A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

—Thomas Paine

Kink, in exile:

There has been an explosion around the topic of male submission. Holding space for it, celebrating it, legitimizing it and so on. This has been amazing to witness[…].

[…]

I’m awake at 4 in the morning furious and saddened by every account of pain, belittlement, and exclusion I’ve read. Outraged that it took me this long to figure out that my difficulty in finding submissive men in the BDSM scene was not an isolated incident and even more outraged by what these men have gone through.

So this is the moment when I cry through my anger, because when morning comes for real I’ll put on my big girl panties and go out to change the world. But right now I’ll just send a shout-out to all the men who have been strong enough, amazing enough, and brave enough to plow through the bullshit and let me see them on their knees while I cry through my optimism.

Galiana Chance:

It started with @maymaym (the guy behind the visual-celebration-of-male-submission site MaleSubmissionArt.com) posting a link to this incredibly well-written piece discussing how often members of the BDSM scene devalue male submissives, even while valuing female dominants.

[…]

Every voice that speaks out in celebration of male submissives helps the conversation. Tonight, the urge to join the conversation overwhelmed me. I had to join.

Professor Chaos:

[I]t’s about fucking time. Because the kink scene treats male subs as if they are unwanted, uninvited guests, not recognizing the fact that they are real people with feelings of their own, that their dominant partners cherish them. Every time I see a Fetlife profile that reads “I’m not attracted to submissive men” (frequently, in my experience, on the profiles of female switches and occasionally other female dominants), my stomach clenches. They don’t seem to realize that such an attitude is linked to another problem in the scene: the tokenization of female dominants.

Perhaps the deepest pain many female-identified people have shared with me, whether kinky or otherwise, dominant or submissive, whether young or old, fat or thin, disabled or abled, queer or heteronormative, married or single, monogamous or polyamorous, is the resentment of believing that no matter the sex they have, a male partner feels satisfied while they do not.

“It makes me jealous,” one woman told me over beers.

I nodded. “It should,” I agreed with her. But it has been difficult for me to trust that the depth with which I can empathize is actually understood. For as long as female sexuality is perceived as performative, male sexuality—regardless of its diversity—is perceived as entitled. But, trapped in gendered frames, neither female nor male sexuality is monolithic; the submissive masculine is therefore revelatory.

As Tomio Black said,

The main task before me is to depathologize #MaleSubmission so that it is seen as a normal and healthy way for people to authentically love.

Or, in Chaos’s words:

While male subs are not seen as potential objects of desire, female doms are seen only as objects of desire. That’s how I feel sometimes as a femme dom in the public scene: they see me, but not my desires.

[…]

And so I feel tokenized. It’s not fair to me, because where would I, a femme dom, be without my masculine sub? We are two sides of a coin. Today I am not beating my queer drum; today I am borrowing maymay’s drum: You cannot truly respect me without respecting my submissive as well. If you value me, you must value him.

“I finally figured out what upsets me about your blog,” one man said, turning to me after a time.

I smiled and turned to face him. “Really? Please tell me!”

“Now that I’ve read your writing, it’s harder for me to just enjoy the BDSM play I do and the sex I have without thinking about how it affects people like you and the culture we live in.”

“That’s wonderful!” I said, my smile widening. He frowned, but it was a friendly frown, his eyebrows furrowed pensively rather than aggrieved.

Submissive men are not monolithic, either. In a comment on Chaos’s post, I plaintively said:

It is a sad fact that most submissive men I have encountered are misogynistic shitwads. They are not exactly helping you or I find cultural acceptance, Tomio, and yet I have an enormous compassion for them because I can so clearly see the pain, desperation, and ignorance at the root of their aggressively obsequious behavior.

One day last year, I was invited to a semi-private dinner party following a sexuality conference. There, an older man, well-known in the sexuality communities for the sex toy company he owns, approached me, drink in hand. He was poorly shaven, his mismatched clothing adding to his unkempt appearance. Something in his eyes betrayed the existence of a continual internal monologue that may have never been shared with another person.

“After I saw your KinkForAll Providence video,” he started, “I’ve been reading your blog. And I just wanted to say I really like it. You put words to stuff I couldn’t say on my own.”

The party was bustling, but small. We moved to a corner of the dinner table and continued talking. He told me of finding Playboy Magazines as a teenager, of growing up into a man with a 9-5 job and an unhappy social life. “I’d get up, go to work, come home at five or six, and look through the [local paper] for the sex ads.”

“Did you ever go?”

“A bunch of times.”

This is an aspect that deserves more words. For now, Galiana offers some that I have angrily (and, to some, offensively) stated years earlier:

I’m starting to understand my potential value in this conversation: to answer the question of “where do male submissives go if they don’t feel comfortable at ‘BDSM scene’ events?” I believe that large numbers of them go to anonymous online female dominants for pay, at least now and then. (I’m a phone sex operator, so this isn’t simply a theoretical idea I’m espousing – I make part of my living talking to them, bless their broken hearts)

And there, online, the extremes of the fantasy are even more heavily emphasized, because it’s simpler to market an extreme, and most people do not have the ability to market nuance. In fact, I’m not sure it’s possible to market nuance at all.

So a male submissive who feels rejected by an in-person group for free may try his hand online for pay, and be met with a WALL of “Dominas” calling him a loser, a wanker, a pathetic bitch, etc, and then… well, then, he either accepts those labels and sees himself as “less than”, or …

Or he remains unspeakably strong in the face of all this stupidity and keeps holding his head high until he finds a partner who is worth him lowering his eyes to. May it be so, over and over.

I don’t believe I could ever feel comfortable paying for sex or BDSM play of any kind—and so to date I never have. But, now, I do better understand its undeniably legitimate value.

Sitting across from the older man that day at the conference’s after party, I asked him, “Do you still see sex workers and pro-dommes?”

“No, I work all the time now,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“It makes me happy to know that the toys I make give other people great orgasms. I just wish someone would want to use one of my toys on me, sometimes.”

“Your girlfriend doesn’t?”

He raised his glass and waved the drink around, looking around with a frown on his face. I didn’t pry. Instead, I said, “I know. It’s hard for me, too.”

He looked at me, disbelieving. It’s become inevitable; I’ve had this conversation with enough people to know where it was going. “Come on,” he said, “you must play all the time.”

I shook my head. His arm hit the table with a thump. He slouched further in his chair. “Oh, man. If you can’t get play, I’ll never….”

There was a long silence. He looked around at the apartment we were in. All of the guests had left the living room and were busy chatting with one another in the kitchen, having drifted further and further away from us—a perfect metaphor for our current topic of conversation.

“How do you do it?” he asked at last.

“Do what?”

“Keep writing.”

I smiled. “What would you do after you’ve given up on having a sexually satisfied life?” I asked him.

“God, I don’t know,” he said.

“Why do you keep making sex toys?” I asked. He looked puzzled, so I explained: “You’re the giant on whose shoulders I’m standing. Thank you so much.” Slowly, he nodded. We drank more.

If you’re reading this, and you own certain sex toys, it’s quite possible you have this man to thank for that. I do. But you’ll never need to thank him. You’ll never have to be grateful. All you have to do is take it for granted—and understand why that is a good thing. As Galiana Chance put it:

Ideas spread. They may spread slowly, but imagine how much greater the chances are now of forming a healthy femdom/malesub relationship than even just 20 years ago. I remember 1991 – I was 21 – and how little information I had available to me. My mind boggles.

More recently, I was in Seattle, unexpectedly performing at a Polyamory Fashion Show at The Center for Sex Positive Culture. There, a woman approached me while I was talking to a friend who lives in that town. “It looks like the lady would like to talk to you,” I said to my friend, about to excuse myself.

