MGTOW Saturday continues with an exciting new evo-psych explanation as to why women, who are so evil, are also so appealing to most men. Because they’re basically giant, sexy Big Macs, at least according to this evo-psychologist wannabe posting in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit.
And now I’m hungry again.
@Katie : thoses bunch don’t quite look like feminist to me, since they want women to conform to an ideal. They can dislike you for how you behave without trying to shame you out of it ; peopple don’t say to people who blast rap out of their sound system in the commute that they are a disgrace to the human race but that they are annoying, so you who isn’t even really annoying shouldn’t be shamed that way.
I am surprised that you aren’t met with disapproval with being polyamoros. Might be country related ; in France it’s an easy ticket to harassment town.
Katie, thats a complicated topic. I dont think its fair for anyone to judge you, and obviously you can be a fdminist and a submissive. The problem that feminists might have with that is that our actions and words have meaning and impact outside of our control, for example you might give your boyfriend or other men the wrong idea about what women are supposed to like/be like. I don’t advocate against bdsn or anything, sexuality is too personal and too complex to judge, but it worries that it might become, to some extend, yet another trend that women are socially pressured into, like anal sex became, like shaving became, like gynoplastia is becoming, etc.
And no, i dont believe in feel good “every choice made by a woman is valid” feminism, at all. To me feminism is about ending systemic oppression and understanding/ending gender roles, and women can and do contribute to shit. For example, strippers contribute to the objectification of women as a group, no matter how they themselves feel about what they do.
Continuation: also take into account that women have a long, suffered history of being sexually subjected to men (not sure how to better phrase this), so while theres nothing really wrong with what you do, it can be off putting to fwminists for such reasons (which dont mean they can harass you about it, geez). Like, would you be put off by a black person having slavery roleplays/fetishes? Similar deal i think.
Well, I wouldn’t know if it is common or not, but personally I am pretty uncomfortable with the kind of submissiveness you describe. One of the reasons being that I read about women in the kink community who were submissive to men (and they are the majority of women in the community) and this particular woman (sorry I cannot cite – I was reading about Burning Man and this woman was involved and I read more about her) told of how EVERY woman submissive to men that she knew had been raped at some point.
I have found some articles to illustrate the point:
http://jezebel.com/5958113/kink-community-tells-sexual-assault-victims-its-all-their-fault
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/on-sexual-assault-in-the-bdsm-community/
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/kink-bdsm-consent-problem/
I would not respond in the same way as those young women you encountered, but I really don’t see how your submissiveness to men is NOT at odds with your feminism.
That is certainly a new take on evolutionary theory.
So presumably men must have simultaneously realised that women are evil (no context given so I guess being ‘evil’ can mean whatever the hell you want) whilst ‘evolving’ to find us beautiful?
Meaning that men saw us all as hideous trolls UNTIL they realised that we are all evil, by which time we were all beautiful in the evolutionarily addled manbrains.
Knowing that evolutionary changes take a LONG time this would have happened over MANY generations.
Does that sound logical?!
LOL
@KK
This is a kinda BDSM slogan. I may not be into something, but, so long as the participants are game, it ain’t my place to criticize it. Y’all do y’all
Here’s why I don’t buy it…
It’s not wrong to discuss kinks. Everything is worthy of discussion (time, space, manner, and interlocutor considerations made, of course). And it’s not wrong to feel like some kinks hold a social component. Of course they do. Rape survivors will sometimes use ‘consensual non consent’ as a coping mechanism. Interracial cuckoldry doesn’t work without hundreds of years of racist bullshit as a foundation. And, if culture can influence kink, I don’t see why it wouldn’t happen the other way around
(Bit TMI)
there’s things I won’t do with my girlfriend cos I don’t like the the power dynamics involved. And vice versa
(Bit TMI)
Now, the folks getting at you were being absolutely shitty. Nobody deserves to be mocked or called names for their risk aware and consensual activities. So, they can go eat gravel as far as I’m concerned. That said, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the idea that being a feminist and being subby are, at least somewhat, opposed. I really don’t know, I’ll let others opine there
I will say that, if that is the case, it’s perfectly OK. Since when does a feminist hafta be 100% feminist in all things all the time? Honestly, I see the shaming of submissive women by feminists to be incredibly misogynistic. That you can’t be a person but a paragon of virtue in order to be of value. Women are expected to be perfect, and that’s shitty. So, once again, gravel eating can commence
Hopefully that was helpful. And *hugs* having to deal with that stuff
ETA: more experienced kinksters? I’m new, feel free to tear this whole thing to shreds. There’s a pretty significant chance I’m talking utter bollocks, so hand me my ass if y’all see fit 🙂
Katie, a couple things to consider:
Submissiveness is not necessarily a feminine trait. I met far more submissive men than women when I was active in the bsdm scene.
