Working from Different Baselines

This article – The female price of male pleasure – isn’t femdom and isn’t even recent (Jan ’18). However, I found it thought provoking and it’s my blog, so here it is.

The basic thrust of the article is that men and women operate on very different scales when it comes to sex and pleasure. For men the range is boring to awesome, for women the range is painful/scary/coercive to awesome. That leads to very different baselines and different normal expectations. On top of that, society has conditioned us to make the male expectation the default one, to the point where people don’t even realize other expectations exist, which in turn distorts any discussion about it.

Although it’s  not about kink and femdom, I think the articles basic point is actually equally applicable to them. If you look around at the online representation of femdom, it would be hard to argue that male pleasure isn’t the primary focus of 95% of it. The dicks might be getting squashed, smacked, beaten, locked up, teased or laughed at, but the dick is still the primary focus. It’s ironic that in a realm where the purported focus is female pleasure and male pain, it’s typically still the women clambering around in the uncomfortable outfits while the men get to sit back and soak in the sensations they crave.

I don’t really have any wise words on how to address this. Hell, this blog is just as guilty of perpetuating the status quo. But if a discussion is going to be productive, all parties have to at least be operating with a shared understanding and a common context. So perhaps just acknowledging the different contexts and baselines that are operating here is a useful first step.

It was tricky to pick and image for this particular topic. I figured a dominant woman enjoying both a candle lit bubble bath and a bound silenced slave to drip hot wax onto was a pretty good representation of what should be pleasure for all concerned. This is Goddess Viper,  a pro-domme based in Manila, with the image taken from her twitter feed. My thanks to Lucy Sweetkill for the original article link.

Author: paltego

See the 'about' page if you really want to know about me.

6 thoughts on “Working from Different Baselines”

  1. Paltego – Hard to argue with the core premise in terms of “life” in general.

    But if you bring femdom into the discussion, and particularly how it’s represented (mainly) online, I think you have to distinguish between pro and personal/lifestyle.

    Crucially, in pro femdom, the male is the customer purchasing a service from a provider (term used here clinically; not meant to be dismissive or disrespectful).

    Appropriately (and essential for a prodomme to survive in the marketplace), the service provided needs to be responsive to what that customer wants – responsive to a male’s fantasies, desires, and whatever else he projects on the pro domme. And, naturally, the successful pro domme’s marketing wisely is designed to appeal to what the customer is looking to buy.

    I don’t mean to sound totally mercenary on this but those are the realities of her business.

    OTOH, in a personal/lifestyle femdom relationship, we don’t see web pages, Twitter feeds and Instagram feeds billboarding what the woman in the relationship wants or requires and, finally, gets from the relationship but it seems likely that the structure and dynamic of that F/m D/s relationship is more closely attuned to what the woman wants/needs/requires to be satisfied. I doubt many personal/lifestyle F/m D/s relationships are characterized by the woman simply catering totally to the fantasies and sexuality of her male “sub”, ignoring her own desires, wants and needs.

    Of course, for any relationship to succeed, she (as the one most in control) will wisely be sure that the dynamic with her sub also pushed his buttons. They’ll each be there – meaning in the D/s relationship – only as long as it works for both of them.

    And therein lies the key: In a pro “relationship”,

    – the customer must get what he wants or he won’t come back;

    – The provider will be in the business because it provides her things she wants & needs: hopefully personal excitement and satisfaction; hopefully professional satisfaction; very essentially, commercial success.

    In a personal/lifestyle relationship, with commerce absent, the parties will fashion a dynamic that works for both of them and that by definition (if the relationship is to succeed) must include the woman’s pleasure as an at least equal, if not superior, priority to the male’s pleasure.

    1. Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I thought it was worth a follow-up post, so read me latest one for thoughts 🙂

      Like I said there, I don’t disagree with the difference you highlight, but in terms of how femdom manifests itself in society in general, I do think there’s a significant imbalance between the two.

      -paltego

  2. Some men are – quite rightly – accused of having a wholly deficient understanding of the female perspective. On the other hand, it might be argued that some women are likewise sorely lacking when it comes to seeing the world through the eyes of their male peers. I think that Ms. Loofbourow’s article is a good example of the latter phenomenon.

    What I find striking is the blasé assumption throughout the article that male sexual experiences are always positive, or at least, that the worst that can happen is to be ‘a little bored’. The male erection is an involuntary reflex, and there is no physiological imperative that any male sexual experience be pleasurable or enjoyable. Guys can, in fact, even have uncomfortable or painful penetrative sex. Believe it or not, there are times when some men just want to ‘get it over with’ as much as some women.

    Moreover, the author fails to acknowledge that bad sex can be a source of shame, humiliation or anxiety – something that is as true for men as it is for women. It might be added that many men feel a pressure to ‘perform’ in the bedroom, and to conform to an abstract masculine ideal, regardless of whether they want to play that role or not.