But before I could, the woman turned to me, saying, “I just wanted to thank you for MaleSubmissionArt.com.”

Surprised, I turned to my friend, then back to the woman. “Oh, um, thanks.” I introduced myself to her more formally. My friend politely excused herself, nodding at me as she gave us space to talk.

“I’m a switch, but I wanted you to know that your websites have really helped me enjoy topping men lately. Can I give you a hug?” the woman asked.

“Uhm, sure,” I said, smiling as I realized the full meaning of her words: sometime in the last two years or so, somewhere in the world, this woman and a man she played with had a good time thanks, at least in some small part, to my publications. We embraced. “Hugs are great!”

Long ago, Susan B. Anthony said, “It is not our job to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful, so they keep going.”

In affirming Chaos’s sentiments, Kink In Exile wrote:

[W]hat does it mean for me in this world that the person I want to play with most, that beautiful strong geeky smart sexually submissive man, comes wounded because the world got to him before I had a chance? I have been known to speak to the fact that men are hurt by the rape of women because their sex life can not help [but] be effect[ed] by a one in four chance that their female partner is a survivor of sexual violence. Is this the BDSM parallel? There are no submissive men and also there is never a line for the ladies room in the engineering building? Are submissive men and women in short skirts equally public property?

If we need a respite, let’s celebrate the small victory of this burgeoning conversation. And, then, keep going.

And why do I have this much trouble? Because the concept of eroticization itself has become a site of immense anguish. Every time something “swings my thoughts in that direction,” I hurt. And deeply. Read my archives and you’ll no doubt see I’ve become darker, more bitter, more jaded, meaner, more ugly. I’m scarred and scared and broken and horribly disfigured. And I’ve said all of this before.

To continue under the sabotaging influence of the epistemic abuse present in the euphemistically named “sex-positive” bubble in which I (try to) live, I’ve begun to tell pieces of my own story. I’ve dug up my own past experiences to use as inspiration because reading the experiences of others reliably sends me into a tailspin of outrage and jealousy and resentment.

What I’m trying to do in all of this is to get you—and everyone you know—to ask one simple question: “How did this happen to maymay?” If I’m really lucky, you’ll also ask the two obvious followups: “Is it happening to other people?” (the answer is yes, by the way) and “How can we make it better?” I’ve been staring at several drafts and struggling to make them coherent in order to lead my readers (and parts of myself) along that quest.

But in the meantime, Delving into Deviance published a post that I’ve been waiting to read from a self-identified dominant woman for a long, long time. Best of all, I could get to its end because it was mercifully free of the sexual triggers that so often make me “step aaawwaaayyyy from the computer!”

Her post is all old, but important news:

[P]ublic adoration (and objectification) of a male submissive is rare. As I’ve come to realize the fucked up state of femdom, I’ve concurrently become aware of the fucked up state of male submission – namely, it’s devaluation. While female dominants are made out to be some scarce resource, male submissives are depicted as a dime a dozen – common, and, even more disturbingly, weak and worthless.

[…]

What is it that makes dominant women uncomfortable with femdom? There are a lot of things. One of the biggest is the sexist attitude that is rampant in the BDSM community. It often seems like women have to remain ice queens, untarnished by actually having penile-vaginal intercourse with their male subs. However, if they want to they can become more male, and thus, more dominant by strapping on and becoming – duh duh duh – The Penetrator. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with strapping on (I’m a fan myself), but a sex act does not a Dominant (or a submissive) make and we can’t just superimpose the male-female dichotomy onto Dominant-submissive and expect that to make anyone happy.

It’s not just female dominants who are getting a raw deal and are having to battle through a mire of expectations in order to engage in the kink they thought they loved. Male submissives find themselves in a community with very few potential partners. Of the potential partners, many will be professional dominatrices, and many (even non-pros) will expect their submission straight out of the gate because of a hidden assumption that if you’re a submissive man you must be willing to submit to just anyone. In defense of these Doms, the moment a woman signs up for any BDSM website she will get an influx of messages from men offering just that – men who want to be her “slave” who have never even had a conversation with her. However, after wading through these fantasists, a dominant woman will eventually find a man who fits her bill because she is valued, and thus, many men will be willing to try to do so.

Submissive men, however, have a much harder time. Because there is this perception of a ratio like 1:20 and because many submissive men either perpetuate the femdom icequeen-bitch ideal that no woman can or perhaps should live up to on a day-to-day basis, male submissives become devalued.

Some have suggested that female pro-dommes also devalue male submission (my boyfriend for one). I don’t think that pro-Dommes cause this problem, but I think that oftentimes they don’t help. Pro-Dommes meet a need. They are the supply to a demand. However, they contribute to the perpetuation of a picture of female domination that just doesn’t reflect real life. But they’re not the root of that problem. As a parallel, just because vanilla men have sex workers and porn doesn’t mean that they don’t know that they can’t expect the same look and sex acts from their girlfriends and wives. However, imagine a world in which vanilla men didn’t meet any women until they began encountering sex workers and porn. This could lead to a much more confusing dynamic for both those vanilla men and the non-professional women they might encounter.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s not only extremely validating to me to read these words from someone else, it’s also extremely important to me that these words were written by a self-identified dominant woman. An unpopular truth is the fact that it is because of the fucked up attitudes Delving into Deviance describes (and that Thomas Millar described more academically) that it almost doesn’t matter how long I, maymay, a submissive man have been saying this—and publicly—for almost half a decade now. People just won’t listen or will derail me (sometimes with their own de-contextualized categorical privilege arguments; “but you have male privilege!”) nearly as much as they’re going to listen to a dominantly-identified individual.

That’s the same fucked up bullshit happening elsewhere. The feminist movement needs feminist men not because women are in fact weak, but because men have a privilege women do not. Black people need White allies. Similarly, submissive people need dominants to speak the fuck up with—not for, with—us.

On a personal note, it’s worth calling my own writing out as vicious and angry because when it comes to the niche of the BDSM community and its interactions, I am an angry, bitter, broken man. I wish I were some kind of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, filled with nothing but love for all oppressors. But I’m just not that perfect. I’m sorry. I’m really, really filled with sorrow about that. But that’s who I am now—hateful and doing my damnedest to direct that hate where it belongs, rather than where it doesn’t.

Some in the BDSM community think I’m a monster, a troll, or a troublemaker. Well, they made me. So ask yourselves, dear BDSM community: How did this happen to maymay? Because for as long as you don’t, there’s going to be a whole lot more “trouble” to come. I’ll see to that myself.

Perhaps paradoxically, I’m actually in favor of absolutism in exactly one context and one context only: the belief that diversity is the only principle worthy of absolutist loyalty.

This is why Thumper’s essentialist explanation of submission rubbed me the wrong way back when I first detected the unmistakable stink of the idea. While essentialist explanations seem plausible for an individual (“I am that I am.”) such reductivism is logically irreconcilable when applied to a group. So, this same laughably nonsensical reductivism is also what triggered me to leave the following intensely harsh (and possibly inappropriately mean) comment on Thumper’s most recent post with regards to a masculine identity.

For my own interests, I’m reproducing our public thread here.

I began:

Since you can take it, I won’t mince words. You wrote:

I firmly believe orgasm control is Right and Natural. There’s nothing kinky about it. It’s totally clear to me now that literally every man in a relationship should have his orgasm controlled by his partner (no, I’m not ignoring you gay guys, but I need to leave you out of this for clarity’s sake). I know that sounds very out there and draconian and like I know what’s best for the entire world. Can’t help it. You can disagree with me if you want, but it seems that, for a man, the act of committing himself to a woman would take on so much more significance if he was also committing one of the critical things that defined him as a man: his orgasm. Not only that, it would make it much more difficult for his partner to drift away. If he really meant it and lived up to his word, the two would be forever locked in a symbiotic feedback loop.

