Thoughts – Page 15 – Femdom Resource

The ambiguity of power

I’m currently reading Staci Newmahr’s Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy. It captures some interesting data but it’s a frustrating book. I’ll dig into why that is in a future post. For the moment I want to tackle one very specific phrasing that caught my eye. It’s on the subject of power in BDSM scenes and how it’s described.

Power and control are obviously significant parts of BDSM play and the author is careful to qualify them with terms such as ‘apparent’ and ‘illusion’. In describing the various phases of a scene (negotiation/play/aftercare) she wants to make it clear that what’s being constructed is an elaborate facade. A type of theater where the actors themselves have to suspend their disbelief. I should add that this isn’t unique to this book. A lot of academic BDSM books adopt similar descriptions, presenting it as an insight into the underlying reality that the players themselves don’t acknowledge.

I always find this approach a very facile one. It ignores the complexity of power in other situations and reduces the value of the descriptive term. Outside of kink we’re happy to use descriptions of power in a nuanced way, without the need for heavy qualifiers. For example, we would be comfortable describing the CEO of a company as having power. He has a degree of control and a corresponding freedom that his employees don’t have. That doesn’t mean he can do anything. It also doesn’t mean that his employees have no options. They can always quit and walk away from their job. But we don’t feel the need to describe his power as illusory just because he requires a degree of cooperation from those who wish to work for him.

To pick another example, when describing the dynamics of a conventional relationship, people will often use terms related to power and control. Those dynamics can play a role in all sorts of relationships, not just D/s ones. Yet nobody feels the need to say something like – “His wife is really in charge of vacation planning, she makes all the decisions. Although of course it’s only an illusion of control because he could always leave her if he wanted.” The second part is implicitly understood, but it doesn’t make the first part any less true.

When I’m stripped, bound and gagged in a BDSM scene, I’m giving up control and relinquishing power. There’s no illusion or suspension of disbelief necessary. I don’t get to control where she puts that needle, where the cane lands, where she puts the but plug (although I can probably guess in that case). The fact the dominant doesn’t have absolute power doesn’t make it an illusion of power. Yes, I can stop the scene at any time and walk away. I can also quit my job at any time and walk away. Neither fact means I’m the one with the power.

It seemed appropriate to finish with a shot featuring a classic demonstration of power – the hand to the throat. This is from the Divine Bitches site. I originally found in on Thy Queendome Come tumblr.

Annoyingly complicated humans

One of the problems when writing about the origin of kinky preferences is the tendency to treat the personal as the universal. It’s human nature to assume individual experiences are widely shared, or even that they are the default experience. That’s particularly problematic with something as complex and multifaceted as kink is.

An interesting comment from Budman reminded me that not everyone traces their preferences back to early childhood. He feels that his triggers came from early adolescence. That’s something I’ve seen reported by others. I’ve also seen posts from people who came to kink even later, years into their adulthood. It was something that they grew into, not an itch that was always lurking under the surface of their sexuality. Humans are annoyingly complicated.

For me however, my kinky nature was in place long before adolescence. How else can I explain me and Penelope Pitstop? As I’ve posted in the past, I loved watching this show as a child. There was something especially tingly about watching Penelope be tied up and placed in peril. Like the magic act I talked about yesterday, it wasn’t a formative experience. There was no traumatic or exciting event that got associated with cartoon bondage. I just loved the idea of control and how it could be taken away. Reaching adolescence just slotted the next piece of the jigsaw in place for me.

I think the fact that people come to different kinks, in so many different ways, and at so many different times, emphasizes the problem in trying to associate particular interests with only single formative events. After all, how many people experienced similar events, and didn’t become kinky? We never hear from the guy who was dressed up as a girl by his sisters, and didn’t become a cross-dresser. Perhaps there’s an underlying predisposition in just a fraction of the population to having a flexible sexuality. One that casts a wider net for stimulus. Some people are always aware of it, some access it via childhood events, some as their sexuality emerges in adolescence, and some discover it via experimentation in later life.

Having mentioned Penelope Pitstop, it seems fitting to close with this image. It has similar feel, with an extravagantly costumed villain, and a helpless well bound victim. Fortunately for the purposes of this blog, it’s a rare reversal of the damsel in distress trope. It’s entitled Fred Stolen by a Villainess and is by the artist Barry960.

And that’s magic!

Can you trace the origin of your kinks or fetishes? Assuming that you have any. Although if you don’t, you’ve chosen a really odd site to browse.

