I don’t know if this makes me a turncoat or uptight or what
But I keep feeling like saying it, and what better place than my own low-radar blog!
It’s not that I am hostile to people being into the kink. I mean I would think that is clear from other over-shares in other posts here by this point? But just to be safe: it is not that I am hostile to people being into the kink.
The reason I feel eye-roll-y about it whenever people announce “hi my name is so-and-so and I am a carpenter, I like kittens, long walks on the beach, I’m a female submissive, a feminist, and my favorite color is black and blue tee hee” is not even because of the way this often happens in spaces where feminism is generally going on. Although that part does sometimes seem conspicuous to me for other reasons.
Still, the reason I get heavy-sigh-ish about it is because to me, the BDSM stuff and any given individual’s relationship to it is no different than the non-BDSM sex stuff and any given individual’s relationship to it. So, unless we’re having a discussion about sex stuff, I am not sure why I need to even hear about you being into submission or spanking or whatnot.
I mean, if we are talking about the price of tea in China, is it relevant for one person in the conversation to offer up the information out of nowhere that he likes doing his girlfriend doggie style? It is okay with me that people are having sex, of many kinds, and liking it. Anti-patriarchal killjoy though I may be, I am hypocritical enough to simultaneously be freewheeling about the sex-loving stuff as well. I just, I don’t get why I need to hear about your specific preferences when we’re not talking about sex and each other’s preferences. That’s all. When we *are* talking about that, or you are bringing it up to talk about, that’s different. But really, as a this-is-what-you-need-to-know-about-me-when-we-first-meet thing… why?
If it’s a “this is my identity” insistence, well, I still have judgement. Part of my identity is whore. Let’s not kid ourselves, that is who I am. Is that on topic when you ask me if I’ve tried the yellow peppers in the vegetable aisle?
I can’t explain why this crankiness stays with me, out of all the other things I have plentiful crankiness about or other things to post about. I did just turn 40. Maybe I am finally a full blown curmudgeon.
I wonder if that is something I should announce the next time we are talking about prices of tea…
March 31, 2008 at 7:59 am
Joan, thanks for posting this — what I always think in times like this is: who decides? I mean who decides what is appropriate? Some people might not think it’s appropriate for me to talk about dealing with incest when asked how I’m doing. Or, to answer a hooker call on the bus. Or even to talk about queer sex anywhere in public, or to talk about sex anywhere in public, or to talk about sex… So, what I generally think is — the more options the better, unless someone is being brutalized or silenced without reason.
Love –
mattilda
March 31, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Hi Mattilda and thanks for commenting.
It’s probable that all my feelings around this shit are neither here nor there. I did want to say - I don’t think it’s about appropriateness, I mean I don’t think it’s a lack of decorum that sets me off. Also, not as an argument that I am in the right for being cranky in the first place, but just as information -
There are reasons to talk about dealing with incest when someone asks how you are (that is on topic). There is a reason to answer a hooker call while on the bus (a person could need the work).
Talking about sex anywhere, and any kind of sex… that’s also a different thing than what I was complaining about. Alas, I say that only to make clear that I’m in favor of people talking more, not less, about sex - not to make any clearer what the original stick up my ass was about.
Feh. I think one problem I have is that I don’t understand why BDSM so often gets presented by participants as if it is the enlightened-est of sexualities, except for some notable aberrations who get scapegoated for “giving all us pervs a bad name in the press/media/public view.” I don’t know right this moment why that is connected for me with people bringing up their kink persuasion out of nowhere. I do know that in my mind, it’s like, I always think about why people are saying things. Outside of drug ramblings (of which I have also been a fan in my time), I don’t really encounter people saying things, ever, for “no reason.”
So, if some straight guy says, seemingly out of the blue, “I like to have my balls cupped while a woman is blowing me,” I ask myself or him or both of us - why did he just pop out with that? And I think there could be any number of answers. Some of which might be irritating to me. Some of which might make me laugh or make me think or who the hell knows.
You know what though, I do seriously have a stick up my ass about the BDSM stuff. I do. Despite being one of the pervert-iest people I know. It raises my hackles when people bring it up out of context, and often it has that effect on me because it seems like it gets done as a “rebellious” thing, whereas I see all kinds of sex that involve manipulations of power to be basically what *everybody* does - some people just do it dressed up in costumes or with more props. I don’t like when the status quo gets framed as daring or subversive.
That is not, by far, what everyone is doing, every time they may bring up their relationship to BDSM. I think that is a closer explanation, above, to what I was originally griping about in this post though.
Last thing about your comment - thank you for expressing compassion (that’s how your comment reads to me) towards whoever I was initially complaining about, with such a degree of gentleness towards me while you did it. That is one of many reasons why I heart you.
March 31, 2008 at 10:25 pm
I agree with a lot of the post, though I think I’m sort of the opposite in philosophical position. I am one of those people who says that BDSM is something I am, not just something I do. I’ve seen too much to make blanket claims for the enlightenedness of the BDSM community, though I do think, in a patriarchy, the people that think about their power dynamics do somewhat better than the baseline of a culture that imposes gender roles and oppression without asking anybody anything about themselves.