(Emphasis mine.)

Put simply, this is the most disgusting paragraph I have ever read from you, and possibly from any blogger in a very long time. Perhaps that is because I greatly enjoy your writing and find that you and I share much of the same fetishistic desires. So I am perhaps hugely disappointed, which thus fuels my disgust at such a ridiculous and callously sexist statement coming from someone who has a track record that has stayed relatively clear of such contemptible essentialism.

Tell me, Thumper, while you stroke your ego for so carefully addressing the wrinkle of homosexuality while simultaneously tossing it to the winds, what about the heterosexual women, what about the wrinkle of gender? What “should” they do with their desires, in your worldview?

On a related note, I would urge you to read the opening chapters to Sex At Dawn, which I hope will purge you of this pathetically reductionist view of the way men “should” be. Ick. This paragraph feels like everything I was warning you against in my (admittedly rambling) post, Orgasm Denial Does Not Submissive Men Make.

I am, in other words, legitimately an asshole sometimes. In case you wonder how I sleep at night, I justify it the same way any other asshole probably justifies it: I think I’m an asshole about “the right things” and not an asshole about “the wrong things.” So, yeah, it’s true I was meaner than I needed to be to get my point across. I hope I’ll do better the next time, and in the mean time I’ll acknowledge both my triggers (sexual authoritarianism and sexism) and my errors (making someone else feel unnecessarily bad).

Anyway, the comment did spark an interesting interaction worth reading. Thumper replied:

Since you can take it, then I’ll not mince words. Chill the fuck out.

Sorry, maymay, this isn’t religion for me or political. It’s my life and what I’m thinking at any given point. I am not here to advance any agenda. I am not trying to please you or anyone. If I disappoint you, we’ll both just have to figure out a way to deal with it.

Nice way to start the day. Thank you for your opinion.

To which I said:

I can take it, and you don’t have to mince words. Sarcasm, however, seems beneath you. Or maybe it’s not? I wasn’t kind, but I was direct.

Anyway, I’m sorry I contributed to a bad morning. That sucks. I’m just headed to bed and didn’t think about your sleep schedule.

You may never take an interest in politics, but politics will take an interest in you. Same thing as what you seem unwilling to acknowledge about my other post, too. Sigh.

As for religion…well, seeing as how you’re the one who brought that up, I’m struck with the unshakable notion that your views are a religion for you.

Such (religious?) adherence to an ignorantly essentialist view of human maleness, or indeed of any human characteristic, is perhaps the most destructive form of self-centeredness, for you declare others’ expressions illegitimate. And I say this, I hasten to add, as a self-identified man who not only would, but already has wholly subscribed to your beliefs for my own life.

I hope you consider these facts the next time you grant yourself absolution because “this isn’t…political.”

Then, circling back to answer my initial criticism, Thumper wrote:

Now that I’ve had a bit of caffeine, I’ll reply to your comment by saying the intention of my post was to describe a strategy in which men (with penises) and women (with the other part) in traditional marriages or long-term relationships could experience greater degrees of sexual intimacy and satisfaction. That should explain my (admittedly flippant) dismissal of the “gay guys” and, I suppose, by extension anyone not in the aforementioned gender group.

I loved Sex at Dawn. Thought it was great. And, truth be told, I think we humans have totally screwed with ourselves and our sexuality. However, I’m also a pragmatist. I live in this time and under these social norms and am married to a devout monogamist. Therefore, while I agree that my POV does not align with the vision of human sexuality presented in the book, I think it very much compliments the version of human sexuality that plays out in my house. Which, at the end of the day, is all I really care about. Were I like you (young, passionate, not married with two kids and a mortgage), I’m sure my position would be different. Alas, I am not. And I’m very happy not to be.

I have no interest in getting into a multi-thousand word debate about this with you. If you feel the need to rail against my pathetic, narrow, disgusting and icky words, please do so on your own blog. Don’t be upset, though, if I don’t ever read it. As I said before, sex is not political for me. It’s personal. You can go fight the good fight. Leave me out of it.

And, finally, my reply:

I think that’s all peachy keen. Until this:

As I said before, sex is not political for me. It’s personal. You can go fight the good fight. Leave me out of it.

You are the pre-eminent blogger about male orgasm control on the entire Internet, on par with Tom Allen. You are political whether you like it or not.

If you want to treat your sex life as wholly personal and not the least bit political, then you can not blog publicly. Otherwise, and I’m not sorry about this, you can’t have it both ways.

My final words on the issue, since I don’t want to overstay my welcome (and you have been generous with my characteristic harshness, so I thank you) will be to make clear that I care about this with “passion” precisely because we share a fetish and every single time I talk about it I reference this blog as one of the only sensible places on the entire Internet to learn about this fetish. It would upset me greatly to need to start disclaiming my admiration for you due to an increasing amount of relatively careless and flippant remarks specifically due to how often I cite your otherwise fantastic writing.

I hope I didn’t ruin your day. I shouldn’t have that much power over you. Thanks again for your generosity with your comments section.

There is, of course, something to be said for Thumper’s argument that we live in a particular world, with particular realities, and not some other world with some other realities. However, we know what we can say about that: it needs changing. I remain baffled by implications such as his that, thanks to the way things are, ideals like sexual egalitarianism even–and perhaps especially–when it comes to consciously constructed power imbalances are the illusory fantasies, rather than the other way around. The ideals I hold about sex are not the illusions, they are the core of our humanity, buried under eons of cultural sediments (stigma, collective phobias, mass hysterics like religion, and so on).

If reality was, in fact, as gender essentialist as Thumper described it, he would not have been able to actualize the relationship he currently enjoys precisely because such a relationship is founded on the very egalitarian ideals his thesis dismisses. He shoots himself in the foot with his own words, same as I sometimes do by forgetting to use honey in situations where it would catch more flies than vinegar.

Maybe next time Thumper and I talk, we will both have learned a thing or two. (If there is a next time.)

Update: Thumper’s got a reply on his blog. It’s worth a read, so check it out. TL;DR version and my reaction: Thumper affirms maymay’s asshole-ishness and will “amputate him from my life” (sic.) (well, okay, but owch), asserts that our worldviews are irreconcilable and as part of that his blog “is not a platform for any kind of activism” (except, as I keep reminding him, when it kind of is, which says more about how narrowly Thumper construes activism and how widely I do) and will continue to write his blog while abdicating any recognition of the influence he has. All right then. Truce?

1. I originally intended the prior, non-parenthetical link to point to Dan Savage’s post, and mistakenly pointed to Thumper’s post about an article by Dan Savage. Hence the inserted parenthetical statement.

Questions for Filament Article on F/m

Alice Archer: [Can you provide s]ome biographical information – name, age, location, links to the relevant blogs you write[?]

Maymay: I’m maymay, a 26 year old guy currently living in San Francisco. I spent the majority of my life in New York City, however, and I spent a year living in Sydney, Australia. I wrote about the BDSM communities in all three of these cities, mostly at my personal blog at maybemaimed.com but also a little bit at my photo blog about male submissive imagery at MaleSubmissionArt.com.

AA: Do you think that F/m suffers from an image problem? If so, what, in your view, is causing this?

Well, yes, and the question raises a few distinct points that are important to understand. Although the F/m imagery we generally see presents only one kind of relationship between dominant women and submissive men, neither dominant women nor submissive men are monolithic groups. Moreover, although dominant women and submissive men are often lumped into the same group together, it’s also important to think about both groups individually.

The truth is that while stereotypical depictions of F/m relationships may be desirable for some people, they by no means reflect all the desires or the reality for all of us. So, to think of F/m imagery as a monolithic group is to actively reinforce the image problem itself. Let me explain.

