The selfishness of the submissive? Active and Passive Receptivity

Both my hobby of video gaming and my serious work at school have relied on the same method of teaching: iterative direction. I'm given a task and a framework, and a relatively stress-free environment to experiment where failure doesn't have tremendous consequences. Within the confines of the system I'm free to figure out what works best for me, and successively adapt my skills and behavior to what's being asked of me. It's a system of read-and-react, where I rely on others to set the tone and the pace, but am free to adjust the parameters to my liking.

My relationships, up until this point, have not been very different. I found this post over at Sex Geek particularly enlightening in figuring all this out:

A friend brought this up with me a few weeks ago. She was playing with several different dominants and tops, and she noticed that some of them wanted her to be still while they did things to her, and others wanted her to be active. She wondered if there was a “right” way to receive sensation. The question about active versus passive physical receptivity is very similar to the question of how much a submissive is being asked to think for themselves (anticipatory service, observing the way things are done and fitting into that, etc.) versus how much they are going to be directed (i.e. do what I say, and only what I say, and exactly as I say it, and when you’re done, do nothing but wait for further instruction). They’re simply different takes on submission/bottoming/providing service and on dominance/topping/receiving service.

Of course, there are no right answers, but here we engage with questions of match. In play, if a dominant fully expects a submissive to react and the submissive’s past experience has been with dominants who want them to hold still, or if the submissive’s natural inclination is to hold still, then the two of them may need to clarify what’s going on. The dominant may feel like the submissive isn’t properly appreciating their efforts, while the submissive may feel that response would be rude or overstep the bounds of their role. In service, if a dominant expects that the submissive will catch on to what’s going on and make themselves useful with minimal direction, but the submissive spends a lot of time kneeling and waiting for orders with eyes downcast, the dominant may end up feeling frustrated and burdened while the submissive may end up feeling inadequate because they’re pissing off the dominant despite following protocol perfectly. The flip side of each situation is equally painful: a responsive bottom who gets told to be quiet and hold still might feel shut down and under-appreciated; a service submissive who takes pride in their intuitive ability to serve may feel rejected and useless if told to stay out of the way and wait for orders. Still, this doesn’t indicate that anyone’s doing things wrong. It just means they’re each sending out signals with the best of intentions but that aren’t quite lining up. As always, clear communication is essential—when we attribute meanings to each of these modes and their many related flavours that may not match up with the person’s intent, we risk hurt feelings and misunderstanding.

I have up until this point definitively fallen into the category of passively receptive. I'm not so much concerned with the method of receiving sensation (where I do nevertheless fall also into the passive category), as that seems like simply a matter of taste, and I don't have much interest in service dynamics. I'm speaking here of negotiating the dynamic of a relationship, of figuring out to what extent and in what manner power exchange will be executed between the two of us and how we'll be expected to behave both in the general public and amongst our kinky friends. As perhaps befit both my submissive orientation and inexperience, I was perfectly happy to allow my partners to set the pace and tone of these considerations, both wishing not to step on my dominant's prerogatives and eager to try out all of the permutations of power exchange the BDSM world has to offer. Ideally, even if it didn't quite work out in practice, I would have spoken up when something wasn't working or if there was something that I wanted or needed that I wasn't getting. I have to admit that this has met with some success: each of the dominants I've been with have had their own flavor and unique flair that they brought to the relationship, and I've cherished the diversity of experiences I've been allowed to have by letting my partner take a leading role.

Even so, I'm a few years and a few more relationships wiser now, and I'd hoped to have a bit more of an idea of what works and doesn't work for me than I've gotten at present. I've very recently been collared to a wonderful person, and I've been more flummoxed than I'd like in the process of talking with her about exactly what I want out of the relationship. Perhaps because of her history as a pro-domme, she's more used to the active style of receptivity than the passive one; I imagine most of her previous clients had pretty clear ideas of what they wanted and had no problems making their desires known. It seems like my passive role in prior relationships led to some complacency, and that I hadn't put quite as much thought into what was working and what wasn't as I should have, so I feel like I'm playing catch-up now.