I think that the culture creates a lot of “hey, I’m cisgendered and het and I have sex the way I assume everyone does, isn’t my joke that assumes you’re all the same as me hilarious?!” Water-cooler humor like that is heteronormative; and it assumes that everyone is monogamous, that marriage is a goal for everyone; and it imports essentialist tropes about what “men” (assumed het, cis) and “women” (assumed het, cis) like to do sexually.
I’m not going to whine about how I’m othered; I’m privileged in so many ways. But I do think that for a whole lot of us our sexualities are silenced by the drumbeat of the patriarchal assumed norm: as Homer Simpson said, “never say anything unless you’re absolutely sure everyone else feels the same way.” The sex joke of the het, cis, married white dude is less often called out as out-of-place; the queer, kinky and poly are the ones accused of injecting our differences. So sometimes it really is off-topic, but I say it’s only off-topic when the standard-bearers of the big, assumed Norm are off-topic, too.
April 1, 2008 at 12:41 am
Okay p.s. the “anonymous” above was me, Joan. Don’t know how that happened.
Thomas, thanks for visiting as always.
Maybe it’s that I live in L.A., maybe it’s that I see kink everywhere, I don’t know… but to me it’s the hypocrisy of mainstream heterosexism, for ever pretending like it *is* different from the kink, that irritates me about mainstream heterosexual stuff. And I gotta say, it is also, I am realizing, what irritates me about the kink - that it ever pretends like it isn’t very much like mainstream heterosexuality. Just with a wink, or a we-get-to-feel-edgier-about-it vibe tacked on. For real. To me, if someone is on top and someone is on bottom - then someone is on top and someone is on the bottom. Separate from what any given person *thinks* of whether that dynamic can ever be good, or neutral, or is always infused with teh evil - it is still that dynamic. Sometimes I am not sure if what you are saying is that it is possible to at once have that dynamic (dominant and submissive) while being different from having that dynamic (dominant and submissive).
Now, I definitely see all kinds of ways that people perform that dynamic - there are a variety of dispositions and preferences and people who put up with shit and people who feel entitled to this or that. But what I rarely see is people simply not having that dynamic.
Me personally, I would say two things about that dynamic. One, it is unacceptable that this is what we teach each other about sex - men being dominant is sexy, women being submissive is sexy. And it is still everywhere, in everything, all the time, and I don’t care whose mom was a high powered executive - if you fucking saw I Love Lucy growing up or any goddamn other thing besides your own reflection in the mirror and your powerful mom standing behind you, then you were immersed in it.
Aside - I am not cursing at you, Thomas.
The second thing is, I think that dynamic - someone is dominant, someone is submissive - causes harm as enforced by heterosexism not simply because somehow when the straights are doing it they just are bigger assholes about it. They call it “natural” or associate women’s submission with religion or virtue or whatever the hell, and (sometimes) claim disgust/disapproval with us perverts.
[I say sometimes because my experience is that heterosexist conservative people may be less likely to be out, say, than I am, but they made up way more of my clients and more of the pool of people to fuck around with on a personal level than anyone who could be even loosely called "progressive." Right wingers are into the kink, not just into the biblical version of it where you don't call it kink.]
Those things are grotesque to me, the women-are-inferior-and-need-strong-men-to-guide-and-protect-and-rule-them stuff, but they are not, in my view, *why* inherent power differentials are problematic. They are what happens because of problematic power differentials.
I think the reason that dynamic contains the ongoing potential for harm - in and out of the self-professed BDSM population - is because, damn, there just seems to be something about humans that kicks in with the power-over thing. I don’t think it is inevitable, in the sense of being impossible to NOT be a fuckhead when you have power over someone. But I have to say, I don’t think that you escape that factor simply because someone thinks it over and goes, yeah, this gives me orgasms, so I say yes to you having power over me, so now we is equals and I am free!
What you said, about people being accused of injecting their differences - that is what I am really trying to address in this comment (not even sure to what extent it relates to my original post). I think it is largely a farce, and that both hetero married white dudes and gals + queer, kinky, and poly folks are kidding themselves to think that they are anything other than largely like each other, in how they act out their sexuality. I include me in this. I mean that I don’t think there can be any real injection of differences, for one side or the other to get huffy about, when no one’s really doing that much differently than anybody else.
One group calls it church-ordained, or natural, or just sexy hot culture woo hoo, another calls it alternative and more honest and more exciting and free-wheeling…. and yet, both worship at the altar of somebody being over somebody else.
As someone who has been with people almost all through that spectrum (minus the poly, I think) I just don’t notice that much different going on between everybody.
I don’t get why that is sometimes a taboo thing to say, though (not saying you are acting that way about it, Thomas). I mean, I get that a lot of people are like “the patriarchy is the devil so it is an insult to say I in any way resemble the devil or what the devil does or how the devil fucks and loves and what he wears, etc.” But in my view - the way things are, the way things resemble each other, the way everything seems to be playing out ad infinitum - that is what we have to work with. Since, also in my view, most of us do love and fuck within that framework, well, what is at stake to talk about all of it openly and without saying one is worse or better than the other?