Both the content and context of the imagery needs to be examined. Overwhelmingly, when people discuss female-dominant sexual imagery, they refer to the leather or latex clad dominatrix, wearing stilettos, snarling and wielding a whip. There are (broadly defined) four groupings here, since generally people who create F/m imagery also view some, if only the images they themselves create:

1. People who create F/m imagery and for whom it resonates accurately.
2. People who create F/m imagery and for whom it does not resonate.
3. People who view F/m imagery and for whom it resonates accurately.
4. People who view F/m imagery and for whom it does not resonate.

Far and away, the most well-represented groups are the ones who create the imagery, not the ones who only view it. Since the creation of sexually-related imagery is so thoroughly influenced by commercial interests, many of these people are either professional models, pro-dominants, or the like. Whether or not these people engage in F/m relationships as a function of their personal pursuit of happiness is, in the production context, irrelevant. People are often surprised to learn how many women appearing in dominant roles in imagery do not play a dominant role in their personal sexual relationships.

Herein lies the crux of the problem: in the over-arching culture as well as in the BDSM subculture (despite some BDSM’ers loud objections to this reality), representations of powerful women are extremely limited. Pictures of dominant women are so overbearingly policed, often focusing on wardrobe above all else, that for a long time the overwhelming majority of culturally acceptable representations of women in power were images of leather-clad dominatrices. And while I’m sure some narrow sliver of the populace thoroughly enjoys such stereotypes, it offers very little in the way of sexual gratification for most dominant women or submissive men.

As a result of this cultural influence, most BDSM communities became ghettos for the small group of people who enjoyed the single, narrow interpretation of F/m relationships that are available there, drawing more of the same into the community, and repeating the cycle of exclusion. Meanwhile, dominant women who, for instance, prefer to play tenderly and in hoodies and submissive men who, for instance, enjoy feeling cared for instead of being called names, are left out in the cold.

So the answer is yes, as most people understand it, F/m does have a gigantic image problem. And in fact, that problem is perpetuated, quite literally, by most F/m imagery itself. How crazy is that?

What lead you to start Male Submission Art?

I started Male Submission Art out of anger, bitterness, and sadness. For years, I had been viewing pornography, erotic images, and other iconography of the BDSM persuasion that did not resonate with me, that indeed pained me. You might ask why I continued to view imagery that I found so unfulfilling and you would be quite right to do so. The simple answer, however, is that it is my sexuality: I am a submissive man, and my personal pursuit of happiness involves expressing love and devotion to a dominant partner from a place of sexual submission.

While it may be reasonable to expect someone for whom most erotic imagery does not offer fulfillment to stop viewing it, it is downright cruel to expect that person to simply live unfulfilled. With few options for satisfying sexual expression, erotic art is a literal lifeline for many people, offering sexual fulfillment at least in fantasy for the things they can not, or feel they should not, actually have in reality. That describes me, except for the fact that I found most of the easily available imagery so distasteful for so many reasons that masturbatory sessions with the stuff sometimes ended in tears.

I felt ignored by so much of the imagery out there, but I optimistically believed I couldn’t be the only one who felt that way. I began to examine why, exactly, I felt so marginalized by most existing imagery and was eventually able to identify an aesthetic that I felt did a better job representing my desires. Male Submission Art was created as the place to curate images I liked, partly for my own sake, but also for the sake of the other men like me who I had to believe felt as I did.

What sort of reaction have you had to Male Submission Art?

The reaction to Male Submission Art has been amazing. Interestingly, it has attracted an incredibly vocal audience of women. I’ve received numerous correspondence from women who have said my work on the site changed their lives for the better. Many of these women tell me personal stories that corroborate my theories about the F/m “image problem.” For instance, Jenny wrote:

For me, years of porn and women’s magazines have left me expecting to be submissive, just because I’m female. And whilst yes, I could let someone take control of me, I enjoy taking that control myself because of the pleasure I can make others feel. […] Thank you for showing me who I am. Thank you for showing me it’s okay to be a strong, sexy woman who takes control (and not just as a one-off to turn a guy on).

While most of the people who wrote to me personally about the site were women, there were gay men and even straight men who also wrote to me. For example, Michael wrote:

As a hetero male sub, I’ve grown up looking at traditional Femdom images. Yes, I “get off” on it often, but there was always something missing: the tender, loving feelings I have and share with my Mistress. Best of all, I’ve found things [at Male Submission Art] that reflect our relationship (and other things) which I can send to her because I know she will enjoy them.

Possibly the most surprising response I’ve gotten from the site, however, is from submissive women. One woman named “Spark” wrote that she wasn’t like any of the other submissive women she knew:

I couldn’t call myself submissive because I couldn’t see how the way I felt and the way [other submissive women I knew] felt was at all the same. […] Then I came across your website, and started to see all these different images of submission. Something beautiful and valuable, a way to be strong and proud and yet not in control. Not something to be ashamed of, something you could really be proud of with good grounds. I guess I couldn’t admit what I wanted to myself until I saw submission with dignity and pride. And I couldn’t relate to it in images of female bodies.

These three are just samples of what must be hundreds. When I still had the energy to post on the site more often, Male Submission Art reached an estimated 17,000 visitors a month. To me, that’s 17,000 people a month who were either actively looking for or didn’t realize they were looking for imagery of male submission that resonated authentically with them.

In the end, we can’t be what we can’t see. And far too much of the mainstream culture doesn’t allow women to see men as opportunities for their own sexual gratification, and it doesn’t allow men to see themselves that way, either. And, while trite, the truth is that’s just not fair.

There have been other commentators questioning some of the prevalent images and assumptions about F/m. Do you think this is changing how people are expressing male submission/Female dominance ‘out there’?

Yes, I do. I’ve begun to see images featured on Male Submission Art crop up as people’s avatars and user profile pictures. It is especially encouraging when I see a beautiful image of a submissive man replacing a cliché image of a scowling dominant woman. Even some pro-dommes who previously featured images of themselves in their avatars have started using pictures of men they saw on the site. This is incredibly important, because it begins to inch towards more equitable representation in the media, both social media and, hopefully one day, mainstream media.

It also changes the way that people think of F/m relationships because so many women, like Jenny, are only offered two options for their sexuality by the overwhelming majority of media: submissive girl or scowling dominatrix. But this dichotomy is as old and as false as the virgin-whore dichotomy, and what’s clear is that perpetuating that false dichotomy does nothing to further the fulfillment of women like Jenny or men like me.

To quote from one of my favorite essays of all time, Kinky Sex for Social Justice:

While I greatly admire and at times practice female sexual dominance, in terms of sexual politics I think it is far less useful for female empowerment than it would appear to be, sort of in the way that the SAT answer choice that seems totally obvious and easy is usually wrong.

This is because intractably submissive men are actually often the biggest misogynists around: their worship of dominant women is the only way they can indulge deviant sexual desires while keeping their virgin/whore complexes intact. The dominant woman and the puritan virgin are in fact quite similar. They are both impenetrable fortresses of untouchable femininity; the woman-as-what-you-can’t-ever-have. The danger of actuality, of real possession, of the sex act and what follows in all its sticky complexities—which we never resolve because it’s no part of the stories of pursuit and courtship on which men and women alike are raised; stories that end with a fade-to-black on the way to the bedroom—is conveniently never reached, and the man can remain in a safe, comfortable state of unfulfilled torment.

Our culture has no idea what to do with happiness or with the getting of what one wants.

When I look at the way most other self-described submissive men behave, I am often infuriated knowing that I will—and do—pay a price for their disgustingly willful ignorance.

Some people say that F/m reinforces sexism by casting women being in control as something ‘absurd’. What would you say to that?

