When I was in high school, I knew a 19 year old girl named Christina who had lived a sheltered life. Her elder brother died on a plane flight to Mexico when he was 19, so her parents kept her very close to home. She wasn’t allowed to go out late, and she’d never had a date.
Christina was something of a genius. She graduated from high school at 16, and by 19 she was in her final year of college.
At this time, she met a man.
He was 35. He was a sadist. Her parents were frightened of him. They forbade her to continue seeing him. She pretended to agree, but snuck out and continued seeing him anyway. When they caught her, they gave her an ultimatum, hoping to force her to choose them over him.
Instead, she dropped out of school and moved with him to another state where she knew no one.
He forbade her from contacting myself and our group of friends. A youth pastor who was friendly with us repeatedly offered her a safe house; he was the first to be banned from speaking to her. I lost contact quickly. We’d never been close.
Rumors trickled in from the single friend of ours who was still in contact with her. They snuck phone calls when her abuser was at work. They were careful to make sure the contact wasn’t discovered.
He had given her a collar, which she was to wear at all times. When he came home from work, she was to present herself naked for his inspection, on all fours and acting like a dog until he gave her permission to be upright and human again. He would examine her body, and then examine the house. If everything was not as he preferred, he would beat her.
My friend told me, “I asked her to stop telling me about it. He bashes her head into the sink, over and over again. She won’t stop it. She won’t let me help her. I can’t bear to hear her anymore.”
I saw Christina once after the abuse started, when she stumbled back to her home state for a brief vacation, after which she returned to her abuser. She was pained, and tired. Before, she had been mercurial and childish. Now, she flashed between moments of intense childlike pouting, and a kind of hard-used suffering when she would suddenly become still and talk about her life in a halting, labored tone.
I don’t know what happened to her after that. I’ve long since lost the last thread that tied us together. I very much hope that she is alive and safe.
They called their relationship BDSM.
Tonight, I spent some time talking to Myca about BDSM. As he’s mentioned here, he’s a practitioner. He and I have been chatting about the subject, and he’s been kind enough to let me interview him — with some interesting results that I hope to put up on the blog sometime when I feel like I can process the subject.
I told him about a man I know who is strongly aroused by women’s fear, even outside of consensual sexual situations. He appears to seek it out, often causing it himself. I don’t think his behavior is deliberate, which is almost more frightening. He receives a neurochemical reward whenever he scares women, and so he continues to do it.
“There’s a line,” said Myca, “between a man who practices BDSM, and a sociopath who uses BDSM as a beard.”
I believe Myca is correct. Neither of these two men is practicing good BDSM as I seem to be encountering it when I talk to friendly, enthusiastic, healthy practitioners, or when I read blogs like this one, which has some exceptional writing: Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces.
Myca talks about the positives of the BDSM culture, of which there appear to be many. The culture of BDSM — as opposed to the desires — emphasizes limits and safe words. Submissives who are versed in a healthy BDSM culture may be better equipped to avoid dangerous situations like Christina’s. Hopefully, submissives are being taught what the signals of a dangerous and abusive relationship are. And hopefully, they’re also being taught that they have rights — that it’s okay for them to assert themselves, even though they’re in a position where they are supposed to be submissive.
Lord knows, that last point — that it’s okay to assert yourself even when you’re supposed to be submissive — is enough of a pitfall in vanilla relationships. In my first heterosexual partnership, I took on the submissive gender role modeled for women. I never refused sex. When sexual relations became painful, I smiled and concentrated on preventing myself from showing any sign of pain, so that my partner wouldn’t be disturbed.
I bring this up because I think it’s important to reinforce that vanilla relationships and BDSM relationships can go wrong in many of the same ways. Men who would never frame their desire for control in terms of BDSM can still socially isolate, hit, and terrify their wives. Wives who don’t understand themselves as submissive can still find it difficult to object to rape and abuse.*
Increasingly, I think this is an important point. Abusive men who would never frame their desire for control in terms of BDSM are still experiencing a desire for control. Submissive wives who are too timid to protest rape may not be thinking of themselves as sexual masochists, but they may be acting in ways that are consistent with submission.
On television, we see sexualized rape scenes. We see the torture of women framed as titilating. We see women wilting from abuse who are still being filmed as sex objects.
This is *unacknowledged* sadomasochism — it’s sadomasochism divorced from the safety rules of BDSM culture and unleashed into the mainstream. It’s BDSM without honest discussion or contemplation. It’s BDSM without the name BDSM. It’s BDSM that isn’t a game.
The issue of BDSM is one that nettles at me. In college, I thought of myself as strongly pro-sex. After a few terrible experiences with certain exploitative men, I’ve veered away from that camp. I’m not sure where I am now — someplace neutral and undefined.
I am uncomfortable with the idea of heterosexual male sadists. Not heterosexual male dominants who like being in control, not heterosexual male switch-hitters who like giving and receiving pain, just heterosexual male sadists. Specifically, paraphilic heterosexual male sadists who require women’s pain or fear for arousal. Virtually everything else I can understand, but this group of people scares me.
They scare me because they have institutional power in a way that women and gay men don’t. Sexualized male violence against women is not a rarity. It’s something that is often carried out.
As long as these men have appropriate boundaries, I’m sure they can be great people. I’m not sure I know any that do (although, it’s always possible that I’m forgetting someone). Of course, if I knew someone who felt this way and who did have appropriate boundaries, then I might not ever know they felt that way. They’d have to tell me since it wouldn’t come up when they harrassed or raped someone I knew. And men whose sexuality makes a lot of people nervous have good reasons for biting their tongues.
Unfortunately, I have known several heterosexual male sadists who had poor boundaries. They’re scary people. They often come across as being like serial killers. When they have a blindness about boundaries, they elicit fear and pain in women who have not consented to it. They are literally taking something away from women for their own benefit. They are turning women’s pain into their pleasure.