The NY Magazine article discussed in yesterday’s post on the origins of people’s kinks, talked a lot about triggers and formative events. Things from childhood that could be directly linked to a later sexual preference. It would seem that some fraction of kinky people have very clear triggers, some can point to a range of influences but no single thing, and others have absolutely nothing in childhood to point at. In the comments to the post Miss Margo mentioned that a lot of her clients can identify triggers, while Vista represented the kinky person without that genesis moment.

Personally I’m in the same camp as Vista. I don’t have anything I can point to that twisted me kinky. However, I can very clearly identify the moment when I first showed interest in a kinky thing. Cue a wibbly wobbly screen and swirly special effects as I take you back thirty (ahem) or so years to a much younger paltego…

I grew up in a tiny village. It was basically two streets, one shop, a village hall and (since this is England we’re talking about) two pubs. This was a time when the internet was still the arpanet and British television consisted of 3 channels. Any kind of organized live entertainment was therefore a big deal. There was the occasional village fête, a Christmas carol concert, an agricultural show, etc. Then one year, when I was around 5 or 6 years old, somebody organized a variety show in the village hall. I can’t remember most of it. It was probably the usual amateur song and dance acts with a bad comedian thrown in for good measure. But there was also a magic act. And that act has stayed with me to this day. It was very traditional. Card tricks. Linking rings. Endless streams of colorful handkerchiefs. And a woman in a sparkly costume getting sawn in half (actually the Zig Zag Girl trick). It was this final trick that particularly transfixed me. I can still remember my excitement as she climbed into the box and the magician tied things around her wrists and ankles. She was constrained, in peril, sacrificial and yet willing. He took away her control, yet she seemed to enjoy it.

From that moment on I always kept an eye out for magic acts and escapologists on television. There was something I found very enticing about the ropes, chains, padlocks and perilous situations that featured in their acts. But it wasn’t till I hit puberty, and discovered the idea of bondage (via my parents copy of The Joy Of Sex), that I had my ‘Aha!’ moment. I certainly don’t think the magic act I saw as a child was formative. The wiring was already in place, because it excited me in a strange way the instant I saw it. The discovery of kink just helped me to understand why I’d found that particular act in an otherwise long forgotten village show so compelling.

It was surprisingly hard to find a magic themed femdom shot. A lot of the equipment for elaborate magic tricks looks awfully similar to the contents of most dungeons, yet there seems to be very little direct cross-over. In the end I turned to the prolific Servitor and this amusingly captioned picture. The ‘magician’ in question here is the lovely Lexi Sindel.

Nature / Nurture / Whatever

The New York Magazine has an article on the well worn subject of nature versus nurture in the context of fetish and kink. It’s a discursive piece, heavy on anecdotes and light on hard data. It comes down firmly on the side of nurture, although it also admits there’s no simple way to divide up such a complex set of influences and interests.

Personally I wonder if, outside of scientific curiosity, the debate is even one worth having. Unless they identify a very clear genetic cause, which seems unlikely given the current research, the discussion isn’t going to result in anything actionable. Nobody is going to be able to come up with a set of guidelines for bringing up a child with “normal” sexual interests. The cause and effect is far too complex and unique for each individual.

It also seems odd that people are so interested in tracking down the basis for kinky sexual preferences, but seem happy to accept all the other preferences people exhibit without question. If somebody says they don’t like carrots, nobody starts wondering if they had a traumatic experience as a child while watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Wine lovers don’t feel the need to tie their interest back to early experiences with a sippy cup and purple grape drink. Even in the sexual and relationship realm we let vanilla preferences slide without comment. A serial dater of blonde women just has a ‘type’. Nobody wonders if it’s because he watched one too many Marilyn Monroe movies while sitting on his mother’s knee. Yet say he likes dominant blonde women, and suddenly there’s an urge to wheel out old Sigmund to try and figure out why the hell he’s so damn weird.

Given this posts focus on the development of sexual preferences, it seems appropriate to finish with this image – ‘School of Bondage’ by zblabla. The classroom can certainly be a powerful influence on sexual development, but it’s not typically this overt.

Revisiting the pro/lifestyle discussion

O Miss Pearl is the latest blogger to venture into the debate around the intersection of pro and non-pro female dominants. She has two recent posts on the topic here and here. I’m going to try and avoid getting deep into the details of her posts. I’ve touched on similar issues in the past (e.g. a series of posts on kink and money here, here, here, a debate with DD here), and while I may quibble about parts of Miss Pearl’s posts, I do agree with the majority of her points. I’m a huge fan of pro-dommes in general, but I still think it’s a bad thing that they’re commonly seen as the primary representation of female domination.