All of which means, even if there isn't a single right way to do this sort of thing, I could use a bit of infusion of the active receptivity into my relationship style. It feels, and is, pretty selfish to expect my partner to supply all the thought and energy into shaping our dynamic if they're not inclined to do so. A dynamic only shaped by my partner is also unlikely to be quite as satisfying as one that I had helped to shape, as well.

I think that my primary form of negotiation will still be the passive receptivity, where I react to the suggestions of my partner; it's simply where I feel most comfortable. Still, versatility on this score can't hurt; finding a compatible partner is difficult enough without adding this to this list. And trying out this other form of negotiation, if only in the short term, can only lead to better self-awareness and communication skills.

The Crisis

I'm going to grow old. And then I will die.

I've always known this fact, of course, and that it seems so much more pressing now than it seemed a year ago will seem odd to most people, as I'm in the height of my youth. I can only respond that, having to for the first time really take stock of my future, with graduation impending, all times after I leave school seem equidistant. Imagining myself at 40, 50, 70 is much easier than it once was, and all ages are equally easy.

I'm terrified, as, I suppose, we all are. First my looks will go, then my intelligence, then my strength of character, and eventually I will be left with none of the traits which I love myself for right now.

Actual death doesn't seem so bad, in comparison. Lucretius' argument makes some sense, at least. Non-existence was not so bad in the billions of years before I was born; I doubt it will be too bad in the billions of years hence. Fear of oblivion is irrational; there is no you anymore to fear any negative consequence.

Achilles' decision is looking more and more rational. A short glorious life may be kinder, if more cowardly, than having to face steady degeneration.

I know, of course, that such fears are uncharitable, and unloving. If I so desperately wish to remain young, I can't very well respect or love the old. If I fear that age will make me unlovable, I must already view the elderly people in my life with contempt. Humanae Vitae, nevermind its retrograde politics, begins to make a good deal more sense. If I am to love my 70-year old self, I must learn to appreciate the virtues of age.

More than anything else, this bit of wisdom I received from my mom has helped me: each age has its own joys. Certainly those of being 55 are different than those of being 21, but they are both worthwhile. I'll probably never bring as much enthusiasm to a television show as I did with Digimon when I was thirteen, and probably no sexual experience will ever match my first time when I was nineteen. Even so, I wouldn't trade the increased self-awareness and self-acceptance I've gained with age for the enthusiasm I had back then, nor would most middle aged people, from what I understand. It's difficult to accept that what is important to me right now won't always be so, and even more difficult to accept that I'm going to have to carve out new niches for myself to figure out how to do what is important to me at each new stage in my life. But there is hope that, as the joys I invest myself in so deeply right now become impossible, new ones will become possible.

There's only one wrinkle. I'm not exactly sure what the joys of being 30 will look like, but I have a difficult time imagining myself enjoying them. Us deviants can enjoy the shallow cares of youth, but we will soon find our hedonistic joys turn to ash in our mouth with the passing of time, as our more respectable peers enter the adult worlds of parenthood and career and we are left to compete with the new generation in a self-destructive cycle. So it seems to me in my darkest moments when I buy the culture's messaging about who I am.

I know that those things are irrational self-loathing, but even so I have to own that I feel adrift where it comes to my future. Even were those options available to me, I can't see myself following the respectable options of a white-collar career with a family, 2.5 kids, and a house in the suburbs.

What exactly life has to offer to me other than that, I don't know. It once seemed like a grand adventure, that I would have to forge my own path. Now on the cusp, it seems much more daunting a task.

Even so, I wouldn't trade the opportunity to try for the world.

BDSM themes once more appearing in my schoolwork

I love, I must confess, that generous pride,

Which has never bent beneath a yoke of sighs...

To make an unyielding courage bend,

To make that unfeeling heart of his feel pain,

To fetter a captive astonished by his chains,

Fighting the yoke, that delights him so, in vain:

That’s what I wish, that is what excites me.

To disarm Hippolytus counts for more than Hercules:

Often vanquished, and defeated more swiftly,

To the eyes that tamed him offering less glory.

