Why the female sexual submissive scares us

In her essay "The Fantasy of Acceptable 'Non-Consent': Why the Female Sexual Submissive Scares Us (and Why She Shouldn't)", Stacey May Fowles self-identifies as "a feminist who enjoys domination, bondage and pain in the bedroom". She explores the tension between that identity and her sense that "a female submissive's consensual exchange of her authority to make decisions (temporarily or long-term) for a dominant's agreement to make decisions for her just doesn't sit well with the feminist community."

The essay comes from the book Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti (with a foreward by Margaret Cho). What follows is a small excerpt [via Alternet]:

This reality raises some interesting questions for safe, sane and consensual BDSM practitioners. If, as someone who identifies as a sexual submissive, you like to fantasize about being raped, are you now complicit in this pervasive rape culture? Are you not only complicit, but also key in perpetuating the acceptability of violence, regardless of how private and personal your desire is? From another perspective -- are you actually a victim? Is your fantasy merely a product of a culture that coerces you into believing that kind of violence is acceptable or even desirable?

Alternatively, is your desire (however bastardized and appropriated) still your own -- your fantasy of "nonconsent" yours to choose and act out in a consenting environment? A personal choice when feminist ideology emphasizes choice above all else?

And finally, and perhaps most important, with all of its limitations, safe words, time limits and explicitly negotiated understandings of what is allowed -- is the consensual SM relationship actually the ultimate in trust and collaborative "performance," its rules and artifice the very antithesis of rape?

Paradoxically, sexual submission and rape fantasy can only be acceptable in a culture that doesn't condone them. On a simplistic level, a fetish is only a fetish when it falls outside the realm of the real, and, as I mentioned, the reason why some feminists fear or loathe the BDSM scene is that it is all too familiar. When a woman is subjected to (or enjoying, depending on who is viewing and participating) torture, humiliation and pain, many feminists see the 6 o'clock news, not a pleasurable fantasy, regardless of context. Even someone who identifies as a sexual submissive, someone like me, can understand why it's difficult to view these scenes objectively. Many fantasies are taboo for precisely that reason -- it's close to impossible to step beyond the notion that a man interested in domination is akin to a rapist, or that if a woman submits she is a helpless victim of rape culture. But consenting BDSM practitioners would argue that their community at large responsibly enacts desires without harm, celebrating female desire and (as is so fundamental in dismantling rape culture) making (her) pleasure central.

As a community, feminists need to truly examine whether or not it's condescending to say to a woman who chooses the fantasy of rape that she is a victim of a culture that seeks to demean, humiliate and violate women, whether or not it's acceptable to accuse her of being misguided, misinformed or even mentally ill.

I really like Fowles' unapologetic identification as a sexually satisfied submissive. At times, though, her arguments veer into anti-pornography rhetoric. It all drives toward this point:

Herein lies the problem -- with the advent and proliferation of Internet pornography, the fantasy of rape, torture and bondage becomes an issue of access. No longer reserved for an informed, invested viewer who carefully sought it out after a trip to a fetish bookstore, BDSM is represented in every porn portal on the Internet. The average computer user can have instant access to a full catalog of BDSM practices, ranging from light, soft-core spanking to hard-core torture, in a matter of seconds. This kind of constant, unrestrained availability trains viewers who don't have a BDSM cultural awareness, investment or education to believe that what women want is to be coerced and, in some cases, forced into acts they don't consent to. Over the years, various interpretations of the genre have made it into straight porn, without any suggestion of artifice -- women on leashes, in handcuffs, gagged, tied up and told to "like it" are all commonplace imagery in contemporary pornography.

So we're back to a causational link between mainstream porn and all of society's sexual evils...

Do we really believe porn has that much power over us? Or is it just an easy target? These kinds of facile arguments distract us from the actual problem: plain, old rampant misogyny. Which is, of course, everywhere - including on the internet, but certainly not exclusive to it. Unclever, poorly produced rape porn with little thought behind it is not the wellspring of all society's woman-hating and power-over culture. It's just another manifestation of it, no?

It's not clear what solution Fowles is proposing to her problem with porn. How exactly are we to go about addressing the ubiquity of crappiness without censorship? Subsidies for producers who have followed Fowles' own exclusive BDSM bookstore education? Waxing nostalgia for the days when sexual minorities were inducted into secretive underground cultures is a privilege. For most, those days were (and for many, still are) marked by family rejection, forced migration to large urban centres, isolation for rural queers and kinksters, lack of accessible sexual health info and treatment and physical and social insecurity. We may not always like the look of kink's mainstream makeover, but I'd still argue it's better than a fifteen year-old in Medicine Hat having to run an obstacle course to find out how his boyfriend can cut him with razors safely.

And hell, who doesn't like a little trashy, brainless porn once in a while? I watch all kinds of offensive shit I have no intention of ever re-creating in my bedroom. The suggestion that we go all monkey-see, monkey-do the moment we turn on XTube means I long ago would have attached a thick dildo to the column in my washing machine, sat on it and put the cycle on spin. I similarly like watching violent sex tapes and those goofy twin twinks incest scenes. When I hear people poo-poo anything but high-brow, woman-directed, consent-given-on-camera kinds of porn, I question the underlying assumption of how we think social change is achieved. Temperance didn't stop folks from drinking and the solution to childhood obesity isn't a ban on everything sweet besides fancy, expensive cakes.

I'm curious to know what others think. I like that Stacey May Fowles is helping to de-stigmatize sexual submissiveness here. I love that she's making it easier for both women and men to tell their lovers exactly how they want to get slapped around during sex. I just think that blaming everything on porn is a tired argument that lets a much bigger problem off the hook.