Roleplaying out one’s kinks in public involves other people in your sex games without gaining their consent. If that’s what you were doing at this party, can you see how these meany-pants feminists might object to being made into an audience for you? Especially if you are involving them in a scene they find repugnant, rather than hot? If you want to have a D/s relationship, there are plenty of ways to do that without the bsdm version of pda.
Also, the personal really is political. Feminisim isn’t about doing whatever you want because it feels good. It has increased personal liberty a great deal but you still have to consider how your actions will affect other people.
@Weasel
Was she doing that? Cos I didn’t read this anywhere in her comment. Reading comprehension has legit never been my strong suit. Did I miss something? She just said they were talking (maybe the subject came up)…
You do realise that excluding and badmouthing sex workers is also a form of oppression, right? That it also enforces gender roles? There’s nothing radical or revolutionary about slut-shaming no matter what language you couch it in.
It also completely ignores the reality of, well, reality. It’s borderline “Picture a spherical feminist in a vacuum.”
</hangover-related grumpiness>
@Axe, Weasel
I’m a day-sleeper so I’m about to go to bed and look at the comments when I wake up, but I want to make it clear if it wasn’t that I was just talking with people who had asked questions about the topic. I was not doing anything sexual and involving random people in it, that would be creepy.
@Axe, Weasel
I don’t see my first comment so if this is a double post I apologize but I was just discussing the topic with people who were curious and they joined the conversation and it got really ugly. I was not doing anything kinky in public at all. It was just a discussion. I am going to sleep now and will check the comments when I wake up. Everyone have a lovely day and thanks for the responses so far.
Sorry Katie, I mis-read you and thought the discussion was started because you were kneeling, ect. I’ve known D/s couples to do that kind of aggressive public role play before- it’s one of the reasons I stopped being active in the scene, frankly.
It’s possible the feminists you encountered were just pushy jerks. They are people after all. Nobody likes to feel criticized over something as intimate as their kinks, but like Axe said, you can’t pretend these things have no social component. Role-playing out subjugation to a man can’t ever be 100% just innocent fun in a world where a lot of women get that forced on them. You don’t know what these women’s backgrounds were like, so you can’t assume their distaste was just academic. You do what’s right for you and you know your partner, but it is something to think about, why you find a certain thing exciting, and why others do not.
@ weasel-rah
I completely understand where you’re coming from with your argument. I do feel a bit uneasy about it though. Perhaps I can set out why it makes me a little uncomfortable?
This feels a little too much like the ‘male gaze harvesting’ thing. Like you’re somehow responsible for how other people choose to react to their observing of you. It’s the same argument that requires schoolkids to dress ‘appropriately’ so as not to distract the boys.
Again, this puts responsibility on people for other people’s reactions. Like how people freak out at seeing same sex couples or inter-racial couples engaging in PDAs.
This is obviously a complex topic, and I agree that actions influence culture as much as culture influences people. But having said that I don’t think anyone owes a duty to others to suppress their own life choices for some nebulous collective good. Whether a woman wears a hijab or a dog collar should be, I believe, a matter entirely for her, regardless of what other people may think about the signals it sends.
Not having a dig. Your points are completely reasonable. I just think the counter argument is perfectly reasonable too and when there’s a conflict like that I tend to default to an individual freedom stance.
I don’t want to say I’m judging you super hard right now, but as a Basic White Girl (Who Happens to be from California):
(Avocado is fucking amazing, y’all. Fer srs.)
But if women choose to do something that is “gendered”, how is that bad? If they truly like to do something, and chose to do it, or if they’re just trying it out, why the fucking shame?
For example, I like to cook and sew and I’m feminine-presenting. Am I then “contributing to shit” because I enjoy something that’s been coded as “feminine”? I like to wear dresses and my favorite color is pink. Am I not being a proper feminist because I chose these things?
And if we’re out to “end gender roles”, why the fuck should it matter if women do these “gendered” things anyways? Ending gender roles shouldn’t mean that we just switch gender roles with men, because then we’d be right back to square one.
