM being bad. It reveals something humans have always known about sex and sexuality: that sex can be quite emotionally powerful, and that sometimes we can harness or use that emotional potency in ways that are actually bad for us.

Saying that I believe that the underpinnings of anti-SM "radical" "feminist" theory are disturbingly similar to the underpinnings of the theory fueling an obviously life-denying organization like NARTH is not saying that any given person who gives up BDSM is unhealthy for it. For some people, that is a positive step.

But that's due to personal factors, and it's certainly not due to my orientation being a "patriarchal lifestyle." (I couldn’t resist snark there…:)

Theories and Commonalities

2008-11-09T09:07:00.001-08:00

I spent some time yesterday reading over the blog of Truth Wins Out, an organization dedicated to "fighting right-wing lies and the ex-gay fraud." As I was reading through some of the discussions and descriptions of reparative therapy and its proponents, I was struck by some commonalities I see between the theories underpinning that movement and the "radical feminist" theories that claim that SM desires are imposed by the patriarchy and bad for women.

Here's TWO's description of NARTH, a a self described “non-profit, educational organization dedicated to affirming a complementary, male-female model of gender and sexuality":

At the Feb. 10, 2007 Love Won Out conference in Phoenix, the “secular” therapist told the audience, “When we live our God-given integrity and our human dignity, there is no space for sex with a guy.”
Confronted with protesters at their 2006 national conference in Orlando, NARTH instructed its members to “sing a hymn or pray instead,” according to Mother Jones magazine, in its Sept.-Oct. 2007 issue.
...Dr. Nicolosi has said in his first book, “Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality that, “I do not believe that any man can ever be truly at peace in living out a homosexual orientation.”
The late Dr. Socarides, who has a gay son that once served as President Bill Clinton’s gay liaison, told The Washington Post on August 14, 2007, “Homosexuality is a psychological and psychiatric disorder, there is no question about it. It is a purple menace that is threatening the proper design of gender distinctions in society.”

Now, obviously this is religion-based, rather than based on a theory that sexuality is socially constructed in a way that's bad for women. But there's a lot that I see that I find very familiar.

First, the "there is no space for" remark. The most strident of the anti-SM feminists also don't usually claim right out that no one should do BDSM. They just remind us that living to our full potential would not include doing BDSM, and that those of us who continue to do it are misguided and confused.

Second, the comment about "peace." This is a big one. According to these sorts of "radical feminist," it's perfectly within our rights to behave as we want, but we can't possibly be happy. Being subordinated to men is a bad state -- and even female tops like me are supposedly "subordinated" to our partners, since only men could ever really want this stuff -- and some secret part of us, deep inside, knows it. We're not content, somewhere inside ourselves, and in five years or so we'll come to the revelations that saved the ex-BDSMer feminists and be unable to deny that we "weren't at peace."

This is a particularly nefarious one. No human being is ever totally at peace with herself over everything. That makes it quite easy for manipulative techniques like these to get their hooks in people. If you're sad, if you're confused, particularly if you're currently unhappy sexually, it's very easy to remember what someone, be they radical feminist or reparative therapist, said to you about not being truly at peace with yourself. It's very easy for that, in turn, to trigger a "purge" if you're insecure: tossing out your sex toys and vowing to "find peace."

I haven't here quoted the bit from the website describing what NARTH takes the origins of homosexuality to be. First, we've all likely heard it: distant fathers, dominant mothers, and other gender-nonconforming setups in our home life. Second, the specifics of that are totally unlike any "radical feminist" theory about anything.

But the similarity I see even there is that the "not at peace" sexuality is taken to be socially constructed. For NARTH, homosexuality comes from being around gender nonconforming people and copying them. For "radical feminists" of this stripe, it comes from being around patriarchy. In both cases, the sexuality cannot be inborn.

It's not only that, though. I personally do think both homosexuality and BDSM orientation can be inborn, but that they need not be, and that using "inborn or not" as the barometer of whether the sexuality is okay or not is beyond stupid. It's that these theories of social construction/nurture are taken to be obvious and beyond reproach.

No one can really, truly prove for sure that social environment doesn't shape sexuality, sometimes radically. We believe that the "mother" theory is stupid as an explanation for homosexuality because there are tons of people it doesn't fit. I believe the "patriarchy" theory is stupid as an explanation for BDSM orientation because I've met tons of people who don't connect it to gender at all.