Yes, some things go on that are worse than others. Nonconsensual acts, for one example.
I just feel like there is mental discomfort for a lot of people in acknowledging how much even the worst of things might sometimes have in common with what we call fun, or love, or happy sex, etc. I don’t feel like it can hurt me to talk about that stuff. But I do feel like the straights don’t have the market cornered on what is considered acceptable to bring up and what isn’t - I mean I feel like kinksters sometimes have a serious vested interest in believing or at least saying that “we are different.” As if it wouldn’t be allowable to keep doing what we’re doing if we weren’t different from “that”, whatever that is.
Meanwhile, everyfuckingbody else is doing whatever that is, in one form or another, so where does the idea come from that we’d have to stop if we were doing whatever-that-is also?
Boy I fucked my shoulder up yesterday and perhaps the pain is making me incoherent, I don’t know. I have to leave work, no internet access at home still, maybe more here tomorrow. Forgive me if this made no sense at all, or was, ironically in regards to my initial post here, off topic!!!
April 1, 2008 at 1:46 am
A lot of the more philosophical critiques of BDSM, especially from the radfem side (and yours, if I understand you) are about the inherently problematic nature of hierarchy. I’m off the bus immediately with that; I have problems with persistent hierarchies, not with temporary and consensual ones.
The social dynamics of oppression are not simply one group of people in charge. They are a dynamic by which the power differential is not only built but maintained — not for hours, but for millenia, through generation after generation of people socialized to think that those inequalities are the way of the world; that it is bizarre to even conceive of the world otherwise.
Where some folks in the BDSM community get mad at me is the part where I say that, when people undertake to construct a power dynamic that persists, that is not bounded in time, that the imbalance becomes a habit of mind. I don’t mean over the course of many generations, but rather over the course of months or years. In patriarchy, we all lack an Archimedean point we can stand on, outside it all, to make completely unaffected decisions; but in a 24/7 D/s relationship I think that’s all the more true. I do not, however, believe that this becomes true over just hours or, except perhaps in the most intense circumstances, days.
If one really thinks that any power differential at all is just patriarchy and inherently a problem, then that’s an internally consistent position. I have absolutely no idea how to live like that. I don’t know how to live without people constructing temporary protocols for who makes what decision. Perhaps there is a utopia where all decisions arise by pure consensus, and do so quickly. I’m skeptical.
So where that leaves me is that people can and should construct temporary agreements for some folks to be in charge. I don’t consider it a persistent hierarchy when I say to my spouse, “we can watch whatever you want,” or when she says to me, “don’t come. I may not let you come for a week or so.” Of course, there’s nothing inherently transformative about that, either. It’s pretty prosaic, in fact. On my account, we all do it all the time. But once one thinks about power differentials as a temporary state instead of the furniture of the universe, they become something that is in our power to rethink, and even to use transformatively. Not a lot of us will, of course. When we have the power to do something really different, we usually do not. Because it’s frightening, and because the society reacts badly to challenge, even if only though the superego in our own heads.
So I’m certainly not saying that every woman who tops a man is inverting the patriarchal construct in which women exist for male sexual gratification; and I’m not saying that every time a queer woman tops another queer woman that it exists outside the social dictate that women shouldn’t have and act on desire for their own sake. But I’m saying it is within the realm of the possible; in fact, I’m saying that it happens: that in some scenes, it’s not just play-acting, but that people really do construct a bubble in which the hierarchies of the wider world are suspended, inverted, transformed or mocked. I wish there was an example of that as often as there was an example of the same-gendered-M/f-crap-with-different-fashion. There’s not, and I’ve made my remarks about het male exclusive tops (who you defend more than I will).
I claim no more for BDSM than “better than genpop,” which in patriarchy is setting the bar pretty low. But I am just plain, on a philosophical level, not in agreement that every exchange of power is like a persistent social hierarchy. I think that there is such a thing as a consensual, constructed, temporary, power exchange and that this is a different thing from the hierarchies that are inherent in oppression.
That’s what I’m saying.
April 1, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Part of my identity is whore. Let’s not kid ourselves, that is who I am. Is that on topic when you ask me if I’ve tried the yellow peppers in the vegetable aisle?
Speaking of sexual proclivities, have you tried the green cucumbers in the vegetable aisle?
I kid, I kid!
April 1, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Uh, hello K.A. and thank you for reading my blog.
Thomas -
I would not say that I think hierarchies are always inherently problematic by their nature. For example, I have power over my cats, and always have and always will. I don’t, however, use that power to dominate them in any sense that the word generally gets used.
However - this is an excruciating thing for me to say but now that I mention the above about my cats, it has made me think of it and how it may relate. Maybe it won’t, but maybe it will.