I’d say that thinking about control as intrinsically linked to gender is absurd. Most of the people who say such things hold contradictory views about sex and gender themselves without realizing it. For example, the idea of dominant women, women in control of a sexual situation, as an absurdity is undermined by the often regurgitated lunacy that women are gatekeepers of men’s sexuality, that women say either “yes” or “no” and thereby are either charged with or derided for controlling men’s sexual urges.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Curating imagery at Male Submission Art has taught me a lot, mostly because many of the images people suggest offer fascinating insights into their relationship with power, and especially how that relationship interrelates with their understanding of gender. I believe submissive men are one of the most under- and mis-represented groups of people, yet are simultaneously a group who could be extremely influential in advocating for gender equality, for the right to be who we want to be and do what we want to do regardless of one’s biological sex or gender. And yet many feminists, especially the anti-BDSM radical ones like Robin Morgan, are quick to discount our experiences out of hand. Morgan says:

Men who see themselves as relatedly masochistic, “femme,” feminine, etc., obviously are insulting the female (in person and in prinicple). If they grovel to a male master they are mimicking (for fun) an experience all women in patriarchy are in some way or other forced to endure in reality. If they cower before a female “dominatrix,” they are superficially reversing, and thereafter trivializing, real women’s real oppression.

I think views like Morgan’s are extremely unfortunate, because anti-BDSM feminists are supposedly fighting for the rights of women to express themselves as they want, and that includes dominant women. But by disavowing the experiences of submissive men, they simultaneously disavow the experience of people who like submissive men, which, if Male Submission Art is any indication, includes a hell of a lot of women. Such dismissive attitudes about the reality, value, and importance of equitable representations of diverse sexual desire reify the narrow, hegemonic gender roles they claim to want freedom from.

Finally, I want to say that like all aspects of sexuality, submission, submissiveness, and its counterparts are descriptive terms, not proscriptive standards. In breaking the mold of F/m imagery, Male Submission Art clearly shows that other people’s dogmatic interpretations of what is or is not submissive, what is or is not dominant, and especially what is or is not manly, have no power over one’s own sexual desires unless one lets them. And frankly, even and perhaps especially as a submissive man, I see no reason to let anyone else dictate my sexuality to me.

(As an aside, it’s a great BDSM podcast, but sadly Axe blatantly sold out his integrity and, despite my helping him cut his podcast costs in half, he chose to stay sponsored by EdenFantasys for “a new microphone,” which is a severe blow to the respect I would otherwise accord him. I donated to his podcast before he was sponsored by them. I’ll never donate to a podcast sponsored by EF. And I’ll probably never donate to Axe again, either.)

Anyway, there were two main topics we talked about on his podcast. He edited the discussion down to two sections. One topic was KinkForAll, which he then released. The other was about Male Submission Art, which he never released. But I did ask for and he did give me the audio. And fuck it, I’ve been sitting on this for over a year and it’s probably time to talk more about Male Submission Art.

So here you go: a slightly-edited but mostly uncut recording of me talking about Male Submission Art.

In light of this content being taking down, I’m publishing a copy of the profile I composed for her self-published column, below.

You Are The Beautiful Kind: maymay

Age

25

Website

• http://maybemaimed.com/
• http://MaleSubmissionArt.com/
• http://KinkForAll.org/
• http://KinkOnTap.com/
• http://ConversioVirium.org/author/maymay/
• http://InternetNonviolence.org/

I have others, too. Just google me for more details.

Orientation

I self-identify as “bisexual” when asked by most people. Among closer friends, I choose to self-identity as a “kinky queer.” I have a distaste for labels but appreciate the power inherent in language. It takes more compassion than most people I’ve met of either “sex-positive” or “sex-negative” persuasions to understand the incredible value that exists in diversity and difference. Like “sex,” both “kink” and “queer” are hotly nebulous terms that no one seems able to pin down. I feel that the freedom such vagueness provides is necessary for making self-empowered choices about one’s sexuality and, by association, one’s sexual orientation.

Relationship Status

I enjoy relating to anyone who shows themselves willing to relate to me as a whole person first, and a sexually submissive man second.

Favorite physical feature on yourself:

I like to think I have the eyes of a beholder, and that they are beautiful. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you beheld your own eyes in this light, you’d think they were your most beautiful feature, too. :)

Tattoos/piercings:

I have a barbell piercing through each nipple. Getting them didn’t hurt as much as I thought they would.

As for tattoos, I tend not to like the thought of them on myself or others. I typically find unadorned skin one of the most beautiful things about the human body, although there have been a few people with tattoos who I’ve felt were gorgeous.

Are you a tits, ass, pussy, etc. man?

I find curvy female bodies particularly attractive; legs and asses are often the curviest part of female-assigned people. I also find the hips of male-assigned people sexy. Perhaps I just like being near hips, legs, and asses. :)

Are you cut or uncut?

I’m circumcised. No one bothered to ask me if I’d mind being cut before they cut me, and I find such lack of consideration regrettable. However, what’s done is done. I am always willing to forgive, but I strive to never–ever–forget.

Charity you support:

There are plenty, but here are some I think are especially worth promoting:

* The Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities
* The Woodhull Freedom Foundation
* The National Coalition of Sexual Freedom

What game did you like playing as a kid?

One of my favorite games was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It’s a classic Super Nintendo game about a young boy in a mystical land called Hyrule who possesses certain mental and physical abilities that he ultimately uses to save a kingdom from being overthrown by ideological extremists. Despite the heteronormative overtones, I found the mix of puzzle-solving and action/adventure a lot of fun. Also, Link is a hottie.

I also really enjoyed the various Sim games; SimCity, SimEarth, SimTower, and SimLife especially.

When was the last time you cried?

About a week and a half ago, I had a conversation with one of my heroes. Ze told me that while the work I was doing was “good for the world,” due to political pressure that had recently been focused on me, my principled stance could be “bad for me.” I cried because it was the first time someone I have incredible respect for told me that I wouldn’t live long enough to see my dream of a world without discrimination realized. I knew this already, of course, but hir words struck me in a time of particular vulnerability, and I simply broke down for a while.

We all need to cry sometimes. We need to cry and feel deflated once in a while so we remain grounded in reality. I’ve been manic and I have been depressed in my life, and I can say that my experience of depression is more firmly grounding than any mania, no matter how pleasurable. This is not to say that depression is “good,” merely that, with practice, the sadness and pain it elicits can be a rejuvenating force of life. Depression is like an emotional wildfire; it hurts and can be ruthlessly destructive, but it also has the potential to seed one’s soul with life-affirming soil and minerals.

I try hard not remain mired in sadness but when sadness is unavoidable I’ve found that it can be harnessed as fuel for my efforts to make Earth a better, more loving place for all its inhabitants.

What do you want to learn/add to what you already know?

I want to learn patience and calm. I’ve been described as “spirited,” “intense,” and “fiery,” as though I’m composed of elementary opposites (perhaps fire and water). I struggle with nothingness; doing “nothing” feels an imposition.

Special skill/talent, what are you really good at (non-sexual):

I’m an “information worker” in the classic sense, and I’ve been told I’m an exceptionally talented one. As an open source programmer (focusing on semantic web development) by profession, I deal with raw data of various kinds on a daily basis. Many of my beliefs are influenced by the ideals of the open source software movement, with transparency, accessibility, and accountability chief among them.

I live in the realm of ideas, concepts, and vision, but I also acknowledge that without means to translate these things to our shared reality, living there is useless. That’s why I write, whether in English or computer languages, and why I place so much emphasis on the importance of language. I’m also bilingual, speaking decent (but not quite fluent) Hebrew.

Also, I can solve a Rubik’s Cube in about a minute, juggle various things, and I crack whips for sport (and for play).

