Category Airing (Reprise)

[ Reposted from here at Trin's request and in a fit of, 'Oh, right, that so goes at SM-F, doesn't it?' ]


I've got a fair amount of stuff rattling around in my head in response to Dev's post about female submission, and a lot of it is horrifyingly fraught and such, so I'm going to try to get what I said in the comments there coherent and see if I can deal with the rest of it later when I'm feeling less like bleeding on the carpet about it.

I am not a female submissive.

I am a woman. I am submissive.

Spotting the difference matters.

I'm on a couple of BDSM communities on livejournal, and every so often someone will pop up with "I read on male_dom" or "femdom" or "humbled_females" or something else linking sex or gender to power exchange. And while I'm pretty easy for communities, none of these have ever even remotely tempted me, not even as a place to lurk. They don't offer me anything I value, that I can value. I just ... not only is this not my kink, it's a kink that makes me uncomfortable.

And some of that discomfort is being genderqueer enough that any sort of sex-based essentialism tends to throw me out of the conversation entirely, because I'm either miscategorised or in that neither-fish-nor-fowl place where somehow, in the discussion being had, I don't exist. And not existing is a nasty, uncomfortable place to keep winding up being, so I prefer to stick to fields where my status as an extant being doesn't throw errors everywhere.

The thing is, these things aren't descriptive to me, stuff like "M/f" or "F/m"; they don't seem to describe systems where those just happen to be the relationships those people have, but rather something where it is important that The Person Of One Sex Is Dominant, and The Person Of The Other Sex Is Submissive. It's a particular gendering fetish, and it's not one that I share; it's not one I want to be involved with, either. ("Your kink may be okay, but I'll go over there now.")

If one isn't treating the sexes of the people involved as something that matters, then there isn't a need to specify. Those facts will come up as relevant, and if they're not relevant, they won't, and there's no sense bringing them up. There's no need to make a marked case of it. Someone reading for detail can probably pick out the facts of various interactions, to some level, and make guesses about others, especially as I do not go to any particular effort to conceal stray data (partially as a political act), but unless it matters, that's just data kicking around.

And every so often I get in my tracking someone doing a websearch for 'femsub' (and that's, I believe, the first time that appears in this blog; I just googled and got this for the search result, which doesn't contain it), and I sort of wince and want to shake the boxes a little, make space in which I can be a submissive without being a "femsub". Because I'm not one, and no amount of treating someone who fits two categories, who is 'female' and 'submissive', as thereby going into a category that links the two will make me stop existing for the convenience of the categorisers.

And all this leaves me awkwardly on the edge of discussions of differences in perspective on seeing a male submissive or a female submissive. For reasons that I think have a lot in common with people who have conceptual issues with the two -- that I'm deeply uncomfortable with stuff that looks like it's framing 'power' and 'sex|gender' as being intrinsically linked in a particular way -- but from my usual Klein perspective. Because I don't approach or perceive power as gendered, I can't meaningfully take part in a conversation in which the gendering of power is present as an axiom. It erases me from the discourse.

It most particularly erases my power. When my submission is gendered, it feels to me like it turns it into something that's about-womanness, rather than about-power. And I can't understand that as anything other than a caricature, because it's so alien to me, so it feels like treating me as a cardboard cutout, making my status as a woman the first and most important thing about me in a context where I feel the most important thing is my status as a submissive.

And yes, there's a fuckton of problematic stuff out there about power, especially in this context sexualised power, and sex|gender. I don't deny that, because I'm not a damned fool. But my submission is not about womanhood, it's not about femininity, it's not about genitalia; it's about loyalty, dedication, oathmaking and oathkeeping, being a pillar of support, service, strength, and trust.

These are not incompatible with being a woman, but they are not female. Focusing on my femaleness uncenters the perception from my power.

And it's all about the power.

