Face of the Scene

Pantryslut on LJ writes in a post titled "on the Fetish Flea, and the scene in general":

Really, I don't think it's nostalgia that has me remembering a time when "the scene," that is, the public face of BDSM ("our community," however you want to put it) was much, *much*, MUCH more diverse. D/S was always the predominant flavor, of course, and that's always chapped my ass a little bit. But there were all sorts of ways to do it, and all sorts of folks to do it with, including a hefty dose of queers, and a lot of dominant women, and quite a few just kinky weird folks doing whatever the heck they felt like at the time.

Now, there's a definite predominating dynamic.

It's male dominant, female submissive.

In fact, it's a little more specific, but I am having a hard time right now explaining exactly how. But, you know, women are there to be displayed, men are there to display them. Women are there to give blowjobs and accept spankings. Men are there to dole them out. Women are on their knees, or on leashes. Men hold the lead. Women smile and flirt and tilt their heads, or they stare at their feet. Men bare their teeth and joke about "if you know any beautiful young Scorpio women, send them my way."

It's also aspirational, with people aspiring to be more and more submissive, give up more and more control, and not just in scene. And you're supposed to have one role with one person. You can switch, but that means you top person X and you bottom to person Y, not "yesterday I tied you to the bed and cut pretty designs into your chest, and tomorrow I think I want you to spank me."

Which of course reminded me of maymay's There is so little space for me:

The overwhelming feel of the event was decidedly…patriarchal. "This is a flirt-heavy zone," the greeter told us as we entered, and proceeded to inquire about Eileen's weekend. Maybe "flirt-heavy" is just the PC word for meat market now. Maybe that's too harsh, but there's no denying the implication that men would do the purusing and women would be the pursued. There's nothing wrong with that (putting my head in Eileen's lap at a party was how we got together—quite the forward thing for submissive male to do, many people would probably think), but the expectation is nauseating.

Even the men, the poor ignorant sods, are succumbing to the peer pressure. (Maybe that's because most of them are spineless bastards to begin with who are just aching to be told what to do. Oops, maybe that was too harsh again.) You see it in their ridiculous bait-and-switch routines where the submissive men pretend to be dominant only long enough to get the woman to bed with them. Then they turn around and get on their hands and knees and start talking about how pathetic they are. This is probably one of the very few times I'll actually agree with those men: they are pathetic, and I'm not only ashamed but enraged to be thought of as similar to them, not to mention just how many things are wrong with the very idea that this tactic might actually work out well for anyone.

I'm jealous of the submissive women for whom this kind of space must be an incredible cornucopia of sexual celebration. I bet they actually had a blast at the art show. At the same time, I'm sorry, for their sake, that this potentially wonderful environment is all but destroyed by utterly disrespectful men.

Now, I'm light-years from being experienced with the way things are in the "scene", as I'm pretty much a private player and always have been, but I've seen bits and pieces of this in a lot of the online conversations I've seen and the references people who actually do nonprivate play or interactions make. And I can't say I know how it used to be, any more than I can say I know how it is now.

If I make it out to the Flea this weekend, though, I'm going to look and see what I can spot.

How hard do folks here find it to find diversity in their kinked communities, or niche communities that are friendly to their particular things? For people who have been around the scene for a while, how has the diversity changed where you are? Has the community fractured into splinter subcommunities, have people gone more private in disproportionate fractions, is it the big town luxury of having kinksters one can afford to dislike? (Thinking of Trinity's comment on Little Light's small town queer folks post on Feministe, here.) And how can it be fixed?

E is for Eclectic: Why Female Gender Supremacy is Ignorant Crap, part 1 of 87

E is for Eclectic: Why Female Gender Supremacy is Ignorant Crap, part 1 of 87

An excellent post detailing why female supremacy (or any other gender supremacy in BDSM really) sucks hairy donkey gonads -- excuse me, licks the pristine vulva of a queen goddess -- er

really stinks:

I try to ignore it, believe me, but this shit is everywhere.

Why bother? Somebody has to. If the intelligent, thinking female doms and male submissives keep ignoring this crap and not addressing it head on, it will never get addressed. Everybody else is too busy laughing their asses off at such ridiculous statements, when they aren't in stitches or up in arms over male supremacy in Gor. Or when they aren't writing all female doms and male submissives off as fucking nutters.

....This is embarrassing, people. Embarrassing! It's like attending a University science school that has a small group of religious zealots preaching Creation Science with megaphones. Imagine them getting all the press attention, them pretending that of course, all of the University believed and preached Creation Science. Not only would I be mortified, but I'd eventually have to look up from my legitmate lab work and say something.

....Being a dominant woman or a submissive man is a sexual kink. You can make a sexual kink into a lifestyle, if you like, or you can keep it for sex play, but you are deluded if you try to make the whole rest of the fucking world fit your own sexual kink. Not to mention making yourself look very, very silly in the process.

"Ah, I'm kinky turned on by imagining submitting to a woman, therefore this is the One True Way and all men should be submitting to all women all the time." 'cause god knows, you couldn't be like specially perverted or something.

....What the fuck do my perversions have to do with the real world? I am now going to use my perversion to believe that the world is flat, the sun revolves around the Earth, that dinosaurs lived at the same time as mankind and that all women want to hurt men and all men want to be hurt 24/7.

Right on, E.

The bizarre thing to me is when people say "this is what women are and this is what men are, and that's that" and then claim "it's my belief":

Why is one person's point of view so unacceptable to others? If she believes in Female Supremacy - than so be it. There is a desire for men to openly submit to the leadership and decision-making prowess of women. I'm one man who is all for it.

