The following are the rambling thoughts of a fevered brain. Literally: I have a 100 degree temperature atm. You have been warned.
Sometimes I worry that enjoying being held down, tied up, spanked and called names is some kind of elaborate acting out of my own internalized misogyny. We’re saturated in rape culture. Maybe it warped me — maybe it made me think the only sexual fulfillment I deserve is when I’m being treated like something less than human. Maybe my attraction to strong men is an attraction to violence. Maybe my feminism is a colossal joke because of the politics of my personal life.
I’ve talked with K about this quite a bit, and he reminds me: it’s not because he’s a man and I’m a woman. It’s because he’s a dominant and I’m a submissive. But without our gender roles and the way our bodies are made, much of our play would look very different. I get called “bitch”, “slut”, “whore”, I get held down by a strong man with more body weight than me, I get penetrated, I get fucked.
This is all coming to a head in my mind because of the #mooreandme protests. I’ve been thinking about rape culture more than ever before. On the outside, much of K’s and my play looks like sexual abuse. It’s not, because consent is always central.
I have never been in a relationship before in which I felt so enthusiastically consenting, though I have never been in a relationship in which I was sexually assaulted, either. During ravishment play when I’m saying “no”, K knows that I don’t mean “stop” until I say my safeword. When I do say my safeword, he stops immediately. (Often he stops before then to check in, because he wants to make sure he always has my full participation.) Even when K tells me we’re going to have sex and I’m not in the mood but do it anyway, because he is my dom, I am consenting more enthusiastically and transparently than I ever have before.
But I still come back to wanting this, and wondering why I feel so empowered by being beaten, demeaned, and “used”. If nothing else, it’s an interesting psychological and philosophical question. I can’t lie to myself and say it has absolutely nothing to do with being a woman; if I were not a heterosexual woman, my sexual fantasies would be very different. Many of them do lean on patriarchal tropes.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, for the moment. I’m submissive. There is no way to know what makes me submissive, but submitting fulfills me sexually. I know it’s not because I’m a woman, because women are not inherently submissive. I also know that submitting sexually, including ravishment play, makes me feel good — not just in the moment, when it turns me on and sets me free, but throughout my entire life.
I take these patriarchal tropes and I use them to power my sexuality. My sexuality gives me the energy to create, be involved politically, live my life the way I want to live it. The patriarchy feeds on women’s guilt and worry over their sexual desires. Patriarchy wants my guilt, not my sexual fulfillment.
So screw it. If I want to fantasize about being kidnapped by a big strong rich handsome dude and carried off to his castle to be his sex slave, I’m gonna do it. And I’m going to do my very best to stop feeling guilty about doing the things that make me strong and happy.
I think it’s great to acknowledge the tropes that inform your submission, and you’re right — clearly they are, to some extent, misogynist/patriarchal. But you are also right that it doesn’t matter where they stem from; what matters is how you are using them. And you’re using them to feed your emotions and desires, which is about the best thing you could do.
I have pondered this a lot myself. I have been submissive 90% of the time with the men I have been with and I wonder is my personal sexual preferences influenced by the screwed up way the world functions? Is the fact I enjoy being spanked and told I’m bad by a man the result of the patriarchy or am I built that way? Sometimes it gets to me and I wonder if I am a broken feminist but you make some very good points which boil down to I bloody well enjoy my sexuality the way it is (and I’m working on refining, defining and expanding it) so letting this train of thought stop me would be letting the patriarchy win! And hell if I am letting that happen!
I don’t identify as a sub, but I’ve definitely had fantasies of submission and ravishment, and sometimes that makes me similarly wonder where it’s all coming from. For me it could have something to do with wanting to file down the teeth of the power dynamics and threats I don’t want to, but must, deal with in real life. Almost like making a game out of something unpleasant and scary.
Whatever the reason, if it makes you happy it’s serving you rather than you serving it. And that’s the important thing. Joyous orgasms are progress.
“On the outside, much of K’s and my play looks like sexual abuse. It’s not, because consent is always central.”
In my own personal experience, with relationship/marital sex, the framing has a lot more to do with what is a violation than the action. If you feel you must have sex with someone in order to stay housed & warm, in spite of the fact you do not want to have sex with that person for any myriad of reasons, for example. If you suffer emotional trauma daily because you are silenced by your partner, but feel you cannot leave for other reasons, that’s a ripe atmosphere for rape.
I have a really hard time wrapping my head around a relationship where one can actually utter a safeword. I mean, not just that the construct is there but feeling able to say “no” without worrying about repercussions down the road or immediately. A relationship like that, where you can communicate to your partner when you have had too much or they are going too far, and you feel able to say it without repercussion is truly a wonderful, joyful thing and it is something that should be celebrated!
At any rate it sounds a hell of a lot better than projecting your past onto new relationships, carrying on that fear of reprisal for the smallest slip-up, having a greatly diminished sex drive and avoiding certain acts which bring up ghosts of the past. (just speaking personally, not for everyone)
Great post, and great point!
I consider myself mostly submissive, and as a woman, I worry about this a lot too…
But then, I think I just need the contrast. I’m busy all day being an engineer in a 90%-male company, so getting tied up in the evening and not having to decide anything is very relaxing… and arousing, as well
I’m a submissive too, though I think I could also enjoy dominating someone if I felt like by doing so, I were giving them a gift, some of myself. For me that’s what it is.
I recently started reading about the Enneagram personality type system, and I am a type two, “the helper”, with a one wing, so my subtype is “the servant”. Women seem more likely to be twos than men because of our conditioning, but not all twos are women and certainly not all women are twos. Reading about this personality typing stuff has really helped me figure out what submission does for me. Since twos have a lot of difficulty admitting that they have needs, much less getting them met, having a Dom who makes it his business to learn about those needs and decide for me when and whether they are met is something that really reduces my anxiety about sex. Without that, I get so much anxiety about sex that sometimes I can’t enjoy it at all.
I have no idea what personality type you are, or whether your experience in this respect is anything like mine, but I hope my little musing helps you in some way. I think that our misogynistic culture teaches women that it’s wrong to have wants and needs of our own, and I think that any way that can be found to get around that, to remove that guilt and shame or at least suspend it for long enough to have some fun, is healthy and loving.
I’m uncomfortable with “personality types” as discovered by things like online tests. (Or horoscopes.) It is good that it’s helped you figure some things out, but don’t forget — you know you best.
I’ve actually never had any trouble asking for what I want sexually, in any sexual relationship I’ve been in. Or saying, “no, I don’t want that, we’re not doing it.” Nor have I ever had any guilt or shame around sex. I’ve led the way on a lot of things with K: anal sex, for instance. The more submissives I meet, the more convinced I am that it can’t be explained by anything in our personalities, any more than being, e.g., a lesbian, could.