“Good girl.”

I don’t think there’s anything that captures my mixed feelings about submission like that phrase. There’s so much in there.

Until very recently, it was one of my least favorite things to hear. So condescending. Patronizing. Paternalistic.

[…]

[W]hat feminist wants to be a Good Girl? After all, every feminist knows that Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. And then there’s the whole madonna-whore complex thing, which will certainly be a subject of its own post at some point.

[…]

So that’s why I don’t like “good girl.” Or rather, why I don’t want to like “good girl.” Because, honestly? I fucking love it. It makes my pussy wet and my heart sing. The first time a dominant partner called me a “good girl,” I felt like I had just taken a shot of morphine. And I wanted more.

[…]

[T]he very fact that I like it so much[…]is a little, well, humiliating. And that just adds an extra frission of erotic stimulation and emotional intensity. As maymay said once, ”I don’t want to be tortured, but I want it.” Obviously, being called a “good girl” is not exactly torture, but I think maymay perfectly captures that paradox of being submissive for me—of wanting the things I don’t want. I want them both in spite of and because of the fact that I don’t want them.

There is, indeed, so much in there. Others’s comments are good, too. I left a comment, which turned into two comments, both of which are relevant enough to this space that I’m cross-posting the ensuing exchange:

Huh. Interesting.

For what it’s worth, being a “good boy” has been one of my favorite things to hear for as long as I can remember. Reading your uncomfortableness towards the phrase makes me inclined to attribute our differing feelings about it to our gendered experiences in the world. (For another example, see also The Sexism of Sex and Smarts.)

When you say:

Oh, and of course, there’s the fact that it’s “good girl.” I know it’s pretty commonplace to refer to grown women as girls, and I do it all the time. But there’s no denying that it adds to the patronizing tone.

I’m reminded of the examples many dictionaries cite to explain the meaning of the word “pretty”: pretty song, pretty room, pretty girl. These are (sexist) sexual standards. They hurt me—and many others, too.

Also, Leah:

I like the powerlessness of the experience. […] Sometimes it embarrasses me to ask for a thing, but I do so out of desire — because I want. Although I am not the one in control, I nevertheless consider myself an equal partner, fully complicit in the sex.

In my (not so) humble opinion, extricating control from power is what claiming sexually submissive agency is about. We are not often taught, as bottoms in the BDSM Scene, how to do this and I think that’s because most of the BDSM community at large has an unacceptably poor understanding of the systemics of power itself, sexual and otherwise. It seems to me that your desire for the experience of powerlessness feels at odds with your claim of “complicity” precisely because you wish to abdicate your control of the sexual situation in order to serve the fantasy of “not being in control.”

That’s totally cool (and fun), but by your own admission of being “an equal partner,” that’s not really what’s happening. Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse. The BDSM community, writ large, enjoys either/or thinking to an astonishingly damaging degree—not to mention how disgustingly sexist they are.

Let’s develop a deeper understanding so more of us can approach these issues using both/and thinking, instead.

FeministSub briefly responded asking for clarifications:

This comment will take me a while to work through. :) But thank you! I did stop and think while I was writing this about whether or not male subs enjoy “good boy.” It actually made me think about how much of the language of domination and submission is at least subtly gendered.

Do you mind explaining what you mean by this?

Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse.

Since she asked, I went ahead and risked explaining without sugarcoating:

I did stop and think while I was writing this about whether or not male subs enjoy “good boy.” It actually made me think about how much of the language of domination and submission is at least subtly gendered.

Subtly? :) It’s quite overt. “Sissy,” “bitch,” “slut,” etc., all usually treat femininity as intrinsically submissive.

And it’s not just gendered. Sexually dominant and submissive lingo frequently puts underprivileged (oppressed) populaces in the submissive role while putting privileged populaces in the dominant one. See, for example, “little girl/boy,” which highlights both size and age—youth are arguably the most consistently disadvantaged populace on the planet—or “who’s your daddy,” for the reciprocal perspective. In other words, if “power is an aphrodisiac,” then oppression is a sexual performance enhancing drug.

In my experience, most BDSM’ers like to avoid thinking about this potentially uncomfortable truth because they either think it might ruin their fun or that they’re not complicit in the damage this can cause. But turning a blind eye to this is as idiotic as saying talking about sex (e.g., negotiating) “ruins” the fun of playing or it’s narcissistic to the point of being inhumane. Yes, some BDSM’ers say that and are those things, too, and they’re usually idiots or privileged shits.

Do you mind explaining what you mean by this?

Put another way, the liminal space of “wanting what we don’t want” problematizes dichotomized notions of control to a degree that threatens much of the powerful/powerlessness fantasies intrinsic to most BDSM discourse.

Oh, all I mean is that most BDSM’ers enjoy treating “What It Is That We Do” as a dichotomy of power wherein bottoms/submissives have none (they are powerless) and tops/dominants have all of it (they are powerful), as if it’s all some kind of zero-sum, either/or game. The way the community talks about this (i.e., its discourse) typically fails to acknowledge or delegitimizes situations in which bottoms have power and tops do not (regardless of whether or not they also have “control”).

For instance, “service top” is a vague pejorative in the BDSM community precisely because it threatens the “powerfulness” of a top. Conversely, “do-me bottom” is similar because it threatens the “powerlessness” of a bottom. I think this is why expressing desire in the form of “wanting what I don’t want” is complicated; it problematizes my own fantasy of absolute powerlessness and my top’s absolute powerfulness, which can feel threatening to many ignorant or simple-minded BDSM’ers.

Since so much of the way the BDSM community and, in fairness, contemporary overarching society, couples submission with femininity and femininity with powerlessness, it should come as no surprise that most BDSM’ers are profoundly sexist and, worse, often willfully ignorant of that. Sadly, the petulant self-righteousness with which many of them go about espousing their “lifestyle” can easily obscure a greater understanding of both the problems with and benefits of “The Scene.” They certainly obscured them from me for a long, long time.

I hope that wasn’t too brash a comment for your blog. I think your post was really good.

As is always the case, the best places to see idiocy and inhumane narcissism of the kind I described is to go to the places where idiots and privileged shits talk amongst themselves. The Internet is amazing for this because few people have the technological know-how to shield their internal discourse from prying eyes—not to mention that such shielding is often antithetical to the point of telecommunication in the first place. In this sense, FetLife offers ideal grounds for privileged-shit-spotting, and David Futrelle’s blog Man Boobz consistently offers awesome roundups and priceless quotes from inside the pro-sexism MRA forums.

I believe every inequality oppresses the oppressors as well as the oppressed because inequality erases opportunity and choice. As a man, I have privilege, but I’m also bound by strict social constraint. I’m not able to cuddle with acquaintances whether female, male, or intersex without being seen in a predatory light. I’m not able to express emotionality without fear of humiliation. And apparently, I learned painfully for the first time through this Femquake thing, some feminists believe I’m also not allowed to offer leadership in gender justice activism no matter how amorphous or self-empowering (as opposed to dogmatic) that leadership is intended to be.

Inequality is not the reality I want for humanity’s sons, nor its daughters, nor the rest of its children. That is why I call myself a feminist.

There are no truths without full and original context

Before I go any further, let me provide some background. On Sunday, April 25^th, I witnessed a surprising amount of debate over whether Boobquake was essentially anti-feminist, and I learned that Brainquake was organized to counter it. Unhappy with this dichotomization, I created another Facebook page and event called Femquake in the name of unity and self-empowerment:

Everyone should have the right to do as one pleases, from showing off cleavage to showing off intellect—or both! The real issue is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Empower one another to live the lives we want, free of coercion.

What seemed pretty simple and straightforward at first quickly became more complicated when a blogger by the handle Feminist Mom attributed the creation of Femquake to Feministing.com and I left a comment to correct the misinformation. Then, an anonymous commenter on Feminist Mom’s blog expressed disappointment that I am a man, as they had been hoping Femquake was started by a woman. Now that they knew a man started the page, they said the sentiment I had expressed through creating Femquake “means…less” to them, despite still being a good one.

When I questioned why this might be the case, Feminist Mom offered this explanation, which I understand and disagree with:

When men step up as leaders for the women’s movement, it looks like we can’t even lead ourselves.

Anyway, consider reading the full comment thread on my post, as well as on this followup post by Feminist Mom questioning, “Men as feminist leaders?“. It’s Feminist Mom’s post and the anonymous commenter there that I’m responding to, below.