When I was young, grade school, some time between like kindergarten and third grade at most I think - I was mean to cats, whenever I had the opportunity to be. I didn’t kill or injure them ever, but I was mean to them, and that’s as much as I will say about that.
Setting aside the recurring urge to kill myself off and on since that time, because of that time, I have to say that it does also now make me think about some of the things BDSM makes me think about.
It is my understanding that children are not infrequently cruel to those in a lesser position of power than them, when they (the children) are themselves subject to abusive powerlessness in their lives. I am guessing that is what was going on with me, although I have to say I am also open to the idea that it’s possible I just have an evil streak that I am more successful at squashing as an adult than I was as a child. That stuff is so horrifying to me that it is hard to think of it being okay to let myself off the hook about it, if that makes sense.
Anyhoo, going with the shit-flows-down-hill thing, as a kid that age I was in a 24/7 culture in my life of eroticized power differentials and sadism. Even when it was not something happening to me at any given time during a day, it certainly was a dynamic that I was soaking in; it seemed just like “how life is,” and not just inside my own home.
As an uncritical, conscience-still-forming young person, my reflexive response to having power-over was to at times abuse it. I don’t remember thinking anything clear at the time, only that my brain and body were in a certain adrenalined state, not sexual for me but certainly could be labeled a state of arousal, technically.
Even with extensive experience dominating people sexually, “consensually,” as an adult, I have never had that feeling again as I remember having as a child when I was being abusive. I’m not saying “BDSM is like me abusing cats as a kid,” I am saying that it is one instance where it seems to me like an environment of power and powerlessness led to automatic craving for power-over and automatic usage of that power in abusive ways. I’m just saying it was like this flow of things, and it is a flow I see often, in and around everything, including BDSM stuff.
So I think: well, what I have seen as an adult in and out of the kink population is that sometimes people who have someone else’s consent and who apparently care about that consenting-someone and have a conscience and are not coming at the whole thing from the dark and horrifying place that I was as a kid - still sometimes people seem to react, *as if it’s natural/expected/reflexive*, to power-over with the impetus to cause pain. I don’t even mean just physically.
The whole idea that having power over someone, in BDSM, so often means “I can make you do/take/say yes to something you don’t like, as proof that you like submitting to me more than you dislike whatever that thing is, and that is what having power over you means, that is what defines and proves it” - that is scary and ill-conceived to me. And yet it is way more the norm than the exception.
And that is where being in a culture that is turned on by dominance and submission, and defines most everyone and everything by it, feels to me like it influences what people do even in temporary and consensual hierarchies. What do people mean when they say “I consented to doing something I hated, as part of submitting to her/him”? or “I made ‘my sub’ do such and such and he/she hated it,” said with a grin, and then followed up with a defensive “hey, she/he is there cuz she/he wants to be!” when greeted with a “huh??”
What can consent possibly mean coupled with the fact of not liking something?
That idea that there can be fluidity around “playing with” whether something is okay with someone or not - I reckon I have pretty rigid responses to that. It’s why the whole terminology of “play rape,” is repulsive to me. If you are there because you want to be, and it is happening because you helped engineer it, then it does not resemble, and is not, rape. Putting “play” in front of it does not make it sexy-rape, or rape-y fun, or rape-y safeness, or whatever. Rape is someone making you have sex with them when you do not want to have sex with them. It is not pretending that you don’t want to and being turned on when someone pretends to ignore your “no’s.” “Pretend force” is more accurate anyway, I don’t know why people feel like they have to invent an acceptable form of rape.
Tangent.
Back to the consensual and nonconsensual stuff - by definition, to me, if you are turned on by doing something and willing to do it and go ahead and do it, even if all you are turned on by is *doing it because someone you’re hot for is telling you to do it, and you wouldn’t otherwise* - if you are turned on and it is okay with you, then that is not the same thing, by definition, as “hating it.”
If an act is transformed for you from something you would never do to something you find yourself doing and in a sexual context and on purpose (rather than forced against your will where you are being traumatized by that), then it has transformed into something you don’t-hate, period.
Without exempting the above from my own critiques or anyone else’s, I will say that the above - the transformation of being turned on by doing something at someone else’s say-so, because of it being them and it being them ordering it or whatever - that shit, I get. That kind of alchemy doesn’t set me off.
What I am weirded out by is either
a) the need, when really dealing with what I just described, to still label it “he/she made me do something I hate,” or “I made her/him do such and such that they hated.” Why the need to reinforce the idea that you can force someone to do something that makes them unhappy (hated it)? Why is that the mark of whether or not someone really is or isn’t under your control?
or
b) both sides *really* doing the made-me-do-something-I-hated or forced-her/him-to-withstand-something-he/she-hated thing. Again, why is that the mark of what sexy power is? Why is that the ultimate measure of power-over?
Again, I am firmly differentiating between being turned on by the idea of being “made” to do things you “don’t want to do,” - I am firmly differentiating between pretend-force and versus actual force that both people just slap a “but-I/he/she-consented!” label on and call it a kinky day.