But unlike the "mother" theory, there's no way to say "this is what happened outside of patriarchy." If you accept their understanding of patriarchy as something that not only affects but shapes every part of our psyches, there is no way to prove them wrong either.

But notice, from what I say above, that this doesn't actually suggest that they are correct. It only looks like it does. Just like there's no way out of the claim that people who do BDSM are unhappy or "not truly at peace" because no human ever is, there's no way out of the claim that people's sexualities aren't fruits of patriarchy because no one is free of it either.

But all that that line of thinking indicates is that we have no idea what human sexuality would look like free of patriarchy. I've seen scads of discussions in feminist spaces about whrther there'd be SM in utopia. They've never come to resolution, for the very same reason: all that any of us, pro or anti, can do in such discussions is speculate. I speculate that SM would still exist, because pain play isn't about power, and that D/s would still exist, because power play isn't about injustice. Someone else speculates that pain and power are attractive because of oppression, and no one in Utopia would dream of it.

Problem so totally solved, there.

Third, both NARTH and the "radical feminists" are careful to inform everyone that they don't intend to impose on anyone. They acknowledge that their treatments or theories are not for everyone. Here's NARTH:

NARTH respects each client's dignity, autonomy and free agency.
We believe that clients have the right to claim a gay identity, or to diminish their homosexuality and to develop their heterosexual potential.
The right to seek therapy to change one's sexual adaptation should be considered self-evident and inalienable.
We call on our fellow mental-health association to stop falsely claiming to have "scientific knowledge" that settles the issue of homosexuality. Instead, our mental-health associations must leave room for diverse understandings of the family, of core human identity, and the meaning and purpose of human sexuality.

I hear something similar from "radical feminists." They are careful to remind any pro-BDSM person they debate with that they have no interest in preventing us from doing BDSM and no personal investment in any individual coming to agree with their theories or to change sexual behavior or orientation. They say instead that they only hope to get more people thinking about where their desires come from and why they have them. I've even e-met a few who've told me they agree with "radical feminist" theories about where their desires come from and kinda wish they could change, but know they can't.

The thing about this, though, is that neither NARTH's nor the "radical feminists'" theories are as neutral as they claim. No, no one is compelling anyone to seek change, if we do these folks the courtesy of taking them at face value when they say that. However, their theories assert that you're broken. If you're gay, it's because something's wrong in your life and you are so desperate for closeness with people of the same gender that you act out sexually, desperate for their attention. If you're kinky, it's because you have been so supersaturated with the message of male dominance and female submission that you're incapable of sexually relating to others in a positive way.

And that, in the end, is the big commonality: the theory that people are broken and need fixing. Homosexuality supposedly comes from family dysfunction; BDSM is often described as the result of abuse, despite many people enjoying BDSM who were never abused and many people who were abused thinking they had BDSM interests before any abuse happened. Corollary to this is the idea that as you heal, your sexuality may change.

I've spoken before about how damaging I feel this is, and I think it cuts straight to the heart of both what's wrong with reparative therapy and what's wrong with "radical feminist theory" about how abuse affects us. I quote from myself, elsewhere:

I don't in any way mean to suggest that I know better than that person [an ex-BDSMer who believed that her SM fantasies came from her abuse, and said that she replaced those fantasies with mental images of waterfalls] where her fantasies came from or how her healing should have gone. But I will say that personally, I found the assumption that healing from my trauma would involve no longer being a sadomasochist pretty harmful.

The people I relied on for mental health care told me that my fantasies came from my trauma, and that once I'd really healed, I'd not have them any more.

I spent so much time worrying about my sexuality not changing, of waterfalls or whatever else not replacing my self, that I didn't allow myself for years to take pride in the actual progress I was making toward healing. I became obsessed with the idea that my sexuality wasn't changing and therefore there was something wrong with me, even as I slowly felt better about myself, less inclined to self-harming (again, maybe to you the desire to do SM and to self-harm are the same, but in my experience they are very different), etc.

I think promoting the idea that SM fantasies are *always* scars from trauma is harmful.

In a nutshell, that's my major problem with both reparative therapy and anti-SM "radical feminism": this theory that you're broken, and if you just pray enough or "examine your desires" enough you'll heal, but that if you don't you must just be too hurt, too broken, too weak, or too easily seduced to get over it.

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