Sex, Lies, Transmisogyny, and the Heteronormativity of BDSM, pt. 2

Sex, Lies, Transmisogyny, and the Heteronormativity of BDSM, pt. 2

Part 2 of Lisa being amazing. On BDSM:

Her implication is that being a sub, being a slave, being a bottom, whatever you want to call it, is completely passive. That basically, all you do is lay there while your top whips you, drips hot candle wax on you, ties you up in restraints, and so on. The top gives and the bottom receives. That the dynamic goes exactly one way. That the top has power and the bottom does not. That the dynamic is identical to the stereotypical heterosexual missionary sex act where the man plunges in and the woman just lays there and takes it. Healthy BDSM relationships just don’t work that way. They have to be highly interactive, with communication and power going both ways. The top has the power to do whatever she wants within the bottom’s boundaries, and the bottom has the power to stop it at any time. Trust is the primary facet of a strong relationship between a top and a bottom, and Ms. Croson does not even acknowledge this. She can’t afford to, since she wants her readers to view BDSM as abusive heterosexual practices taken to an extreme. The top as an angry, controlling wifebeater, the bottom as a submissive victim who can’t even bring herself to leave her abuser.

This is echoed in the beliefs, when inclusion of BDSM practitioners at MWMF was being debated, and some women believed that allowing them on the land would give the subs a chance to escape these obviously abusive relationships. Some suggested setting up workshops to help them get away - of course, none wanted to get away because they love their kinks and have too strong a sense of themselves to allow others to talk them out of it.

On transgender:

She repeats the same arguments about transgender as she does about BDSM - which is expected, because she wants both equated as the same kinds of “wrong things” in feminist eyes. She again asserts that “where identity springs from is never examined.” What she really means is “Whenever trans people explain their identities, their sense of self, and why they transition, we ignore them and impose our narratives upon their lives. Those invented narratives never examine where identity springs from.” As I mention before, if you differ from the expected norm, you’re almost forced to examine it. I spent years when most kids think about G.I. Joe or Barbies trying to deconstruct what the hell “being a girl” meant vs. “being a boy.” I tried to see myself as a person with both a male and female spirit before I was eight years old. I tried to examine the possibilities that I was just a transvestite, or gay. I questioned constantly how I could know I was a girl when my body said I was a boy. I examined my identity, my sense of self, every way I could think of. I tried to suppress the idea entirely. I never really got to the bottom of it all, but I searched every nook, cranny, and crevice I could find that might give me some hint. I just don’t see how you can grow up with the sense of being one gender, your body being the other sex, and dealing with the messages society sends boys and girls while trying to sort them all out without some serious examinations of what’s going on.

Her argument seems to imply that trans people decide one day that we want to transition, that we’d be more comfortable as the other sex, or life would be easier because we can’t handle being gay - this isn’t much of a stretch, because other articles on Questioning Transgender explicitly lay this out. In her lack of understanding - and her lack of willingness to understand - transgender lives, Ms. Croson imposes patriarchy upon who and what we are.

Submissive Men and Radical Bullshit, er, Feminism

A couple of people had asked me what radfem theory has to say about submissive men. Well, hunting back through everyone's favorite piece of completely wrongheaded literature I found it! Here y'all go:

Some politically co-optive men have even claimed that their masochistic identification is "woman-identification" and that it is meant as evidence of sympathy with feminism -- which shows how abysmal is their understanding of women and feminism. But that any men should wish to experience what they think women experience -- this is old news, as old as Pentheus' curiosity (and is rooted, I think, in envy.) Men who see themselves as relatedly masochistic, "femme," feminine, etc. obviously are insulting the female (in person and in principle.) If they grovel to a male master they are mimicking (for fun) an experience all women in patriarchy are in some way or another forced to endure in reality. If they cower before a female 'dominatrix,' they are superficially reversing, and thereafter trivializing, real women's real oppression. The one act literally makes fun of the pain of our reality by ignoring our powerlessness; the other act mocks the reality of our pain by denying our powerlessness. Both are vicious, expectable, and for the purposes of our investigation, irrelevant. [i]

---

[i] Morgan, Robin. "The Politics Of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies." Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis. Edited by Robin Ruth Linden, et al. (San Francisco: Frog in the Well, 1982), 117.

*huggles the irrelevant femmes* I still love you...

And honestly:

"You mock my pain!"

"Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."

Honestly that's SM in a nutshell to me, right there. LIFE HURTS. Might as well have fun with that rather than sit around blubbering about it. Orgasms > pissing and moaning.