When men are getting pleasure from women’s pain in meaningfully consensual BDSM relationships, they aren’t taking something away from the consenting women. The women gain pleasure, and the men gain pleasure. This is the same thing I want in my vanilla sexual encounters: pleasure for pleasure. They obtain it in a different way. I don’t really understand how that dynamic works in a way that makes me comfortable, but my comfort is not a requirement for other people’s sex lives.
I have class-based critiques of men gaining pleasure from women in this way. But that’s about broad sociocultural movements. I find the proclivity for this behavior in a patriarchal society to be somewhat suspect. However, I think that the solution to the problem is culturally based — if maleness were not defined as power, and femaleness as lack of it — then I would be much more comfortable with whatever form of BDSM continued.
I don’t know what kinds of BDSM would continue. My suspicion is that more people would be switch-hitters, and that there would be close to parity between the sexes in terms of who was dominant and who submissive. It seems likely that some people would continue to obtain sexual pleasure from the neurochemical release of adrenaline — and that’s fine.
However, after my conversations with Myca, I am beginning to think that my discomfort with BDSM is rather like the cultural terror of stranger pedophiles. Some stranger pedophiles exist; some BDSM relationships go wrong. BDSM can exemplify some nasty things about our culture. But what’s much more common are the abusers who are in trusted positions as parents and teachers — in this case, the BDSM that exists unacknowledged in mainstream culture, masquerading as the kind of vanilla sexual behavior that most people don’t think of as needing limits and safe words.**
A few years ago, a friend of mine was walking alone on a deserted beach where she’d gone to relax during the dress rehearsal for a play. A group of men who were fishing catcalled her. They wanted her number. She smiled, told them she was engaged, and went on her way. They followed her, these five men, all of them together, and she alone.
I doubt these men understood their actions in terms of dominance and sadism, but they were feeding their comeraderie and their arousal on my friend’s fear. This vanilla interaction is every bit as much about transforming a woman’s terror into men’s pleasure as my acknowledged sadist acquaintance’s harrassment of women at bars.
BDSM culture is sometimes a problem. But I think the tendency to blame it is like the tendency to focus on stranger pedophiles. It takes a problem that is terrifying and close to home and projects it outward into the shadows: the scary man lurking at the border of the playground, the strangers wearing leather and ball gags.
BDSM culture frightens us because it shows us, naked and acknowledged, the sadistic behaviors that exist elsewhere. Sadism is scary. It can be very problematic. But proper use of BDSM culture is itself the salve. BDSM is a game. It has rules and escapes. It has limits and safe words. It defines boundaries. It stimulates articulation of power dynamics which otherwise fester unacknowledged.
If everyone who fetishized control acknowledged it, and respected the rules of BDSM, probably the world would be a safer place.
Instead, we teach men that any woman is available for their gratification. Some BDSM men fall prey to this teaching, and so do some vanilla men. The vanilla harrasser grabs a woman’s breast. The sadist harrasser corners her at a bar while she cringes away. Male privilege suggests to both men that women’s bodies, fear, and pain are at their disposal. Institutional power often allows them to harrass those women with impugnity.
I admit: I am more troubled by the sadist harrasser who likes to scare women than I am by the vanilla harrasser who grabs their breasts. My body is mine, and men should not touch it without invitation. Men who do so steal some portion of my sense of well-being. But men who deliberately frighten me are stealing more, and more likely to make me fear for my life.
Still, all this behavior has to be stopped. It is unacceptable for the sadist to frighten a woman for his gratification. It is unacceptable for a frat boy to rape his date because she doesn’t struggle. It is unacceptable for a sociopath to sexually torture a stranger. We may look at these behaviors as related to BDSM, vanilla sexuality, and insanity respectively, but they are all united by the concept of control without consent. That’s the real spectre.
—
*I’m focusing on this gendered dynamic because it’s the one that causes me the most reservations, because of the way that it interacts with privilege and institutional power. Other dynamics are certainly worth discussing, but I’m not going to get to them in this post.
**Of course, it does need limits and safe words, which feminists know. “Limit” = “nothing you don’t obtain enthusiastic consent for.” Safe words = no, fuck off, go away, excuse me, I’m a lesbian, I’m not interested, Stop, and no reply at all.
Note to commenters: Comments are locked to feminists only. Perspectives that are skeptical of BDSM are welcome, but shouldn’t cross the line into attacking individuals. For instance, it’s fine to express reservations about the boundaries of the class sadists; it’s not fine to tell a commenter that his wife is insane because she’s a masochist. BDSM people, the same basic rules apply, and don’t attack skeptics who may have good reason (such as personal experience or experience with friends or loved ones) for their stances. Bear in mind, as always, that we are talking about real people (Christina and Myca, for instance) who have real lives.
This post is not meant to be comprehensive. I have other thoughts and questions about BDSM, some of which I will express in subsequent posts.
I am trying very hard to come up with a good way to answer this.
I don’t see what the problem is with BDSM according to this particular entry. I see a perfectly reasonable account of problems with society: gender as it relates to power, consent issues, and messed-up sexuality. The only issue I am seeing is that some people use BDSM as a cover. There are many other things people use to cover their terrible behavior. I see that you are saying that part of the problem is that some people are naturally and uncontrollably sadistic, but I don’t know if the same part of the brain that gets off on fake fear and pleasurable pain is the same part of the brain that gets off on real fear and actual torture (any brain scientists who would know more about this?)
I am, of course, not saying you can’t or don’t have other reasons for disliking or feeling conflicted about BDSM, but I am not sure I understand what this particular reason is.
Christina’s story was terrible, but it is not BDSM. Now, do I think that we have to respect other definitions of a word? There are certain cases where I think someone’s self-defnition superceeds the traditional definition (say, trans people who still appear in their birth body, or people who say they are bisexual even if they haven’t really dated both genders *I really hate when people judge sexuality by sexual partners*) and there are certain cases I think we can ignore what people claim they are when there is evidence to the contrary (say, someone referring to themselves as liberal when they have conservative politics). In this case, I don’t think we need to agree with Christina that her relationship is in any way BDSM when it is clearly abusive instead.