From Racine's Phedre

I had fun translating this =)

The age-old queer flame war: gender conformers vs. nonconformers

It was inevitable: The Neogaf gay thread has finally erupted into conflict between the gender noncoformers and those who act more in line with social expectations. While, as with most online debates, they're generating more heat than light, the discussion over the past page or so has at least been enlightening, and it's interesting food for thought.


I think it should go without saying that all gender expressions ought to be acceptable, and that we ought to take them as legitimate expressions of identity rather than a disingenuous piece of rhetoric in the culture wars. Feminine guys act that way on the whole because they feel more comfortable acting that way, not because they want attention; masculine guys are acting the way they do on the whole because they feel more comfortable doing so, not because they're desperately seeking the approval of hetero society. At least, that's what the vast majority of each group tells me, and claiming that you have transcendent insight into another's condition better than they themselves have is just hubris, and fails to treat people with the respect they are entitled to as members of the human species.


And yet I have to own that I've got a dog in this fight, and that my natural sympathies incline toward the nonconformers. I've been exploring my feminine side quite a bit, after all. Despite my bisexuality, I find myself in queer social spaces more often than not, largely because they are far more accepting of gender diversity than most places, especially where it comes to romance. If my desire is split between the sexes but I have been almost exclusively homosexual behaviorally, it's almost certainly because I feel like I have to put on an act and become someone I'm not to inhabit the heterosexual male gender role, while I can just be myself when I'm with a guy. All of which leads me to be defensive in such debates even where it is irrational or unfair; when a gay guy mentions a perfectly fine tendency to prefer masculine men or that they prefer not to associate with the feminine, I feel like the fragile safe spaces that I've created where I can be myself are in danger.


I'm certain that my opposition feels the same way, and that all the talk about how queerness affects perceptions of gender makes them feel profoundly uncomfortable in their own social groups. They're perfectly fine taking the normative gender expression, and I imagine, fear that such compulsory noncomformity may make them outcasts within their own community, suspended between a queer community that hates them for being normal and a normal community that hates them for being queer.


So, of course we've got to learn to get along, and I don't think it would be that difficult, provided that we don't see someone else's gender expression as a threat to our own. And hell, I'm generally attracted to masculine guys, so it would be pretty unwise to try to chase them out of the community!


But there's an elephant in the room here, and I don't intend to pull my punches: Western hegemonic masculinity is a toxin, and if there is to be any rapprochment between the two camps, I think it needs to be eviscerated from our cultural lexicon.


That needs some clarification, obviously, especially if it is to square with the above acceptance of all gender expressions. I don't here mean particular traits that have been associated with masculinity. I've got a Chase Daniel autograph on his Sports Illustrated cover hanging on my wall, after all. I was a debator, with all the competitiveness that entails, and part of my process of self-actualization has included adopting at least some masculine traits, jettisoning my social timidity for a more manly courage (admittedly, this is more likely than not to manifest in having the courage to express my feminity in social situations that may be hostile or asking a guy out, but still: manly courage). Courage is a legitimate virtue, no less so for having been associated with toxic machismo.




What I'm referring to here is much more closely tied into homophobia, effemephobia, and sexism. It's all well and good to claim that we ought to respect other gender expressions, but western hegemonic masculinity is constructed in such a way as to discourage this acceptance, and as such without modification presents a threat to the very diversity of gender expressions we're attempting to protect by offering it a safe space.


At first I was merely bewildered by and felt some pity for my peers who were so controlled by their masculine identity that they refused to play Paper Mario and thought "Celda" was for fags. If they were so obtuse that they'd deny themselves some of the most excellently crafted experiences in their favorite hobby for the sake of not appearing feminine or gay, their loss. Pity turned into a sort of condescending anger when they made it clear that my own enjoyment of such entertainment placed myself beneath contempt, as I knew that they were pathetic but had no way of turning the social tables on them.


In truth, I have to own that my own exploration of my feminine side dervies much of its motivation from the desire to avoid that sort of patheticness. Let me never, ever, be so insecure in my gender identity as they were! Anything at all to prevent myself from being anywhere near the target audience of this sad Super Bowl ad.