Ultimately, the conversation seems centered around two concepts: equality and leadership. To avoid any potential miscommunication or further conflations, I want to address both of them distinctly, and as succinctly as I can.

Leadership

Feminist Mom begins with a question:

What you said was, “for people to realize a desire to be independent, regardless of whether they are women or men, ‘following leaders’ is not the way to do it.” What is the way to do it then?

I thought I was pretty clear about my thoughts on leadership when I said this in an earlier comment:

All of us who started a “*quake” are leaders. But so are the many people who spread the word about the events. Jennifer McCreight could not possibly have done what she did without the leadership of her “followers”, which I count myself among.

What I am pointing to is the initiative of each person involved in collective action, such as the 160,000 people who wore “immodest” outfits on Boobquake, the several thousand who participated in Brainquake by showing off Iranian women’s intellectual achievements, and the several hundred who participated in Femquake by doing one, the other, or something else of their own choosing. In my view, many of these people could be considered leaders as well as followers. When I said that ‘following leaders’ is not the way to [achieve independence] after describing the ideal of self-empowerment that I tried to put forth in coining ‘femquake,’ what I meant was each individual can find independence through intentionality, but not through thoughtless action.

Independence is leadership of oneself, for oneself—but not necessarily by oneself. When someone has the freedom to choose their actions, they are no more followers than they are leaders. They may also be following the lead of one person while leading others themselves. To construe freely following a leader as being placed in a hierarchy in which there is no opportunity to move around is to misconstrue choice with force, and personal initiative with disempowerment.

So, the way to achieve independence is to acknowledge that you can both lead and follow at once, or you can do one or the other, and at your own volition. Otherwise, you are beholden to either your leaders or your followers. If you choose to follow a leader, do so with intent and without sacrificing skepticism. If you choose to lead, do so through example and without antipathy.

Equality

The Anonymous who I quoted in my last post left several more comments:

maymay is really misguided on how the infrastructure of feminism actually works. I can tell that simply by his disbelief in a feminism hierarchical…of course, I’m just reading off this page and hasn’t ventured into his blog yet. I imagine it’s a lot of RAH RAH YOU ROCK and I’m sorry that I can’t be the one, it’s a sweet effort and I appreciate that his heart is in the right place but nobody wants to hear from the white man on damn near anything to do with fucking equality, okay?

[…] get off my nuts b/c we’re talking about maymay here and not me.

Nobody wants to hear how a man lead us to unite our boobs and our brains and that is the long and short of it here. Men are NOT feminist leaders. They can be active participants in the movement, but they have to take a back seat in the charge and that’s just what it is. I’m sorry.

In regards to “how feminism actually works,” there is probably a lot of sociopolitical nuance that I have yet to learn. You are welcome to teach me, Anonymous, if you can do so without being mean to me. Otherwise, as should be elementarily obvious to you, I will simply refuse to listen.

Since you say you haven’t ventured into my blog yet, I can easily forgive your ignorance on the fact that I am a bisexual man. This instantly places me outside of the heterosexist viewpoint you seem to have already “imagine[d]” me in. Furthermore, I can forgive your ignorance on the fact that I am a sexually submissive man. Or that I am a Jewish man. Or that I am a non-monogomous man. Or that I am a man diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Or that I am a man without a high-school degree. Or that I am a man like many others who has faced any number of additional circumstances that would cost me certain privileges in one sense or another.

But should any of those things even matter in defining the value of Femquake? On the Femquake page, Ian Iverson said:

Part of gender equality is to not let gender be a basis for projecting motives onto others.

I think it does a severe disservice to any and all social justice causes to stand under a banner of equality and wave a flag of feminism while speaking assumptively about who someone else is due to either real or perceived privilege. I feel this is doubly true when one does this while admitting to indolence. It’s actions like the ones Anonymous demonstrates that retard the progress of gender justice because it alienates people who would otherwise easily identify themselves with feminist ideals.

I felt hurt—deeply hurt—that my gender would be the cause of a devaluation of the message of Femquake. I am left wondering: what role would Anonymous have men take as “active participants in the movement”? I, for one, do not advocate for equality so as to be told my place.

Later, Anonymous commented again and said this:

It annoyed me further to see that there is a wiki article about this now and the comments were all “I’m glad to see women discussing this, taking charge of this”.

YEAH, ABOUT THAT. The brainchild behind Femquake is a fucking man, so we don’t even have that glory hole, it’s his…and that’s why it means less to me.

As it should.

Feminism is about gender equality, and until we have gender equality, everyone of all genders will continue to pay a horrifically painful cost one way or another. In feeling that Femquake somehow belongs to men because a man started the page, Anonymous is playing a simplistic (and very sad) zero-sum game where the actions taken by people of one gender necessarily invalidates the value of another.

That is an old, ugly game that can never lead to equality. Feminists ought never to play it.

And that’s all I have to say to or about Anonymous.

And y’know what? That’s not so terrible. Here’s why.

The Internet is like a giant game of telephone

While misunderstandings and hurt feelings aren’t fun, they’re not the only thing that can result from a game of telephone. Similarly, while misunderstandings and hurt feelings sadly abound in response to Iranian Cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi’s claim that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes (not to mention Pat Robertson’s equally bigoted claim that gay people cause hurricanes)¹, a lot of real good did come from Boobquake. As Lissy observed:

watching my facebook statuses I noticed something… boobquake worked for a lot of people who I know don’t spend much time thinking about feminism at all. My very capable and hardworking sister Ginger, takes no shit from anyone but would never be described as a feminist activist[…]. But boobquake? She was onto that, spewing on her facebook status about sexist pigs in a way that made me a proud older sister… she listened to me ranting, all that time I thought she wasn’t listening as a teenager she was!

Of course, baring cleavage in the name of women’s liberation is itself controversial. In short order, Boobquake received criticism from feminists who felt “saddened” by this response. A counter-event, categorized as a “Protest” on Facebook named Brainquake, soon sprung into being. What’s most interesting of all, Brainquake creators Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi say that they’ve been in touch with Boobquake instigator Jennifer McCreight, and McCreight says she’s been in touch with the Brainquake creators, and that there’s little (if any) animosity between the three of them.

Responding to factional feminism

Nevertheless, while hanging out on Twitter on Sunday, I saw a seemingly endless stream of negativity about Boobquake from Brainquake supporters. It was being described as “anti-feminist,” and while I personally don’t find boobquake that appealing (although it is funny), I found the negativity spewed Jennifer’s way even less appealing. That’s when I decided I’d break the binary and came up with Femquake. As I wrote when I introduced the idea:

Both breasts and brains are good for humanity and deserve our respect. Don’t coerce women into being proud of one over the other, or feeling ashamed of either! YES WE CAN all get along.

[…]

The core ideal is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Decrying women who are proud of their bodies is as oppressive as forcing the ones who aren’t to cover them up. Hailing intellectualism over physical value is as insensitively demonizing as nonconsensual sexualization.

It’s time for women, men, and everyone else to empower one another to live the lives we want to live, free of coercion and abuse, whether modestly dressed or not.

It’s time for a FEMQUAKE!

Jumping on the “b*quake” bandwagon had its benefits. Within hours, the Femquake Facebook page had hundreds of fans—and an equal number of detractors. It seems that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. And, statistically speaking, that’s precisely the problem with Boobquake, too, as Phil Plait from Discover Magazine wrote:

there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. […W]ithout defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

Jennifer McCreight, Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi, and myself have all received criticism for supporting gender justice in our own ways, and the criticism is as diverse as ever. That’s no surprise, and again, I think it’s actually a beautiful thing. Having this diversity empowers people to choose the form of activism that’s right for them.

And if you don’t see what you like, you can self-empower yourself to go make it.

Feminism is about gender equality, and equality requires self-empowerment

That message of self-empowerment is, in my view, what my response to the factionalism over the “*quake” events is all about: Don’t let ideological feminists shame you into covering yourself up, or pressure you into exposing yourself, I wrote. Your body is YOURS. It is yours to show off however you like, whether physically, intellectually, or otherwise.

On that note, let me share with you some of the criticism I’ve received over Femquake. I think the negativity can be illustrative and can offer a wonderful opportunity to practice empowering positivity. If all this hullaballoo over boobquake has shown me one thing, it’s that we all need to practice assuming good faith and responding to offense nonviolenty.