Is it my mission to go around and inspect everybody’s kinky stuff to see if it meets my personal acid test, and then call in the troops for no-kink-having enforcement when it fails? Okay, yes, in my dreams I do have that power. However, in real life, I don’t actually have to go out of my way to find out if people are doing that shit, because it is all-too-often in my face, and also I don’t even have the power to convince ME to not do things I’m uncomfortable with sexually, let alone anyone else.
Okay, about this:
“that people really do construct a bubble in which the hierarchies of the wider world are suspended, inverted, transformed or mocked. I wish there was an example of that as often as there was an example of the same-gendered-M/f-crap-with-different-fashion. There’s not, and I’ve made my remarks about het male exclusive tops (who you defend more than I will). ”
I guess I do not grasp how the hierarchies of the wider world have ever been or could ever be actually suspended, let alone truly transformed or inverted or mocked. I mean, I know this is flippant and not very nuanced, but it’s kind of like how I used to joke about when even the most “genuinely submissive” man came in to session with a pro domme - the only real power that ever exchanges hands in that situation is the money going from his pocket to hers. Nothing I do in private, in happiness, outside the bounds of what is mostly allowed, etc. - none of that actually suspends the hierarchies of the wider world. They occur simultaneously, and the former does not act upon the latter in any noticeable way whatsoever. It is my contention that the latter can and does always act upon the former, regardless of what people think or what they think they’re doing.
I agree with what you said about conceiving of power differentials as a thing that *can be* manipulated rather than as “furniture of the universe,” (a phrase I particularly liked). I mean I do think that it is *possible* for power differentials to be manipulated. I just think that at this time, mostly when people are “mocking” the static hierarchies of the wider world, it is in the sense of “emulating,” more than subverting or challenging. Even when they think they are being subversive. I am guessing I see more of this in what I’m seeing that what you see in what you’re seeing.
Lastly, on defending hetero male exclusive tops - I don’t really feel like defense is relevant. I mean I don’t feel defensive of or for them, or like defending them, or like they - or any of this - is defensible so to speak. It is what it is - I see it as being certain things, in certain ways, and it seems like there are things you and I see similarly and things we don’t.
My questions and beliefs about it are not something I feel from an attacking place, is what I mean by defense not being part of it. I wouldn’t defend me either, for participating in all that I participate in, but I am also not attacking me about it.
I don’t know if all that sounds like semantics. What I *do* feel about het/male/tops-only is that a) I think their enactment of misogyny is far more recognizable and noticeable because they are doing the things that the wider world o’ hierarchy says they are entitled to do in the first place and b) as such it is more nauseating at first glance than many other configurations of dominance/submission. My experience is not that as a group, het/male/tops are worse or better than everybody else who does kink. We are all mostly doing status-quo-in-drag as far as I’m concerned.
The things I have said about hetero male tops that are perhaps more generous than what others might say is that my experience, of that group specifically, is of people who are more inclined to worry about actually hurting me versus less likely to worry about it. In fact, queer women switches and bi male switches have been the least vigilant, of the folks I’ve known.
Which, to me, gets to something else I think about when you and I talk about this stuff. Maybe it’s only men who would go see someone professionally who are more careful - maybe personal-life kinkster het dude tops do act more entitled as a group, and I have just had the good luck to avoid more of them even in my personal-life roamings. At any rate, what I have seen is that heterosexual male exclusive tops are more likely to have felt hesitation about acting on their dominant/sadistic urges than people who are not historically granted that position of power in the wider world. Men are simultaneously reared to dominate women and to conform to this surface-y commitment to “not be a jerk, never hit/hurt a woman.” Men who are not comfortable being dickheads already are generally men who are not initially comfortable acting on the het/dude/top urge.
There is sometimes a sneery, extra-entitled-because-I’m-claiming-something-usually-denied-to-me type of, well, entitlement that I have seen with people who are not hetero male tops as much as from people who are hetero male tops.
I guess I feel like - not that you personally are intentionally doing this, Thomas - but I do at times feel like hetero male exclusive tops get scapegoated in the BDSM population. Like they are people who can clearly be pointed to as doing noticeably not-subversive, not-transformative things at best, and super creepy/horrible/even criminal things at worst. And, they can. They can be pointed to as doing those things.
But when that is a party line - and again, Thomas, I am not saying it is for you, I believe you believe the thigns you say, not that you are a kinky sheep with this - but it is in fact a party line in the BDSM population, that hetero male exclusive tops are kind of the people who “make us look bad.” And so I ask, aside from possible public service announcements (”hey that particular guy is a fucker,”), is there anything else that is being served by identifying het/male/tops as the primary enact-ers of the dynamics of this heterosexist, male dominant society? Does it in fact ever serve to take attention away from what any of the rest of us are doing, or make us look better by comparison, or all the things that scapegoating functions as?
I don’t think that is the same thing as defending het/male/exclusive tops, but if it comes across as defending them, like saying “hey stop picking on them because we all suck,” well, then I am not expressing myself clearly enough because that is not what I feel or mean to convey.
Thank you for explaining more about what you are saying, by the way.
