S&M and Me

so, one of the things that i've been rolling about in my head is the idea of the intersection of power both within my relationship and outside of it. and i've been wanting to write a post for a while about how i view BDSM in a feminist context. but i've been dragging my feet. until yesterday, when ren posted about some BDSM articles on Nine Duce's blog. and that there were more than a few comments telling submissive women that they didn't know how to do feminism, in fact pretty much hadn't a leg to stand on in calling themselves feminists, because of their sexuality.

now, i am not a submissive woman. but i have friends who are. and while i don't see submission as a feminist action i don't think that one negates the other. in fact, i think more submissive women should explore feminism. not because i want them to change, cause i really don't. but because i think the intersections of power and sexuality are profoundly interesting and can perhaps deepen an already meaningful relationship based on choices.

the thing that's pissing me off more than anything on the thread is the total denial of female dominants. now, i understand that femdomme doesn't fit into neat boxes of patriarchy and male domination of poor deluded women. i get that. but an honest discussion of power hierarchy in relationships needs to look at M/f and F/m as well as M/m and F/f and all other permutations. maybe i'm hitting my head against a wall thinking that anyone there wants to have a look, and not just have a bash the men party.

but the thing that this has made me realize is this: i love my lifestyle. and i've been neglecting my beloved. not sexually, cause we fuck like bunnies. we're young, he's hot, i have a high sex drive. but in those aspects of our relationship that are unique to us, i have been neglecting him. i have let things slide, while giving him his permanent collar. which seems wrong somehow. that's another post all together. but i think i've been trying hard not to create this cognitive dissonance in my head that i actually did. and that's not ok.

so, well and truly thanks radical feminist hate for making me defend myself and my beliefs. i'm not afraid of exploring the intersection of my sex anymore. and in fact i'm looking forward to it.

What Kind of Sex do 9 out of 10 People Enjoy?

Gang Rape! bwahahahahaha... *puking noises*

so, generally speaking i have awesome housemates. h is like a little sister and i enjoy her company, and she has a similar vibe to my own kid sister who's pretty much her same age. a is pretty awesome but our politics and worldviews are radically different and sometimes i'm astounded by the things that come out of her mouth and that she thinks are ok. like the gem of a joke referenced above.

a few nights ago we somehow got on the subject of that joke in particular and the use of rape, and can rape ever be a punchline for a joke of any kind. obviously the joke above falls into that, not ok, catagory. gang rap as a punchline, not funny. saying steven spielburg raped indiana jones... gray area. using rape in stand up to make a joke or satirise the way we view rape, the way the word is ubiquitous, the way we have a blame the victim mentality... i'm ok with that. and so a, my beloved and i were all having this discussion and it was interesting to say the least.

my beloved is a fervent believer in no censorship of any kind. the phrase, you CAN'T say that is one he will fight against. and while he agrees with me that base humor that does nothing more than make rape funny with no attendant social commentaries wrong, he doesn't think the word itself should be forbidden. we used the rape of indiana jones as his example, and going into it i was going nonononono... you can't say that. "but the word itself," he reasoned, "has a meaning that fits exactly what i want to say happened." Spielberg took a childhood icon and violated every precept, ripped away the things that made it great, and generally destroyed it. his argument is that rape is a word, a word we shouldn't use lightly or bandy about in a joking manner, but that it is a word we should use. and i can concede that point. if we use the word rape in a conscious way, perhaps that will give it back some of the power it has to be a serious word. and then statements like, "if you take the last piece of pie i'm going to rape you," won't be said in a flip sort of way.

another bit we talked about was the rape fantasy. which i'm ok with. fantasies about power, struggle, the erotic nature of that struggle are all concepts i can get behind. i think people should be free to explore in their fantasy life anything that gets them hot, including rape. i even think that a select few people with the emotional maturity to handle the realities of the situation should be able to enact said fantasy with their partner. because there you have consent. you have two people discussing the wants and needs and realities and how to recover and when does stop actually mean stop. it's something i toy with myself. from the perp end, not the victim end, but it's there in that dark part of my own fantasies. being able to acknowledge that, and relate to it on a fantasy level, is what makes it a thing i'm likely to never do. because i know the difference between fantasy and reality, and maybe if this type of fantasy were less taboo it could be talked about as opposed to repressed. i'm a big believer in repression of sexuality as a way to seriously and monstrously distort it. and distortion of this kind of fantasy can have serious repercussions.

but i want to know what you think, reader who stumbled on this lengthy post. is rape ok to joke about? is it ok to use as a word? do you think i'm off my tit?

Princess Charming

So, apparently too much pink is damaging to the personalities of little girls, which i causing quite the comment session at feminisitng. and of course any discussion about pink eventually leads to princesses cause, all princesses wear gobs of pink...you know? at least, they do in our culture obsessed with driving home the notion that girls need their men to come along and rescue them. and i had this epiphany, like i do sometimes, about how i used to be that girl. and how i'm not anymore.

i had a relationship that was bad, not as bad as some and certainly not as bad as it could have been. but in the sense that he wreaked havoc with my sense of self worth and made me doubt everything about myself it was bad. not that my home life at the time was any better. my mother and i have never had what i would call a normal, healthy relationship, although now that i don't live with her things are much better. then along comes this guy. he's big and strong, with piercing blue eyes and a smooth tongue, looking like some nordic/germanic warrior and i fell hard and fast. and he knew it. and he took control of it, and me. and i very much wanted him to. i very much believed that he was going to save me from my life, and that we'd go off to the college of his choosing and i'd be his little house wife. thank the gods that didn't happen.