@Custard_Socks says “fuck off with your titpics”

I followed conversation about #Femquake on Twitter. Here’s what @Custard_Socks had to say:

Femquake? Brains and boobs? My sister’s a flat chested idiot but she’s done damn well in a male dominated job, so fuck off with your titpics

(They said it here.)

I responded:

@Custard_Socks #Femquake is feminist solidarity—the idea is that #sexuality is too often divisive. Why be so negative when we could empower?

In answering honestly (I believe), @Custard_Socks said:

@maymaym From the participants on the Femquake Facebook page, feminism means you can brag about your high IQ & big tits. Solidarity, my arse

@maymaym Boasting is empowerment for the selfish.

(They said it here and here.)

At this point, it occurred to me that there probably wasn’t anything I could say to convince this person of Femquake’s intent. I simply don’t know how else to describe Femquake than the way I did on the Femquake Facebook event page:

On Femquake Day, honor a feminist who inspires compassion among different groups of people and who celebrates the value inherent in the diversity of human sexuality. In other words, HONOR FEMINISTS WHO ROCK YOUR WORLD!

Or, just smile at a stranger. It’s good for them, for you, and for our planet. :)

If honoring feminists who rock my world amounts to “brag[gin]” about their high IQ and big tits, well, fuck, I’m in! If smiling at strangers is “boasting” and “selfish,” fuck it, slap my ass and call me narcissistic! Smiling is healthy, and so is being proud of who you are.

Anyway, taking my own advice, my conversation with @Custard_Socks continued with my reply, which I intended just as genuinely as I believe they intended their earlier reply to me:

@Custard_Socks :) I hope you have a fantastic day today and brighten someone’s day. It’d be wonderful if you were able to do that.

But a moment of insight hit me when @Custard_Socks answered back with, @maymaym Are you saying I’m more than likely not capable of that?

“Oh,” I thought to myself, “is that the concern?” Does @Custard_Socks feel so disempowered to bring joy to others that they are so ready to jump to the false belief that others find them incapable of it? Obviously, only @Custard_Socks can answer that, but regardless of this person’s situation, it occurred to me that countless people probably do feel exactly that.

Maybe some of what the knee-jerk negativity in feminist debates needs is someone to say, “Hey, I support you, and I think you can bring this world joy!” (You can read the rest of my conversation with @Custard_Socks here, here, and here.)

Melliferax says, “someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.”

Femquake got blogged about right alongside Boobquake and Brainquake, just as I’d hoped it would. Of course, not everyone was so enthused. In a comment on one such blog post, Melliferax said:

Femquake… had a very quick look and it just seems like the usual call for equality? How’s that different from, y’know, feminism or good ole humanism? Why is it that every time someone comes up with an idea, like arresting the pope or showing some cleavage, someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.

Femquake was born out of my unhappiness with the unhappiness many Brainquakers felt towards Boobquakers. So yeah, I guess you could say I was “whining about it.” But is that so terrible?

I mean, if a “call for equality” can come from unhappiness, is saying that the people who advocate for that equality are “whining” really going to help matters? I don’t think so, but I’m not going to belittle you for thinking differently.

If calls for equality stem from whining, then maybe what we need are more people whining! What I think we don’t need, however, is negativity directed at calls for equality. Since you get to choose how you respond, why choose something negative when you could choose something positively empowering?

Millerax says that Femquake “just seems like the usual call for equality,” but as the billions of female-assigned, intersex, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, kinky, and queer people will attest, calls for equality is anything but “usual” in far too many parts of the world. I think the absence of more calls to equality in places like Iran is seriously whacked, yo. Don’t you?

Anonymous says, “awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. […I]t means a little less to me now.”

As I’ve been saying for years, one of the beautiful things about the Internet is that it enables us to let our ideas, words, and actions speak for themselves, without judgements based on age, race, gender, or other characteristics. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a insert-your-feared-identity-here. However, identity really matters to some people.

In a comment on Feminist Mom in Montreal’s Femquake blog post, someone who prefers to remain anonymous said:

awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. That’s all great and lovely, but I guess I was hoping that it was a woman. If that makes me sexist, well, I guess maybe I am.

Not gonna lie, it means a little less to me now.

The point is still there and the point is a good one, but meh…some dude on the internet leading the charge on us uniting our boobs and our brains is just, IDK, ironic.

Thanks for the help, though.

First, Anonymous, you’re very welcome! :D I’m glad to help bring about a world where gender justice is a reality!

That being said, I have to wonder why my being a man means that Femquake loses some measure of respect in your eyes. As a man, I know that it’s very difficult for men—including myself, at times—to stand up for the rights of women. Y’see, I could choose not to. I could go about my life content in the knowledge that because no one questions me when I check “M” when replying to Facebook’s “Gender” question,² I have privileges that someone who checks “F” may never have.

And y’know what? That’s a pretty sweet deal for me and the other “M”‘s, and a pretty crappy one for all the “F”‘s.

That’s why it’s absolutely baffling to me that when men stand up for gender equality, it somehow means less than when women do it. The reality is that no matter who is standing up for gender equality, it means the same thing: that we are all working towards the same goal of equality and opportunity for all souls on this planet, regardless of what body those souls inhabit.

So, while Anonymous may find it “ironic” that a man like me came up with Femquake, I find it equally ironic that someone who wants to support gender equality would devalue an effort to support gender justice due to the gender of that effort’s founder.

Strengthen love, not shame

There are, of course, plenty of other negative and positive responses to Femquake, and I’m thrilled to see that the Femquake page is still getting fans. After all, communication is inherently imperfect because otherwise we wouldn’t need it. And so I think, in the end, all this diversity is beautiful—it’s a reflection of the diversity inherent in all of you!

Ultimately, regardless of whether someone supports me or tries to put me down, I’m going to work on just being happy. I want to spread joy in the world. :) I know it can be hard, and I struggle to smile sometimes but, with your help, I’m learning how.

Thank you for all the criticism, the support, the encouragement, the denigration, and responses. Thank you for keeping the conversation going, and for talking to one another, and to me! Thank you for turning a sexist comment by an Iranian religious leader and a boob joke by a young feminist into an opportunity to promote peace and happiness and understanding and unity and self-empowerment and beauty and intelligence!

Now go and enjoy life, because working towards bringing pleasure and joy and equality and opportunity to everyone—everyone—is what feminism is all about!

1. I think Pat is wrong about the whole hurricane thing. I think Teh Gehys actually cause volcanos. Don’t you remember the recent Icelandic volcano that halted air travel in Europe? I mean, those Frenchies are all sexual deviants! I say we need a #Gaycano experiment! Go, Internet, go!
2. Facebook really ought to change that label to “Sex,” not “Gender,” since those two words are not actually interchangeable. See also: Gender and Technology.

This interesting image via SlaveBoy.Tumblr.com.

One of the things that has seriously bugged me for a very long time is how lots of people think about submissiveness, particularly but not necessarily as it relates to male sexuality. It bugs me because for all the lip service paid to respecting submission, very little about the way it’s discussed actually seems to be respectful of submissive desires.

I, unlike many submissive young men in their teens, surrounded myself with the culture and ritual of dominant/submissive relationships through the very fortunate circumstances in which I found myself. Yet, despite my incredible access to such resources, it was indescribably difficult (not to mention painful) for me to get to a point where I felt like I can enjoy my sexual submission as a valid part of my masculinity.

Why was it so hard for to me feel validated in my submission? Why does it continue to be a struggle for many people, as the overwhelming response to my subversive writings at MaleSubmissionArt.com show? This question, at once both simple and unspeakably intricate, is what I want to address in this post.

Imagine for a moment you’re a young guy (or a guy of any age, really) trying to understand your sexual desires. You know you want a relationship with (in the name of simplicity) a woman who will “take charge in the bedroom,” but you don’t really know what that looks like. You come across porn and sex blogs and, like a second (or third, or fourth) erotic awakening, all sorts of fantasy imagery involving either getting butt-fucked or not being allowed to orgasm, or both of those, starts bubbling in your brain, since—let’s face it—that’s most of the erotic material out there for such guys. You finally get a girlfriend and, remarkably, she’s good, giving and game, so you get butt-fucked and she doesn’t let you come. “Wonderful,” you’re likely to think, “now I’ve been submissive.”

