Definition Check

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

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.

Does theory come from experience?

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.