” In this case, I don’t think we need to agree with Christina that her relationship is in any way BDSM when it is clearly abusive instead.”
I hear that it’s an example of badly practiced BDSM. But they felt they were following internal rules, and that those rules were appropriate to bondage, domination, submission, and masochism. That was how they perceived their relationship, how they contextualized it in their lives, and how they presented it to others.
I suppose I would want to call it an abusive BDSM relationship, in the same way that I would call something else an abusive (vanilla) relationship. I don’t really understand why the two attributes would be mutually exclusive.
Mandolin,
Were you reading Alas back in early 2006. There was a really interesting discussion about this topic back then. Mostly me, cicely, Myca, Thomas, and FCH, also BritgirlSF, and Jake Squid. bean was involved in it too, but I guess she asked that all her comments on Alas be dropped down the memory hole at some point. Personally, I find that creepy and sad (she wrote some interesting stuff here on Alas, including on that thread), but to each their own…
Mostly here, but also spilling over to my lj.
I think that my position is very close to your own.
[Edited to add]Actually, I see that the thread I mentioned shows up as a “possibly related post” in the side bar. That is such a cool feature!
[Silenced, I have two objections to the comment that was previously posted here.
One: I do not have, at this point, any reason to consider you a feminist. On the other hand your silly slams at Pandagon, and your digs at women in other threads, suggest strongly that you are an anti-feminist or someone who’s not yet come to a definite, thought-out position on these issues. Therefore, I do not accept your ticky-box checking as a valid endorsement of your feminism for the purposes of posting on my feminist-only threads.
2) I read your comment as questioning the validity of my claim. Lu seems to share my interpretation, and responds in that vein in the next comment. However, it’s now been pointed out to me by two people that it is equally possible to read your comment as salacious, as if you were asking what channel the images I discussed were on so that you could find images of women’s torture to get off on. The leery goggle-face smiley you used lends credence to that interpretation.
In the wake of point #1, I don’t really care which was your intent. Both readings still seem possible to me.
I’m not saying I don’t want you on any of my threads, or that I’ll never want you on my feminist threads — I appreciate that you’ve modulated your tone so far in response to moderation requests, and if you’re genuinely interested in feminism, I look forward to a day when we have common ground. That’s not today, though, so for now I’d appreciate it if you’d not participate on those threads of mine that are marked out as intended for feminists only.
–Mandolin]
Ever watch “Law and Order”?
My point is that BDSM requires consent and respect. I have never heard of participants “bashing heads against sinks”. It is the anti-BDSM to do something like that. I can frame myself as a Christian, but I don’t believe Jesus even existed and I think the Bible is a load of crap. I can still tell everyone I am a Christian- should they respect that and refer to me as such when I clearly don’t believe in any of their talking points?
I suppose my point is why refer to it as an “abusive BDSM relationship”? You aren’t qualifying it as an (for instance, exact circumstances unknown) “abusive monogamous sexually active white may-December white collar-blue collar childless whatever relationship”. The BDSM isn’t what makes it abusive, any more than its the monogamy or the sexually active or the childless parts. Isn’t it just an “abusive relationship”, period?
My point was also that what Christina’s boyfriend gets off on on that relationship- real fear and nervousness and non-respect- is different than what other people get off on who participate in BDSM- pretend fear and head spaces and endorphins.
I first saw an excerpt of this post that mentioned only the “unacknowledged sadomasochism” bit and I was really uneasy. Reading the whole thing… I’m still uneasy, but not quite in the same way. What happened to your friend is chilling and horrible, and you are in fact right that there exist people who use BDSM as a cover for their abusiveness.
Well, “cover” isn’t quite the word. I think it’s being used as more than that, as legitimation. I don’t know too much about your average abusive man, but I get the impression that a lot of them are aware on some level that the relationship they’re in is fucked up. I may be wrong, but I suspect that some “honeymoon period” expressions of guilt may have some sincerity, even if the person has no ability or desire to actually stop.
Where with a guy like this, he never has to feel guilt (or at least doesn’t have to acknowledge it) — he can tell himself that that’s what a harsh “Master” does and feel no guilt — as well as have permission to get off on behaving that way, as well.
And yes, knowing someone in a situation like that, especially meeting them before you’re aware of the community and the safeguards present in it (which, as should be obvious from this post, don’t always work — especially not when people become fascinated with the fringes and decide that the people who keep it “too safe” are pansies, which does happen), would make one really suspicious of BDSM. It should.
But I still feel profoundly uneasy with “the unacknowledged sadomasochism in everyday life” type thinking. It’s been very common in anti-SM feminist circles, and it very often takes on a life of its own and grows to the point where it’s no longer clear what “sadomasochism” is supposed to mean. Any social power dynamic becomes a less obvious “form” of “SM,” such that looking at us is a “useful tool” for understanding “hidden” social dynamics. We’re no longer a group, a subculture that deserves respectful ethnographic study. Rather, we’re treated as a tool, a handy magnifying glass for theory-making.
Which is how you get, for example, the absolutely endless heterocentricity in the theory. Any and all SM that’s worth talking about becomes male dominant/female submissive. No gay folks, and no femdom, because that’s not useful for the theory. That doesn’t provide your handy blown-up Patriarchy Microcosm.
And what people are missing there is that gay leather, lesbian leather, femdom, etc. are not funny little outliers that don’t give you information about the patriarchy. They’re integral parts of the whole. If you look at the history of sadomasochistic subcultures in the US, you’ll find that a lot of what exists now in terms of community come from gay leather. The “feminist” focus on M/f dynamics is heterocentric in the extreme, and seeing feminists erase and neglect queer subcultures makes me very uncomfortable.
I’ve also talked incessantly, and I’m sure you’ve seen it from reading sm-f, about the way someone like me — a female who prefers the dominant role — gets ignored completely as some sort of rogue data point. Since I don’t square with the theory, and since people like me are rarer than the reverse, I get treated as someone who it would be derailing or tangential to bother to listen to at all.