I will say that I think it’s important in these discussions to avoid purely binary classifications. There’s not a single type of pro/client interaction, in the same way there’s not a single lifestyle interaction. These things exist on a continuum. There’s also not a single role that people are uniquely assigned. It’s often acknowledged that a pro-domme may also be a lifestyle dominant, but that same flexibility should also be attributed to her clients. It’s not wrong to occupy multiple categories. What’s wrong is to take a dynamic unique to one and apply it to another. Pro-dommes aren’t looking for a date and lifestyle dommes don’t exist to service male submissive fantasies.

Shortly after reading Miss Pearl’s thoughts I came across this post by Ms Maya Midnight. She’s talking about clients who ask for an ‘easy session’ and what a pain in the ass they usually are. Their definition of what an ‘easy session’ is rarely chimes with hers.

My definition of an easy session is one where I can wear and do more or less whatever I want — or at least have a very wide variety of enjoyable activities to choose from. It also means an easygoing, responsive sub with good communication skills who doesn’t top from the bottom. It does not require much if any prep.

I thought it made for an interesting statement in the context of the pro/lifestyle debate. Often the complaint from lifestyle dominants is that guys expect them to dress like a fetishists wet dream and focus with laser like intensity on the submissive’s very specific fantasy scenarios. i.e. The stereotypical pro/client scenario. Yet, for a pro, her best clients are those who care about the dynamic (rather than an activity or outfit), communicate well and actually submit. I suspect the above list of attributes would strike a cord with lifestyle dominants just as much as professional ones.

The image is taken from Ms Maya Midnight’s website. She’s a NYC based pro-domme. Her interests and a link for booking a session is available here.

Picking your orientation

After yesterday’s post, which talked about sexual orientation and BDSM, I did what I should have done right from the start and searched for other posts on the topic. That led me to this excellent one by Clarisse Thorn. I think she covered the complexity of the discussion rather well.

To this point I’ve tended to think of sexual orientation as being specifically about what gender someone is attracted to. Not because I believe that BDSM isn’t an intrinsic part of some peoples identity. Just that the common and accepted usage of sexual orientation is around gender, and I don’t like overloading terms unnecessarily. However, I did find one of the comments in Clarisse’s post particularly interesting. It quotes Charles Moser and lists the factors he believes makes up an orientation…

Lifelong – Difficult to Suppress
Prepubertal Recognition
Interest Despite Aging
Immutable, but Fluid
Emotional Price to Do or Not Do “It”
Lust – Specifically and Especially Sexually Arousing
Effect of Testosterone/Anti-Androgens

One does not have to satisfy all 7, but they distinguish a “lesser” sexual interest from an orientation. It also means that not everyone who does a behavior (even repetitively) has an orientation. Also, an orientation can satisfy less than 7, but it is hard for me to imagine someone who satisfies all 7 not having an orientation.

I’m not quite sure what he means by the one on Testosterone, but when it comes to my BDSM interests, I’m batting 100% on all the rest. I think they make for an interesting checklist to consider.

Of course, if the complexity of the human condition is all too much for you, becoming a coffee table is always an option. I’m pretty certain they don’t have a sexual orientation.

I found this on the Undiscovered Limits tumblr.

William Saletan on BDSM (again)

Regular readers may remember this previous post critiquing William Saletan’s BDSM articles at Slate. His latest offering is considerably better that his past efforts, but that’s not exactly a high bar to aim over. There’s actually some real data in this new article, although his thinking remains flabby and his reasoning haphazard.

He doesn’t seem to understand common activities like piercing or electrical play, or when tools like safewords might be needed, and therefore makes foolish sweeping statements. He correctly states that BDSM participants are not a single homogeneous group, but finishes with a set of conclusions that implies they are. I also think his concerns about exploitation based on the gender percentages in the top/bottom roles makes no sense in the framework he presents them. However, I’m going to ignore all that, and instead talk about a single issue he raises: Is BDSM an orientation?

This is a hot button topic for some kinky people, who get quite passionate about it. He implies it’s not because some fraction of people only dabble in kink. Personally I think the whole discussion is a red herring.

The people who argue that it is an orientation often seem to draw from, or adopt similar arguments to, some of the recent debates on gay rights. The religious right would argue that being gay was a choice and therefore gay people were choosing to give up their right to marry. Presumably they thought that people were being gay just to spite them. The obvious counter argument was that homosexuality was an intrinsic part of someone’s identity, and it was therefore unfair to penalize someone for something they had no control over.

