#Gamergaters applaud hiring of fake gamer as Breitbart Tech editor

“excuse to get sexually off without claiming “BDSM” but kink is outlawed in their religion.” BECAUSE kink is outlawed in their religion, I meant. And “revealing” should be “revelling”

M, I’m not going to echo your call for Virtually Out Of Touch to be banned, because I think she’s at least engaging in good faith and banhammering should be reserved for those who’re worse. However I acknowledge my privilege in saying this, and so am happy to listen to others if they feel she’s a detriment.

@Virtually:

A few times perhaps not, but consistently over years, it is. Ask the doctors who are dealing with young and younger people coming in with stretched out this, prolapsed that. Or better yet, ask the people dealing with these health issues directly, like I did.

I’ll repeat myself: this is a homophobic slur. Accusations of anal sex being unnatural and unhealthy are nothing new, and have been thrown at gay men for a long time; this is just the latest incarnation.

That hole is entirely capable of handling things going in, because it’s capable of handling things equally big coming out. It’s a muscle: muscles don’t become weaker through being used.

Sex “negative” feminism? What does that mean?

Here’s a moderate position advocated by the great Heina Dadabhoy, attacking the lived reality of sex positivity rather than its idealised form:

http://skepchick.org/2013/07/sex-negative/

(I agree utterly with what Heina says there, by the way.)

Here is a more hardline position, attacking the ideal form of sex positivity:

https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/

(As a straight man it’s not my place to agree or disagree with this position.)

Genuine kinksters may gravitate toward more male submissives but the vast majority of people are mainstream and the mainstream push is for women to be the subs, hello 50 Shades of B.S. and online porn where the default is women being subbed and degraded and this is what kids are exposed to today.

Here’s where you lose me.

I think you are conflating, as Orion said, two different things: kinky people being kinky with one another, and BDSM-flavoured pornography which is aimed at a non-kink audience.

Do you have a quarrel with the first group (in which I include myself, and in which I know a number of excellent people, including a lot of badass feminist women)? If not, I would like to ask you to use language which is not condemnatory of us, because right now that’s exactly what you’re doing and it’s irritating.

As for the second group, yes, I agree that there’s a problem with BDSM being used as flavour of the month to sell straight pornography, whether it be romanticised abuse like 50 Shades or non-romanticised abuse like a lot of pornographic images and movies. If I could wave a magic wand to get rid of all this shit, believe me, my hands would be a motion blur.

However.

Just as there is an issue with lesbian pornography (not the straight stuff, but authentic lesbian content by women for women) being consumed by a straight male audience who appropriate its content for a patriarchal society, there is also an issue with BDSM pornography which is created by kinksters for kinksters being consumed by a mainstream audience who appropriate its content for patriarchy. As such, one is caught in a bind: you cannot reasonably ask us not to make porn for one another, but you can’t stop that stuff going mainstream either. It’s a difficult position.

Like I said, if your position is that vanilla appropriation of authentic kinky stuff is a problem, I agree. On the other hand, if your position is that all kinky stuff is problematic because of the culture in which it takes place, I agree with the sentiment but disagree with the conclusion. If your position is that kink is inherently wrong full stop, then fuck you.

@EJ,

I get what you’re saying about bdsm, but it seems like it’s a very different way of fetishizing power. Mainly because it’s not about violating boundaries and does require carefully set boundaries beforehand.

@Virtually,
I didn’t bring up that story to demonize kink or anal. I brought it up because it was about a man who thought that it was acceptable to dictate how his wife should style herself and complain about her enforcing boundaries. The fact that she was frequently and happily satisfying most of his other sexual desires (including anal sex) and that that wasn’t good enough for him suggests that what he wasn’t satisfied with getting piv or anal from someone who didn’t hate those acts and that he wanted to let her do the things that he knew that she hated. It wasn’t really about the physical acts themselves; it was about wanting to wear her down into doing something that she didn’t like.

@VOoT:

A few times perhaps not, but consistently over years, it is. Ask the doctors who are dealing with young and younger people coming in with stretched out this, prolapsed that.

That sounded like BS, so I tried looking around. So far I’ve found the following: 1. Prolapsed rectums are most commonly encountered on children under the age of 6, no cause given that I’ve seen so far. Most likely a birth defect. I assume that if I’m wrong about that and penetration was involved, it most likely would have been the result of child rape. 2. There is an exotic porn thing which I’ve never heard of called “rosebudding” which involves inducing a temporary, partial prolapse, and this is supposedly very dangerous. Don’t know how it works, really don’t care to know. 3. Came across a few conservative blogs which were all “gay sex causes prolapsed anuses hurr durr” without providing any links or proof. I’m still thinking it’s BS.