Gender Supremacists in BDSM: A Difficult Confession

I was just thinking of a comment of Verte's in another thread, wherein she mentioned asking people into male-supremacist BDSM "why they get off on it"

and I was thinking that it seems to me that they're not just getting off on the idea of a world following the dynamic they like, but interpreting the world AS secretly following that dynamic. And I don't know why that is, but my guess is insecurity. If you know something secret about women or men that they don't admit to, you don't have to feel like a pervert or an outcast or a nostalgic, reactionary person.

Why am I mentioning this? Because of an old, completely cringeworthy personal diary entry of mine from Feb 2001 (at the time -- though it should be obvious -- I thought I was straight. I was also trying to use "femdom" as a way of making myself more feminine. I'd always been more comfortable androgynous or masculine, but felt ashamed. When I discovered the Scene, being a feminine top seemed a good compromise and I tried to shoehorn myself into it for a while. Later I let go of that and realized that I didn't really want to be feminine, even in a dominant way.)

I realized something today: I never thought I saw things along gender lines, but I'm now realizing that I do. i just see things along backwards gender lines. :) I am beginning to think that maybe the reason I'm still a tad confused by Maledom/femsub relationships is that in some fundamental way i see things the opposite way. I always used to think I was totally egalitarian on this -- equality, M/f, F/m, But I am beginning to believe (to my own disquietude) that what I have is not only a preference but perhaps a paradigm. No, I don't wnat it to be one -- I want everything to be equal in my own eyes... but right now I think it's not.

I say this because I think of the Femdom as the ultimate in the ideal of a female -- a sort of goddess nature that I strive toward and can't help but believe other women strive for as well even though I know their quest for their inner divinity doesn't have to take that form. I say this because I see male bottoms the same way -- as a perfection, as this noble form that exemplifies what the male essence really is. I know it's not actually true, but it is what my instincts tell me: that all the male posturing, endless male jockeying to be at the top of the sexual totem pole, subjugation of women in the not-too-distant past, etc is all an illusion, built on fear of losing power and becoming what they truly are.

I don't like that I have this feeling -- I know it is not true, and everyone is everywhere along this spectrum. But I can't shake it, and that is what makes me find Maledom/femsub so odd. I can't imagine that any woman in her right mind would be submissive. Not that I think it's wrong in any way... just that it leaves me confused. I can imagine easily a woman submitting to another woman -- then she'd just be lower in the hierarchy than the other woman who Doms her. But I just can't picture why someone who has the inner force and actie spirit of Goddess would choose to give herself over to the sublime passivity that for me is the domain of the guys, I know our culture says the opposite, and I myself tried to fit into the "passive, feminine girl" mold -- and only felt natural when I let that go. But i am universalizing my experience here, and that's not good.

Why am I? I don't know. Rationally, rthere's no reason for it. Rationally, I see that many people see men the way I see women, and women the way i see men, and such views have limited both. But for some reason, my instincts tell me it just makes more sense one way than the other.

Yowie. Yuck. Ewww. Gah.

But re-reading it, I DO remember feeling that way. And I DO remember having no idea why, feeling that I was being unfair, etc.

Now that I think about it years later, having been exposed to tons of different BDSM dynamics and people, being comfortable with my bisexuality, having played with women, dated a woman, etc...

...I really think that came from insecurity on my part. I was a very new top, and very young (21, at the time) and overwhelmed with new feelings. I was frightened because I knew that society in general thought I should submit to men. And in the dungeon I was seeing men let down a facade of dominance and become comfortable and open in a way I often didn't see from men with macho walls up.

So I suppose it was easy for me to look at men who were behaving nastily or who seemed insecurely macho and grin knowingly and think "I know what you REALLY are..." (and of course, that meant that what had been a threatening or uncomfortable interaction with a sexist fool could become a sexual fantasy about what might happen when he let that facade down... ;)

Applying this to male tops, I can easily imagine similar faulty reasoning on their part too. Silly as it looks to most feminists, there are a lot of men out there who feel insecure because feminism has shaken up what's expected of them. Witness how incredibly incensed men can get about minor points of etiquette, like whether or not women want doors held open for us any more, and how rude or disorienting this is for some men.