If you’re lucky, maybe it was really wonderful. More power to you. But what if it’s not? Moreover, and I suspect this is most common, what if that wonderfulness is just the tip of the iceberg? What if the new experience was amazing and novel but you want more? What is that “more” that you want? More butt-fucking? More bondage? More sexual service? More orgasm denial? What are you yearning for, really?

This, sadly, is where many of us get stuck. I’ve read countless words from hundreds if not thousands of men, all of whom seem to be trying to answer these very questions. I’m one of these men, trying to figure out what the fuck all this desiring is, trying to make it “more” and “better” as though I’m following some kind of primal programming. I want to be more passionate. More intimate. More connected. More devoted. More focused. More meaningful. More submissive.

Obviously, this is a very big topic, and I often feel overwhelmed just thinking about how submission relates to my life, influences my relationships, or shapes my desires. As I often struggle with articulating these thoughts, I figured that even if I don’t get it quite right, it’s worth sharing some of where I’ve gotten to because I no longer enjoy sex despite being a submissive man. I finally enjoy sex because I am—and want to be—a sexually submissive man.

Hopefully, I’ll clarify the imprecise language we currently have available to explore gendered power and submissive masculinity in particular, and I’ll address how such feeble language may cause egregious ambiguity in communication as well as misconceptions about fundamental desires that hamper our understanding of consensual sexual submission.

Hot or not? Submission isn’t arousal.

This submission stuff is hard, and I’m not the only one who’s struggled, or is struggling, with it. One reason it’s so goddamn hard is because the way I so often see it conceptualized feels polluted by imprecision, absolutism, and sexism.

Most of the time, I ignore a great deal of the polluted chatter because it comes from people I don’t hold in high regard to begin with. Recently, however, some of the men who blog that I respect a lot have hit some of the same notes while singing submissive masculinity’s tunes as the people I ignore, and that is something I cannot ignore.

More specifically, Thumper, whose blog I read almost religiously, inspired a debate between MyKey and myself. In a comment on one of Thumper’s posts, MyKey said:

The denial after [lots of orgasms] is much harder and much sweeter for it, and the submission deeper and more fun. Of course during those periods [after orgasm] its hard to be as submissive[…].

Although I’ve read this opinion expressed in about a bazillion different ways, it’s a sentiment I’ve never felt completely comfortable with. Indeed, the more I dissect my own submissiveness and explore what submission means to me, the more upset I get by its prevalence. I get even more upset when bloggers perpetuate this, because they are currently the most influential source of education about submissive masculinity.

But before I get too far into what I find so upsetting about the way this is framed, let’s make one thing clear: what I’m about to say has nothing to do with espousing a submissive ideology, a One True Way® for being a “real submissive.” It’s irrational to, for instance, call a self-identified switch “a submissive” when that person is feeling submissive by sole virtue of their feelings; they are no more or less “a submissive” than they say they are, despite how desirous of submissive feelings they are at any given time. Insofar as identity politics are involved, they stop at the point of acknowledging that your identity is a part in your personal experience of the world.

This post, however, is not about your experience of the world. It’s about finding a way to convey your experience in a manner that is reconcilable with the different experiences of others. This is important because, lacking this ability, all conversation about submission starts with “for me,” repeats the caveat, and then ends with “Your Mileage May Vary.” To date, every way I’ve heard anyone talk about submission breaks down when someone else introduces their own, differing, experience, and I’m afraid those conversations are no longer useful for me.

Anyway, the short debate between MyKey and I ultimately lead to a post in which Thumper put forth the following equation:

Denial + arousal = submission.

In the comments—worth reading despite veering into predictably unhelpful tangents at points—Thumper later amended this to read Denial + arousal = submissive energy. That’s better, thanks in part to the focus on “energy” (I think more precisely termed desire) over the intrinsic nature of the outcome. Nevertheless, I want to challenge both statements because I think the premise underlying them is simply not true.

Both statements feed into a dangerous, wide-spread stereotype: the cock-centric notion that if you control a man’s penis, you control the man. Is that true? Of course it’s not. These activities could certainly be an expression of dominance or submission and they might trigger dominant or submissive feelings in oneself or one’s partner(s), but Thumper, MyKey and I already seem to agree that the acts are not, themselves, the root cause of submission or dominance.

To wit, and to Thumper’s credit, one of his next sentences is the following:

That’s not saying I’m in no way submissive when my sexual appetite has been totally sated. I think I would be accepting of domination even then. [And later, in the comments:] I wasn’t trying to suggest it’s just that simple […] but they are strongly related.

Indeed, I can think of no realm less suited to the beautiful simplicity of mathematics than human desire, so it’s obvious that Thumper’s equation is an oversimplification. Since we can all see that things are not “just that simple,” I presume that what Thumper, MyKey, and other submissive men perpetuating this simplistic formulation are trying to get at is that they feel submissive more acutely when the fact of their orgasm denial is at the fore of their thoughts. Thumper says he feels his “sub mojo” lessen after he has come. MyKey calls this sensation “sub drop” and, since I disagree with the premise of their statements, questions whether I’m “wired differently”.

At least in this regard, however, I am not wired differently. I do understand the sudden, often startling change in desires post-orgasm. During relationships with keyholders, the degree with which my interest in, say, getting my penis locked away waned after having an orgasm was (and still is) totally remarkable to me. Nevertheless, similar to the experiences of others, when my keyholder wanted me locked, I got locked. Why? Because that’s hot! It wasn’t quite as hot right then, but it was super-hot shortly thereafter, when I was once again unable to masturbate freely.

This simple after-the-fact observation points to a crucial distinction I fear is missing from the conversation about submission: just because an activity is less pleasant at some moments than it is during others doesn’t mean I won’t do or enjoy those activities. Moreover, the drive to perform those activities independent of one’s immediate motivations is a distinct, separate pleasure, from the pleasure one gets from desiring the activity directly.

I think Tom Allen illustrated this in the sexiest way ever in his erotic story, Ahead of Time. Portions of this story are so apropos to this discussion that I just have to quote it:

“And I want you to come really hard for me. I want you to remember this for a long time.”

“Oooh,” I moaned aloud.

“That’s why I’m going to make you eat my pussy right after you come.”

I gasped. It was like an electric shock to my groin. I’ve long had this fantasy, but could never bring myself to do it. The idea of being forced to clean her, to lick my still-hot come from her, to hear her demanding that I make her clean, to make her come with my tongue… I’ve only mentioned to her a handful of times over the years, but I’ve never been able to ask for this, let alone to try it. She was right, there’s something about the first ten or fifteen minutes after coming that puts all that desire right out of my head. I was excited, but at the same time a bit fearful. I knew that I wouldn’t want to do it afterward…and so did she.

She sensed my hesitation. “I know the idea turns you on,” she said.

Thinking fast, I said “But, I, um, thought that you were satisfied. You told me that you had come enough for tonight.”

“Oh, you’re not going to do it for my pleasure,” she said, “at least, not for my sexual pleasure. You’re going to do it because in a few days, you’re going to think about it, and you’re going to remember this evening as the hottest thing we’ve ever done.”

[…]

I was still partially dazed as she inched her knees alongside my body. When she finally rested her legs over my arms and braced her other hand against the headboard, though, things…changed somehow. Her pussy, which just minutes ago was a beautiful, warm cave, suddenly now seemed like a hairy tube of flesh that was filled with something that I didn’t want. Ugh, how could I ever have asked for this? I pursed my lips, but it was too late—I felt the drips onto my cheeks and chin. Seconds later, her slick lips were pressed tightly against my mouth, and I could hear her encouraging me to clean her, to keep sucking and licking until everything was gone.

(Emphasis mine.)

What Tom’s story and our many similar experiences show us is that not even the men who purport to quantify submission based on sexual arousal or orgasm denial actually do that. Although our awareness of submissive feelings may be intensified by specific, often fetishistic triggers (e.g., being horny and prevented from coming), those two concepts are not causally related.

For men like Thumper and I, who clearly dig orgasm denial pretty hard, it makes sense that this desire is a core aspect of how we want to fuck. But we do ourselves and our readers a terrible disservice by perpetuating the idea that our fetish is the cause of our submissive desire rather than a manifestation of it. Submission does not come about through someone else’s control—that is mere restriction in the best case, and abuse in the worst case—it comes about through our active desire to submit. Consensual submission is not about how someone else controls me, it’s about the opportunities I create for myself to be vulnerable to that person.