but in the depths of the dysfunction of that relationship, all i wanted was for him to consume me. it's the closest i've ever been to full submission of my will to another. and if the relationship hadn't been as crash and burn as it turned out to be, i might have ended up in a very different place. but it was. and it did.

fast forward almost a decade, and i'm in a new city with the most perfect man for me. we were laying in bed, not that long ago, talking about all manner of things and i asked him if he was glad he'd moved with me. we hadn't know each other very long, let alone been dating for long, when the decision got made. and he looked at me with those dark blue/green eyes of his and said "of course i am. you saved me from, what was turning into, a really hellish life." or something to that effect. reading the bit about princesses, and their desire to be rescued from their lives, made me think of that moment. and while that statement should have had all kinds of subversive undertones, it somehow doesn't. he's a strong man, stronger than he knows i think, and perfectly capable of dealing. the move was my idea and i orchestrated the endeavor, but he funded it and turned it from a pipe dream into a reality. but he credits me as his savior, and in some ways i really like that feeling. in many ways, i also think it feeds into the power exchange dynamic we have, and the occasional and general roll reversals we enjoy.

i'm not really sure where i'm going with this. it doesn't have a point, like some posts i've made. but the thought really made me go humm....

Enlightening Pillow talk

so my housemate, her boy, my beloved, a friend of his and i were all sitting around watching Pen and Teller's Bullshit. now, i love these men and i will totally fess up to having a wee crush on mr. gilette. and i'm not entirely sure how we got on the subject but my housemate said she wouldn't allow her kids to have barbies. and i said something to the effect of not allowing barbie because of some crazy second wave feminist idea was... something. i was tired, and don't really remember all of it. but it's got me thinking back to something i read on fatshionista! a while back about the phenomenon of the "incredible bulk" or fat girls who verbally rampage about their fat acceptance and refuse to "worship at the alter of diets" and how alienating that can be to the casual listener. and i think i'm getting into that mind frame. which i have to curb. which means i have to apologise to my housemate when i see her for possibly getting out of line.

though it did end up with a really intense convo between my beloved and i. we were talking about how this whole activism thing has become REALLY important to me and that i know he understands it intellectually but i'm pretty sure he doesn't get it. and i finally found a really amazing way to express it to him... he's a history major and he's looking to deal in pre-colombian middle and south america, which means aztecs, olmecs, incas and mayans. these cultures are mythic and mystical and alien to the average american, and we imbue them in our pop culture with all kinds of fantastical properties. or we say there we totally savage and marvel at how they could have done the things we have evidence of them doing. and i realized, he plans to spend his education and stake his academic reputation on refuting these myths. and he takes the opportunity to talk to people about them pretty much every time they get brought up. and i asked him, "how is what you do any different then what i'm doing?" and we talked about it, and came to the conclusion that it isn't though it is. but we're coming to a better understanding.

because he asked me the most important question i think he's asked me in a long time. "what do you want from me?" and i have to admit it took me a while to answer the question since i hadn't exactly framed it out in my own head. what it basically came down to though was the need for him to understand how big this really was, and that i was challenging many things in my own head. for him to understand that i'm more than a little afraid of the challenges this could bring into our relationship. and most importantly for him to take this seriously, let me sound off, challenge me with questions, encourage and support me. i also expressed the very real concern i had over creating a cognitive dissonance in my own head about our power exchange relationship which is not equal or egalitarian, and how it fits in with other things i think and feel about unequal relationships between men and women. i do not want to be hypocritical and say it's not ok for you but it's ok for me.

which made him ask in that kind of scared, vulnerable voice i find so delightful and lust inducing, "you're not going to suddenly get rid of me, are you?" i'd be a liar if i said showing him how much i value him didn't end the night on a really good note.

Shhhhh it's not ok

so last night my BF and i were looking at the latest news on the prop 8 opposition and the move toward legal proceedings in the state. and i was ranting at him about how fucked up it was that the prop passed and how the yes vote people lied and why the opposition failed to not only stop this piece of bullshit legislation from passing, but they failed to be inclusive and unifying in the way they did it. i was pacing, and ranting, and it took him aback a bit. he's never seen this political side of me, never seen this radical passionate side of me. oh, to be sure, he's seen me passionate about other things but never politics. and while our views match i am more well read on the subject i'm likely to rant about. and so he tried to calm me, think he'd done something to upset me, when really i was just angry at the situation. angry and swearing, which i rarely do.

and it frightened me for a moment. the idea of him shushing me, not to make me be quiet but to calm me down, was hard for me to process. because i wanted so much to know it had nothing to do with him trying to calm down the hysterical woman who was being unreasonable. i wanted so much for him to not have that seed of patriarchy deep inside him waiting like some cancer to suddenly wage war on our happiness. and while he assured me that no, he was afraid he'd done something to upset me and that i was angry at him, it did make me question the effect of activism.

not that i would give this up for him, but that it would break my heart if we were to fundamentally disagree on this. and i said to him the reason i feel it needful to speak and to give information and statistics is because i genuinely think 80% of people who speak out against gay marriage because it will force their church to do xyz, who back the fat people as unhealthy ideology and participate in fat hatred clothed as concern for the health of others, who are against comprehensive reproductive health are just ignorant or unaware of the spin they've been fed. and i said to him, these people are the kind that have to be talked to, have to be told, because eventually they will listen to bits and pieces and discover new ideas. and once that happens, the number of people who will be able to look at him and think (or worse say) "he's thin, he's good looking, he's smart so why is he fucking a fattie" will go down. if not away.

of course he promised to punch anyone who dared say such a thing in the face. which made me a little melty. but the fact that he hates willfully ignorant bigotry is a huge pat of why i love him.