I don’t have any problem with critiques of socially compulsory forms of male dominance over women. I share the worries you have about that. I don’t even have a problem with critiques of the heterosexual and pansexual (which reads, more often than not, “het men and bisexual women”) BDSM scene for not doing more to challenge these norms.
But I do object, and object strongly, to the “these people show us something about everyday life!” memes. I am not a magnifying glass. I am a person.
Silenced, do you get out much? Or have cable?
A therapist once told me that he thought my descriptions of topping (most particularly my mentioning feeling peaceful afterward) sounded like a study he’d seen of abusive men, who supposedly experienced a calm period after beating their wives.
I’ve seen several therapists since who consider his seeing that “connection” as ridiculous and appalling as I did.
For me, that feeling of peacefulness comes at least in part from knowing that I did my “worst,” and my partner enjoyed it and loved it. It makes me feel that all parts of me are in principle acceptable and lovable, even the dark and scary bits.
I’m thinking of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where the half-Klingon goes into some sort of violent mating mode and winds up wrestling erotically with (and sexing? can’t remember) another crew member. After it’s over, he grins and says “Hey, that wasn’t too bad.”
It’s that sort of feeling. That even my dark side isn’t “too bad.” Not because I don’t have very dark fantasies or because my mean streak is particularly diluted, but because… hey, we’ve gone down into those depths, experienced passion and desire and fun, and come back up.
I doubt an abuser has a warm feeling of being loved and accepted after he’s terrorized someone. Even if he forces her to say “I love you” or “I deserved that,” that strikes me as totally different than being hugged and thanked by an endorphin-high person who feels happy.
I take your point, JenLovesPonies, and I don’t think you’re wrong, really, but I’m of two minds.
First: What you’re saying about the difference in classification between ‘abusive BDSM relationship’ and ‘abusive white/monogamous/childless/heterosexual relationship’ is right on, and I think that the cultural tendency to focus on the BDSM element while ignoring the other elements owes quite a bit to the comfort level people feel in slagging off what other folks do in bed (or in love) while resisting examining their own relationships and lives similarly. That is: The same folks who think that BDSM is evilbadwrongpoop would rarely, if ever, acknowledge the ownership dynamic that underlies monogamy . . . or if they do, they certainly wouldn’t condemn monogamy in the same terms that they use to condemn BDSM. Often, because they believe that despite the underlying dynamic, it’s possible to have egalitarian monogamous relationships built on equality . . . but god knows that that’s just impossible when it comes to BDSM. And yeah, funny how it’s the sexuality they don’t share that they feel comfortable slagging off, isn’t it?
Second: I think that what Trin said in comment #7 is 100% true in regards to the obligation we in the BDSM community have to avoid providing cover or legitimacy to abuse. The existence of a (sorta) organized community and the risks inherent in WIIWD I think gives us that obligation. And as much as I believe that monogamy is likely to create situations that are just as unhealthy (or unhealthier) than BDSM, I think it’s less likely for an abuser to actually cite monogamy as a way to justify abuse (although yeah, actually, now that I think about it, I may be wrong), and (more importantly) there’s not really a monogamous community who can stand up and condemn these things outright.
—Myca
“rarely, if ever, acknowledge the ownership dynamic that underlies monogamy”
Ha! Monogamy makes particular sense to me because I like D/s. I like the idea of someone “belonging” to me.
I totally think compulsory monogamy is worth critiquing, just as compulsory dynamics of domination and submission are. But I’m quite leery of the idea that we decide critiquing BDSM in this sweeping way is disrespectful and replace that sweeping critique with a sweeping critique of consensual monogamy. If I can choose D/s, surely I can choose to share my love with one partner at a time.
Oh sure, I absolutely agree. I’m in a monogamous relationship too. My point was much more that folks never want to see their ox gored with quite the vigor they use in goring someone else’s. Replace monogamy with heterosexuality or whatever.
—Myca
MYca: I’m of two minds on that obligation. I think it’s obvious that if I know someone in the community is abusive, I should do my best to get that person ostracized and make sure people are aware of it. But I’m not sure what that means with respect to hunting these people out and discovering them, somehow. Is there a moral duty for any and all vanilla people to go looking for the vicious bastards in their midst? If I’m a vanilla wife in a random sleepy neighborhood is it my duty to start investigating how other wives act? How husbands do?
Clearly it’s incumbent on me to provide support to someone who I know is being abused, and if I have leverage in the community to limit that person’s power (over his wife, in the community, etc.) I should use it. But do I have any more obligation than that?
I don’t know if the BDSM case is the same. Sometimes I think it’s not, just because there does exist a BDSM community in a way that there does not exist a “vanilla community” whose members look out for and rely on one another.
But sometimes I think not. Many of the cases of abusive BDSM I hear about come from groups that explicitly reject a lot of the safety-based tenets of the larger community. So you get, for example, small enclaves of people who believe in M/f total power exchange, where you’ll read messages from the women looking for Masters who say “I want him to control me utterly. I want to resist and lose and know I am there whether I want to be or not. I’m a slave. I don’t want to play with power. I don’t want this safeword bullshit. I want to be forced and re-made.”
And the men who interact with them, from what I’ve seen, are often men who have either been run off of the larger community for not adhering to community ideas of safety, or people who have left it themselves, dismissing it as “play-acting” and claiming they are “real” because nothing less than “true slavery” will do.
Once these people have slithered off to their own little slimy enclaves, what obligation does the community have? Should we be trying to expose them? Get their websites shut down? Should we set up rescue missions to try and convince the women that they’re playing with fire?
I really don’t know the answer myself. I know where a few such enclaves are and I spoke out where I could, but few people were interested in giving up their dream of “true” slavery/ownership. They had, like I mentioned, left BDSM’s “mainstream” (or simply avoided it) for exactly this reason.
Ah, okay. I wasn’t sure if you were saying that, or if you meant “actually, monogamy is The Problem!” In which case it would be Same Logic *ahem*, Different Day. My bad.