The only way to end gender roles is to allow anyone to take part in these activities and not bar them based on their (either perceived or actual) gender. Not just encouraging people to act only outside their gender role.
Ew. No. Stop being a SWERF. No one here likes SWERFs.
Bashing sex workers and saying that they’re “contributing to objectification” is bullshit, for a few reasons:
1. Men can be/are strippers too. Are they “objectifying” men?
2. People should be allowed to own their sexuality in any way they want, as long as it’s in an acceptable place and around people who consent to it. Strippers are performers who perform for consenting adults and get paid to do it, nothing bad about that.
3. Slut-shaming women isn’t fucking feminist.
4. Sounds like you have a lot of fucking internalized misogyny to work through if you want to shame strippers for doing what they do.
@Katie
On makeup and presenting as girly, it’s complicated for me. Growing up the girls who were really into makeup and feminine clothing and hair products were the ones who attacked me a lot for not being into those things and also for being fat. As an adult, I don’t have that problem anymore, but when I see someone who presents that way I wonder if they’re one of those types. I get told a lot that I should wear makeup. My wedding planner told me I had to wear makeup if I wanted to be able to look at my wedding photos (I cried a lot that night). Now I cringe when I look at my wedding photos because they don’t looks like me because I wore the damn makeup. I’ve had coworkers suggest that I should have worn makeup for group photo days. While I don’t think it’s anti-feminist to wear makeup, makeup is currently a tool that the system uses to control women. We’re turned down for jobs over it, we’re both expected to spend the limited money we’re allowed to earn on it and shamed for being superficial when we do. We don’t exist in a vacuum so our choice is not free. Nothing we do is simply because we like it. We like it because of all of the influences around us. But I certainly can’t blame any individual woman for choosing to wear it. We all make choices about which parts of society we do and don’t want to participate in, and those choices always have some positive aspects and some negative aspects (I doubt a purely positive or negative choice exists in any decision of this type). We have to weigh those along with all of our other decisions.
TMI time: I have some fantasies that are pretty submissive, so I get the BDSM sub thing. But for me I prefer not to talk to anyone about them. I did talk with my husband early on but really it’s not something I want to act out; I just fantasize sometimes. I have similar thoughts to makeup on this, where the desire and choice aren’t being made in a vacuum and I know a big part of my personal fantasies has to do with how women aren’t supposed to have sexual pleasure (this has improved more recently but when I was a teenager and forming my sexual identity it was still to the point where I didn’t understand why women liked sex until I had an orgasm, which didn’t happen until I’d been sexually active for a while). By fantasizing about not being the one in control, I felt more free to experience pleasure. This is absolutely rooted in patriarchy, but at the same time I can’t help the way growing up in this society has shaped me.
@Katie
Not everything that we do has feminist implications. I’ve been spending most of my free time lately building out the movie studio in The Sims Freeplay on my tablet. There’s nothing particularly feminist about that, nor does there need to be. (70.2% done, y’all!)
However, some choices that we make have implications on culture. We are products of our culture. There is no such thing as “natural” human behavior, and claiming that some trait is “innate” is fraught because separating our innate traits from our culturally-defined traits is difficult. We can say that homosexuality and heterosexuality, for instance, are innate because they cross cultures and occur everywhere at generally the same rates, whereas we can’t say the same about BDSM.
It’s important to interrogate our culturally-influenced traits, and the actions we take as a result, and determine if they advance feminism, are neutral, or detract from it. Feminism, at its core, is the effort to advance the station of women toward equality. How does acting as a BDSM submissive help to achieve that?
I’m not saying that you can’t do BDSM with your boyfriend, but it’s not a particularly feminist thing to do. Depending on how open you are about your collar-wearing, and depending on what kind of attitudes this reinforces in your boyfriend, it can be detracting from feminism.
What you’re describing here is sometimes called “choice feminism.” As in, “I am female, I choose my choice, therefore my choice is feminist.” Choice feminism is super-appealing to people who don’t really want to do feminism. There are a lot of anti-feminist women, for example, who claim to be doing choice feminism when they try to squash down other women. If a woman trying to put other women back into the kitchen is feminist just because a woman is doing it, then feminism ceases to mean anything.
