I know I haven’t been very active since I moved the blog to a new host. Hell, I’ve hardly been approving comments (I’m also thinking about turning off comments on old posts, because while it’s always cool to see a supportive comment a year after posting something–hell, even flames on old posts remain hilarious–the spam is too much to deal with). I’ve had some things I wanted to write about, mostly about sex. Not even the kind related to gender and physiology! The kind that word makes most people who aren’t me think about!

I’ve been a little down lately, though…I haven’t been able to find any resources specifically talking about BDSM/kink from a feminist perspective (unless it’s an extremely negative one) and that kind of steamrolled my enthusiasm for posting about such things because I’m pretty sure I’m just going to get a lot of abuse for it and I frankly don’t feel up for it…

But! BUT! Apparently there is a new blog out there, let them eat pro-sm feminist safe spaces, the existence of which makes me pretty happy. I’ll have to keep an eye on it to see how things develop, but it sounds promising.

One thing I hope to post about later is addressed in this post by Trinity, which discusses anti-BDSM feminist arguments and, well, why those arguments are effective in theory but don’t actually apply to the reality of kinky life:

So there’s not much knew I have to say. All I really want to mention is that, as a woman who tops not only women but also men, there really isn’t much about us in the internal warfare. And I wonder why this is. on the one hand, I know that it’s because the radical feminist analysis (Yes, I realize that not all radical feminists agree with this analysis, but that’s what it’s most often called, so that’s the short cut that I will use.) is concerned about dynamics between submissive women and dominant men. I know that their interminable analyses of lesbian sadomasochism, as well, center around a faulty idea that all leatherdyke are butch-femme, and at a butch is emulating men.

All that means that a woman top, unless she is very strongly masculinely identified (oddly, I think I might actually qualify on some of these analyses, though I doubt people would expect me to top men since this would slot me into “butch” if anything), doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t show up on the radar at all. Neither does a male bottom, unless he is into such stuff as feminization, in which case he’s slumming for fun. ( gay men don’t fit into this well at all either, since these sorts of feminists pride themselves on not caring much about men. The assumption is sometimes a similar butch-femme dynamic, which totally misses the hypermasculine emphasis in much of gay leather.)

…

And that’s the thing. I happen to believe, probably unlike many other sadomasochists who’ve run afoul of these people, that their analysis is actually impressively internally consistent, and difficult to argue with in some ways because of that. But the big problem with it is that it’s extremely narrow. It works, if it works at all, for a tiny set of textbook cases. Not only are they all male dominant and female submissive, or *maybe maybe maybe* *possibly* butch-femme in an extremely traditionalist way, but they are all male dominant and female submissive in a cartoony way. No one’s dynamic actually looks like that, not even the M/f folks I know who consider themselves old-fashioned.

And that’s the problem. What they’ve come up with is a theoretical analysis of a theoretical problem. It’s internally consistent enough that it can convince people that they understand what’s really going on — if said people don’t actually know or want to know about the real nuts and bolts of sadomasochists’ lives, play, and (possible) power relations (remember, they’re optional!)

More later.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Feminist Movement, Links, Sexuality.