So my cards are on the table and my biases are known: I find such an identity aesthetically repulsive and unvirtuous. Quite apart from my subjective value judgments on the matter, however, I feel the argument that such an identity is injurious and destructive to the cohesion of the gay community stands.


The overriding feature of such an identity, it seems, is not any one particular trait but its reflexive defensiveness and hatred of anything that lies outside of itself. Intellectuals may hate the yokels and liberals conservatives, but nothing produces so much anger as a masculine man being accused of being feminine. This anger extends to association with anything feminine.

The problems for cohesion in the gay community and respect for all gender expressions ought to be obvious. It's unfortunate that it's come up in the NeoGaf debate so often.


So there's nothing wrong with liking football, talking like a straight guy, being completely ignorant of fashion, or not wanting to wear a skirt. But for the love of tolerance, keep the instinctive defensiveness and antipathy that so characterizes modern masculinity out of it.

Towards a Performance Model of Personal Appearance

The highlight of my last Tuesday was finding a few cute tee shirts at Target for far cheaper than they should have been. I actually spend at least a small amount of time every morning blow drying my hair and styling it with gel. I probably spend more than is consistent with my goal of practicing temperance on good hair stylists and optional treatments like highlights.

Fifteen year old Alcibiades is rolling in his grave.

In high school, following fashion and practicing personal grooming beyond what was necessary for hygiene seemed like a pointless shell game. It was, as I conceived it, a transaction: if I were willing to put the time, effort, and money into looking good, you might give me the time of day in a social situation. Since even in the darkest days of my most strident utilitarianism I was leery of placing the sacred value of friendship into the crass hands of commerce, I considered that I was better off not playing the game. At least then I knew that my relations and friends were interested in something more important than superficialities.

There's at least a grain of truth in that narrative to my 180 degree turn. My migration from a social context where a 120-pound guy with a boyish face and a curvy body was apt to be treated like a scrawny weakling to one where such a one was more likely to be treated as a sterling example of queer submissive sexuality certainly helped start the transition. I've found a milieu where such care is far more likely to produce results in getting people to be friendly and in finding sexual partners.

Yet I have also found a milieu where such an appearance is more likely to be appreciated and validated by my peers. While this may superficially seem to resemble the transaction model I outlined above, and would have probably seemed so to my 15-year old self, it is not necessarily so. While the notion of the atomistic man, drawing a conception of self wholly from within, admitting of no social influence, may be attractive, it's simply not an accurate depiction of reality. The formation of an identity is necessarily a social endeavor, whether one defines oneself in contrast to or in accordance with dominant paradigms. Examples of others and esteem of peers point in fruitful directions for self-actualization, and there's nothing wrong with that. While one shouldn't allow the collective to run roughshod over any trace of personal expression, one shouldn't turn down the help a group of peers offers guidance towards how one wants to present oneself.

Which isn't to say that there is no authentic expression of the self involved, and that all is social influence. Part of my continued interest in fashion can be attributed finding models that can exemplify and peers that appreciate, not simply the looks that I can pull off, but the looks that personally appeal to me. Once I got around the latent homophobia preventing me from exploring the girl's section of clothing stores, with their tighter jeans that showed off more and their tee shirts that had a color palette broader than gray and white, I found a lot more worth spending money on.

When I walked into a gay bar for the first time, soon after my 21st birthday, I was blown away. Here was a group, finally, that appreciated the gender expression I'd been struggling towards for years, with a huge selection of attractive looks that I wanted to emulate, not out of a desire for social return, but as a means to be comfortable in my own skin and become the person I want to be. And even though I had some highly unorthodox selections of accessories, my collar and cuffs (laid over the most colorful tee shirt and the tightest jeans I had), everyone there was friendly and sociable. I never felt compelled to dress like them for acceptance.

That isn't a transaction model, where I expend the time and money on looking good for an expected social return. It's a performance model, where I take the examples given to me as an opportunity to express myself and create something I personally find valuable. It's a model that I think is far healthier and, frankly, allows me to have a lot more fun.