I think what we do is talk loudly and make as clear as we can that they don’t represent us, and that we don’t think what they’re doing is necessarily healthy.
I’m right there with you on the whole “how much obligation do we have to them when they’ve openly rejected our community” thing, and it’s understandable, but I just worry that to outsiders we all look the same . . . and someone like the dude taking advantage of Christina, in Mandolin’s example, claims the mantle of BDSM just as much as we do.
So yeah. Half my distancing is for the benefit of newbies to the community who probably should be told by someone, “Checkitout: I’m a kinky mofo, and these dudes are not cool.” The other half of my distancing is for my own benefit, because I’m frankly pretty tired of being told that since I like to consensually spank my girlfriend, I’m the equivalent of the above dude.
—Myca
Yeah. I used to constantly lurk on those sites, partially to stare at the trainwreck, partially because I too had fallen afoul of one of these jerks at one point (he sent me illegible nasty email about how I’d never properly care for a truly submissive person if I thought anything so Profoundly Important could ever be mere “play”, and threatened to tell “everyone” (read: his little cult) I was an abusive pseudo- dominant), and partially because part of me just really Wanted! To Convince! At least one of them! That there Is! Something! Better! Out There!
Which I never really managed to do. I think a couple of people thought I might have a point… but these were people who really were totally wedded to the idea that someday the perfect person would come along and make them REAL slaves forever and ever. The denial of reality was miles thick.
Getting away from them, not playing desperate debater/savior made my life a ton healthier. I could turn my energy away from people who were lost causes (or at least who it was abundantly clear I by myself couldn’t rescue) and turn it toward communities that were positive and fulfilling for me and the others in them.
That’s why I find myself leery of accepting the mantle that if we want to truly be accepted as feminist, we have to clean those closets. Some of them we just can’t clean, any more than vanillas can make sure no domestic violence happens in non-kinky circles.
It’s very much Model Minority type thinking, to my mind. “If any of this goes on in your circles, your circles are dangerous, bad, and wrong. ‘That’s BDSM for you!’
If it goes on in ours, well, that’s patriarchy for you. What do you mean ‘that’s vanilla for you?’ That’s incoherent!”
“in Mandolin’s example, claims the mantle of BDSM just as much as we do. ”
Right. And I like you better, so I want to give you exclusive right to the term, but why should I? Does Heart become not feminist because I think her stance toward transpeople is idiotic? Or is transphobia something that happens within the movement feminism?
I guess if someone wants to define the term BDSM as including, definitionally, appropriate safety measures that are at all times respected, that’s fine. I would then reframe all the use of the term in this post as heterosexual male paraphilic sadism.
FTR, I talk about heterosexual male paraphilic sadism not because it’s a microcosm of the patriarchy, but because that’s the dynamic that has the most power to *create* a microcosm of the patriarchy. The abusive heterosexual male sadists I’ve known were able to use the patriarchy to prop up their abuse. I see a difference between this and what I’m accused of doing. I’m not talking about part of your community and pretending the other parts don’t exist; I’m explicitly talking about part of your community and saying that my words shouldn’t be taken as representing the whole.
I also think the idea that one can’t form social theory based on the activitiy of communities is dangerous. We’re all microcosms in one way or another. As someone with training in social science, I generally do social analysis, not individual analysis, though the two sometimes intersect.
“Does Heart become not feminist because I think her stance toward transpeople is idiotic? Or is transphobia something that happens within the movement feminism?”
Personally, I’m hard pressed to see people as feminist when they advocate discriminating against, disrespecting, and shaming women.
I could, I suppose, call someone feminist whose transphobia comes from ignorance — someone who is making the all too common mistake of theorizing about trans experience without doing any actual listening to trans people. Or I could say that feminist works produced in a time when people were a lot more ignorant about trans stuff is feminist, and has transphobia in it because it’s historically colored.
But I really find it hard to think that feminism is consistent with calling women men, demeaning their lives, bodies, and experiences.
“But I really find it hard to think that feminism is consistent with calling women men, demeaning their lives, bodies, and experiences.”
There’s a certain wing of feminist thought, though, that leads to these (abhorrent) assumptions. I think it’s one of the dangerous misapplications of the theory, but it feels consistent to me within the theory, even if the people doing it are being assholes.
But that’s fair enough. I’m willing to concede that Christina’s relationship was not BDSM.
Her partner was still a sadist. It seems that there are a lot of men in this culture who are trained to get sexual satisfaction from women’s *real and nonconsensual* pain, and that those men appear in many veins of society including vanilla relationships and abusive relationships that mimic some BDSM protocols.
I fear those men; I think a lot of people [women] do. I think the group most visible to the dominant culture that appears to embody these traits are male BDSM sadists, when in fact most BDSM sadists aren’t into real and nonconsensual pain. However, this group of people is visible and different, so it’s easy to map one’s fears onto, when those fears would be better directed at recognizing that absive, nonconsensual sadists don’t tend to identify themselves as Lord Drakkon (though they may, just as they may identify themselves as anything else).
I’m trying to suggest there’s a difference of degree*, but not much of a wall per se, between Christina’s mate and — say — the guys documented in the recent men’s magazine issue who said they wanted to humiliate their girlfriends by getting them to have anal sex when it was painful and they didn’t want to do it. These women, at least ostensibly in the framing of the article, weren’t receiving pleasure from the pain or humiliation. Both sets of men are acting in a nonconsensual sadistic fashion, because what’s arousing them is the pain and humiliation of a woman who’s not enjoying it, or who has no recourse to safety.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to only call out Christina’s mate as the unhealthy nonconsensual sadist, when both sets of people are acting in a sadistic fashion. Thus, unhealthy nonconsensual sadism appears in both BDSM and vanilla contexts — and probably a great deal more, by absolute numbers, in the latter.
–
*because Christina’s partner did her a lot more physical damage.