I think getting dragged into that kind of discussion misses the point on two counts. Firstly, when you’re dealing with prejudice and bigotry, any apparently logical argument offered is really just a smokescreen. If you knock it down they’ll simply move on to another. The color of someone’s skin is clearly intrinsic to a person, but that didn’t stop society withholding civil rights from minority groups for many years. They simply picked a different reason to do so. Secondly, there are plenty of examples of society protecting the rights of groups that are the result of choice. For example, nobody pops out of the womb with a specific religious affiliation, despite what some religions may claim. Yet religious freedom is something society chooses to legally protect.

Rather than arguing that particular groups are special, we should be arguing for a culture that has a strong bias to protect people’s rights to live their lives as they see fit. And if you’re going to claim that their freedom to do so harms you in some way, then that had better be some clearly provable harm that we’re talking about. Not just that you think it’s icky to have a co-worker who might be into BDSM. Or that you think there’s some risky but undefinable moral hazard to having kinky people bring children up.

I wasn’t really sure what photograph was suitable for accompanying this post, so I thought I’d simply continue the medieval theme from yesterday. Mr Saletan seemed particularly concerned about knife play. I wonder what he’d make of bloody big sword play?

The image is by the photographer Jerrell Edwards (also on deviant art). I found it on Thy Queendom Come, Thy Will Be Done tumblr.

A smart person saying smart things

This is a companion post (of sorts) to my one from a week ago entitled ‘Smart People Saying Stupid Things‘. That one concerned smart but non-kinky people being stupid about kink. This one features a smart but non-kinky person being insightful and observant. Like that last post, the linked text is lengthy and non-erotic, so if you’re simply looking for visual stimulation I’d suggest skipping to the picture at the bottom.

The smart person in question is Camille Paglia and the article that caught my eye is called ‘Scholars in Bondage‘. It’s a critique of three recent academic books on kink and BDSM by Margot Weiss, Staci Newmahr and Danielle J. Lindemann. All three generated a fair amount of online discussion, particularly the one by Margot Weiss. I think it’d be fair to say that Paglia is less than impressed with them, and her criticisms really resonated for me.

Primarily she attacks their tendency to bury their subjects under ‘a sludge of opaque theorizing’. They start with a fascinating subject, but rather than use the evidence they’ve gathered to illuminate it, they obfuscate it. They write defensively, for the benefit of their academic peers and the theoretical frameworks they’ve been taught, rather than to push our understanding of the subject forward. This is a common tendency in these kind of studies and it always annoys the hell out of me.

Her other major criticism is that they lack historical background. They’re so caught up in the theories of modern gender studies that the cultural context is entirely omitted. From early religious iconography, through Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, up to Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe, there’s a rich and important cultural background to understand.

Finally, I particularly liked her closing thoughts on what S&M actually is.

My conclusion … was that sadomasochism is an archaic ritual form that descends from prehistoric nature cults and that erupts in sophisticated “late” phases of culture

Sadomasochism’s punitive hierarchical structure is ultimately a religious longing for order, marked by ceremonies of penance and absolution. Its rhythmic abuse of the body … is paradoxically a reinvigoration, a trancelike magical realignment with natural energies

I’m a non-religious person. I don’t ‘get’ religion and it makes no sense to me. But this remark did resonate. On the surface BDSM play seems sexual and hedonistic, a world away from the purity of religious penance and absolution. Yet, I wonder if the underlying psychology is actually quite similar. A great BDSM scene both focuses and energizes the self, but also liberates from a sense of self. The submissive/sinner is both the center of attention but also the least important person. They are reinvigorated through surrender and acquiescence.

This image is by the Italian photographer Alessio Delfino. It’s from a series entitled Tarots and is called La Papesse. I originally found it on the Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

Amusingly, when doing a reverse image search to track down the source for the image, I came across this modified version of it. I’m all for people exploring their kinks and creating their own porn, but this is a real WTF. I’m not sure what’s the idea behind combining that image with the additional surreal text (apparently she’s a financial adviser who likes baked oatmeal) and profane text (she likes peeing, shitting and spitting on slaves), but I think it sprained my brain.

Smart people saying stupid things

I’m starting this post with a warning about the links it contains. Normally that would mean I was about to discuss edge play and feature potentially disturbing images. However, in this case the links are to conservative journalists talking about kink. I realize that may still constitute edge play for some people. On the face of it they’re discussing extreme porn from kink.com, but it quickly gets into general issues of consent and sexual ethics.

What started this unlikely flurry of posts was an essay by Emily Witt entitled What Do You Desire. The heart of the piece is a description of a shoot for the Public Disgrace site, but it also encompasses the tech culture, San Francisco culture and Emily’s own personal life. It’s an essay that got a lot of attention across the web, not just from the writers below. Personally I was unimpressed. As a kinky and techy person, who lives on the West Coast and visits the Bay Area often, I expected to read something I could relate to. Something that reflected, at least in some way, my experiences. Instead it comes across as a high concept piece. Rather than immersing herself into the culture and drawing conclusions from it, I got the impression Emily went in with a concept and cherry picked her observations to match.