Basic logic for those who slept through it in college (and I don't blame you if you did, it's boring shit. What I do blame you for is being unable to figure this out for yourself):

If you assert that all A's are B's, you're asserting that no A is not a B.

Thus if you assert that all men are submissive and all women dominant, you ALSO (it's magic how this works!) assert that

• No man is not submissive. (Which is broader than, but also includes, "no man is dominant.")
• No woman is not dominant. (Which is again broader than, but also includes, "no woman is submissive.)
  

If you assert that (or the related "Men should submit to women"), you're no longer making a statement about you yourself and what you like. You're being prescriptive. You're telling others how to live their lives, how to set up their relationships, and how to fuck.

There is no cute little backdoor by which you can escape saying you're for anyone living as she likes if your whole framework for looking at the world involves all men doing one thing and all women another.

[sarcasm] Though perhaps people this incapable of using their own reason do need to be governed for the sake of the health/sanity of the rest of us humans. [/sarcasm]

PLEASE EXCUSE ME FOR NOT VOLUNTEERING.

(and don't even get me started on the blazing heterocentrism of role-by-gender approaches. I guess, being bi, I have to co-own the harem of slaves in Femdom Utopia with another woman rather than owning her too, or something.)

BDSM women's spaces and transphobia

When bending gender around can be described as a fetish, and you combine that with a sizeable population of transmen and transwomen in a smallish subculture, the results can be explosive, confusing and often pretty offensive.

Of all the arguments I've seen pan out in the BDSM community, the debates over where transwomen are 'allowed' to be and what they represent are often the longest and most heated.

We've had the argument over the personal ads, whether transwomen should have to put themselves in a separate category from other women so men don't have to look at their profiles. We've argued at great length about the London Ladies' Munch, who took a democratic decision to only allow physically transitioned transwomen in. I get what they were trying to do (which I'll explain later..) and think the move was well-intentioned, but it resulted in a lot of people using the contention over exactly what constituted 'fully transitioned' to have a grand transphobic rant. We've also had an argument about women's toilets at clubs and who should be allowed in them, which resulted in the same.

There's always people like me, with a few trans friends on and off the scene, who are completely bewildered that what's between someone's legs apparently makes them 'less' of a woman when most would say they have experienced the vast majority, or even their entire lives as women; who can't imagine having a 'girly' setting that would exclude them for not being girly enough and who don't feel they need to be segregated and start their own munch! And then there are the 'if it was born with a dick, it's a man' types, who will argue their prejudice into the ground if they have to. While some of these arguments come from men, the transwoman who caught the most flack were most offended, I think, when the arguments came from women. Women who wanted to exclude them.

The mainstream UK BDSM scene is pretty heterocentric and, as a bi, queer identified woman in a hetero relationship, there are parts of that heterocentricity that marginalise me let alone gender queer, lesbian and transgendered people. I know some lesbian SM communities turn their noses up at transwomen (and there was one SM dyke who was probably the most offensive of the lot) and people who engage in relationships with transwomen, but fortunately SM Dykes don't share that view at all.

I think the issue the Ladies' Munch were trying to address, originally, was the problem of predatory straight men who crossdress, or who are transvestites only in their scene persona. I get that this is a problem. The whole point, as I understand it, of the Ladies' Munch, just like the under-35 munches, is just to have an evening with other kinky people where you're less likely to get approached and preyed upon. I know that SM women get this all the time. When I went to my first munches, aged 19 or so, I was the youngest female - and female sub at that - by a mile, and did feel I got a lot of unwanted attention from much older men, waiting to approach me one by one. I barely got a chance to talk to other women until I learnt to feel more confident in those spaces. I get that women only munches are useful for noobs, particularly, but I still feel the emphasis of them is oddly heterocentric. After all, what is the point of a 'safe space' for women not to get preyed upon if they allow lesbians to attend but not straight pre-op transwomen? What is it about transwomen who do not yet have or have chosen not to have a body sex that matches their gender that makes them less acceptable or somehow understood as more predatory than lesbian women? I find this confusing.

What a number of people seem to miss is that there is a major difference between someone who fetishises female clothing and appearance and someone who has been born into a body that does not feel like their own. I think it's really important that women in the BDSM community begins to accept and embrace transwomen's presence and offer them support. There are sexist male dominants, and there are a lot of men who are made incredibly uncomfortable by transwomens' presence, probably more uncomfortable than most women. There are dominant men whose approach to transwomen on the scene is almost aggressively exclusionary and I'm still unsure of exactly what it is that makes them so uncomfortable when so much of the scene is based on assumption and appearance. But transwomen on the scene need women's support and to feel included if we don't want them to feel marginalised and so men begin to offer them the courtesy they deserve.

Most people can accurately guess whether someone is dominant or submissive by the way they present themselves (well, I get told I must be a dommay quite often, but I've stopped letting it bother me) and I don't really understand why it's so impossible to refer to someone as the gender they are presenting.

It seems to me the problem is all about how well someone 'passes'. If a transwoman is dressed up in high femme clothing, or has had cosmetic surgery on her face to 'feminise' it, or is generally 'convincing', she might be allowed in and accepted. If not, she's just 'a bloke in a dress'. Or even just 'a bloke'. For them, there is nothing more complex than that going on; there is no differentiation to make between a woman who has lived part of her life with the wrong genitalia, and a man who has a fetish for women's clothing. And that's no good at all.

I want to make it absolutely clear that this feminist space is trans-friendly. It's cross-dressing friendly. Hell, it's feminist-man-friendly.

But we still don't want no predators here. Simple as that.