@Leda Atomica: I’m not fully steeped in BDSM culture, but I’ve been to some events. There are Male Doms with female subs. There are Female Dommes with male subs. There are Female Dommes with female subs. I hardly saw any M/m Dom/sub pairings, but I’ve been told that gay men into BDSM don’t usually mix with the straights and have their own things. I’ve even seen pre-op/non-op trans people with whoever. There are also switches, who take turns with the different roles. And sometimes you can’t even tell which one is the Dom(me) and which is the sub… people would probably think my boyfriend is the Dom at first glance if they saw us engaging in BDSM play because he’s the one doing things to me (i.e. the “top”), but I’m the one in charge of the relationship. And on top of that, not all people engage in the S&M portion of BDSM.

So no, I’m pretty sure that in terms of actual experiences of actual practitioners, it’s not about “women as a submissive punching bag”. If anything, it’s somewhat more egalitarian than society as a whole. At least if you consider the choice to be dominant or submissive to another, and other people’s respecting that choice, to be a form of equality.

Oh, and thank you @Snowberry! Posted without refreshing page, ooops.

@Leda:
As you will.

BDSM grew out of the conflation of two scenes, the gay leather S&M scene and the straight femdom B&D prostitution scene, neither of which matter nowadays because the internet happened and swept all the Old Guard stuff away. (A lot of gay leather people are pissed about that, incidentally, and see it as appropriation of their space and crowding them out. They’re not wrong, but… bleh. The politics of Old Guard could be another handful of essays unto itself.) In the modern world what you have is a melange of many different people who come to the scene with different motives and for different reasons. Because most people are straight, most people on the scene are straight, although gay, bisexual and trans* people are disproportionately common.

In my experience, one of the issues that makes it hard to answer your question simply is that the same act can be interpreted very differently by different people. For example if I go to a club leading a friend on a collar and leash, then we would understand it as a deliberate use of power dynamics within a relationship in which we both got off on that sort of thing but were nonetheless consenting equals. Right next to us, however, a person might see us and think “right on, brother, all women are animals, I’m glad you’ve shown that bitch her place”, and another person might think “he must be amazing for her to let him do that to her, I bet he makes six figures and buys her all the shoes she wants.” These people might even engage in play together, each getting their own different thing out of it; and there’s a whole body of community etiquette which moderates that.

For that reason, it’s difficult to say “the scene is about X.” Even if it’s an act that two different couples do, they almost certainly mean different things by it.

Statistically, most people in the scene are submissive straight men. Unfortunately dominant straight women are the rarest, and can often charge for their services for that reason. Submissive straight women are more common than dominant straight men, however these numbers are reversed by the large number of non-kinky men who come into the scene in the patriarchal perception that it’s an easy way to score a freaky chick. We fucking hate those people, not least because they create a woman-hostile atmosphere which further upsets the numbers, but it is a thing and it does happen.

Harassment is, sadly, an issue; and a lot of people draw precisely the wrong lessons from it.

Because of this and other factors, yes, most of the couples one sees at events and parties are male dominant/ female submissive. It’s my suspicion that these sorts of couples are actually even more common when you factor in the people who pop up, find a mutually-agreeably kinky partner, then disappear again to live quiet happy kinky lives and never interact with the wider scene, content in their own monogamous bliss. However, I have no statistics to back up this hunch.

On the other hand, especially in bigger cities, one tends to see the scene fragment. There are female dominant parties, male dominant parties, gay events, female-only events, rope events, et cetera. (Rope in particular has a reputation for being something of a cult – people discover it and disappear off into that social circle, never to be seen again.) Therefore, it’s entirely possible that someone may go through the scene and go to lots of parties and so on, while only seeing one part of it. If they come out saying “the scene is about X” then that was genuinely their lived experience and I will not contradict it, but it’s kind of like the metaphor of the blind people and the elephant.

Finally, in my city there are a lot of people in their early to mid 20s in the scene who are less kinky and more into the promiscuity and wild experimental sex aspects. In previous decades they would probably have attached themselves to a different subculture and adopted its trappings. Fortunately, these people bring a very tumblr-style set of gender politics to the scene in which patriarchal assumptions are responded to with dismissive laughter at best.

Does that answer the question? Sorry if I went on wayyyy too long.

@Orion: Maybe it varies from region to region? Or even if my experience is highly atypical, I wouldn’t consider that to be a very valid view. It’s not too far removed from the kind of argument where “women cannot meaningfully consent to sex with men because patriarchy”. That was rejected by most 2nd-wave feminists and is even less accepted now.

Hello.

About the blue hair, i do not really understand why they have a problem with it. Having being raised among old TV animes including characters with a rainbowick panel of hair colors, i never have been surprised, and even less shocked, by persons dying their hair with this kind of color (which does not mean i always find it charming). Mind you, if searchers find, one day, a way to make the specific gene which control the color to the hair encoding other colors than the traditionnal ones, maybe, it may be fun.
I wonder how the gamer community will react if, in a future episode, Lara Croft dyes her hair in blue. Burn at stake ?