While I might not have been impressed, a lot of other people were. What particularly entertained me were a series of posts from conservative writers. Roughly in order (as they responded to each other) there was: Rod Dreher, Noah Millman, Alan Jacobs, Noah Millman 2, Rod Dreher 2, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Conor Friedersdorf and Rod Dreher 3.

There’s enough material in those articles for a dozen posts, but I’ll try and limit myself to just this one. As you might expect they have a few interesting insights scattered randomly through a whole steaming mound of ignorance. I don’t fault them too much for that. No doubt if I was writing about Conservative Evangelical Christians in the South on the basis of a single provocative article I’d also reveal a lot of my ignorance about that group. What I will fault them for is the horrible underlying logic in some of their arguments. Particularly Rod Dreher writing here on the subject of consent.

His argument is, at the heart of it, a variant on the slippery slope fallacy. He starts out by defining consent as the way people judge right from wrong. He then points out consent alone can never be enough, because people can consent to terrible things. For example, the cannibal who ate a willing victim. And therefore, if consent is not your guiding light, then what can be? How can anyone define what is morally right? The only answer must be God.

For all its many flaws, Christianity (like Islam, like Judaism) at least offers a standard by which to judge right and wrong….
…Christianity at least holds on to the idea that Truth exists, and is knowable, however imperfectly.

The huge glaring flaw in this appeal to absolutism is of course the problem of defining religious Truth. Saying Jesus would have frowned on cannibalism is uncontroversial. But what was his position on silk scarves tied to the headboard? Or a little nipple biting during coitus? And if that’s OK, does he draw the line at nipple clamps? How about anal sex between a loving couple? What if it’s a loving gay couple? I haven’t noticed too many burning bushes appearing recently to give us guidance on these areas.

Of course what people like Rod Dreher really want to impose with a religious standard is their standard. They really know what God meant to say. Of course in reality they have no divine hotline. They’re just people making judgement calls about right and wrong like everyone else. They just don’t trust the rest of us to do it properly.

I’ll leave you with an image of two sinners doing terribly wicked things. I know it might look like a beautiful image of two people enjoying an intense and intimate moment, but that can’t be right. Nipple clamps are clearly the work of Beelzebub.

The image is from the always excellent bondage is not a crime tumblr.

The gift that keeps on giving

Stabbity recently put up a post on the well worn expression – “The gift of submission”. This crops up fairly regularly in D/s discussions and I think it’s fair to say that Stabbity is not a fan. She doesn’t like the mismatch between the D/s dynamic and the cultural assumptions that come with a gift. For example, it’s rude to take back a gift, but entirely correct to take back submission should that be desirable and/or necessary.

I agree with her general point, but also dislike the expression as it’s commonly used for a different reason. To me it always seems to have an element of hypocrisy. A gift is given primarily for the benefit of the recipient. I’m not going to give someone a bottle of wine and then expect to be able to drink half of it. Yet submission is almost always about meeting personal needs. Obviously one always wants to do that in a mutually beneficial relationship, but it’s rarely a case of being singularly beneficial for the sake of the domme. In fact, of all the situations where the enjoyment is unevenly distributed, I’d bet that the vast majority skew to favor the submissive. Beating a kinky partner when you’re not really into it is being GGG. Beating an unwilling partner because you’re kinky is abuse.

Despite all these problems, I would like to reclaim or recast the expression. For me when I think about the gift of submission, I think about it being a gift to myself. I’m not sure how I ended up wired as both kinky and submissive, but I do now appreciate that it happened. For many years I compartmentalized that side of myself, treating it as something distinct from who I actually was. Acknowledging it and incorporating it into my life certainly hasn’t made my life simpler, but has made it far richer and more interesting.

In contrast to the standard usage of the phrase, which paints submission in an altruistic light, I’ve often been tempted to see it as a selfish trait. That it’s a flaw in me that will put additional demands on a partner. Thinking of it as something that I’ve been given, as a gift that gives me unusual yet desirable characteristics (plus a rich source of NSFW anecdotes), helps me fight that negative view. It’s not quite a superpower, but it can be a complex-yet-beneficial power.

The image is by JSV Photography. He has a blog here, including this entry on the above photograph. He also has an eBook of bondage for those of you into beautiful women in rope. I originally found the image on the Redhead with a Riding Crop tumblr.