That’s the question, to me. When is a person a part of a community? I don’t know this guy (and thank the Goddess for that), but I’d guess that if I asked him how involved he was in the local BDSM/leather community I wouldn’t get a “Very.”
I could definitely be wrong, but I’d suspect that if this guy went to some large group like APEX or TES or BR with his “slave” in tow and she had marks from her head being slammed into the sink, people would have questions he wouldn’t want to hear. Yeah, some people can write off some rather nasty conduct as heavy play, and I do think that goes on and is bad (there’s one particular guy in the local scene who endless controversies rage around, because he plays so heavily. Some hero-worship him and some hate him.) But I don’t think that someone saying “Yeah, head-slamming is punishment in our relationship” would be embraced by the community.
So what’s he doing? Probably smarmy shit with his partner, alone, by himself, trading tales of prowess with a few other people with similar proclivities over the Internet. So is that a community? Well, I suppose so.
And is what they’re doing “sadomasochism?” Well, it’s hard for me to see how it could not be, at least on his part. But what does all that mean and who does it reflect on? That to me is a much harder question.
And as far as what I said about theory — I don’t know. I do think there’s a very real tendency to zoo-animal BDSM people (or anybody with a fetish, or a deviant sexuality.) And I had just come off of reading/hearing about one of those old-school radicals who liked the “BDSM is a microcosm” theory. So I misread, at least in part.
But I do think there’s a lot of assuming going on about which desires fuel which people, and I’m not entirely sure I think it’s right. I suppose my sexual enjoyment of inflicting pain is akin to this guy’s, but what does that really mean? What are we each getting out of it? Do those differences matter? How? I’m leery because I really don’t know those answers.
To use another example, I prefer Ampersand and you to Christina Hoff Summers, but she calls herself a feminist too. I would rather that the term feminism be associated with you, than her, but how can I judge?
That’s the problem.
And yeah, it’s a problem across the board.
Just as Feminism has no central controlling authority with the power to define what is and isn’t feminist, neither does BDSM. Only for we kinky folk, I tend to think that the problem is even worse.
There are a lot of definitions of BDSM out there that include consent, safewords, & etc., as part of their definition, but the people who don’t meet those definitions claim that BDSM has been “hijacked by wusses who don’t understand the true blah blah blah blah.”
It’s like how Amp is a big asshole both for saying that Christina Hoff Summers isn’t a feminist and for saying that he is. The people on both sides of Amp claim that he’s hijacked the definition of Feminism.
And they’ll never not say that. About anything.
So for me, this is a little like talking to people whose only exposure to feminism is something really extreme and scary, and who therefore don’t define themselves as feminist and who oppose ‘feminism’, but who say stuff like, “but I’m all for equality, reproductive rights, equal pay . . . [continuing list of feminist issues] . . . etc., ”
—Myca
I’m hearing that.
My issue is that of the people I’ve known in my life who claimed a BDSM identity, they split about 50/50 on the consensual/scary-shit side of the fence, so it’s really hard for me to reconcile my personal experience with what you’re saying. I understand that I’ve probably known more who were on the consensual than scary shit side, it’s just that the consensual people’s fetish wouldn’t necessarily have come up, since often the way I learn about the scary-as-shit people is when they abuse or harrass someone.
The two of you obviously have better, and greater, experience than mine. I’ll bow to your definition.
Yeah, and I think it really depends on what definition we’re using, and cases could be made for all sorts of definitions, from something as broad as
“someone who works for improvement in women’s lives”
or as liberal as
“someone who seeks to eradicate discriminatory practices affecting women”
to
“someone who believes society to be an oppressive patriarchy, and seeks to dismantle this patriarchy through consciousness-raising and radical social change”
to
“someone who believes there are multiple sites and axes of oppression and commits herself to dismantling each, recognizing that none is more important/profound, but who focuses personally on those affecting women most.”
If you’re following definition 3, that seems to exclude transphobia from feminism. But 1 could be consistent with it, as could 2, depending on how you analyze what patriarchy is and means (and whether transfolk are its agents somehow, as is commonly assumed.)
And yeah, that happens around BDSM too. I really think the problem is, in part, that we don’t know what sadism is, or the desire to erotically dominate. Or at least I don’t think I do. I’m not convinced my feelings aren’t similar to this guy’s in some way. We’re both hitting and liking it (sexually), we’re both wielding power and liking it (sexually). But we’re creating two very different sorts of experience, from what I can tell. I’m creating one that’s welcomed and wanted, and expressly wanting that, and he’s creating one that isn’t (or at least seems not to be; Christina is described as suffering and aware of her suffering.)
How different are those experiences? How akin are we? I don’t think we know that yet, and I’m not sure we can know that unless some brain scans happen somewhere.
Mandolin–are you familiar with Elf/Shardik/The Journal Entries? I don’t have a place where I feel comfortable googling it (it’s very not-worksafe), but he’s an out heterosexual masochist; you might find some of his writing interesting/thought-provoking. (Just a warning–some of the Journal Entries squick me a lot; I’m recommending his blog, not necessarily the Journal Entries themselves.)
I’m not convinced my feelings aren’t similar to this guy’s in some way. We’re both hitting and liking it (sexually), we’re both wielding power and liking it (sexually). But we’re creating two very different sorts of experience, from what I can tell. I’m creating one that’s welcomed and wanted, and expressly wanting that, and he’s creating one that isn’t . . . How different are those experiences? How akin are we?
Maybe I am missing something big — this is not an area in which I have any firsthand experience — but it seems to me like you’re really not giving yourself any credit here.
I have sex with women and like it (sexually); many rapists force sex with women and like it (sexually). If the rapist is a woman (as I am), the specific sex acts may be very similar, even in some sense identical. When I have sex with women, however, it is welcomed and wanted and I expressly desire to have sex only in that context. Rapists, on the other hand, don’t.
Daisy,
Point taken, and I used to leave it at exactly that. My feeling that maybe there’s more to it, though, stems from my feeling that, well, part of what I do and want to do when doing some BDSM is explore and indulge the darker side of me (with safeguards in place to make sure no one really gets harmed, or at least that those risks are minimized.)
