BDSM and Feminism?

BDSM can go the other way round, too...

It's an interesting topic. I can't understand why a woman would have that kind of fantasy, but we are all different. If it is consensual, and she does it as a fantasy only, completely separating it from how society should work, then I don't think BDSM and feminism are incompatible.

scaryclown
What an utter load of judgemental, condescending, ill-informed, ignorant B. S.

stop being weird.

BDSM is about avoidance of emotional intimacy in order to force the physical enjoynent of sex into a psychological space that addresses minor psychoses and emotional issues by linking them with a sexually orientated behaviour. Its silar to saying 'i never cry, but do punch the fuck out of people who break a rule i have set up to protect my emotional self from being hurt''

Its a ritualised way of getting pseudo emotional connection with bodies that have been disconnected from a normal emotional sexual response.

The exaggeration of bdsm behavioirs to be political or 'corrective for the universe' is like saying 'yeah isteal stuff not because i want to have it but because i am artistically examining the ideas of possession in a modern transactional environment..ie its an intellectual/thinking approach to what woild be ab emotional and physical experience if the brains of bdsm folk werent in the way of pleasure.

oh shit! its me bring weird isnt it...

I don't see how sex can be sealed off from ideology - as though it is purely a matter of autonomous choice rather than socialisation.

Sex is supposed to be based on mutuality, not power. BDSM signals an acceptance of sex as an exercise in power - not mutuality and equality. The fact that it is technically consensual does not make it any less an expression of patriarchal culture.

I guess it depends on your own specific point of view and interpretation of how your actions fit with your views are.

I have one friend who I know to be into BDSM; he's a sub. He says a big part of the appeal is the level of trust you have to have between you for it to work.

why be weird though? i find bdsm sort of like saying 'i'm a sugerer' and wearing a funny hat to drink tea. iyswim.

my best sex and rel. has been where both want to please and be pleased in varying amounts throughout an evening..or relationship. stopping and actively taking turns all seems a bit too organised to me...

isnt it like world of warcrafy..stuff thst sonepeople call boardgames..others see as life?

maybe if you dont get it you can't so apologies if i'm off crack..eith tiff

One thing I find difficult to reconcile is the idea that maledom is deviant, when it's just the prevailing paradigm.
I'm not sure what this means?

Interesting how those with the most offensive fetishes get pearl clutchy if you don't use their euphemisms.

Ok then - what is "ageplay"?

I am primary an ageplayer and also a domme. One thing I find difficult to reconcile is the idea that maledom is deviant, when it's just the prevailing paradigm.

As for sissification, that's mostly a male thing. I make a distinction between subs who are submissive - they want to please you - and those with a submission fetish - they have a shopping list of fetishes they want carried out. Any domme I've ever known is only interested in the former, unless they're a pro domme.

As some of the previous posts have been theoretical in nature, feel free to ask me questions.

Dammit, phone just lost my post!

Sea's post about 4 back crystallised in my mind what I was trying to get at when I said non-BDSM traditional romantic fiction can almost be more dangerous.

BDSM and rape fantasy fics are often about what their authors call "hurt/comfort" (which incidentally isn't necessarily even sexual - our fave male character can get horribly wounded in battle and the side kick can provide comradely emotional comfort), or what is known in the BDSM community, I believe, as "aftercare". The problem is that this mirrors the abuse cycle in DV - violence, fake apology, period of being nice to make up for it, gradual ramp up in tension, more violence and repeat. I suspect the neurotransmitter/receptors and psychological sense of addiction to the highs and lows are the same in both instances.

But there's a sense in which romantic fiction as a whole does the same. Instead of the hero attacking the heroine, he demonstrates his dominant nature by fighting off the bad guys. And often, the bad guys are attacking the heroine, which serves to underline her submissiveness and/or vulnerability. It's the cycle of abuse, but at one step removed. The thing that makes it insidious and dangerous is that this isn't how it works in RL. In RL the dominant man who can fight off the bunch of blokes on a Saturday night punch-up is the same guy who goes home and beats his girlfriend. Violence, once allowed to run rampant, doesn't stay compartmentalized.

I've had some interesting conversations with an anthropologist friend of mine about this. Male on female violence isn't constant across societies, it varies. One of the predictors is the level of external threat a society faces. DV is lower in agrarian/peaceful hunter-gatherer societies than in warlike tribes constantly having border skirmishes with their equally warlike neighbours. And she tells me that when you interview the women about their attitudes to DV, it becomes clear that there is a kind of Faustian pact going on. The women will say things like "he only beats me because he cares about me enough to get angry". They see a bit of non-fatal violence as a price worth paying to avoid gang rape and possible murder by raiding parties from the neighbouring tribe. Or as she more succinctly put it - priming male violence to a hair trigger level is like leaving a loaded gun around the house - you never know what direction it's going to go off in.

To me, this plays into the social/psychological explanation that I think Sea and I favour, rather than some sort of evolutionary explanation of the sort posited by Biscuits. It's external threat level which seems to prime male violence, then it goes off unpredictably. And this can vary on timescales much shorter than those needed by evolution. My grandfather, by all accounts, was a horribly violent man (mostly directed at his sons rather than his wife - he was emotionally abusive to his daughters). But when you dig into family history a bit more, he'd served in the trenches in WW1 (yes, that long ago, I am an old gimmer, and the youngest daughter of an older mother who was in turn the youngest daughter of an older mother). He came back with PTSD, which probably explains, though doesn't excuse the violence.