Questions - what is “genpop” and what is an “Archimedean point”? I feel like I should know what they mean but I don’t…
April 2, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Sorry to use jargon. I pick up terminology in various places and I have a bad habit of using it without thinking about whether other folks understand it. By “genpop” I just meant general population. The Archimedes reference was to his apocryphal saying about being able to move the whole world if he had a lever long enough and a place to stand: to move the world with a lever, you’d need a place that’s completely outside the world.
About het male exclusive tops, I really wish there was some empirical work out there, because the plural of anecdote is not data. The people I know are not necessarily a representative sample, and the people you know are not either. All our perceptions are at least in part prisoners of our experiences, I guess.
I’m actually a lot less concerned with the people who identify themselves with a community in the broad sense and adopt norms like SSC (or RISK, for those who need a label to say they are more-hardcore-than-me). You may be right that at least some het male tops are sensitized to how what they do interacts with the larger hierarchies, which is something. I’m very concerned that people who are sort of dablers and fringe participants in BDSM think they’re above or outside real discussion and norms about consent, but leach off of the acceptance that BDSM has gotten (limited as it is) in order to do things that are abusive and label it BDSM. I’m thinking of Glenn Marcus, here, holding a sub against her will and threatening her and stalking her; and of Travis Anton, whose sub finally shot and killed him to escape, and those guys in the Pacific Northwest who lured sex workers and tortured them nonconsensually, believing they could always say that women who got paid for sex would and did consent to anything. (And I don’t deny that abuse happens in queer communities and relationships, too. I don’t deny that at all. What I don’t think I’ve ever heard, BTW, is that a switch had a propensity for abuse. Just sayin’.)
Speaking as a prisoner of my experience, I’m not entirely sure I can figure out what you mean about tops doing the “see what I made her do” thing. I think I know what you mean; and what I’m thinking of is the smug smirk of someone who is malicious, who is a controlled abuser. I’ve seen it and I don’t like it. That’s going to be not-uncommon in a society full of hierarchies and where people revisit the abuse they suffer on others below them. But that sort of malice is not, on my account, a necessary part of any temporary power-over, not just in theory but in practice. It seems to me that that is the “same old shit,” the locker-room “dude, guess what I got her to do” misogyny transported intact into our community. That is where the patriarchal colonization of people’s minds still plays out among BDSMers; none of us are completely free. But I think that’s our inability to transcend our learning about sex and sexuality, not something inherent to trading power.
Sure, as a bottom, I sometimes do things I hate, as distinct from things I “hate,” and really, I’m using those terms so loosely that I couldn’t define them. For example, one thing I’ve done a lot is that my spouse will tell me not to come, and I’ll fuck her. If I come, I’ll be punished with kicks in the balls. Now, I love ball torture: but not right after I come. In the post-orgasm comedown, I detest it. When I’ve been unable to keep myself from coming, I shiver all over in dread of what I know is coming. A few times, she’s taken pity on me and given me a pass; most times if I come without permission I suffer the consequences. When it’s happening I hate it, and I hate that I couldn’t stop myself from coming. But I like that kind of play a lot. It’s tremendously hot for my spouse having that feeling of control; she can make me come basically any time she wants, if she tells me to speed up or go deeper or says something hot or puts something in my ass. I’m already on the edge; she can push me over. It’s tremendously intimate for me to give control over my orgasm to someone else. In a way, I guess I could say that I like submitting to her more than I hate coming without permission and getting kicked in the balls, but that does not ring true to me. I like the dynamics that we create more than I hate some aspects of how we get there. Which I think is not the same thing.
That kind of scene does something else, on my account. There is a whole set of cultural assumptions about how penetrating is power and being penetrated is powerless. But that’s not my experience; at least not all the time. I have a powerful set of experiences that enveloping is powerful, and that penetrating is (or can be) powerless; that she’s being fucked for her and I’m fucking for her. There are all sorts of commonplaces about intercourse being just for the cock, about women unsatisfied and men coming and rolling over, about the sex ending with the male orgasm. I have a powerful set of experiences that say otherwise. So that’s the sort of thing I was talking about where the temporary power relations are at odds with the mechanics of patriarchy. Patriarchy may be a giant, nebulous set of cultural constraints, but it has to operate through very concrete stuff; and that stuff is a set of shared assumptions about what men are, what women are, what sex is. Those can and do change and adapt over time, but they are not infinitely flexible. If they were infinitely flexible, then there would be no way to alter or attack patriarchy; if patriarchy could instantly and at no cost appropriate women firefighters, then having more women firefighters would do nothing and would not be worth fighting for or celebrating.