When I hear people discussing submission as though it is the result of the thing they want instead of discussing submission itself as the thing they want, it’s like listening to people talk while putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Such an awkward conceptualization of submission is not merely incorrect, it’s very dangerous because it restricts any submissive desire into a necessarily coercive paradigm.

In this instance, with teasing and denial as the addends, it constructs mens’ submission as totally dependent on the myth of male lust (the idea that men are controlled by their penises because they are men). It states that submissive energy is itself induced by a woman (or, more generally, “keyholder”) by accessing that man’s sexual potency in a strictly prescribed, time-release fashion, like a pill.

This is the same misconception that says blowjobs are inherently submissive, or that pain is inherently bad, or even that blogging about sex is inherently submissive (srsly)! Sadly, these ideas are the prevailing view of what “submission” is, and I think they totally miss the point about the validity of submission itself as a core motivation.

Framing submission as a second-class thing, a byproduct of some other, first-class particle, is incorrect. Submission is it’s own distinct facet of sexual desire.

Reductionist Submission Is Dangerous To Your Sex Life

There’s absolutely nothing wrong about getting off on stereotypes. While the reasons for why many submissive men, including myself, fetishize orgasm denial are debatable, that obvious fact does not make orgasm denial a component of submission. Akin to the way desiring anal sex does not make someone gay, abstaining from orgasm does not make someone a submissive. Abstaining longer doesn’t make them “more submissive.”

Sexual “teasing” is really pleasurable and fun for many people, regardless of their interest in submission. For a huge population, that kind of sex is all about improving their orgasms, whether “vanilla” or not; I’ve read of self-identified dominant men who enjoy the practice, too. For other people, like certain religious sects, some portions of asexual populations, and anorgasmic women, living (or trying to live) an orgasm-less existence isn’t even kinky. On the flip side, there are certainly some submissive men who simply aren’t into orgasm denial at all.

In other words, even though sex acts obviously influence one’s mental or physical state at any given moment, conceptually coupling a sexual activity to what an activity means is going to cut you off from the pleasure of diverse sexual experience. Teasing and denial (the “denial+arousal” part of Thumper’s equation) are not ingredients for submission, they’re just toys I play with because I, like many others, enjoy expressing submission with them some of the time. Sometimes we enjoy it more than other times, but sometimes we express that same submission in completely unrelated ways.

Regardless of your personal experience, I’d urge you to avoid linking any sex act to any intention, even “for you,” even if it’s your fetish. The stereotypical view of orgasm denial as requisite for or even directly “enhancing” submission, even for those of us who fetishize it, simply doesn’t account for our own diverse expressions of submission. To assert that it does is fundamentally miscommunicative. It’d be like saying getting flogged is submission and that the harder you get flogged the more submissive you are, and although people often make the “harder=submissivier” false assertion as well, that doesn’t make it sensible, that makes it dangerous!

That definition of submission, coercive at best and abusive at worst, invalidates submission itself as a potential motivation for healthy sex by undermining a submissive person’s power to choose exactly what they do or do not want—a power that’s required to make healthy sexual choices for one’s self, even “as a submissive.” It tricks us into believing all the false dichotomies embedded in hegemonic culture that tell us BDSM is obscene, and that to be submissive is to necessarily be unassertive, passive, self-effacing, receptive, or acquiescent. These are not ambiguous, wishy-washy obstacles to people’s health. For many people, particularly men who are deeply immersed in heteronormative culture, these are real factors that contribute to sexual anxiety and a horrible depreciation of self-image.

Defining the degree of one’s sexual submission as the summation of a period of orgasm denial and current sexual arousal is not only reductionist, I believe it’s actively damaging. The equation perpetuates the myth of male lust and disavows the validity of submission as a sexual self-expression that can be actively chosen, rather than induced coercively.

In the post that spawned all this theorizing, Thumper wrote:

I had cruised all through my adolescence with no inkling I was what I was (though I can see some signs that were there all along).

Like Thumper, I was certainly submissive before I had a dominant partner in my life. So while this rant may sound like meaningless semantics to some, it’s crucial that we amplify these distinctions and move the prevailing understanding of submissive masculinity away from the limiting, misrepresentative, and downright sexist bullshit so often spewed by exploitative pro-dommes and the likes of Elise Sutton (no link because I hate what she says; Google it instead actually, Gloria Brame’s essay on Elise Sutton is totally worth reading). That’s precisely the kind of bullshit that kept “what we are” hidden from men like Thumper and I for so long.

As an adamantly submissive man myself, I’m sure my personal experience is going to be different from, say, a switch’s orgasm denial experience. And that’s the point: submission is not about creating a ruleset of Things To Do To Be Submissive for anyone, yourself least of all. Very simply, it’s about sexual self-expression in order to be happy and healthy.

So please, all of us who blog about such things, stop insisting that keeping a man from his orgasms somehow turns him more submissive. You’re just fooling yourselves, your readers, and arguably worst of all, your lovers.

It was not that, as this putrid “news” article disgustingly asserts, “The downward spiral of Hope’s life was unstoppable.”

If everyone I know who had a picture of their boobs on the internet before their 18th birthday killed themselves, I’d have a lot of dead friends. I wouldn’t be around to remember them, though, since I’d be dead too.

It wasn’t SEXTING.

It was you, adults, all the adults in her life.

I feel that the full blog post is simply required reading.

On Twitter, Cos pointed me at another commentary from The Curvature. He sent this commentary to Andrew Meacham, the author of the original news story. Although I tried, I simply couldn’t read through Mr. Meacham’s article because of the overwhelming anger I felt at each turn where he (and the numerous commenters on the article) twisted this story around to blame Hope herself, to stigmatize her because she was stigmatized, to shame her for being a victim, to paint her as the one to be punished for her “impetuous move.”

We as a society have become so good at victimizing victims, at absolving ourselves of any wrongdoing, of telling ourselves all the lies we need to hear to make everyone believe “there was nothing we could do,” when in fact we did nothing at best, or were the active ingredient in creating the terminal disease of sexual shaming at worst. If you can’t see that there is a parasitic insistence of a karmic theory of she-got-what-she-deserved so insidiously lodged into the minds and hearts of so many people, then you may not have Hope’s—and other youth like Hope’s—best interests in mind. For god’s sake, please look again.

In her TEDTalk, gang rape survivor and real-life hero Sunitha Krishnan, says:

I was 15 when I was gang raped by 8 men. I don’t remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. Yes, there were 8 men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn’t go into my consciousness. I never felt like a rape victim then or now. But what lingered from then to now—I’m 40 today—is this huge outrageous anger. [For] two years I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated because I was a victim. […] We, as a civil society, we have Ph.D.s in victimizing a victim.

(Skip to 2:45 for the quote.)

Back on Twitter, Cos urged me to write to Mr. Meacham. So I wrote him this, which I want to share here:

Dear Mr. Meacham,

I am writing to direct your attention to some very poignant commentary regarding your article in the St. Petersburg Times printed on the TampaBay.com website covering the tragic suicide of Hope Witsell.

The commentary I hope you will read is here:

http://sylviasproblem.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/what-happened-to-hope-witsell/

I believe the commentary I linked above is extremely important because it expressly discusses the angle with which news stories like this are covered and provides some insight into how to do so in order to help the Witsell and other families in the future.

It is my sincerest hope that you read the above commentary with an open mind.

Thank you very much.

This is about all I can take before breakfast time. I hope the rest of my day isn’t quite so depressing.

Update: Mr. Meacham replied to my email, although I won’t republish his email here as I never asked if I could do so. My understanding of his reply is that, as a reporter, he feels it is only appropriate to report on things that actually occurred (i.e., tangible events), and not to make any implications about their cause or effects. This is a very appropriate thing for a reporter to be doing.

Unfortunately, although this sounds good to many people, by focusing on the physical acts of sex, what these people are actually advocating is discrimination based on one’s choice of sexual activities. That doesn’t strike me as a very noble goal at all. A great example is the endless blowjob debate: Is the act of orally pleasuring a partner inherently submissive?