@Alan
Eh… disagree here. In these cases, nobody’s objecting to the act. They’re objecting to the participants. I don’t like seeing PDAs personally. I don’t broadcast that to the folks doing it tho. And I definitely don’t determine the strength of my objection on the genders or ethnicities or whatever of said people. There’s a pretty big difference between ‘I feel uncomfortable about people being explicitly kinky around me’ and ‘I feel uncomfortable about gays being explicitly kinky around me’. And that difference should be noted
Agreed. Also, it feels a bit victim blamey to put the onus on women to upend patriarchal and toxically masculine dominance culture (my vocabulary, behold it!). It happens, but it’s way way rarer that the convo comes up about whether it’s OK for men to be dominant…
@KatieKitten420 – I’m sorry you had that experience. I don’t think those women were generally representative of feminists. Perhaps they didn’t mean to say upsetting things, but they did, and your feelings are valid. They could have been somewhat naive/misinformed and thought that being submissive in one area of life (e.g. sex) = being submissive in all areas, or that you held it up as some sort of feminine ideal.
At the same time, it’s true – as @PoM said – that our activities and preferences are shaped by culture. And again that our actions influence culture in turn. That said, I don’t think that something private like sex-related activities between two or three people has much chance to shape culture either for good or bad, and I don’t think that being a submissive in a relationship is necessarily bad. There are other actions you can take that have much more influence on the world, and it’s those that will show whether you’re a committed feminist or not, IMO.
@ Axe
Yeah, I see your point. Is there though a distinction between the act and the participants? The ‘offence’ appears to be ‘existing in public’. Obviously that arises from the identities of the participants, but it’s daring to ‘scare the horses’ that seems to be the trigger. Although with bigots it’s the mere fact that people exist that bugs them, regardless of whether they actually observe them. Reminds me of that old definition of puritanism; “that lurking feeling that somewhere out there people might be happy”.
(We’ll probably have to dig that one out now with the DUP thing)
@KatieKitten
As you can see above, this is a complicated issue that even people who all identify as feminists have trouble with.
One thing that stands out to me in your story is *how* this was tackled. Whatever you may think politically of someone’s behaviour, a personal/mean attack on someone you have just met at a party is both rude and inappropriate. If you have a problem with something someone is doing or you disagree with something they’ve said, the correct way to express that is: “I disagree with you/feel uncomfortable with what you said and here are my reasons,” not “You’re wrong, and destroying feminism.” I actually think this is an issue of manners, not feminism – there are many different types of thinking in feminism and you’re never going to get a definite answer about whether they or you are right, because there isn’t one 🙂 But they were sure as hell rude 🙂
For the record, my personal opinion is that any attempt at all to police other women’s behaviour or looks on the grounds of “being unfeminist” is… inherently unfeminist. I am not into forcing people to conform, whether it’s to the patriarchy or the matriarchy.
Oh God, not the fucktabulous “Choice feminism” buzzword again. Do I really need to explain why comparing submissives, sex workers and stay-at-home mothers to fucking Christina Hoff Sommers is just plain gross yet again? Because I’m way too sober for that right now.
(Yes, I know who posted that. No, I don’t care. That fucking exclusionary-ass feministier-than-thou bullshit buzzword pisses me right off.)
It is the one thing that keeps us from thinking logically
Lulz.
I’m a virgin
So, all that experience with evil women and marriage is just bitterness and brainwashing from the mgtow cult.
I’m shocked, shocked I say!
Do I really need to explain that I didn’t do that?
@Ellesar : your point make me uneasy, because it’s the same argument who is used to police the way women dress.
It’s one thing to ask a submissive in a BDSM community to be prudent. It’s another one to say what you said.
Also, in which way the fact that submissives are more at risk is at odds with feminism ? I think asking people to fit a mold, regardless of which one is fundamentally at odds with feminism and progressism. It’s the same problem as denying feminisn to veiled women.
(however, I can double on with the advice of choosing very carefully a BDSM community. It’s a very mixed and dangerous bag)
I’m with SFHC. There’s a world of difference between women and feminine-presenting persons choosing to do traditionally feminine and/or sexy things that society frowns upon, and being a terrible person who insists that they’re a feminist because they’re being shitty people and chose to be so.
There shouldn’t be any shame in women choosing their life for themselves, regardless of how much or how little it fits into a gendered role.
However, there should be plenty of shame for women (or anyone for that matter) for trying to pressure other people into a way of life that they personally approve of, instead of letting that person (or persons) decide for themselves.