Begrudgingly Introspective

“My initial proposal expressed a special kind of vitriol for anyone who would dare interrogate the motivations of someone in a D/s relationship. Rather, a dynamic where one partner exerts an agreed upon amount of control over the other. My first attempts to explain such a relationship on paper were quickly scrapped, leading to the brief, sanitary sentence above that could never touch on every facet involved in such an arrangement. How do I explain this to a layman without describing abuse with extra steps? Though I was hardly an Anastasia Steele when it came to my own experiences with powerplay, at 20 I couldn’t even pretend to hold a fraction of the knowledge real sex educators had.”

I started my research with a seemingly-complete idea of the logic behind feminists who looked down on expressions of sadomasochism. It became easy to develop the idea that this movement was both relatively new and mostly concentrated in the digital realm, persisting only through uninformed users trying to sound progressive without considering the consequences of their rhetoric.

Of course, that was hardly the case, and I found myself returning back to one article in particular, linked below –

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470593120926240?journalCode=mtqa

The above content somehow touches on just about everything my piece hoped to dispute. Each enviously well-articulated section echoes sentiments common amongst the “anti-kink” branch of feminism. I would come back to it several times a day, quickly growing frustrated with the image of the vulnerable woman the authors painted. From the article’s perspective, female practitioners of taboo sexual acts, BDSM and all, were not acting on their own desires, but rather some sort of compulsion to adhere to a system that consistently relegated them to inferior positions, even in bed. The world the writers depicted was, by their own admission, “rather fatalistic,” framing the sex lives of many women as being unwitting extensions of a culture of persecution.

I’ve been historically indignant towards the apparent need of women to justify their own desires as existing separately from those of a man. Beyond the inherent erasure of many queer women and other individuals’ experiences, the assumption that most women find themselves in a submissive role due to their inability to recognize their place in the patriarchy has always been belittling to me. Disputing the basis for such a suggestion would be ignorant of me, as living a single day in a woman’s body would be enough to confirm that there’s some truth to this. That does not mean, however, that the consensual imposition of control is synonymous with a loss of agency. To imply that there must be some sort of dramatic reasoning for any woman’s choice in the bedroom also implies that women as a whole are born fundamentally pure and thus incapable of naturally finding solace in sexual deviation.

If the above passage didn’t indicate as much, most of the challenge in these last couple of weeks has been in reconciling an obvious bias in my research. The last thing I’d want my writing to do is a reflect a position that’s more defensive than investigative, parroting the same tone of the various nuance-allergic online activity that kickstarted this project in the first place. Part of my hope in combining psychological framework with personal nonfiction was to highlight my chosen topic in a more human and revealing way. While this will certainly mean confirming some points contained in my opposing view’s article (and yes, demonstrate my ever-reviled pattern of self-justifying behavior), it will also give me a chance to write a more honest portrayal of how women might organically develop atypical sexual habits.