If you answered yes, can you please explain to me why women are being submissive when they give a man a blowjob but not necessarily being submissive when they give him a kiss? Both activities are manifestations of potentially (but not necessarily) sexual desire that use a woman’s mouth and lips. I recall reading a study (and now fail to locate the source; damnit; can anyone with Google-fu out there find this?) showing that 30% of a typical person’s ability to sense arousing sexual stimuli is clustered around their mouth and lips. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, would you agree that kissing can be physically stimulating for the person actively doing the kissing? If so, why would this not be true for fellatio? Do you really think kissing the skin of a person’s penis makes that much of a neurochemical difference than kissing the skin of their lips? It’s no wonder so many people enjoy making out and giving their lovers head.

Everyone—including feminists—who incorrectly couples physical activity with emotional intent like this is doing exceptional amounts of damage to the realization of sexual equality. They are forgetting a fundamental truth of Ethics: equality is not interchangeable with sameness. If you treat two different people in an identical fashion, without regard to the context each individual is in and without consideration of their personal motivations, are you really treating them fairly?

Riddle me this, anti-BDSM feminists: Is your goal to establish an allowable set of sexual activity or is it to empower everyone to choose what activities—not necessarily sexually motivated activities, mind you—they would like to partake in, free of social, political, gendered, racial, and other barriers to the pursuit of their own happiness?

Now, while you’re chewing on that, despite the fact that I think feminists, if not feminism, who are rife with extreme opposition to consensual power exchange and BDSM activities is unfortunate, I’m actually pretty empathetic to them. Sadly, such fierce opposition to What It Is That We (in the BDSM communities) Do is not hard to understand if you’ve seen even one glimpse of the sexist assholery I’ve witnessed coming from significant segments of the BDSM community.

Oh yes, don’t you fret, radical feminists, I agree that sexism is alive and well in many people’s understanding of BDSM, if not also their practice of it. ::shudder:: That said, I don’t think inheriting indefensible ideals of sexism by lazily flipping the genders around is anything other than bad logic.

Without a doubt, the most blatant recent example of what I see as indefensible sexist beliefs coming from someone involved in the BDSM community was expressed by a man named Rob, who co-hosts a podcast called The Oh Team (…ew…really? Reminds me of that guy in Office Space making his “oh face”), when he appeared as a guest on episode 2 of the This Week in Kink podcast. I raised a stink about it over on MaleSubmissionArt.com, which I’ll quote:

Our species is fantastically diverse, so collectively we embody myriad dichotomies: tall and short, women and men, dark-skinned and light-skinned, hairless and hairy, and dominant and submissive, are just a few. Human diversity is so vast, in fact, that it’s impossible to infer any given person’s makeup in one sphere (say, D/s) from their makeup in another (say, gender) with 100% accuracy.

Nevertheless, many people often attempt to do just that and end up acting in extremely discriminatory ways, such as the example of Rob in Episode 2 of the This Week In Kink podcast (produced by, surprisingly, the same people who run FetLife.com), with this astonishingly sexist remark:

“I firmly and strongly believe that it is a woman’s role to be submissive to a man. I believe that submission in men is taught at conception because as soon as women realize that they’re pregnant, they start planning that child’s fucking future and quite often that the mother is definitely the beginning of the emasculation. That said, I think that women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power and eventually need to be slapped in the fucking head and put in their place.”

(Skip to 34 minutes and 32 seconds for the quote.)

This is the kind of thing many dominant men say that makes me want to puke and—I might add—to which I would quite reasonably respond with an anti-BDSM mindset if I were not a submissive man myself. Since I am, the idea that “women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power” seems ridiculous to me, because I’m constantly facing a world in which I get handed the bill in restaurants if I’m eating out with a woman, in which I’m unfairly expected to be the pursuing partner in a flirtatious conversation, in which I’m rarely encouraged to feel beautiful, in which I’m granted unbelievable privilege in my professional work. (I’m a male programmer. Here’s what I don’t have to deal with.) Beyond that, the fact that I’m submissive and a man seems to signal implicit permission for others to ridicule or sissify me, and ignore my desires.

What reality do some dominant men inhabit that they think women-at-large “need to be…put in their place”? Sounds to me like they are pretty well entrenched where these men want them to be already. What ruffles my feathers, however, is this: by pigeonholing women into submissive positions (in any sphere, not just sexual ones), these men not only obstruct the equal opportunity that should be afforded to women, but they also obstruct the very same right to equal opportunity for other men.

In other words, there will never be the opportunity for anyone, regardless of D/s inclination, to freely choose how they would like to experience consensual power exchange without gender equality. Many people in both the feminist and the BDSM communities consistently fail to correctly recognize the interactions that power has with sex. In the case of the former, specific activities are assumed to relate to a power exchange, perhaps thanks to cultural scripts that are played ad-nauseum such as those in mainstream pornography. In the case of the latter, gender insensitivity contributes to a belief system that actualizes sexist behavior without regard for personal choice (and that’s why outspoken women like Bitchy Jones are so spot-on so often).

In one of the followup posts over Rob‘s sexist remarks, Delilah expressed my sentiments very well, if strongly worded:

I’m disgusted by the tendency in a certain type of male dom to believe that they are simply bringing back the good old days by making women subservient the way God intended. Aren’t we supposed to be progressive? Isn’t the point of alternative sexuality to explore, well, alternatives??

And get a load of the comments over there. Don’t get me started on the whole “I have a right to my opinion and you have the right to yours” crap. Free speech is free speech, and this fuckwad has the right to say whatever he likes, just as I do. But to hide behind free speech, to say that you will “fight to the death” next to me to defend my right to have an opinion, too, when in the same breath you’re saying that I’m a second-class human being, is completely disingenuous. It wasn’t so long ago that women didn’t have the right to an opinion—whether in matters of state or in the home. You can’t have it both ways, asshole.

[…]

Much more of this, and I’ll be as bitter and angry as people seem to think darling Maymay is. Nice job, kink community.

What’s worse, such ignorance is not restricted to anti-BDSM radical feminists and parts of the BDSM community. Professionals like lawyers and politicians come to similarly ignorant conclusions, I think, because they haven’t the necessary understanding either of gender or consensual power exchange.

Well, fuck! Wouldn’t you say coming to ill-conceived conclusions about things like how our bodies work, how our legal system should work, and how our governments should be structured, not to mention how technical societal infrastructure should be built, is a problem for our society? I think that’s worth fixing.

I have a great deal of respect for John and Tonja, the hosts of This Week in Kink. Nevertheless, I’m saddened by the ignorance about how issues of power intersect with issues of sexuality some of their asshat mandom guests have displayed. I also feel that anyone with an audience of several hundred thousand, such as that of the FetLife.com membership, has a social obligation to accurately portray the distinctions and details of What It Is That We Do and to combat misconceptions about it, such as deeply-engrained sexist ideals, whenever they arise with at least equal vigor as the misconception was presented with.

Which is what I told them when, to John and Tonja’s immense credit, they actually invited me to come onto the show for episode 8. Since the This Week In Kink show page has since disappeared from the Internet, here is an archived MP3 recording of the show. Skip to 6 minutes and 10 seconds in for that part, although I’d love your feedback about the entire conversation. Also, as an aside, I’m looking forward to This Week In Kink getting more submissive men on the show (and maybe even some gay, lesbian, and transgendered people as well, which TTBOMK, are also missing), as are some others, it seems. Once again I find myself alone, for the time being.

Naturally, John and Tonja have a right not to do what I’d like them to. And, of course, how easy for me to tell them what to do. That’s why, because I don’t like it when people just talk and don’t do, and since I’ve been intending to do this for ages anyway, I (re)started my own podcast, one that specifically addresses these issues and ties them into my agenda to make the intersection of power and sex and the way it impacts everyone, not just “kinky people,” more apparent to the world at large. It’s called Kink On Tap.

Kink On Tap 1 through 7 were made way back in 2007—a lot can happen in two years. Also, I’ve never produced a podcast before so I’m excited to be learning about the craft and eager to hear feedback. What do you think?

• I realize this will probably be “too techy” for some of my readers, but what the hell. This not-so-recent article on Read Write Web has caught my attention a while ago and I’ve been musing about this sort of thing ever since. Marshall Kirkpatrick summarizes sociology and technology researcher Corinna Bath’s findings as he asks “Will the Semantic Web have a gender?”
  

  […]the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn’t until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities.

  Too often, Bath argues, “binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use.”