Have a nice day.

dhag85:
More accurately. They recognize that said fictional women don’t have agency and its their creators that do. They want the same control of real women as they do fictional.

@Orion:

I’m not so sure. There’s lots of female-submissive stuff marketed as “fetish” or “kink” porn. In some cases it’s produced by the same people as the fem-dom videos. Kink.com, for instance, has a mix of everything. People in the scene definitely do consume it — I know several submissive women who watch fetish porn (or found the scene via fetish porn) and some dominant male kinksters also. Now, there are lots of men who aren’t involved in BDSM who enjoy having power over women; it’s possible that these men are the primary market for “fetish” porn, but I kind of doubt it. In my very limited exposure to fetish porn, I got the impression that it tended to focus on things your standard male chauvinist would probably find repulsive, like machinery, gags, suspensions, rubber, urine, and the like. (I could be mistaken; I myself find all those things repulsive, so I didn’t investigate much) I would guess that the films marketed as “BDSM” or “fetish” porn probably are consumed mainly by the kinky.

That’s an interesting point.

I agree that kink people watch kink porn (including kinky women), and my apologies if it sounded like I suggested that they didn’t. However, since vanilla people massively outnumber us and many aspects of the scene end up getting appropriated by vanilla people to suit their own needs, it is my belief that most kink porn is made for the consumption of the vanilla people because that’s where the market is.

I think we disagree here: if I’m right then the male-dom stuff is made for a non-kinky audience who are less put off by the fetish aspects than you suppose; if you’re right then the kink scene (or the people who are sitting at home wishing there was a scene in their town / they were socially able to be part of it) skews far more male-dom than I’d supposed; or it could be the chudwahs ruining everything again.

Now, I happen to know the documentary VooT’s link cited (The Price of Pleasure); although it’s commonly invoked in anti-BDSM posts, it’s not about “bdsm/fetish” porn at all. It’s actually primarily about what is sometimes called “gonzo” porn (although most websites don’t have a “gonzo” category, so this stuff is just spread everywhere).

Ah, thanks for that clarification. I entirely agree with the sex-negative people when it comes to gonzo porn. That stuff is genuinely horrible and speaks poorly of the society that produces and consumes it. I was happy when Max Hardcore went to prison and hope that more of the producers join him there.

I haven’t seen that documentary. I’ll see if I can track it down.

It’s funny how things vary from region to region. I’m passingly familiar with the scenes in a couple of American cities, and while I too have seen most non-straight sexualities well-represented, I’ve actually found male homosexuals to be distinctly uncommon. Gay kinksters seem to have decided that it’s easier to find a kinky man in the gay scene than a gay man in the kink scene, so they tend to stick to their own.

It might be a transatlantic thing, or just that my city has a very old, large gay community whose roots in the scene are sunk deep enough to be viable even today. I’d be interested to hear about what San Francisco is like, if you’re familiar with it: as one of the gay world’s cities of pilgrimage, I’d be surprised if it didn’t have a strong gay kink scene (although that scene may not overlap with the straight one.)

@Leda Atomica:

Thank you for the insight to the way society can affect a man’s view of himself (and women), Falconer.

AAAAHHH NO I DON’T HAVE INSIGHTS I HAVE PRIVILEGES All I know is what I’ve read on the Internet, but thank you very much!

(Crossing my fingers and hoping that if you meant “fuck off, Falconer,” you’d have said “fuck off, Falconer.”)

Hey, I’m really enjoying all this BDSM stuff! I haven’t participated in my local scene for a while, but I see my experiences reflect those of EJ and Orion.

I agree the is no “one way” of feeling/experiencing BDSM and it’s mostly influenced by whatever worldview we have before we practice it.

As for communities being egalitarian -or not- my experience is, yes they are somewhat more egalitarian (at least the ones I’ve participated in) but not in an obvious way.

I actually became a self-defined feminist because of the exchanges going on in that community, because I’ve never met such vocal feminists… AND anti-feminists.

I realized with time, that old straigh dom dudes feelt extremely threatened by the slightly more diverse community than they are used to, so they -being MRA leaning from the begnning- take more and more radical positions, which are ignored or shrugged off by most people, even when being overtly aggressive or bigoted.

So it os a hostiler environment for women and feminists, but at the same time it offers more opportunities out of the trap, because feminists participate nonetheless and many of us are respected members of the community (especially feminist old straight men -go figure). And the effect of our presence is visible as well.

I guess a random youbg woman would have more chances of being mistreated in BDSM, either by ther partner and the community, mostly emotionally, but they also would have better chances to find people who can help, and to find an explanation of their feelings outside the traditional patriarchal narrative.

I’m not sure this evens things out. It’s complicated.

I think the worst mistake of seeing BDSM through a sex-negative lens is that we miss the oportunity to find out a hell lot of things, contradictory things, that are going on all at the same time in BDSM communities.