As silly as I find all that stuff, it's not hard for me to think myself into the place of a man like that and think that, perhaps, believing in some secret kernel of submission in all women could make him feel just a little less threatened and bewildered. If he's not secure enough to let go of that thinking... well, that's where some of the pushy insistence that all women submit (or should) could come from.

As far as the submissive people who are into gender supremacy, that one I can't wrap my head around as easily because I'm not submissive. But I suppose it could be similar. A straight man comes to terms with the fact that he yearns to be a woman's slave, but still feels emasculated among his straight male peers -- and BAM! secret truth: Women are Superior Goddesses and patriarchy is bitter fear of The Real Reality. A straight woman finally manages to escape the pressure of what she deems a "feminist" life path/demand set, and BAM! "we're all unhappy with 'the feminist new order', deep inside..."

I don't know. I'm embarrassed at that old post of mine. But I do remember thinking it. And I remember the thought that most straight men were liars, that they secretly yearned to be mine, under it all... it was an exhilarating thought.

Remembering it, I'm not surprised that some immature people would be stuck there.

"Smashing" Binaries?

I had written up a long post, but it got eaten.

I've been thinking a lot lately about binaries. The binaries in SM sex. Top and bottom. Giver and receiver. Dominant and submissive. The way that these roles complement one another. The way that they're designed to fit together perfectly and create an intense experience precisely because of the contrast between them.

A lot of feminism is suspicious of binaries. Gender is a binary that we love to discuss smashing or subverting, even if we often find ourselves creeping back to essentialism when we try to justify destroying it. We love to talk about the societal roles imposed on men and women. The way that, if you haven't been paying attention, they seem to be complementary and maybe even sweet, but really they raise the men at the expense of women.

But a beginning to wonder about binaries. I'm beginning to wonder but the people who fit into them. People like me who like being tops or bottoms. People like the more traditional transsexuals, who I occasionally see getting shit from people who think that they should be helping to smash or subvert the gender binary. Who get told to be less traditional, or less stealth, or more genderfucked in general for political reasons. Or even people who get told they're not really straight, or not really gay or lesbian, because everyone must be a little bisexual.

I'm beginning to think that many of us fit in -- and even like -- some binaries. I'm beginning to wonder if we don't all have some secret hidden polarity that we find exciting, or interesting, or the just plain fits. And I'm starting to think that we need to talk less about smashing binaries and who should be doing it, and more about enabling people to really and truly fit anywhere on continuums, even the ends. Because we're not really trying to destroy the ends. We're just trying to make sure that being on one end of the other is not compulsory.

And yeah, in one sense that "smashes" the idea that everyone is 0 or 1. But people tend to confuse that with "getting rid of 0 and 1." "There will be no bottoms (and by extension, no tops, the tyrants!) in utopia." "'Man' and 'woman' will lose their meaning." "No one will be 'straight' or 'gay', because no one will 'feel locked in' to a certain kind of partner -- oh, those weird people who don't behave omnisexually? They're just unevolved."

And that... uh. No, not really the world I want, thanks.

Stacked Decks and Rubber Cocks

I want to talk about stacked decks. I got into a discussion here with another dominant woman about the use of strap-ons with male partners. She is vehemently against them, or at least vehemently against the stereotype that all dominant women use them or that they should be the culmination of a female dominant, male submissive scene:

And, no, fucking someone with a strap-on is not empowering. Having to use a rubber cock to fuck someone is – I think – rather the opposite. It’s like an admission that a woman isn’t equipped to fuck and dominate someone. It’s equating the dom-fuck with the penis.

Having to strap a phallus to myself to be a dom? Empower me backwards!

Listen carefully and you’ll hear the oh so subtle message of strap-on play: You need a cock to be on top, you need a cock to be a dom, you need a cock to fuck.

I mean really, seriously really, does no one else think that it is *fucked* *up* that scenes of a woman dominating a man often culminate in her doing a more politically dubious drag act than your average forced fem session.

