More on feministing

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?"

More Linkage: Ren says "prove it"...

...about the claim that there'd be no BDSM in Utopia:

Grumble. Okay, so, some interesting stuff going on here over at Trinity’s: The Have You Examined Baseball Bat Effect and the bullshit and rage it inspires, the Patriarchal Influence Pie Flinging fest and how annoying that shit gets, blah blah blah, the story that never fucking ends, some people are just so much more enlightened, and IN A POST PATRIARCHAL WORLD THERE would be NO BDSM or other such “unsavory” sexual activities…

To which I say: PROVE IT.

How is there any way, whatsoever, to prove that in any sort of society, or future, whether or not desires to dominate or submit, be aggressive or passive, take power or relinquish power, would simply disappear?

So many fucking people like to write off things like aggression, power seeking, or want to dominate as “male” things, but I do not buy that shit for a second. I think those are human things, human desires, with no real specific gender, and no matter what sort of world we live in, there will always be people who want, like and get off on those things –regardless of what is between their legs.

I do recall, many years ago, in an Ethics class, I proclaimed quite loudly that I never believed there would be peace on earth. I was rewarded with shocked and stunned looks by a roomful of silver spoon hippies who had never worked a day in their lives, and of course, they all wanted to know why! My response…well, because there will always be someone like me, who will want what you have, and be willing to try and take it, and there will always be people like your parents, who have things, and will do what is needed to keep people like me from taking them.

Grim? Yes. True? Also yes.

I think that we can chalk up more to a human desire to thrive and prosper, and good old envy and shit like that, rather than “patriarchy”.

And I have to ask, in this mysterious future where everyone is all happy happy joy joy equal love woohaa…

Is everyone equal in all ways? I mean, I’m non-neurotypical. As in, well, I am just fucking wired differently. Aggressive. Anti-social. High strung. Don’t sleep much. Truth is, I do like hurting people in sex, and being hurt in return. A lot of that probably has to do with that aggressive, anti-social thing I have going on. Yeah, I do it with consenting people, but yeah, there it is. Sooo, do people like me, or any of the other countless non-neurotpical people out there, exist in future perfect land? Are there no bi-polar, or OCD, or schizophrenic, or psychotic, or depressed, or any other type of non-neurotypical people out there? Or how about those folk with physical issues which make alternative forms of sex sort of the only sort of forms of sex that work for them?

Or do we not just exist in that perfect future and all? Somehow, we’ve all been…dealt with.

Do tell, I’m curious. How does one think they can eliminate HUMAN desires like control, aggression, submission, dominance, pain, and things of that nature.

How do you plan to so utterly rewire humanity like that?

What, dare I ask, is the plan?

Examination Burnout

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...

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.

Examination

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.

On Asking (And Not) Asking Why

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*

Tired now...

...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.

Curiosity, again

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

1. "I tried that and it yielded nothing useful," or
2. "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?