Special skill/talent, what are you really good at (sexual):

I think everyone is best at what they enjoy most. That’s why successfully communicating pleasure and enjoyment is part of what makes great sex great. One of the nicest compliments I received was from a partner who told me, “You taught me so much about my body.” But that compliment is misleading. I wasn’t the teacher, she just found herself more able to learn about her body when the sex she started having became pleasure-focused as opposed to goal-focused.

How old were you when you lost your virginity?

That depends on the “virginity” you’re asking about. If, as I presume you mean, you’re asking when the first time I had penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse with someone, I was 16. For the record, she spent a significant chunk of our relationship convincing me I was ready for sex before I felt comfortable doing it. After much discussion, she said, “A candle that burns brighter might not last as long, but I think the light is worth it.” The metaphor to our relationship seemed apt.

Sex, just like anything else in life, is only a “special” thing if you imbue it with specialness. Sex, like a bright candle, has no innate morality.

What are your masturbation habits? How often? Where? Props?

Masturbation is like an adventure game one can play with one’s own body and mind. :) If I spent as much time having sex or masturbating as my critics would have people believe, I wouldn’t actually have time to write and speak about the things they criticize. Make of that what you will.

What do you fantasize about? What’s your fetish? What turns you on?

I find dichotomies of power really fucking sexy. I have always loved, and still love, playing–but not being–powerless. (Photo credit: Male Submission Art)

The single biggest turn on anyone can tempt me with is intellectual collaboration. If I find value in your work, you suddenly become very attractive to me. The minds of motivated people who innovate in their fields are brilliantly sexy. I know this sounds corny, but it’s true. I’m an intellisexual, through-and-through.

What was one of the hottest moments of your life?

:) Those are memories best shared in person.

What would you do at an orgy?

Good question. I guess I’ll find out when I participate in an orgy for the first time.

You have one night to completely pleasure your lover. What do you do?

Pleasuring someone is an act deserving of thoughtful consideration and care. Although this is very hard for me to do, I think each and every time it is attempted, it must be approached with the childlike wonder that inexperience and uncertainty bring. I have never been able to pleasure a lover the same way twice, and I’ve found that I do better in bed when I stop trying to replicate past successes and simply relish the mutual enjoyment of the moment.

I find it shameful that we are so often indoctrinated with the fallacy that pleasure is some homogenizing force in society, that everyone does or should enjoy the same things in the same ways. The reality is that what one person may find pleasurable, another person may not. Treating different people identically and blinding oneself to the individual differences like body weight or genital sensitivity, or to group differences like race and socioeconomic class, is not a vision of heavenly equality but hellish discrimination.

Sex and pleasure is as diverse as food and nutrition. There is no single right way to enjoy food. Similarly, there is no single right way to enjoy sex.

As may have been clear from some of my answers, I bristled at the hetero-centrism in Kendra’s questions. For instance, questions like “Are you a tits, ass, pussy, etc. man?” presume a lack of male-male encounters. I found that (a little) off-putting.

What I didn’t know until after I submitted this profile was that the questions for female-assigned and male-assigned people are different. There are, in fact, two sets of questions in the YATBK column questionnaire (the counterpart to the “Are you a tits, ass, pussy, etc. man?” question seems to be “Beauty tip:”, reifying how the rules of flirting are sexist and wrong), and which set of questions you are prompted with depends on Kendra’s read of your gender. That’s more off-putting, but hey, it’s her website, and I appreciated the inclusion of a number of genderqueer profiles there.

Watch on Ustream.

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

So, when Sinclair asked me to read today, I was actually going to read a piece from my personal blog called “Men and Masks in Porn.” It was about the fact that in most of the porn I sought out, or found, when I was younger men are literally masked, not often for the sexual excitement of the thing but to hide their identity. We’re told that that is how men resonate with porn, that that would let us put ourselves in their places. That didn’t really do it for me at all.

And then, as I was thinking about what to say when I was speaking up here today, I kept getting drawn back to that Baptist proverb, that religious quote, because religion is one of the most powerful forces that exist in human history. Many people say it is the most powerful force, but it is in fact second only, I think, to sex. Not even religious guilt can stop or suppress any kind of human desire. I mean, there’s way more than enough news stories about…that.

So now, I understood the kind of sex that I wanted to have when I was really young, when I was about 10. And I started to look at pornography when I was 10, I found the Internet at that age, and I knew even then that it would be about 8 years or so before even the things that I wanted would be legal for me to have.

In fact, it’s still not legal for me to have some of the things that I want. I joined public sexuality communities at 18. I’m not allowed to consent to certain activities I’d like to consent to. Several people want to make certain things—sodomy, for example—illegal. And I know that for some of you in the audience today, it’s not even legal to be who you are. Many of you are forced to compromise half of yourselves—one half or another—just by putting M or F on any number of government forms.

So I’m thinking about all that as I’m growing up, and as a teenager I’m finding various representations of what I’m told I should want. And so I’m watching porn, and—this is me at like, 15 or 16, or 17, or 18 or so—I’m masturbating to it, and my dick is hard in my hand, and I’m crying because it’s not resonating, it’s not what I actually want, it’s not me there.

I think I’ve become so good at seeing what I want to see. In fact, you know, when I look at porn sometimes I change the genders around in my head. As a sexually submissive guy myself, I look at a lot of BDSM porn, a lot of women bottoms, and I’ll change the genders around in my head. When I see a woman tied up, I think, “It’s okay, I’ll just imagine them as a guy, someone like me.” Or when I see men, I’m like, “What are their faces like?” Because, again, masks. So I’ve become so good at seeing what I want to see that instead of seeing what there is, it’s become difficult for me to see the world as it is, and to take off my own lens. I think that’s probably one of the first masks that I’ve been almost traind to put on, out of my own desire.

And the more I looked at porn the more I realized I really wasn’t interested in seeing images of sexuality that aroused me, I was much more interested in seeing images of sexuality that reflected mine, so I could connect with them and see myself represented in that image and have a validation that I actually exist, that other people are like me there.

So I started to create spaces. One of the projects that I run is a website called MaleSubmissionArt.com and it was really designed around this idea: “You cannot be what you cannot see.” So I started to ask people to send me images of male submissiveness and masculinity in a submissive sexuality context. And the responses I got to it were absolutely astonishing. Some of the responses were from submissive women, which I could never have dreamed of getting. Here’s one of them:

I just wanted to thank you. I am a young woman and even though I’ve known I was submissive for quite a while, I’ve had a hard time reconciling that with my strong personality. Your comments, though, have inspired me to go looking for a dom willing to work as hard for me as I’ll work for them. I’m pretty sure you’ve changed my life for the better and I sincerely appreciate it. Thank you.

This desire to create spaces where we’re represented, I think, is common to many of us and many of us are trying to forge what I believe is a very new morality. One in which behavior towards other people is really geared not towards how we would like to be treated but on how they, themselves, would like us to treat them. I realize that’s a radical concept to some people but I think it’s very important and that’s not how we’re told we should behave.

About many of the spaces I’ve created, many submissive men have told me–you know the kind, a little creepy, not really very well-suited to public spaces, kind of hard to talk to–many of them have said, “Thank you for writing the things that you do. There aren’t many men who speak about the things you speak about.” They seem very lonely to me.

In their pain, I found a lot of validation because I understand that and I’m, truly, very lonely. When they thank me for what I write I understand the importance of my work. Having created those spaces, I really felt like I needed to distance myself from the very communities I went out to join at 18–they weren’t the spaces for me–in order to create new spaces.

I run an Internet talk show called Kink On Tap (at KinkOnTap.com). One of the responses that I got from there in another email was someone who wrote to me and said:

You’ve brought me more than a bit of peace on [the subject of my sexuality]. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone. Even though I was told over and over in my childhood that being anything other than the average, normal, baptist girl was a bad thing, reading your blogs and listening to Kink On Tap disproves all of that and I’m delighted to say a small amount of my own self-hatred is beginning to wane. And for that alone, I thank you so much.

