a bit of good discussion at the end of the comments to this
some of it pretty personal to get dredged up in an entry rather than comments, so I'll quote a rather generic piece of joan's comment and my response in there:
Joan:
But, especially in the spanking fetish scene, that infantilizing of the person who's on the bottom often extends outside of role play and is just an attitude that makes me feel like, wow, these people are in a time warp and think it's the 1950's and women are children who are always trying to "get away with things" and need to be put in their place. And by put in their place, I'm not even talking about spanking - I'm talking about the way people talk to each other, the attitudes of who knows what, who knows better than who, who should be looked up to with fluttering eyelashes, who is - basically - the classic patriarch figure (even with women tops).Me:
AHHHHHHHHHH okay.
this makes a lot more sense to me now. thank you.
that whole "I'm a BRAAAT! *batbatbat*" thing.
Yeah, I puzzle over that too.
I don't really have the same experience of it being overwhelming though. In a few of the rural communities where most people are M/f, yes, I do see it.
But... hmm. What exactly does one DO about that?
Because some of it IS an ageplay thing, a particular sort of "little girl" role.
And I don't always know quite how I feel about carry-over. I'm sometimes really bothered by it, and sometimes really not at all.
Because on the one hand, yes, it seems a bad place to linger. And what does it mean that adult women want to see themselves that way a lot of the time?
But on the other, it seems to me like that's about childhood more than gender. It seems to me that, with the bratty bottoms twirling their pigtails at least, the fascination is with the idea of being a spoiled -- as in, beloved yet unruly -- little girl.
And that seems to me like it's tied more directly into wanting to re-write, re-experience, or play around with a certain idealized form of girlhood to e me than like it's about sexism.
But then the question becomes: what about the tops? What about "Daddy"? Where's he coming from?
I know plenty of "Daddy" types who I think are doing it in a healthy way, but they tend to be queer. I don't know as many straight Daddies at all, in general -- but with the online ones, certainly, there's an infantilizing element that goes beyond role and gets... squicky for me, too.
But again, how much of it is carried over into offline M/f D/s, I don't know myself. You suggest a goodly amount and I see no reason to doubt it.
So... hmm. Where does that leave us? I don't know either.
