BDSM and Feminism?

[LittleBooInABox]

What are your thoughts, can someone be in a BDSM relationship and still be a feminist?

Can a women yield control to her partner, (male or female) in a safe, sane and consensual manor.

Or not?

I'm curious.

so if its really problematic for a feminist to have BDSM interests, would it be hypothetically best if she just stuck to the kind of sex she wasnt really interested in? Or maybe just not have sex at all? Wonder how long that would last.

Im assuming the people that think that its anti-feminist, arent actually interested in BDSM type activities, so its pretty easy to criticise other peoples sexual tastes

and is it just people who are into alternative stuff who have to pick apart the sociological reasons they like the consensual things they do?

There's huge amount of feminist analysis around heteronormativity and consent, so no, thinking about your sexuality in political terms is not something specific to BDSM.

Generally people talk about their sexual interests changing and developing when they think about them.

I don't think anyone on here is advocating anyone start or stop being involved in BDSM?

I dont see anyone making threads on here picking apart heteronormative stuff , even if there is feminist analysis in academic circles.

There have been a number of them. They're some of the most controversial on here.

I've definitely been on threads picking apart heteronormative sexuality. For instance, BDSM aside, "normal" sex (i.e. the mainstream stuff in Hollywood films that maybe get a 12 or 15 cert) often involves heavy overtones of female submission (e.g. the Twilight saga, or even the famous kiss in the Empire Strikes Back) which - here's the thing - isn't seen as submissive, merely as the natural order of things. So much so that when I wrote a sex scene with a woman instigating it and expressing what she wanted in bed (it was a pretty equal sex scene in my eyes, with two very enthusiastic participants, just doing what turned them on, and very vanilla), it was commented on as being the woman being dominant. And yet (I write fanfic), had I written the self same scene as two men, it would not have been read as sub-Dom in the slightest. In fact, had it been a M/M piece, it might have even got a certain subset of readers (the sort who want their male-male fiction clearly labelled with a "bottom" and a "top") complaining that, over the course of the whole piece, it was all wrong because who was topping swapped over!

You're assuming wrong, Branleuse. I think there are many problematic things a feminist can do as an individual. If someone can reconcile it with their feminism, good for them. I find it difficult, personally. For many reasons which I am not going to go into here.

My take on this is an evolutionary one.

The fact that some/many women get sexual pleasure from pain or submission shows how dark the history of human sexuality is.

Women have been kidnapped/beaten etc so often as a matter of course over history that finding sexual enjoyment from these things is a genetic adaptation that helped women survive in dark times.

In some circumstances, you're more likely to survive long enough to reproduce after being kidnapped by a neighbouring tribe if you have a place inside you can go to that let's you submit/be hurt and derive enjoyment from it, rather that instinctually just fighting back.

It made me so intensely sorrowful that that is part of our history when I first thought that. Subjugation written into our DNA.

Not evolution. That takes too long. Socialisation rather.
Basically you're saying that being sexually submissive is part of our natural makeup? That's not a feminist view.

Evoltution can happen quickly seachange. It's punctuated equilibrium, not gradual change. Never mind the possibility of deliberate sexual selection for a characteristic, or selective breeding.

Plus, people have been treated as livestock at times in human history. People of both sexes have been bred for certain characteristics like animals in societies where slavery was prevalent.

I'm saying that some people have sexual submission as part of their inherited preferences. Not that being "sexually submissive is part of our natural make-up". Those inherited preferences have been imposed on those people. So the socialization has been physicalised. In the same way it is institutionalised.

That to me explains why some people are genuinely sexually submissive and get real physical pleasure from it and have no problem with it. Some people have that but are deeply conflicted about it. Some people are not sexually submissive (or sexually dominant) at all. Then socialization is another layer/level in that.

And I think it is a feminist view- one that is realistic about the deep effects and extent of patriarchy and oppression. One that is realistic about how

Story, posted too soon...

One that is realistic about how far oppression can reach into our lives.

I feel that it's deeply unfeminist to tell a woman what she should or shouldn't find sexually arousing, what I might like to do in the bedroom does not in any way shape or form impact on how I want to be treated outside of it. I am in a mild bdsm relationship and if he ever disrespected me outside of a sexual setting he would be history in a heartbeat.

I get a massive kick out of being sub because it takes away all the responsibility I have in the other areas of my life but I am beginning to wonder if I'm just lazy and want him to do all the work 😂 Actually I am only partly joking there because I do switch from time to time which he enjoys.

biscuit - I find your argument very odd to be honest. Are you suggesting that some women who have been kidnapped and raped throughout history have somehow enjoyed the experience? Or that they could only bear children if they did enjoy it? Or that we have been selectively bred like dogs?
If you're saying that submissiveness is now part of our DNA through the process of evolution then it would follow that that is part of our nature.
None of that makes the blindest bit of sense to me.

As I understand it, to people who practise BDSM, it has nothing to do with rape. It's about consent.

Well, I find your insistence that we are not a product of human history odd.

Yes, at some times and in some places humans have been selectively bred like dogs.

Yes, at some points and places in human history, women have been forced to adapt to kidnapping and forced sexual relationships as the norm. Tribes/villages have resorted to women stealing frequently. Rape has been used as an instrument of war frequently. Rape victims do report the ability to dissociate as being a key feature of surviving the experience. Everyone knows about fight or flight being instinctive responses to threats, but freeze and fawn are also instinctive responses to threats. Some people run, some people fight back, some people freeze/switch off due to fear and some people flatter/fawn over the aggressor. All are survival strategies. It's not a big leap from freeze or fawn to protective mechanisms evolving that enables people to survive prolonged capture. Stockholm Syndrome is a well documented and recognized phenomenon. Now imagine how that develops when there is no rescue, no rehabilitation no it continues over whole lifetimes for generations.

I'm not saying that only women who enjoyed it would bear children. But I am saying that the survival chances of offspring are better when the mother forms a "relationship" with the aggressor/kidnapper, gets the aggressor/kidnapper to care for the offspring, and who herself survives (doesn't fight back) and sticks around (doesn't run off). Women will often do anything for their children. Someone who is actually able to develop feelings and positive sexual response to such an aggressor has a better chance of pulling that off than someone who pretends.

I am saying that the reason that submission etc is something that both men and women can derive pleasure in safe and consensual setting I. The current epoch, is from something linked to a capacity that evolved in part as a response to enable surviving oppression and subjugation for long periods of time in the millennia gone by (by which I mean generations). That subjugation can be by "other" communities or within communities.

People who practise BDSM now do so in a framework of consent. But the reason people feel a need at all to practice it is in part linked to a survival need from other times. The ability to run fast didn't evolve so we could hold Olympics Games and win medals. It evolved to evade predators.

Of course I know that we've been affected and influenced by human history. I'm a feminist, so of course I agree with that.
What I disagree with is your assertion that we have been selectively bred to enjoy submission. That it is now somehow part of our DNA.
This is a dangerous argument, because genes are what makes us what we are in a biological sense. We don't have control over the genes that we possess. I can't change my eye colour for example. So, if a woman has the so-called gene for submissiveness, then she's stuck with that isn't she? (And I'm not really sure whether I think BDSM is harmful or harmless - I'm on the fence at the moment).
I think there's a much simpler explanation for people liking the idea of BDSM. I think it's socialisation. From a very young age we are exposed to ideas where girls and women are weaker, are captured, need rescuing from the scary man. We get this idea from stories and cartoons when we're young.
Some people grow up to love the idea of being rescued by the knight in shining armour, some grow up preferring the idea of the bad guy tieing them up. It's playing out a fantasy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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).

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.