A culture where femdom sex puts more value on strap-on up arse than cock in vagina it is saying that the person on top, doing the fucking, intrinsically has more power than the one on her back getting soundly pounded. Which really isn’t true. There’s a lot of nasty things I can do to a person when I’m underneath them, close to their belly and their chest and their nipples. Things that they can’t really stop me doing because their arms are busy bearing their weight and doing all the work of fucking me extremely nicely and hardly

Now if you know me, you can probably predict my reaction to this pretty accurately. That being that it's profoundly insulting to claim that I'm disempowered by having sex in a way that I like, (even worse, that I don't come from the sex that I like, as if 1) I'm lying and 2) how good the sex I had is is dependent only on my orgasm, and whether others are adequately aware of it, even if they're predisposed to believe I must not have had one!) and worse to suggest that I must do it because I'm only serving someone else. As I said in the comments to her post, I fantasized about penetrating my partners since I knew what penetration was. Part of the reason I sought out the SM community was precisely because of that hokey, woman as penetrator stereotype. I was like “Oh, whoa, women like me! I’m not crazy!”

And there's also the disability angle. Relaxing enough to enjoy being penetrated is somewhat difficult for me. On rare occasions, it's worth doing. But when I could be inside my partner, experiencing what it's like to actually literally get into someone... relaxing enough to like something in my vag just seems a bit silly and off-point.

So there's the whole whiff of ableism in people telling me what I should and shouldn't be doing when I'm having sex with a man. (Interestingly I see much less shit about whether I should be penetrating a woman. The feminist in me asks "Why is that?" Knowing what people think of my flexi-semi-stone-ity, I know the answer well, I think: Some cunt needs to be getting penetrated, and well even if hers isn't, at least hers over there is. That's what cunts are for.)

But here BJ is again, responding to me:

And there is so much gender fucking in femdom compared to other deviances. You have to ask why.

That's when I realized, thinking about how I didn't dare say in her space that I love gender fucking (alongside good old fashioned pain, it's my biggest turn-on) and actually prefer to be called Sir rather than Ma'am, that the deck is stacked either way.

The deck is stacked against me because I'm too butch, not adequately representing my gender if I do what I want to do. If I do what I want to do, no holds barred, I must be demonstrating that being masculine and being dominant are one and the same. No matter how vehemently I insist that I don't believe this is the case for anyone else. I will be seen much more easily and much more frequently than I will be heard.

The deck is stacked against her because every time she claims that being penetrated can be a dominant act, someone out there isn't going to hear that either. Someone out there is going to go right back to thinking that she must be less dominant or be submissive deep inside, because she really likes to be on her back.

And I think it's very important to acknowledge that all of us fit the "problem" stereotypes in some way. I fit them because I love being a butch top with the feminized male bottom. I've introduced several partners who never would've liked or wanted it to feminization, who've come to love it precisely because I like making them my "girls" every now and then.

And as far as she goes, I don't know or well enough to know how she fits them or doesn't. But I do know that she calls herself "Bitchy Jones," and even though I get the pun (on "Bridget Jones' Diary"), it makes me groan because I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired of the stereotype of a dominant woman as "A bitch." I hate that.

It makes us all sound like harpies, shrilly picking at people, with nothing real or serious to say. It bothers hell out of me. Yeah, we're bitches, baby. It couldn't possibly be that we're smart, or taking pain from us is fun, or we're authorities who deserve to decide. Nope. Don't fuck with us because we're bitches.

Reminds me so strongly of the stereotype of overly "dominant" vanilla wife/female partner-as-petty-controlling-nag that I cringe.

And there she is, OMGBWTFBBQ, REIFYING IT ALL BY NAMING HER BLOGX0RZ NO WOMAN SHOULD WANT THAT!!!111!!!eleventy!!!!zomg! IT'Z BAD 4 UZ.

To me this stuff, this inavoidability to ever fully divorce ourselves from the crap version of what we do, is why a careful, thoughtful feminism is something the SM community badly needs. It's not necessary because it's better not to be feminine, or better to find an empowering way to be feminine. It's necessary because patriarchal stereotypes create Catch-22's where no matter what we do, someone out there can call us not feminine enough, or disempowered due to or femininity, and have what they say stick. Have what they say taken to define us, over our own voices and we have to say for ourselves.