So, people often ask me why I do the stuff that I do. And to that I’ve started answering with this question, which is: “What would you do after you’ve given up? After you’ve given up on having a sexually satisfied life? On having what you want?” My answer to that is anything you need to do to stay alive.

The correspondences that I get keep me alive when I feel like I’ve despaired. And I feel like I’m making people’s lives better. That’s the only currency I think I have—it’s not money, it’s not friendship, it’s not loyalty, it’s not sex—it’s doing. Actually doing. Action. So this new morality based not on commandments we’ve received but on affirmations we define for ourselves, I think, is how I keep myself alive and how I hope others will do the same, changing the world for the better.

People say changing the world is hard, that it’s a difficult thing to do. I think that’s not true. I think many of you in the audience by your mere existence here are changing the world. And it’s not changing the world that’s hard, it’s staying alive to do the work that’s difficult.

So what I want more than anything else in the world is to find other people like myself. People who are bored by complacency, who are exhausted by inaction, and who are stimulated by that discomfort. Because I think no one’s sexual rights—not one person’s—are assured unless all people can have the consensual relationships of their own choosing.

So if nothing else, for the love of love, reach out to someone and tell them that they are not alone. Connect with people so that they feel less alone. Those emails literally keep me alive. Email a friend and tell them about this reading series, encourage them to come out here, because too many people still think that they are alone when they are not.

That’s why I continue to receive numerous personal, private, correspondence from people of all genders, backgrounds, ages, and concerns who are uncomfortable about speaking non-anonymously. These folks have already made a leap of faith merely by emailing me (emails are not anonymous), yet what they have to say is so vital, is so important, and I believe is so prevalent that not sharing these “private conversations” publicly routinely pains me. I frequently ask for permission to publish these exchanges (even though I consider anything that comes to my inbox fair game for public blogging) out of respect for the concerns of others, regardless of my personal inclination towards radical transparency.

This stockpile of personal correspondence, the things these “garden-variety,” “normal,” even “vanilla” people tell me about themselves and their lives in one-on-one conversation that they would not feel comfortable sharing more publicly is evidence of the reality that “the moral majority” is simply a misnomer. They are, in fact, merely one very vocal minority. And, what’s more, so am I—I am a different vocal minority.

Since it will always be easier to destroy, to shame, to hate, than it will be to create, to empower, and to love, my challenge is to prove to the silent majority how necessary their voices and their actions really are. Until some perceived heretic such as myself can stand up to the monster of cultural shaming, to challenge the tyranny of “common sense,” and to expose the enraging and despicable lies activist academics peddle as fact, the silent majority will remain silenced by the vocal minorities fighting to maintain the cultural, religious, and economic status-quo.

On that note, here’s one such (slightly edited) exchange that I think is eye-opening with regards to its under-reported, and perhaps unacknowledged, prevalence. Like many others, this person prefers to remain anonymous because their “views have the potential to piss just about every camp off.” (That’s rarely been on my list of reasons why not to do something, but I respect the sentiment.)

So without further ado, here’s the closest thing to a guest post I’ve published on this blog:

Maymay,

I can finally sit down and write you an email on some of the thoughts I’ve had while reading your posts. Let’s start with the Submissive Man in 2007:

I wanted to write about why many submissive men are just as responsible for debasing their own sexuality as the many pro- (and so obviously not-so-pro-)dommes who take delight in squashing them down while lifting them of that burdensome weight in their wallets. (“Thank you for stealing my money, Mistress, would you like another dollar?”)

There seems to be this strange notion in femdom that women are superior to men. As a fantasy, I can kink on that notion for perhaps a two minute stretch at a time (perhaps longer with a visual like something by Sardax) before I discard it at as silly (for me). I’m not a loser. I’m not a worm. I’m not a piggy. I’m not worthless. I’m not a maid. I’m not a handyman. And I’m not a wallet. These notions of male submission don’t resonate with me at all. In fact, I think my submission to a woman has a special meaning because I’m awesome; the type of submission I do when I’m submissive is not necessarily “better,” but it is different, and it is under-represented.

There are tons of internet femdoms urging me to prove how worthless I am to please them; why not femdoms urging me to prove how awesome I am to please them?

I certainly don’t want to step on other people’s fantasies, yet there comes a problem when certain fantasies can’t be distinguished from reality, and when certain fantasies marginalize others (like mine). Sexual dominance really isn’t necessarily the same thing as status superiority; just because I often want women to have the former, it doesn’t mean I believe them to hold the latter.

Like you, the other thing I have trouble relating to is paying money for “financial domination”, “tribute”, or “sessions,” at least not in typical contexts. As a student of seduction for many years, I want people to do stuff with me because they are enthusiastic about it. I want people to want me. If someone doesn’t want me enough to do something with me without any exchange of money, then they don’t want them as much as I would want them to want me.

I originally figured out some of the problems with males attempting to exchange money for female sexuality from the seduction community, in posts like these.

By the cultural default, paying money implies that I am inadequate in intrinsic desirability, and that I must “sweeten the deal” financially to make up for this inadequacy. I do not accept that framing of the situation at all! If I’m not desirable enough for someone to want to be sexual with me without me having to include extrinsic incentives outside their enjoyment of the activity, then we are really not a good fit.

An important lesson I’ve learned is that a lot of the status that people give me depends on how much status I act like I have. Similarly, people seem to treat me as more desirable when I act like I’m desirable, and when I act in a way that shows that I believe that they will find me desirable.

Yet if I offer someone money for a sexual experience, I am acting as if I believe that I’m less desirable to her than she is to me; my belief in my lower desirability will then serve as evidence to her that she should also believe that I have lower desirability. By the same logic, I understand your ambivalence about pro-dommes asking you to session with them. If I received such a suggestion, I would be offended inside, because it would imply that she saw me as less desirable than I saw her, and that she considered it acceptable to rub that perception in my face and have me be thankful for a chance for an asymmetrical interaction with her. Thanks, but no thanks.

I would argue that pro-dommes (and non-pro) are also being short-changed by these exchange metaphors in their own dating lives. They (and men who approach them as potential lovers) are used to accepting a metaphor which devalues the man’s desirability. I’m currently seeing a pro-domme. She asked me out after we got talking…but I wonder what would have happened if instead I had followed one of the standard submissive scripts and asked to be her slave, pay her tribute, worship her, or session with her. There is a good chance I would have destroyed my desirability for her, and we wouldn’t now be enjoying experiences that she charges other men hundreds of dollars for in “sessions.”

Since I want people to want me, I go to great lengths to make myself attractive to people I’m seeing. Getting ready can take me several hours, and even more if I’m going out as a girl. As a student of
seduction, I enjoy using my knowledge of sexuality and psychology to create mutually-enjoyable situations. Sometimes, I view the images and interactions I create as a form of power, and sometimes I view them as a form of service; these views are not mutually-exclusive. With people I go out with, part of my effort to create an attractive image and enjoyable interaction involves avoiding and ruthlessly shutting down interpersonal dynamics that undermine my desirability or value as a person; this could be construed as a service.

Since I believe that a lot of stereotypical male submission dynamics and scripts will undermine my desirability and value in even a dommes’ eyes (including, but not limited to, forms of financial exchange), I am forced to reject them in order to maintain a mutually pleasing and sustainable interaction. For me, the best way to “serve” (to the extent that the notion of service resonates with me) is to reject the stereotypical, self-undermining notions of service that are associated with the devaluing of submissive male sexuality. I serve the relationship, and I serve the other person through my service to the relationship, even if this service involves me rejecting tempting cultural scripts, rejecting certain dynamics or tests from the other person that I judge as harmful to the long-term health of the relationship, not necessarily giving them everything they want when they want it, asserting myself, presenting strong opinions, being challenging, or saying “no” or “not yet.”