    (It might be added that the author also skipped over the gay and bisexual segments of the male population, who are rather obviously going to have a rather different perspective than heterosexuals. I think that it would be difficult to argue that society caters to the sexual desires of gay men.)

    To bring this all back to femdom – it would be an oversimplification to say that pleasure and pain are so equally divided along gender lines. Being part of a scene with someone who doesn’t respect you or your limits can be unpleasant or even downright terrifying for either party, regardless of who’s wearing the uncomfortable clothing. Additionally, and specifically to femdom, men may suffer as much exclusion, derision or harassment, owing to their interest in the fetish, as is experienced by many of their female peers.

    This is not to say that I don’t think that there are fundamental inequalities in the depiction of, and types of attention paid to, sex. I agree, vociferously, with the position that what women want, and what women feel in the bedroom, should receive the prominent place in the art and discourse around sex that it is currently denied.

    What I object to is the author’s zero-sum mentality, which seems to pre-emptively reject any notion of cross-gender solidarity or shared experience. In a way, her argument simply mirrors the biological determinism posed by the (detestable) Andrew Sullivan article mentioned early on in the piece. Are there differences in perspective? Of course. But this does not mean that we cannot speak a common language, voice common grievances, or come to common solutions.

    [P.S. Apologies for climbing up on the soapbox]

    1. No need to apologize for getting on your soapbox. I have the comments section open because I like comments :-). And I’m about to get onto my soapbox in return!

      I’m not sure why you thought the author should have included gay men in the article. It was clearly about the sexual dynamics between men and women and the context society uses to frame those dynamics. So why would gay men be relevant?

      I also don’t see the zero sum mentality that you reference. I don’t see how thinking more about the female reality of sex is a trade-off situation. She doesn’t say that (for example) we should remove money from medical studies on men’s sexual health and spend them on women’s. She just points out that effort and investment on one side is way more than the other. Maybe we should invest more in both?

      Generally your comment reminds me of the “All lives matter” idea or the “Not all men” idea. i.e. Someone identifies a specific problem, and then rather than discuss and tackle that problem, other people muddy the water and divert the focus by throwing all sorts of issues into the mix. Those issues may be genuine ones, but why does every discussion have to cover ever problem? It’s a big world and you can find examples of pretty much any scenario you like. Yes some men can experience some very bad sexual situations, but unless you’re suggesting that the general way that most men and society think about sex is not as the author describes, that’s not really relevant.

      -paltego

      1. “Yes some men can experience some very bad sexual situations, but unless you’re suggesting that the general way that most men and society think about sex is not as the author describes, that’s not really relevant.”

        In my opinion, it is absolutely relevant, because it is the basis for finding common ground, for coalition-building. How the heck do we expect to change the world when we pre-emptively reject people who could, and should, be our allies?

        The Andrew Sullivan article that Loofbourow cites at the beginning of her piece, and which she is in large part writing in response to, suggested that #MeToo was effectively misguided because of supposed fundamental biological differences between men and women – men will always have a testosterone-fueled semi-caveman mentality that women can’t understand. Loofbourow turns this argument around, and likewise argues that there are fundamental gender differences – but that rather that it is men, not women, who have refused to accept the biological realities of the other side.

        From a purely rhetorical point of view, it’s a nifty piece of writing, because it uses the structure of Sullivan’s argument to reach a (seemingly) opposite conclusion. But this is also the problem. Because Loofbourow lifts many semantic elements from Sullivan, she also ends up implicitly picking up some of his underlying premises – namely, that men and women have such totally different biological experiences as to dismiss any possibility of shared understanding. I see Loofbourow as giving Sullivan a round thrashing on the rhetorical side – indeed, because she’s a much better writer, she’s practically running circles around him. But, when we get down to brass tacks, she isn’t really contradicting him or rebutting his sexist argument. And that’s the problem.

        This approach infuriates me, because I see it as artificially limiting the scope and power of the argument. I inject complexity into all of this because I see this issue as having a broader appeal than it seems Loofbourow is interested in admitting, and I want to illustrate that this it cuts across gender lines. By talking about ‘men’ and ‘women’ in monolithic blocs, the author reinforcing the underlying sexist logic that got us to this point in the first place, and undermining the emancipatory thrust of her argument.

        1. So I think a fundamental problem here is that I don’t understand your takeaways from the piece. For example, what specific part of it do you think rejects coalition building, or rejects people that could and should be allies? I mean literally, which specific paragraphs? At no point reading it did I feel excluded or that I couldn’t be part of the solution. Given that I didn’t feel rejected by the article, yet you clearly did, there’s probably not much point debating further without trying to narrow that down.

          -paltego

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