Random Morning Thoughts
Yeah so some “BDSM Positive Feminists” or some such linked to me mocking me the other day, either not knowing or not caring that I would see it. I found their comments, which were an attempt to paint me as either stupid, intolerant, ignorant, or self-absorbed more enlightening about themselves than about anything I’d said. Most interesting is the corners they try to paint any feminist who dares question BDSM. Usually they will say, upon reading any criticism of BDSM from a feminist standpoint, that we just must not know anything about it, we must be ignorant about how truly wonderful and sexy and enlightened their “underground” society is. But when someone as myself or Biting Beaver reveals we have lived that lifestyle for years and hated it due to the abusive nature of said “lifestyle”, we are told “it’s just you”. It must just be me, just because “I didn’t enjoy it” doesn’t mean other women can’t! What’s wrong with you that you didn’t enjoy it? Then there were the ones who feigned some sort of coyness: “She says she was involved with the BDSM lifestyle for 15 years, what does she mean?” I mean I lived it, from any number of angles, no, not just one, and not just with one man, it wasn’t a problem of just it being “the wrong man”. Then there’s the clincher which would be floor-rolling-laughter funny if it weren’t just so fucking sad from someone who thinks they are a feminist: “If she didn’t like the lifestyle WHY DIDN’T SHE JUST LEAVE? WHY DID SHE STAY SO LONG?” All of this: “it’s just you” “its an individual problem” “why didn’t you just leave” are the farthest things I can think of from a feminist standpoint. I’m tired of little girls – and despite your age, if you are saying this kind of bullshit, you’re an ignorant little girl – without that vaguest idea, who need to go take Feminism 101, seriously, who have no clue what women have struggled for in the last century, saying ignorant crap like this and then wanting the label of feminist – and I have to wonder, if they think like this, why do they even think they are feminist? “Why didn’t she just leave?” You didn’t seriously just say that did you? That’s like, what every anti-feminist who hates all programs for battered women says. You expect me to take your commitment to feminism seriously when you spout that kind of bullshit? Come now. Go read a few books by those “second wavers” you hate so much.
In spite of all the whining about how feminists are raining on their sexy parade, I can’t find, despite searching for hours, anything on the web outside of this small collection of radical feminist bloggers, anything at all written by feminists talking about the abusive practices of BDSM. Try it. Go to google and type in “BDSM is abuse” – what you get are pages and pages of results of BDSM people being really defensive about how “that’s just not true!” The odd story reported of a relationship that did end up being abusive is philosophically separated from BDSM and analyzed to death showing how it couldn’t have been real BDSM. Ironically enough, after a few pages, intermingled with these too-loud protests by the “leather community” are links to BDSM porn websites which promises you hot, hardcore pictures of tortured, abused beaten slave bitches begging for the abuse to stop. You know… hot. No where can one find any discussion of how manipulative abusive men can be, how they can and do frequently frame their abuse as “just BDSM” and therefore perfectly consensual and okay. No where can an abused “sub” find a help page from the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of safe, sane and consensual. It’s an individual problem. It has nothing to do with the lifestyle. What’s wrong with you? Nor can one find feminist sites condemning BDSM. In fact when you find feminist sites discussing it at all it is in terms just as glowing as everywhere else – although you do find lots of BDSM sites mocking feminists and feminism. In fact, it is hard to find anything even mildly critical of BDSM practices on the web. In fact, BDSM is so widely popularly accepted that we have “hot” kinky movies glorifying the Marquis De Sade and male doms everywhere and “Secretary” and… you can’t find books by Dworkin in most local libraries when you go to look for them, or a feminist bookstore in most towns, but there’s “adult shops” everywhere, and strip joints and… remind me again how sexually repressed we all are and how the anti-sex feminists are ruling the planet and BDSMers are oppressed hurt people who have to live underground to keep from being dragged off by the police because of us evul radfems, I keep forgetting.
Then you see these “pro sex pro sm feminist” websites and blogs put up like they’re the first ones ever and this total, total anomaly. They can’t even admit where the real pressure is coming from. It isn’t the feminists by and large who are policing women’s bedrooms and throwing women out of the club for indulging in a little game of tie me up and spank me. But within the BDSM culture – AS IT IS EVERYWHERE ELSE – feminism is a dirty word. So it is more provocative to the BDSM community for a uppity slave to declare herself a feminist than anything else. It is to the BDSM community she must endlessly defend herself. “Yes I can still obey my male master and simultaneously believe I am a free individual! I am CHOOSING to obey! It’s my choice to give up my free will!” The mind boggles, but when you try to point out the inherent contradiction from a feminist stand point, you become the evil hag who is trying to destroy a pretty girl’s sex life, no doubt out of jealously because you aren’t getting any yourself, of course.