I think it’s worth acknowledging to the people who do fear or even hate BDSM that well, yes, it does often involve people playing with emotional and physical limits, pushing themselves, facing fears, dredging up demons.
Vanilla sex can certainly do this too, and I think it’s warping to act like it doesn’t or can’t — just talk to many survivors for whom opening up to sexual experiences requires a great deal of trust. (Note that I’m not saying every survivor is this way or attempting to encapsulate The Survivor Experience or something.)
bUt BDSM is, or at least is for a lot of people/in a lot of situations, *about* that fear, that power, those “edges”, in a way that vanilla sex isn’t. Vanilla sex isn’t often centered around that, and BDSM often is.
I think it’s worth acknowledging to the people who do fear or even hate BDSM that well, yes, it does often involve people playing with emotional and physical limits, pushing themselves, facing fears, dredging up demons. . . . bUt BDSM is, or at least is for a lot of people/in a lot of situations, *about* that fear, that power, those “edges”, in a way that vanilla sex isn’t. Vanilla sex isn’t often centered around that, and BDSM often is.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But there is nothing wrong with choosing to challenge yourself, to push your limits (or have them pushed), to confront your demons, right? Those things are integral parts of growth and many people get a lot of respect for them, like athletes who push their physical limits time and again.
So while there are certainly big ways in which BDSM is different from vanilla sex, I still don’t see where the confusion comes in about whether the experience of someone in a BDSM situation is different from the experience in an abuse situation. In one situation, you have two people who want to be there, who have sought out the experience, and who respect one another as sentient beings — much like in totally vanilla, consensual sex situations. In another, you have one person totally disregarding the other and deliberately brutalizing her — much like in a rape situation. Both cases might involve hitting, fear, and the exploration of the darker side of human nature, but the people are having completely different experiences, no? The way that a rapist and I might both have orgasms while engaging in the same sex act, but it’s clearly completely different?
Edited to add: It’s very deliberate that those are questions, because as I said in my first comment, I don’t have any firsthand experience with this. I’ll believe you if you tell me I’m mistaken, that the two cases (of consensual BDSM and abuse) are more similar than I imagine (or anyway that the experiences of the sadists in each case are more similar).
A friend of mine pointed out this blog post, and I’ve set my website link to a blog post of my own where I talk about my (very positive) experience on the fringe of BDSM culture. The practical experience that I’ve had matches the theoretical description I’m replying to very nicely.
Although, I would challenge the statement “Limit” = “nothing you don’t obtain enthusiastic consent for.”
Consent can be genuine but reluctant, and the process of finding out exactly what your limits are can be a challenging thing for all parties involved. When the enthusiastic consent becomes reluctant consent, you’ve reached a kind of limit, let’s call it a ‘soft limit’. When reluctant consent becomes reluctant refusal, you’ve reached another kind of limit. When reluctant refusal becomes determined refusal, you’ve reached the hard limit.
Up to the soft limit, you don’t really need explicit negotiation, unless you’re misreading signals about someone’s enthusiasm. It’s in the area between the soft and hard limits that things can most easily start to go wrong and become corrosive. ‘Reluctant refusal’ is particularly problematic, because it could be that the person is reluctant to refuse, or it could be that they definitely want to refuse, but are reluctant to express their refusal. Hence the importance of checking and double-checking and re-checking, and of creating an environment where the expression of refusal is encouraged. People don’t like being refused, and very large numbers of them suppress the expression of refusal in others and (perhaps just as destructively) in themselves.
Interesting, the link that I followed dropped me in partway through. Reading the story about Christina, I think it’s relevant to point out that the sadistic partner controlled her in the same way that she was accustomed to being controlled by her parents. They attempted to control her access to people, and he did the same thing, the difference being that he won the battle.
In my own experience, it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I started to realise that I had rights when it came to where I directed my affections, and how I was treated, and how I didn’t have to do things for other people that I didn’t want to do. English-speaking society tends to discourage people from being open about their power relationships, and the ones who don’t learn to respect their own feelings (like Christina) can suffer for it very badly.
Definitely an interesting post.
For starters, I identify as dominant now. What feels like ages ago, but is only a couple years, I used to ID as a switch. I ended up in a relationship with an abusive man. Long story short, I ended up being the sub a hell of a lot more than otherwise with him. And being sexually and emotionally abused. Since I left that relationship, I stopped IDing as a switch, as the idea of giving in that way even a little terrifies me. I truly do agree that there are people who use BDSM as a cover for their genuine, sadistic contempt for women. The idea of consent doesn’t even factor in with them.
I think the best we can do is say, there are otherways to do that, if that’s how you want to live your life, go for it, but ummm… we will be over here if you decide it isn’t all it was cracked up to be and want out.
Excellent discussion. I very much agree with the point Trin and Myca made above about the importance of not allowing BDSM to be used to legitimize abuse [and conversely challenging attempts to equate BDSM with abuse]. It seems to me that there *is* an extra responsibility for those of us who practice BDSM to counter this; we’re the most aware of and attuned to this phenomenon, and have the most to lose from it.
And I think it’s worth fighting for the kind of definition of BDSM that we want — one that excludes abuse. Sure, this doesn’t prevent others from using the terms differently (that’s why they call it a definitional struggle). As the “please note” box here illustrates (“if you don’t think the post author would regard you as feminist …”) well-defined subjective meanings are very useful in their own right.
Consent comes up a lot and I think there are a lot of difficult cases here — and the context of a patriarchal culture (both the income asymmetries and the normalization of traditional gender roles) has to be taken into account. The question of gender roles also comes up for me as a submissive transvestite: to what extent am I inhabiting/reinforcing societal norms that oppress women, to what extent am I calling attention to them?
jon
When I say BDSM community, I don’t think I was using the same meaning that you seem to be. For instance, I don’t really hang out with other Jews (at least not around the topic of Judaism), but I’m still part of the international diasporic Jewish community.
