Is There a Feminist Position on BDSM?

Author: Avedon Carol

Avedon Carol is a founding member of Feminists Against Censorship
and author of "Nudes, Prudes and Attitudes".

The Feminists Against Censorshop website can be found at http://www.fiawol.demon.co.uk/FAC/

The other night I watched a couple of hours on television that were billed as being about "female sexuality", and after a while I began to notice a funny thing: it wasn't terribly vanilla. Lots of women were talking about female sexuality, and although they certainly described acts that could be undertaken in a vanilla context, one might have been forgiven for having received the impression by the end that the words "sex" and "kinky" were, for women, synonyms.

It's an impression I've been picking up for years. Oh, I've met plenty of women who enjoy vanilla sex, but I often feel that I've met more who don't. Throughout my life, I've heard women talk about intercourse like it was some kind of rip-off (and, despite what the US Congress and the Washington Press corp may have been saying lately, people do have an annoying habit of meaning "intercourse" when they say "sex"). Sex, they believe, is something that men like. What women like, they think, is something they call "romance" or "love" - or, god help us, "foreplay" - but which people who have taken a good look at the BDSM scene might recognize as being ritualistic, role-defined behaviour.

Back in the 1970s, feminist author-activist Robin Morgan tried to sort out her limited understanding of women's fantasies in an article for her book "Going Too Far". In it, she described what she says was an apocryphal story about a feminist meeting in which a woman had hesitantly brought up the question of kinky fantasies, saying she had them - masochistic or submissive fantasies - and wondered if anyone else did. One by one, the story goes, each woman slowly and quietly raised her hand. And then the subject was quickly changed to something else and the issue of female masochism was never raised again.

Later on, BDSM women started to emerge within the feminist movement and were quickly ostracized by anti-sex movement women, to the extent that this issue, like pornography, created increasing division within the movement. And at that point, anti-SM politics became a staple of feminism with one side defending and the other viciously attacking.

The popular myth, for some years, had been that men have sadistic or dominant fantasies and that women have the corresponding submissive or masochistic fantasies - and not the other way around. It's a purely sex-typed perception that sees BDSM as representing extremes of what are
imagined to be the traditional (or "normal") roles and traits that are ascribed to us within masculinity and femininity, and perceives not even an edge of overlap, let alone complete role-jumping, between the two. So men - all men, to one degree or another - are Dominants, and women are submissives, it is believed.

Early on in modern feminism, it was a subject that was discussed only in the negative. Male sadism/dominance was an evil consequence of masculine sexual construction, but most feminists preferred not even to acknowledge that some women might have the corresponding submissive fantasies. That men might be interested in submission themselves was not even passingly recognized, and the idea that women would want to be dominant was...well, I suspect that it was seen as a hoped-for outcome that could only be achieved with the greatest difficulty and certainly not in our lifetimes. (But I definitely felt I was under pressure from some quarters to be dominant if I was going to persist in my unfortunate tendency to interact sexually with men. It was also made clear to me that I was supposed to prefer the "female superior" position in intercourse.)

Most research doesn't actually support the view that sexual dominance/sadism is largely male or sexual submission/masochism largely female, let alone that BDSM-related preferences are universal in either sex. And neither does a look at the BDSM scene, where male submission is

highly visible. But the scene doesn't represent the entirety of each sex anymore than activist feminists were a cross-section of all women.

But we certainly are faced with a conundrum. Morgan wasn't alone in her perception that "women" (by which she really must have meant herself and the few women whose sexual interest in BDSM-related fantasy she was aware of) were "masochistic". Andrea Dworkin has expressed a similar belief in this world in which women and men are all universally sexually compatible as femsubs in a world of Doms. (We pause for a moment while all the frustrated Doms and femsubs out there laugh bitterly - and also wonder where professional Dommes get their money, in that case. God knows that life would be simpler if all women were anything that corresponded to all men and we didn't have to worry about sexual compatibility between us.)

Now here's the interesting thing: anti-SM feminists were tucking the whole constellation that we now call "BDSM" into a pocket of sexist piggery on the assumption that all women were subs and all men were Doms. Obviously, if they saw this as so universal, they must have been including themselves - they weren't saying, "How come I'm the only woman I know who isn't a masochist?" And, as Andrea Dworkin makes clear in her own autobiographical writing, the reason for this was simple: they weren't exceptions to this "rule".

Indeed, Robin Morgan's own exploration of the subject explained "female masochism" as an inevitable reaction to the thwarted desire for love that women felt, that we were all prepared to accept this shadow version of love for the real thing because men couldn't provide the genuine article.

And at no time has mainstream feminism ever offered a criticism of the underlying assumption that women are submissive or masochistic. They may argue that it evolves only out of a sexist cultural upbringing - that it is nurture, and definitely not nature, that creates this dualism of "perversion" - but they do not argue that the dualism is not there.

Only the splinter-group of SM women were trying to confront the myth, and even there, curious statements have fluttered through the community that have to make you wonder. Was it Califia who said that, "feminists make the best slaves"? Is something going on here?

It is not surprising that women who hold a feminist belief in equality would be scared to death by fantasies of submitting to men, given the way "female masochism" has been used since at least the time of Freud to validate laws and traditions that gave women lower social and legal status, not to mention as a justification of rape. To this very day, social conservatives prefer to believe that any evidence of submissive/masochistic sexuality in a woman is "proof" that men are supposed to dominate women. (I've even seen a real Christian marriage manual that is possibly the kinkiest thing I've ever read, using sexist language that sounds like a lot of old SM tropes - all with a straight face.)

The moral right is sometimes quite explicit about this, and it's clear that some of their social scientists honestly believe in the dichotomy and see feminism as the real perversion. Ironically, one such anti-porn researcher, Dolph Zillmann, is the one most often cited by "feminist" anti-porn activists to support their own view. Catherine Itzin, one of the better known anti-porn "feminists" in Britain over the last ten years, cites him frequently. She also dismisses anti-censorship women as being part of "the SM Mafia". Now, there's an interesting phrase, one that at once labels her opponents as perverts and questions their right to express their own views and experience at all. And Itzin complains that pornography silences women!

Well, I know that not all anti-censorship women (and there are a lot of anti-censorship women, at this point) are BDSM women, let alone subs, but I also know that feminism is full of fear that examining BDSM openly and honestly will let a very scary genie out of the bottle. I wish I could say with a certainty that the strongest fuel on the anti-SM side of the feminist movement wasn't coming from closet subs, but everything they say makes me think that's just what they are. So the other joke is that, while the anti-censorship side is full of a wide variety of women, some of whom are subs, some of whom are Dommes, and many of whom are neither, it seems like the anti-porn, anti-SM women are the ones who are most afraid of being exposed for the secret thralls to the patriarchy that they really are. Oh, dear.

For me, whether it's looked at as a feminist issue or just a general, common-sense matter, your body is your own, and so is your sexuality. The same arguments that apply to rape versus sex freely entered into apply here: You have a right to reject any partner and any act, in any place or time, that doesn't suit you, but when it comes to consensual acts, it ain't nobody's business but their own.

© Avedon Carol