• Speaking of the Web, Elizabeth writes about her concerns with WordPress.com’s censorship of what it deems “mature” content. This is precisely why I host my own blog on my own server, and part of why I’ve helped Kink in Exile and Essin Em do the same for themselves. If you need tech help doing the same, feel free to contact me, and since I reserve the right not to reply, you should have no qualms about “bugging” me with a request for help.
• Ranat writes what is very probably the funniest and sexiest post I have read in a long time called Pon Farr and Other Ways to Get Away With Non-Consensuality (because we love Vulcans). I’m not sure if I had a geekgasm or a trekgasm while reading it, but some of its ideas could certainly fuel a number of fantasies capable of giving me just a plain old orgasm!
• As he is wont to do, Axe humorously writes about the unequal door fees for women and men at most kink/fetish venues, and quotes my response to his question:
  

  Perhaps it goes back to the age old question: If women are just as into this stuff as men, where are these women? Why are men paying a hundred bucks to get into a swingers event and women can walk in for free? Are the men like myself who want to go to events like these so horrible and disgusting that the only way a woman will go is if she has nothing better to do?

  I posed this question via twitter and a few people responded.

  […]

  Maymay gave me some of his wisdom via twitter. “The reason kink/fetish events are cheaper for women is blatantly obvious: sexism. Women are products, men are the consumers.”

  Oh how I wish this wasn’t true. If only I were being the one consumed and used like a product.

  I also replied to his post in the comments:

  [W]hen I go out to kink events like this with a significant other, here’s how I expect to look at the costs:

  $5 for women + $25 men / 2 people = we each pay $15 entry fee

  I’d consider any woman or man in a supposedly equal relationship, D/s or otherwise, who doesn’t also do that sexist.

• Tom Allen informs us about the Boy Scouts’ decision to include (some) sex ed topics in their program. Tom has this to say about the move, which I can’t second strongly enough:
  

  The sooner we, as a society, can kick off the notion that morality is tied to sexuality (or more specifically, sexual enjoyment among consenting partners), the better off we will all be.

• Last but certainly not least, today FetLife.com announced the addition of a “Fluctuating/Evolving” option was added to the list of possible options for users to list as their sexual orientation on their profiles. John Baku had this to say about his choice to add the option:
  

  Things can not get simpler then being a straight guy which to be honest I find is a bad thing in my position. It basically means I have to wait until someone opens up my eyes to the different types of orientations and as well the issues and politics behind the different sexual orientation.

  I believe FetLife is the first site to get this right. Ever. Congratulations to them, and I hope more sites follow suit, not just for sexual orientation but for gender identity and other options as well. I eagerly anticipate the day when the notion of radio boxes for “male” or “female” will not be the only options!

I very recently did exactly this (although I was much nicer than I could have been) on a local young-persons-in-Sydney group’s mailing list. I remarked that I had done so, and due to popular demand and interest with regards to my remarks, am going to share a single edited excerpt of that thread here. In case anyone is local and cares to join the group, here is my original post.

The year is 2008. The place is Sydney, Australia. The topic is male bisexuality in the BDSM community. The population of the scene here…well, the population of the country is barely the size of the state I came from. These people are not “simple, country folk” by any stretch of the imagination, yet I can’t help but feel as though I’ve been transported to a kink scene from ten years ago:

Congratulations in advance to those of you who actually follow and read the linked references. Those of you who don’t will assume I am just rocking the boat. I am, of course (rocking the boat that is)—though I’m trying to do so while adding significant substance to the conversation.

On Aug 4, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Person A wrote:

In my brief time in the sydney bdsm scene, i’ve noticed girls are a lot more willing to play with other girls than guys are to play with other guys. why do yo think this is? Do you think bisexuality is more comon in girls in the vanila world too. Do girls who engage in bdsm play with other girls even consider themselves bisexual. looking forward to your comments

for the record I am 100% straight male.

So is my male dom top friend who is dating a boy. Though labels like “staight” or “bi” can be useful, they are ultimately meaningless. It’s actions, not words, that define people and who they are.

Person A then wrote:

I’d feel uncomfy playing with a guy, even if just tieing me up etc. how do other guys feel.

Lots of “straight” guys feel this way while encouraging girls to get it on with one another, and if you haven’t noticed most guys in the BDSM community you’re a part of are straight. Perhaps that’s why you’ve noticed that girls are a lot more willing to play with other girls than guys are to play with other guys. Huh. Imagine that.

See also this satire: http://bloodylaughter.com/2007/07/26/eureka/

On Aug 4, 2008, at 5:34 PM, Person B wrote:

that’s because girls are just the more attractive sex, is my guess.

Person B, we’re both lucky we don’t really know each other because it makes it a lot easier for me to tell you that you’re being an ass right now.

On Aug 4, 2008, at 7:54 PM, Person B tried to redeem his statements by qualifying them like this:

I meant that in the most objective way possible, which is not to say that I don’t find certain guys attractive and would even consider certain BDSM scenarios involving that person, but it happens very
very rarely for me and he’d have to be pretty fit. And I think most girls would agree with me that girls tend to be more attractive than guys in general. Is that true or have just been speaking to the the wrong girls?

You’re oozing the kind of heteronormativity that makes me dislike heteronormative spaces—like this list right now. Personal preferences are one thing, but trying to pass these off as “statements intended in the most objective way possible” belies your ignorance. Again, I say that heteronormative culture encourages exactly this kind of thinking.

See also:

http://maybemaimed.com/2007/08/21/i-want-to-be-a-pretty-boy/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/12/the-rules-of-flirting-are-sexist-and-wrong/
http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/the-unfairest-of-them-all/

On Aug 4, 2008, at 6:02 PM, Person C wrote:

hi all, long time lurker first time poster. I consider myself a straight male as i can’t really see myself being with a male sexually without bondage being a huge part. It was something that i was very nervous about until my Mistress at the time introduced me to the concept of playing firstly with couples and then eventually she was happy (as was i) for me to play solely with makes. Fem Dom’s are still my preference however my desire to please outways if there are dangly bits or not. Now i’m “out” i hope to catch up with some of you soon

And then, right on cue, on Aug 4, 2008, at 6:33 PM, Person D wrote:

Here’s my theories.

Girl on girl is a bit more socially acceptable than guy on guy due to the fact with guys there is the implied image of things up the arse.

Yes, exactly. God forbid something goes the “wrong way” up a man’s butt. Of course, every straight guy knows women’s asses are a two way street.

This is precisely why the feared “image of things up the [guy's] arse” has become the femdom cumshot in porn, and it’s where this (insulting) notion of “forced bi”—which is pretty much exclusively a femdom/malesub dynamic—comes from. Now, I love getting fucked in my ass, but I love getting fucked on my penis, too. In other words, being the person who does the penetrating does not equate to having power, or masculinity. Perverting (and I use that word deliberately) anatomy to create falsehoods of power imbalance is nothing more complicated than plain stupid.

See also:
http://bloodylaughter.com/2007/07/11/fuck-him/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/08/12/pegging-gets-mainstream-attention-and-kinky-porn-gets-rightfully-slapped-upside-its-head/

Portions removed at the author’s request.

You’ve hit the nail on the head, though you’re not tying it all together quite yet. This is the same masculine heteronormative sexuality that defines male sexuality based on dominance and power, only it’s now happening in reverse. Where the former circumstance is one in which a man is dominant and thus validates hegemonic masculinity, this circumstance is one in which a man is submissive to another even more masculine/dominant/powerful man and thus validates hegemonic masculinity. As far as genders studies students are concerned, this is just a situation where you have six of one thing and half dozen of the other.

In other words, men’s fantasies that are geared around being submissive to a “real man” merely enforce the hegemonic masculine stereotype. Now, that’s not bad (it’s quite sexy—I personally love the idea of submitting to a strong, dominant, het guy I find physically attractive) it’s just very, well, we’ve all been there and done that.

See also:
http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/submissive-men-and-the-humanity-gap/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/18/how-an-outdated-view-of-masculinity-ignores-the-needs-of-all-men/

Anyway, for more insights on gender and male sexuality, see this 10 minute video:

http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/06/transgender-basics/

Regards,
–
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Volunteering: http://ConversioVirium.org/author/maymay

It’s funny to me, how much Australians are interested in the happenings in America. I suppose that makes sense, but as an American who (like the stereotype) never really realized how much of an influence America was to the rest of the world, it’s taking me a little by surprise.

Anyway, needless to say, I’ve been keeping up (a bit) with the Democratic national primary. It’s hard not to. The whole world was practically sitting on the edge of its seat wondering who will win. A black man or a white woman as candidates give rise to only two topics in the right’s conservative hypocrisy: racism and sexism.