Speaking of the whole “second wave” vs. “third wave” BS – yeah, I called it BS. Supposedly women my age are supposed to have “moved on” beyond all the “anti-sex man hating” second wave, there’s supposed to be some big gulf, and now since “we’ve achieved liberation” (when?) women are now “free” to “sexually express themselves!” For some bizarre reason, young women feel THEY are the victims of ageist discrimination, despite the fact that patriarchal society progressively devalues women (whom it views as non-human, non-thinking, and good only for their sex appeal and baby making ability) as they grow older while valuing men (who are considered human, thinking and intelligent) more and more for their knowledge and experience as they age. For some reason, when young women are reviled/objectified as THE sex class, as fetish objects for men’s sexual pleasure, they are choosing to believe men’s lies about how this is “power”. When older women who have been through it all (yes, we have) and have seen themselves and their friends be hurt by men’s lies (yes, we have) over and over again, and then watched as one by one their friends are discarded after developing a few small wrinkles or gaining a few pounds with age; when we try to warn younger women, younger women turn, and with the full support of patriarchy behind them, spit on older women who try to tell them what they don’t want to hear. The patriarchy reviles older women as unsexy, unsexual, unwantable, thus revealing their true feelings on women’s only value – young women who buy into the false idea of “third wave feminism” are frequently cheered on and supported by men who couldn’t give a damn about women’s rights. Young women’s own unexamined ageism fuels their readiness to agree with men who croon lies into their ears, tell them how much more valuable and wanted and sexier they are than those old dried up hags who probably never got laid right anyway, or just don’t like sex, or just hate men. “Sure I’m okay with you being a feminist, baby, as long as you aren’t one of THOSE kinds of feminists.” Unlike every other political movement which builds upon the successes of their forebears, young women have this bizarre idea – completely supported by the patriarchy – that the freedoms women have now just sort of spontaneously occurred out of the enlightenment of considerate men who really don’t hate women and decided one day to do the right thing. Young women in fact seem to see “second wave” (read: older) feminists not as trailblazers who have done great things for women, but rather as active ROADBLOCKS who are HOLDING BACK THE ADVANCE OF FEMINIST CONCERNS. This dramatic reversal of the truth would be breathtaking and completely inexplicable if we did not look at the ways, both subtle and overt, that the patriarchy uses to discredit everything women do and all the steps they take to make both feminists and older women invisible. For the most egregious and common example of this just consider the commonly used passive tone inherent in the frequently used sentence “women were given the vote”, as though it were a gift granted upon us by considerate men (who might just take it back if we don’t show proper appreciation). Furthermore consider how feminist action has been continuous and ongoing and not broken up into “waves” of anything, yet what feminists have accomplished for women is never discussed until until Roe vs. Wade comes up. Then everything that feminists accomplished after this is considered having “gone too far.”
I do not wish to attack young women – I’m really not that old myself. But I want to point out to you that older women and feminists don’t exist in some ivory tower of ignorance where they’ve never heard about sex or anything kinky; they aren’t some sort of freakish creatures who have no natural sexual desires; they aren’t innocents in the ways of the world; they aren’t merely unfortunate, damaged, insane victims who have “just happened” to all have met “the wrong kind of men”; they aren’t “bitter old hags”. All of these stereotypes are part of the patriarchy’s package of fearing the power, knowledge, energy and experience of older women and thus feeling a need to debase, dismiss, and marginalize them. When young women are separated from their older feminist forebears by believing these lies, they are giving the patriarchy exactly what it wants. When young women think they are somehow going to re-invent feminism anew and give it some catchy new name to make it “more progressive” and more “modern” they aren’t really accomplishing anything. A hint should be that feminism doesn’t need to attach itself to any other political agenda in order to form its values, not libertarianism, or the Democratic party, or the Green Party, or the anti-war movement. Feminists can be involved in any of these movements for their own reasons, but these movements and their goals do NOT have women’s rights and concerns as their primary or even their major goals and thus should NOT be confused with feminism.
Oh god please disregard this pre-coffee rant I wrote between mining ore in the virtual game world to try to level my blacksmithing skill. Ha.