Yeah, I think so too. I mean, think about the words “rape” and “sex.” We do say, for example, that rape is “nonconsensual sex,” yes, but we also say things like “Rape isn’t sex” — in the former sentence we mean something like “activity involving genitals and/or sex toys” (and for some people, though not most feminists, that’s narrowed down to “penetration”), and in the latter we mean something like “consensual activity involving genitals and/or sex toys” (note: I’m not defending either of these strongly; I don’t mean to get into “is X sex” right now)
I think it’s possible to use the term BDSM in a similar way, such that we can mention, for example, that an abusive relationship included, say, bondage gear and whips, but still not think of that as what comes to mind when BDSM is mentioned, any more than we think about rape as a special little revolting subsection of “sex.”
I’m not sure you can be a part of a community you’re ignoring. Maybe you can, but something doesn’t ring right about that to me. Especially when you contrast something like BDSM, where there are quite a lot of community aspects to it for a lot of people, with vanilla sexuality, in which the idea of a community aspect to sexuality is not generally thought about at all, much less embraced.
Y’know, a few months ago I might have thought seriously about this, but now I’m really on Not Care Island about it. I don’t really think someone else’s dressing in feminine clothes I don’t even wear says something about me or my womanhood. And I also think that, well, a lot of crossdressers who are into that for sexual reasons aren’t really mimicking women — most I know wouldn’t, for example, get off on wearing the pants I wear while hiking. It’s not about mimicking women, it’s about playing a role.
And I guess that role can be critiqued for what it “says about women,” what it plays up and what it plays down — but I’m not so sure that people playing games and choosing something cartoonish because it plays up what they like is really high on the list of feminist issues for me any more.
I have to agree with Trin’s comments regarding the BDSM community. I recently became active in my own local community, and it is a support group, a social club, an educational experience, etc., in ways that the (much larger) vanilla community is not, and never could be. In addition, part of the mission is acceptance of us and our practices, no matter what the gender or roles we use to define ourselves. I don’t know anyone in my circle, small as it may be, who would agree to include abusive “dominants” in our community.
“There’s a line,” said Myca, “between a man who practices BDSM, and a sociopath who uses BDSM as a beard.”
This is profound, and it isn’t just true for sociopaths. It also applies to attention-seekers, power-tripping narcissists and drama-addicts of all types.
Hannah Arendt called this “the authoritarian personality”–and lots of these types of people adopt BDSM as a social pose, or beard, if you will.
Thoughtful post and great comments!
Daisy: I think those sorts of people use just about anything as a beard. Religion is another big one. Many schools. Any group with a “boot camp” approach to discipline. Hell, even feminism of certain stripes can be a beard for some people who think they have the one true theory of patriarchy and how to smash it. I don’t know that BDSM is particularly special in its beardiness for these people. I think they look for any hierarchy.
(And some look for groups that are nominally anti-hierarchy, so that they can claim “I don’t have any power!” when called on their behavior by those they dominate.)
OK, I’m like 1/4 of the way through the link Charles provided, and I am convinced:
My use of terminology sucks, and I need to go back to the drawing board with some of this. Not necessarily with theories about fear of predatoriness in vanilla relationships being broadcast out at spooky, external BDSM people… but in figuring out how to express and contextualize my response to those men who are aroused by women’s nonconsensual fear and pain.
Some responses to Trin:
Good points.
I think these are interesting and scary questions. On an individual level, the line seems easy to draw. If you create those experiences within a wanted context, that’s very different than creating them outside of one.
On a cultural level, I get very tangled up. To what level is sexuality extricable from culture?
Ugh, I get this way in all the pro-sex/radfem debates. I feel like both sides are saying something important and true, and that they’re related, in the way that you can describe a river on a molecular level and be correct, and also describe it as a system that’s part of the ocean and still be correct, but the two descriptions will not appear to apply to the same object. I feel like if I could just look at it the right way, everything would resolve.
But I can’t get it at a point where I can articulate things.
Oh, definitely. But a lot of these feminist discussions become “what do the desires mean?” and I think that’s something of a different question than “when you do it, do you do it consensually and in a way that’s fun and positive?”
I used to think there was no… negative? element to the desires. I still lean that way. But at the same time, I do think that some people’s SM (not everyone’s but yes, I include mine here) is expressly about playing with scary human emotions/the beasts in the psyche, and I think it’s a bit unfair to BDSM’s detractors to pretend we’re all being totally emotionally safe and cute. While I think the BDSM I do is quite different from the activities of a textbook sexual sadist, and anyone who gives some simplistic argument for my beign wrong to say that will get chewed out, and loudly — there’s still a reason the word “sadist” attracts me and my partners, and that it fits.
I think the huge question is less about me (I just explained my take) and more about abusers. What is it they really want? Clearly some kind of control. But why? How? Instability in their own lives? Misogyny? Anger? Fucked up brain wiring? Lack of empathy? Vulnerability? Sexual desires they can’t rein in? There are so many possible reasons people could abuse, and I’ve never been able to make their behavior make sense to me.
So I guess the thing is I don’t even know if I think many abusers are sexually sadistic. I’m sure some are — and it sounds like the case in the OP is one of those, that this got him off. But a lot of the descriptions I hear of DV generally don’t sound like that to me. It sounds more like a desperate need to maintain control than a desperate need to come, *usually*.
And I think there are certain brands of feminism that trace things back to male sexuality (or better phrased, to male sexual dominance as a cultural phenomenon), such that things like BDSM, porn, etc. get brought up as encouraging these bad attitudes. And… personally, I can see where that idea comes from, but I’m not sure it’s really all that directly *sexual* (as in, “it makes men come”) so much as it is fear of losing power, and possibly using sex as a tool to regain the power and respect they think they’ve lost. To me that’s not quite the same as “I’m about to squirt when I hit you,” or the like.
Hi, I know this article is more than two years old, but I found it very useful. I’m going to be doing a presentation on this topic for the BDSM student group at my college, so I really appreciated this perspective!