I’m really grateful for all the personal correspondence I’ve gotten and I hope it continues. I also hope that more such correspondence—in whatever form it takes—encourages people to open themselves up a bit more than they otherwise would. Although this exchange was about a topic germane to BDSM and, therefore, this blog, I’ve had similar exchanges with self-described “normal people” who held “unpopular,” “under-culture,” or just plain “perverted” views.

And you might be surprised to learn how many of them came from doctrinal socially conservative or religious backgrounds.

You guys are the silent majority. I’m a bullhorn, a loud voice, maybe a lighthouse doing my best to shine light onto an otherwise dark and rocky shore of a corrosive and repressive hegemony. But I’m not the meat of the matter, you are. What will it take for more of you to speak up and speak out?

It’s interesting to note that I was already “the sex blogger that didn’t blog about sex,” at least relatively infrequently and tamely. Nevertheless, I’m even more widely read now (after stopping to talk about the practice of sex) than I ever was before. More interesting, however, is that I’m still asked questions about my personal sexual practices, and asked questions about sex in general, regardless of how much I do or do not talk about what I like to do in the sack.

Recently, I got one such question in an email from someone calling themselves Charybdis:

I like pain, bondage and most of the BDSM culture, but one problem I keep bumping into is that I cannot find a partner who accepts that I do not need, or really want, penetrative vaginal sex. I find a far more intense pleasure moment in other areas of sexual play.

I know what I like and want. But I keep bumping into that wall within the culture that I am supposed to really enjoy his dick inside of me. Will I ever find anyone who understands? Is it alright to be me, as I am, and still be the dominant personality I am, yet not want to be fucked in my vagina?

I have read some (ok, a lot) of your posts, and you seem to really GET how to explain things. I just haven’t read anything where you spoke to this.

—Charybdis

Both the tone and the content of Charybdis’s email resonated with me. It’s frustrating at best and downright depressing at worst to continually feel barred from a full and happy expression of my sexuality thanks to other people’s failure to acknowledge my desires. When Charybdis says they “keep bumping into that wall within the culture,” what I hear is, “I’m frustrated by the systemic suppression of the validity of my sexual desires simply because they do not conform to cultural norms.”

It’s worth calling out the fact that the “culture” being spoken of is, itself, a subculture (the BDSM subculture, specifically), and yet even here, far from the mainstream, there’s cultural pressure to conform to some idealized standard of behavior and desire. Regardless of whether such conformity is required by the mainstream or a subculture, the root of the problem is the same: unquestioned values coupled with disrespect of diversity. While I see nothing inherently wrong with communally-defined idealized standards, I see a lot of things wrong with the ways those standards are perpetuated, ways that needlessly harm people like Charybdis and myself.

So, first, Charybdis, know this: Yes, it is alright to be you, as you are, and still be the dominant personality you are, yet not want to be fucked in your vagina. Second, know that you can fuck with your vagina as easily as you can be fucked in it. And finally, know that while you may not have found people who understand this or who don’t value intercourse highly yet, such people are out there, and they are probably looking for you, too.

Intercourse, which is the word I use to distinguish penis-in-vagina sex from the many other and equally enjoyable kinds of sex I have with partners, is one of the things that’s changed a lot for me over the past two years. Eileen and I did have intercourse, but extremely infrequently by anyone’s measure—maybe once every few months or so? Anyway, it was certainly rare enough that it was especially noteworthy when we did have intercourse. By contrast, intercourse is the sex that Emma and I have most often—intercourse is at least part of almost all of our sexual encounters.

Although I haven’t written much about intercourse specifically, which speaks more to how unimportant the fact of the act is than my interest or lack thereof in it, Eileen has, and I’d encourage you to read through her archives on the subject of sex:

ladies and gentlemen, I am a supposedly “sexually liberated” woman who does not enjoy the act of sexual intercourse. […] I’ve been there, in many different ways with a moderate handful of partners. And I’m here to tell you, it just doesn’t do it for me.

[…]

I would rather curl up in bed with my Hitachi Magic Wand than my achingly eager boyfriend. I’d say it’s a very good thing I ended up with a boy with a fetish for pleasure control.

I don’t doubt that it’s my “fetish for pleasure control” that shaped my rather existential values regarding sexual acts; the act of intercourse isn’t hot for me without a certain intentionality and since that intention can be achieved regardless of a specific sex act, I have no worldly reason to find having my cock inside a partner’s cunt particularly important. Sure, it feels wonderful, but so do many other things. I kink much harder on being sexually controlled in novel and psychologically intimate ways than I do on simple intercourse.

Indeed, the only strong motivation I can remember feeling for intercourse is derived from my partner’s desire for the act itself. Enjoying particular sex acts for the acts themselves very often boils down to sexual compersion, for me. Such is undoubtedly the case with Emma.

When Emma and I have intercourse, we do so because she wants that, specifically. So clear is the distinction between her desire for the act and my desire to pleasure her through the act that intercourse, for us, often revolves around an explicit and intentional challenge in which my sole purpose is to pleasure her with my cock (often to the exclusion of my own orgasm, because then the power differential is even more pronounced). During these scenes, which rarely involve restraints or any other traditional symbols of the BDSM subculture, I’m not a man wanting sex but rather a mindful and sophisticated pleasure toy that’s been “turned on” for her use.

While the sex I had with Eileen is stunningly different from the sex I have with Emma, my intentionality has not changed. I was Eileen’s toy. Then (and, happily, now) I was Emma’s. Eileen had her personal motivations. Emma has her own, different set.

When sex is amazing, it is never because of a sublimation of desires on anyone’s part, but rather an alignment of individual self-interest and fulfillment. For many men, intercourse has specific meaning, value, and importance. For me, it doesn’t. I’m no more or less a man than the men who desire intercourse, and neither Eileen, Emma, nor Charybdis is any more or less (presumably) women than other women with different desires than theirs.

Interview on FCCFreeRadio segments

The conversation I had with Lilycat and my fellow guest, an artist by the name of Chris Fabbri, didn’t just stay on KinkForAll topics. We talked about a lot of things, and with Lilycat’s permission I’ve chunked up the interview into 5 separate edited segments:

1. Segment 1 (MP3) – 13 minutes – Finding one’s place or making a space for yourself, self-respect and respect for others and the arts, what’s “conventional” and how that interrelates with body image, and KFASF of course!
2. Segment 2 (MP3) – 10 minutes – Submissive masculinity, power in submission, art and culture, having fun being who you want to be, MaleSubmissionArt.com.
3. Segment 3 (MP3) – 12 minutes – Gender bias and transphobia in mainstream media, acknowledging youth sexuality and young people’s agency, empowerment versus protection.
4. Segment 4 (MP3) – 26 minutes – Art and censorship, connecting the dots between various “isms,” how education and self-expression empowers young people, anecdotes about abstinence-only preaching, SexEdEverywhere.com.
5. Segment 5 (MP3) – 10 minutes – Living in San Francisco, addressing inclusivity in community organizing.

Thanks so much to Lilycat for inviting me on and for letting me share the audio recording on my blog! Lilycat’s show, Lilycat on Stuff airs every Sunday at 2 PM Pacific time on FCCFreeRadio (107.3 FM).

Also, don’t forget that even if you’re not in the bay area, block off March 21 to watch KinkForAll San Francisco’s live Internet stream and participate online! Of course, if you are local to the Bay Area, please sign up for KFASF and stop by! I’d love to meet you there. :) Here’s all the 411 on KinkForAll San Francisco, in case you need it.