The politics of BDSM

Whenever I bring up the specter of discrimination against kinky people to my liberal and sex-positive friends or even family, I get typically get the same response.

"You don't know what the social landscape will look like by the time you enter the workforce! Look at what the gay community has done in just the past decade!"

If there's one strain in liberal thought that's absolutely anathema to me, it's the naive insistence on the inevitability of progress, exhibited most strongly in the communists ("Like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." --Nikita Khrushchev). There was nothing inexorable about our victories in civil rights, social safety nets, and social permissiveness. Society does not tend to more progressive mores over time (progressive itself being a misnomer that reinforces this myth), at least not inexorably.

The best hope for improvements on this front, and it's slim enough, is riding on the coattails of the gay movement. If we can succeed in enacting very broadly-worded anti-discrimination against sexual orientation statutes into law, then convince a sufficiently sex-positive court that it does or should apply to us, that would be a huge victory. The general sexual permissiveness that the gay movement engenders also offers hope for the future.

Nevertheless, I am not very hopeful that such things will come to pass. Foremost among the reasons for pessimism is the lack of our community's will to political power. There is little consciousness of community among us; while appellations for individuals like dominant and submissive are common, the best we can come up with when referring to the collective are "kinky" or "the S&M community." Frankly, I think that the conservatives' railings against the "gay agenda" were well founded; the gay movement was breathtakingly well-organized and tenacious. We've certainly not got that. Frankly, there's a part of me that wants to get my law degree, join the national coalition for sexual freedom, and start trying to change that.

But that's far from our only concern. For one thing, language isn't doing us any favors, even beyond the complete inability it has to evoke a common consciousness in our community. Much as the gay community managed to turn its psychological designation "homosexual" into a relatively positive sounding, though by now dragged through the common culture as an insult of sorts, "gay," (and a shame that "homophile" never caught on) so too do we need find something better than "sadist" and "masochist." Might I suggest "lypiphile" - "pain lover" in Greek -as a catch all for both masochists and sadists, submissives and dominants?

More importantly, however, we've also got a vanishingly small bloc of support that cuts across the traditional political binary. Libertarians obviously have our back, as little good as the Ron Paul fanatics will do us. Conservatives hate us for obvious reasons. But most importantly, we've not got the entirety of support from the liberal bloc that carried the gay movement to a by now nearly consummated success.

The truth of the matter is, there's much in our sexuality for a certain type of liberal to dislike. Hierarchy, dominance, and control are anathema to liberals, and not all of them will see their evils mitigated by the fact that it's chosen - especially with the liberal tendency to discredit autonomy for environmental factors. If a criminal can be exonerated because of a bad home life, the masochist can be pitied for having been taught by their environment to glorify cruelty and suffering, to the point where the liberal in question ignores the entirely positive subjective experience and instead focuses upon those unhappy antecedent causes. (I've come out against the pop psychology explanation of masochists reliving their abuse in the past, and this shouldn't be construed as supporting that assertion. Nevertheless, it's the sort of explanation most people are likely to believe.) After having fought so hard for egalitarian relationships, many liberals will find it distasteful to return to what is perceived as an outmoded and barbaric form of relationship dynamics, again, even if it is freely chosen, and particularly when the genders of the participants evoke the bad old days of unchecked patriarchy. Feminists in particular will hate us, both because maledom femsub is the rule in the community (mostly because dominant women are like freaking unicorns. I am so incredibly glad that I'm bi, not only because of the ease of finding a partner, but also because the demographic problem has warped almost every aspect of femdom. But that's a subject for a different blog post), and because many see any instance of power and hierarchy during sex, even when freely chosen, even when the genders of the participants are subversive of traditional gender roles, as reinforcing the idea that sex must be predicated on a power relationship, and thus injurious to both sexes but particularly to women. Third-wave "sex positive" feminism will have our backs, but not everyone's on that bandwagon.

Of course, there are certain elements in the liberal camp that will support us. Many exalt autonomy above any of the previous concerns, and feel that a person's will to do what they wish is the highest good. In fact, I'd be tempted to say that, with the authoritarian section of the left in rapid decline ever since the demise of communism, that these types are what predominates in the American left today. If they can get over their initial revulsion to our odd sexuality, we'll have their support. And with the gay rights movement teaching them to do just that, there's a good chance we'll succeed.

As a self-identified liberal, though slowly sliding into libertarianism, I must answer these concerns if I am to reconcile my sexuality and my politics.

In the first place, I'm no anarchist. I do not see hierarchy qua hierarchy or authority qua authority as an evil. The institution of parenthood is one of many instances of benign authority. There is nothing in my philosophy to preclude benign authority, and that is precisely how I would define my relationship with Socrates, and any BDSM relationship at its best. Nor indeed should the comparison with parenthood imply irresponsibility. Rather than the abrogation of responsiblity that an adult child would desire, submission to me represents, in its best light, honor, duty, and devotion.

Moreover, if I understood the word correctly from my readings as a junior in high school, I am strictly a pheonomenologist. (Undoubtedly, my real life friends who have actually read Hegel are going to laugh at my crude approximations of the philosophy. To which I say, "hush.") I consider the highest truth to be the subjective experience of an individual, and as I have stated before, I emphatically reject the intrinsic theory of value. On this view, the fact that what I do in the bedroom has the outer trappings of the typically negative heirarchy and control is irrelevant. Indeed, because the subjective experience that it provokes in a submissive individual is so radically different than what it would provoke in anyone else, any sort of equviocation between the two is absurd, the most rank sophistry.

As to the feminist assertion that my activities reinforce a conception of sexuality as an act of power, I must disagree strongly. In the first place, I emphatically reject the second-wave feminist adage, "the personal is political." It's difficult to see how what I do in my bedroom, with at least a modicrum of secrecy, affects the broader culture. But even if it did, it would not send a message that control and hierarchy in sexual relationships were okay, but that autonomy and individual choice were paramount to having a rewarding sex life.

Moreover, my personal philosophy considers autonomy of the utmost importance. And while, on the face of it, this would present a problem with my desire to surrender autonomy, at least in part, there is actually no conflict. If I don't have enough autonomy to be able to surrender it when I feel that it will lead to a more rewarding life, I consider that autonomy meaningless.

Even with all of this, though, there are times when I can't shake the feeling that conventional wisdom is right. No, I don't have any guilt about the supposed perversion of it; that ship sailed a long time ago, when I was coming to grips with my bisexuality. Nor indeed can it be fairly characterized, in my opinion, as guilt.

But there is a fear that I've somehow been corrupted. That my soul has been taught to revel in the basest of actions. This may be an exultant expression of my deepest self, but if I feel that the ultimate expression of my self is when I'm being used as a human toilet, what's that say about my self?

Those times are rare enough, however. Ultimately I know them to be baseless anxieties imposed upon me by an intolerant society. I rest easy on my conviction that the inherent theory of value is ultimately a bankrupt philosophy.