This was such a heated race that I’ve even received regular emails from some people in my extended family about it. Their emails are extremely strongly-worded short essays with arguments as to why I should or shouldn’t vote for Obama or Clinton (though mostly only because of the candidates’ opinions on Israel, which I couldn’t really care much about anyway). I’m thinking of telling them to start a blog.

I really have no opinion one way or the other about the merits of either candidate—I’m simply not very well informed. That said, Debra Haffner linked this 5-minute video produced by the Women’s Media Center showcasing myriad clips of all the sexist remarks made about Hillary during her campaign. I rarely link videos in this blog, but this one is worth your time.

There’s a lot of sexist language harassing women in this video, since its goal is to showcase how the media is sexist against women. However, that’s just half the story. There’s at least an equal if not greater amount of sexist language in today’s media against men since, obviously, most public political discussion happens about and between men. Where’s the highlight reel of political pundits proclaiming that some candidate “doesn’t have the balls” to do something brave?

One reason I’m more than a little withdrawn from politics is because I know I’ll never be elected to public office. Even if I had the aspirations, I would simply never survive a smear campaign. I mean, look at this blog!

Indeed, back in the “good old days” when I used to stay at Paddles, the local NYC public BDSM club until 4 AM, that was even a joke. The lot of us, my friends and I, would stumble up the stairs in the dark and then burst out onto the street like mole-people, bleary eyed from a long night. We used to joke with another, “Well, I’m certainly not running for public office after tonight!” the implication being that we’ve done yet another thing that would get us booted immediately if the word got out.

While this threat is meaningless to me, since I don’t want to be in public office anyway, I have met more than a few people over the years for whom this is a real concern. They remain anonymous to this day precisely because they do, at some point, want to be in public office in order to make our government better, and most of them don’t even want to get into the areas of sexual rights. They’ll never have a blog like this, though, because having a blog like this—doing what I’m doing right now—means I’ll never win a race for public office.

But hey. I still get to vote. And of course, I will.

On the second of January I received an astonishingly fitting pair of postal letters. The first letter was the new catalogue of The Stockroom, one of the largest online sex toy retailers, and the second letter was from a local church that promised me blessings for using their special prayer rug. Dear readers, I kid you not! Of course, I promptly tossed the Jesus-decorated prayer rug in the trash, flipped through the Stockroom’s catalogue until I got bored seeing women tied up, and then gave it to Eileen, since she’s far more excited by that idea than I will ever be.

I suppose it should strike me as not at all odd that I’m seeing a disturbing influx of sexist, incendiary material fill every possible orifice of my news feeds. Most infuriating of all is that it’s not even that much more than usual, which is to say that the litany of aggravating material I’ll briefly discuss below is far more often the rule rather than the exception and that, itself, is the most depressing thing about them.

First, via The Sex Carnival, this Boinkology post links to SellYourSexTape.com with more cheerful humor than I could ever muster. It showcases with quite explicit flair exactly how marginalized a sexuality like mine is, as if there wasn’t enough of that already.

[…]if you want to make the big money ($2000, for the curious), you’ll have to document your sex life for an hour a day for an entire week, making sure to keep it interesting. Bonus points for shots of “daily life” and minimal shots of the boyfriend — this is straight porn, after all.

Oh, and kinksters need not apply: “Sex scenes should be natural and loving and happy, no violence, but don’t forget the money shots! Do not include anything illegal or “obscene”. ie. no interspecies, no golden showers, no forced sex, etc.”

Once again we have these time-honored, incredibly insulting assumptions about porn and sexuality. Men consume, women are the product. Anything that isn’t straight, hetero-normative sex is “unnatural,” or “obscene.” Rougher, more “violent” sex is okay so long as it’s the woman on the bottom, for “the money shot,” but if you can call it kinky then it’s immediately cut. No concern is ever paid to the woman’s sexual satisfaction, as long as we get to see the man ejaculating. Also, we don’t want to look at men because men aren’t sexy, they’re just facilitators; a man’s value is in his finances.

In an even more mainstream outlet, Tom found the kicker when he came across AskMen.com’s recent article called, of all things, How to Dominate and Dominant Woman. Augh! As Tom put it rather succinctly:

Because, you know, [women] all secretly want to be submissive. Not to mention that they will respect men who do this.

I could barely get through the introduction to this article without gritting my teeth:

We often associate dominant women with whips, chains and a pitiful man groveling at their feet while licking a pair of vinyl boots. This certainly occurs with some regularity, but you may be surprised to learn that dominance doesn’t always translate into sadism. On the contrary, many dominant women play the superior role in relationships simply because their man hasn’t learned how to dominate them. She may be strong-willed, feisty and independent, but this doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be ravished like any other female might. If you’re ready to take charge in the bedroom, the following tips will show you precisely how to sexually dominate a dominant woman.

It’s precisely this kind of narrow-mindedness that keeps both men and women enslaved to gender ideals that make only a very small percentage of real men and women happy. In one fell swoop, this introduction alone manages to insult just about every possible orientation I can think of, including submissive men (by calling us “pitiful”), dominant women (by implying they should be playing an “inferior” role in a relationship), and dominant men (by stating rather explicitly that not dominating a dominant woman means they haven’t been ready to “take charge” yet). I think the only insult I’m not seeing is one aimed at submissive women—but that’s probably because they’re so inconsequential anyway that their influence doesn’t really matter in the first place.

(Elizabeth, please do an 87-part series on this. Please. PLEASE!)

From yet another corner of the blogosphere I was shown this “orgasmic experience simulator” that, while obviously someone’s idea of a joke, basically denigrates the male sexual experience as devoid of diverse value even though it seems to be making fun of the female orgasm at first glance. The simulator is a simple two buttons, one for experiencing orgasm as a male and another as a female. Click the male button and your browser window shakes just a smidgen and you’re presented with the following JavaScript alert box:

Total Time (including undressing, dressing and somking a cigarette): 58 seconds

Press the female button and you’re guided through numerous jump-through-the-hoops alert dialogues that ends in a climactic window-shaking experience. This is an example of the prevalence of the misguided belief that men are all the same, the same belief that has that disgusting AskMen.com article thinking the only submissive men are pitiful examples of masculinity.

But wait, there’s more!

Lolita found a video about which she asks “is it bondage porn, or an Agent Provocateur video?” Once again, all I see is blatantly misogynistic understandings of sex, with (once again) submissive women centerfolds. What’s striking about this instance is that it is so obviously an advertisement directed towards both men and women, yet it is still women on which the camera unapologetically focuses throughout the entire video. The message is, once again, crystal clear: it’s the female form and only the female form worth embracing for the singular purpose of abating the carnal desire of men.

Poor, hapless, helpless men, one might think! In both the vanilla world and the kink world men are treated very much the same: as victims of their own biology, always thinking with the wrong head. Control sex, it’s thought, and you control a man, because sex is worth more to men than anything else. How much more? Good question!

Thankfully, Eileen showed me this post of Bad Man’s that links to CostOfSex.com, which has a handy calculator to show us exactly how much time, effort, and money men spend each day on their high-priced hookers called girlfriends and wives. Oh, and hookers. Can’t forget the hookers. The takeaway from this link is that the message of men-as-monetary-value and women-as-sexual-value is so ingrained in men themselves, that they are taking a perverted sense of pride in their efforts to get the most sex for the least amount of money. That is, after all, exactly how men are taught to prove their manliness!

Lest you think that it’s only people like you and me who can see the sexism here, note that the CostOfSex.com calculator is courtesy of a site that calls itself Mr. Sexist. They sell T-Shirts. Want to know my favorite?

I’ve got an 8-inch thick wallet.

I do realize cultural and sexual progress doesn’t happen at the blindingly fast pace that we’re all used to technological advancements happening, but, seriously…if this is what 2008 has in store for me, I’m going to keep wishing I could hibernate until 3008 rolls around. Again, I do realize some of these are jokes—and yes, they’re kind of funny in that “I’m only half-joking” sort of way. What hurts me right now about all of these things is the insurmountable disparity of privilege in regards to sexual power—in what ways power is or is not okay to be shared or expressed—that results in the stigmatization or, worse, the invisibility of submissive men like me (and, for that matter, dominant women, too).

Will it really take ’til 3008 to stop hurting?