And at some point, somewhere, women will have been selected as sexual partners by powerful men based on how compliant they are.

There's no basis for this statement. It's pure speculation.

I didn't say we have been selectively bred to enjoy submission. I said that selective breeding is a facet of human history. I also said that people develop counter intuitive characteristics to cope with extreme stresses and situations. And that there will be some adaptations that confer reproductive advantages in some situations. When you look at those things happening across many generations, some pretty complex behaviors and characteristics emerge. Socialization can be hard wired in, and hard wiring affects socialization. They don't take place in isolation from one another. Some people will have inherited physical characteristics that makes it easier for them to endure pain than others- as mentioned, how strong their endorphins response is for example.

And at some point, somewhere, women will have been selected as sexual partners by powerful men based on how compliant they are. Those women and their offspring will have had access to resources on that basis.

That is such an interesting way of thinking about it and it makes complete sense to me.
If you fantasise about a dominant man who hurts you or forces you to do things, you can also turn the idea of that man around in your head to also make him your protector who has your best interests at heart.
That narrative is very common in the BDSM world where people talk about what an ideal Dom/Sub relationship should be like.

It makes violence seem less frightening because it's in s controlled setting.

That mirrors the conclusion I came to when I realised how prevalent rape fantasies are in fanfic (a genre predominantly written by women for women). I decided a lot of it operatedat the level of a kind of society wide form of Stockholm syndrome where some women handle the ever present danger of male sexual violence by creating narratives round it and eroticising it. A lot of the women who write this stuff are rape survivors, and say they find writing a very effective form of therapy (whether it's healthy is a different question: some of the defences of the more extreme stuff are a bit reminiscent of pro ana websites).

fox that sounds fascinating. I will have a read.

vestal. That's what I meant - it's socialisation. I was disagreeing with biscuit saying it's part of our DNA.

She also says on p.3:

"It's not that "cross-generational sex", fetishism, sadomasochism, and trafficking in or using pornography are never punished. Sometimes they are, but never enough to dampen their popularity. Just enough to make them seem forbidden and keep them exciting. It's not that there are no sexual choices that truly violate society's rules. What I am suggesting is that the "deviant" sexual practices defended and promoted by the pro-sex people aren't really pro scribed by society; they're pre scribed. They're not really deviant at all. They're good soldier conformity."

And I'm willing to bet that in those societies you mention where kidnapping and rape are the norm, no woman fantasises about BDSM.

Rape is waaay to normalized in our culture, and plenty women fantasize about BDSM.
So there is that. I do think it can be socialisation. I.e. we are socialized to sexualize female submission.

I don't subscribe to evo psych theories for many reasons, including the "just so" aspect. However there is interesting feminist thought about the effects of socialisation on women's sexual desires.

www.mediafire.com/?6lcyid9dchi5bdi

It's an essay by Dorchen Leidholtd from The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism published in 1990. It's only 7 pages.

On p. 5 she asks where sadistic and masochistic fantasies come from and she says:

"To begin to answer these questions, we have to look beyond fantasies themselves to the culture in which they develop. It is not just coincidence that they imitate the violence men do to women and girls. Think about the implications for our sexuality of the following statistics: More than a third of us were sexually abused as children (Russell, 1984). For many of us, our first sexual experience was a sexual assault. Forty-four percent of us will be raped (Russell, 1984). The environment in which we learn about and experience our bodies and sexuality is a world not of sexual freedom but of sexual force. Is it any surprise that it is often force that we eroticize? Sadistic and masochistic fantasies may be part of our sexuality, but they are no more our freedom than the culture of misogyny and sexual violence that engendered them.

"The inescapable fallacy of the sexual repression thesis, as applied to women by the pro-sex people, is that it looks at sexuality within a context of largely mythical sexual restrictions and outside an environment of real, ongoing male sexual exploitation and abuse. In doing so, it turns what is done to women's sexuality by external oppression into something we do to ourselves in our heads. It suggests that if only women can beak through internal "taboos", we will have sexual freedom, indeed we will be free. It ignores the real political lesson of women's sexual experience: women cannot have sexual freedom, or any other kind of freedom, until we dismantle the system of sexual oppression in which we live."

On p. 6 she says:

"I've come to believe that a human being can learn to eroticize anything - including banging one's head against a brick wall."

When a man is the sub, the thrill is in the swapping of the dominance roles but this is not feminist as it recognises the female submissive as the norm and the transgression is that the male is submissive.

Like most evo psych stories, I think it's heading a bit into "just so stories" (and as Sea points out evo psych from a feminist perspective is a dangerous weapon to invoke.) I think there's a simpler explanation, given conversations I've had with friends about what they call "sub space" (as I understand it, a kind of almost trippy state subs enter during BDSM). The human endorphin system is very variable. Some people get rinners highs very easily, others never do. If you have a very responsive endorphin system, coupled with a culturally conditioned response to be submissive in bed I can imagine it would be like having sex on poppers only with a naturally occurring neurotransmitter supplying the high.

And I'm willing to bet that in those societies you mention where kidnapping and rape are the norm, no woman fantasises about BDSM.

And I just disagree with you when you say that the sexual enjoyment of being beaten and kidnapped developed genetically as a way of coping with actual kidnappings and beatings. No woman has ever enjoyed actually being raped. What nonsense.