April 2, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Okay so Thomas, I am going to address something you shared that is personal, because it is what I am thinking and talking about, not because I intend to pick on you or to try to make you feel crappy about what you do with your partner. (Not that I assume I could even succeed in making you feel crappy, just saying that is not my aim here.) Because what you mention is a charged thing for me as well as an example of what I’ve been trying to get at, it feels impossible for me not to talk about it. So, this:
“For example, one thing I’ve done a lot is that my spouse will tell me not to come, and I’ll fuck her. If I come, I’ll be punished with kicks in the balls. Now, I love ball torture: but not right after I come. In the post-orgasm comedown, I detest it. When I’ve been unable to keep myself from coming, I shiver all over in dread of what I know is coming. A few times, she’s taken pity on me and given me a pass; most times if I come without permission I suffer the consequences. When it’s happening I hate it,”
and then this:
“that’s the sort of thing I was talking about where the temporary power relations are at odds with the mechanics of patriarchy.”
For me, there is nothing at odds with the mechanics of patriarchy about one person having the power to punish another person in a way they hate and dread, and that being just how it is between them. *That*, practiced pretty commonly by both male and female tops, is one of the main problems I have with BDSM stuffs. Because it exists in conjunction with other things - a woman being on top, sex being about something besides cock and male orgasm - does not exempt it from still being what it is. What I mean is, the at-odds-with-typical-patriarchy stuff does not by default drag the punishment stuff into outside-the-patriarchy land.
Now, you also go on to say that you enjoy that kind of play, but I want to make sure I am understanding you - I read that to mean that you enjoy the aspect of feeling powerless on many fronts - powerless over if you will be allowed to come, powerless over whether she will say you can’t come and then do something that makes you come anyway, powerless over the consequences of coming without permission. What I don’t read it to mean is that the actual consequences are ever exciting or pleasurable for you, but instead are simply something you accept as basically unavoidable?
To me, that is one of the most glaring marks of patriarchy, that one person is given authority over another and the person with the authority gets to make arbitrary decisions about things like obediance and punishment. I can’t get my mind around the possibility that it is ever something besides the mechanics of patriarchy.
I used to grill this guy at a job I had when I was just out of high school, about why he, as a Christian, believed that men should be the “head of the household.” And he would argue that “someone has to be the person to have the final say, someone has to be the actual head of a household, it can’t just be that no one is the head,” and then I would be like, well, I don’t agree that that’s true, but even if it were, what sense does it make for it to automatically always by definition be the man? I am smarter than most dudes I will ever meet, and also more sensible, compassionate (childhood monstrousness notwithstanding), etc., so what kind of insanity would it be for me to have someone else be the decision maker for my life?
Now with BDSM, I feel like there is also an acceptance of ideas and practices that really are arbitrary in nature, but that look to many kinksters like what kink is by its very nature.
Why, in order for power play to be real, or exciting, or whatever it is that the person-with-power-who-really-hurts-you-as-punishment provides with their control of you, why is it that it so often necessarily includes what you described? I’m not asking you why you guys like it, or why you submit to it, or to justify the personal choices you are making with your partner.
I’m asking about the way this sort of thing so often goes without saying, without question, without objection: if you are the one submitting, this is one thing that goes along with it; if you don’t like it, basically the party line is “well then don’t do it.” Is that an actual response to the question, though? I mean, couldn’t we also say “well, if you don’t like that intercourse as a custom is centered around the dude, then don’t have intercourse?” But is that a response, or a shutting down of questioning/critique?
What I mean by saying it is like that belief system with the Christian dude is that there is a point in the questioning where it just seems to fizzle out to “well that’s the way it is,” or “that’s just how it works,” or “that’s just what we have decided consensually to do with each other.” Those are not, to me, fundamentally different conclusions than “well that’s just how it is, someone has to be in role x and it just so happens that it’s the man.”
Mind you, this dude was careful to explain to me that it was a benevolent position of authority, that it would be un-Christian to wield that ultimate-decider position with anything other than complete respect and equal consideration given to the wife. He wasn’t talking about a biblical version of Glenn Marcus.
The fact that a dynamic exactly like that could be carried out between people in other configurations besides male-dominant and female-submissive does not make it a dynamic that is not like the one carried out by a male-dominant and female-submissive couple. It just means it different people in that dynamic. That’s what I mean by saying I don’t think those temporary power relations are at odds with the mechanics of patriarchy, but are in fact THE mechanics of patriarchy.
Patriarchy says the man (in BDSM, the top) gets to say what is okay and what isn’t, and has the authority to punish women (in BDSM, the bottom) and any other man with less power who disobeys the rules he sets down. It doesn’t work in reverse, that is one way you know which way the power is flowing, that is apparently one of the “proofs” in BDSM of who has the power - if a top disappoints a bottom partner, or even pisses him/her off, or makes a mistake (and everybody does) - the bottom doesn’t mete out punishment to the top. Ever.
Why?
If punishment for mistakes, for doing something the other person didn’t want you to do, is acceptable, particularly punishments that are truly aversive to the person receiving them, then why isn’t it okay for the bottom to do the same to the top?
It is arbitrary, not logical. It is what people have decided the rules are. And it gets presented as the fabric of the kink universe pretty much in the same degree, if not more, that patriarchy gets presented as the fabric of the universe to the wider world. I say “if not more” because I don’t see/hear/read many/any other kinksters - not talking about non-kinksters objecting to kink, but actual kinksters - questioning this dynamic, I don’t see kinksters ever doing anything besides accepting it as a given, or just saying “well that’s not my thing, personally.” But it is not a true “given.” It is completely arbitrary to decide that having power-over includes subjecting the one you’re controlling to truly aversive punishments for disobediance.
Now, I do not apply this questioning to people who incorporate non-aversive “punishment” as part of their play. Like, spanking fetishists, for one random example. Being told you are going to be “punished” and even as a bottom having some nervousness about it is still all part of the pleasure-loop for many people in that scene. And I’m talking - stop reading, anyone who is bummed out by specific descriptions of s/m - I’m talking about hard spankings that leave marks, so although the “punishment” aspect is not real in the way that being kicked in the balls after unauthorized orgasm is real punishment, it is a real physical event that involves intense sensation that under other circumstances one would be completely averse to.
I feel like I am compelled to talk to you about these things, but I also am concerned that we might be in some loop wherein it seems like I’m insisting “yes you are too the patriarchy with your partner in your kink!” And I also am concerned that if that is the perception, that I’m trying to slap a patriarchy-enact-er sticker on you, then it is also seen as a serious slur. Given that it seems you and I both object to nonconsensual power differentials, which is what largely goes on in patriarchy, then I feel like this is translating as me saying you and your partner also suck because you are like sucky patriarchy.
In fact, patriarchy does suck, and in fact the mechanics of patriarchy look more like the rule than the exception to me, in kink, but that for me is an observation, not an accusation. How could it be otherwise, is what I wonder? And I guess I wonder it both rhetorically (of course it is this way!) and in sincerity (is there a way to not-have it be this way?).
Also, I didn’t think you were being high-falutin’ to use that jargon, btw, I just tend to ask when I don’t understand something isntead of not-knowing something and pretending I do. Which brings me to -
I don’t understand what you are saying with this:
“Patriarchy may be a giant, nebulous set of cultural constraints, but it has to operate through very concrete stuff; and that stuff is a set of shared assumptions about what men are, what women are, what sex is. Those can and do change and adapt over time, but they are not infinitely flexible. If they were infinitely flexible, then there would be no way to alter or attack patriarchy;”
What is not infinitely flexible? How we think about men, women, sex? And if so, why is there not an infinite amount of ways to think about each? And why is the lack of infinite flexibility what is necessary to alter or attack patriarchy? I am so lost here, oof.
Thanks, Thomas.
April 2, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Don’t worry about me getting huffy and hurt because you have a different analysis. I’d rather kick this stuff around with a smart kinkster than not. And I don’t mind analyzing what it is that I personally do. If I put it out there, it means I an okay with putting it out there. I would talk about things that I do as a top, also, but those are very personal for my spouse (because they’re all constructed around giving her the scene that she wants), so she’s asked that I not go into details about that on the blogs.
You said this:
What I mean is, the at-odds-with-typical-patriarchy stuff does not by default drag the punishment stuff into outside-the-patriarchy land.
This is what I was getting at with the quote at the end about infinite flexibility. There’s a lot of theoretical stuff (and you’re almost certainly better read in it that me) around how power-over in patriarchal. What I’m saying is I’m starting the other way, going from the specific to the general. Do we believe that the Second Wave made a difference, that women made gains, that the grip of patriarchy on women’s lives was pried somewhat looser? I believe that. If that’s true, then it is possible to make progress even if we can’t yet scrap all gender constructs and all power relations. So if we can make and do make progress even without destroying the fundamental mold of power-over, how? Well, I think that’s because, while patriarchy is rooted in fundamentals of hierarchical structure, on my account, it is something else. It is a system of oppressive gender roles, imposed on everyone. It oppresses women; they get by far the worst end. But it’s sub-optimal for everyone in that women’s position would improve both relatively and absolutely in not-patriarchy, but men’s would also improve absolutely (not relatively as they would lose unearned privilege, but I say we’re better off without it). It is, in my view, a “prisoner’s dilemma” — the classic game theory hypothetical where two prisoners are separated. Under one common variant, if the prisoners trust each other and don’t talk, they both go free; if one talks he gets a better deal than the other, but still gets prison time, and the other does far worse. That’s how I see patriarchy: men are doing time for turning on women because we’re too scared to stick together against the pressure, but by doing that, we’re putting women in the way worse position. The role of oppressor sucks, the role of oppressed is far worse, but the role of nobody oppressing anybody is best.
So the “not infinitely flexible” part is the gender constructs, not the hierarchies. Men and women refusing to do what they are supposed to do weakens patriarchy. Men that don’t tolerate misogynist jokes, that don’t victim-blame rape survivors, that do housework and parenting or even (if het) stay home while their female partners are breadwinners; women that take powerful and high-profile jobs or traditionally male jobs or who exuce physical confidence; these break down the fundamental dynamics by which the patriarchy tells each succeeding generation, “this is how it is, it cannot be otherwise.”
I’ll leave it at that, mostly because work calls.