On Male Submissive Role Models, Part Two: Hayate the Combat Butler

That's our protagonist on the left, the eponymous Hayate. Leading a comically crappy life played with almost insensitive levity, he has to work to support his spendthrift and worthless mother, who has accrued more debt than he could possibly pay off. By the first episode of the show, his luck in evading his debtors has run out: he is cornered by yakuza, intent on taking what's owed to them either in yen or pounds of flesh. Owing to an improbable set of circumstances, a fabulously wealthy heiress, at the center of the above picture, comes to his rescue and thwarts the thugs. Now in her debt, the only way Hayate can repay her is to enter her service as a butler in her antiquatedly aristocratic manor.

Of course, they fall in love.

Much of the show's action, invariably played comedically, revolves around Hayate's and Nagi's budding romance while Hayate attempts to discharge the duties incumbent upon him as a butler to such a prestigious family and Nagi navigates the social terrain at her posh academy. As one would expect with a butler falling in love with his employer, the show hits subtly on d/s themes, though appropriate for its younger audience (if you have any doubt about its intended audience, scope the PSA that occurs before every show, urging kids not to sit too close to the television). While concerned with bailing his family out of financial distress, Hayate's number one priority seems to be reflecting well on the Sanzen'in family, taking his service-oriented role as a point of honor. His wooing of Nagi's heart generally revolves around showing his care through service, for example, in a madcap dash to evade yakuza, samurai, and giant robots to deliver a forgotten lunchbox to her at school.

As the above plot would indicate, this show doesn't take itself too seriously. It's light-hearted fare, and its absurdity can begin to grate if you're not part of the young teenager target audience. This is a show that both relishes and lampoons traditional anime tropes, and as such may seem utterly inscrutable to those unfamiliar with the medium. While I would encourage first-time anime watchers who are only interested in the d/s themes to give it a shot, it wouldn't surprise me if you tune out after a few episodes. You have been warned.

One of the wonderful things the show has done for me is rescue the business-suit-as-submissive-attire from the toxic tendrils of stereotypical femdom. Hayate is invariably dressed immaculately (except in the episodes where his ruining of a suit, expensive to both his pocketbook and his honor as a representative of the Sanzen'in family, becomes a plot point), but it's intended to highlight his pride in service to his aristocratic family. The suit functions as a reinforcement of his service-oriented attitude, rather than, as in most femdom, a contrast with it, proof that the powerful seductress can get even the powerful businessman on his knees.

This has been particularly useful for me, as, owing to the internship I accepted this summer, I find myself in possession of quite a few suits. At first I dreaded the entering of hegemonic masculinity that would be expected at my new workplace, tempered only by my refusal to trim my long hair. Male fashions have always seemed excessively drab to me, focusing on the most uninteresting part of the color palette. Yet I was pleasantly surprised by the array of colors available in dress shirts and intricacy of patterns available for ties. Especially for a college-aged intern, it wasn't difficult to put together a wardrobe unmistakably masculine and playfully flamboyant and vibrant, a rarity given our visual lexicon for male fashion.
Musings on suits aside, I've heard through the grapevine that Hayate, as befits his feminine body type, eventually ditches his traditionally masculine attire for a maid outfit. Having not arrived at that point in the series, I'm inordinately curious to see how the show handles it; given its respectful treatment of male submissives so far, I doubt it will be festooned with the self-loathing that too much of crossdressing in a femdom context is laden with.

A quick note: If you're looking for the show online, it's much more likely to be known by its Japanese name, Hayate no Gotoku, rather than by the English translation of its title. It's not available in English dubs, to the best of my knowledge, though as with seemingly all anime these days pirated versions with English subtitles are readily found with a simple google search.

On Penetration and Power

I've noticed in several gay communities online (nearly all of them also have a furry bent, for whatever reason) that sub/dom is becoming a synonym for top/bottom (in the queer sense of the penetrating or penetrated partner, not in the kinky sense). For example, this picture was posted in the "subs coming handsfree from being fucked" thread on fchan:


(click the picture for the gorgeous full resolution version)

The one getting penetrated sure doesn't look submissive to me!

In any case, it's true that being the penetrated partner has always had submissive implications for me. I recall once Socrates suggested that we try it, and I nixed it, arguing that it wasn't submissive enough (yeah, sexism, homophobia, and topping from the bottom all combining into one moment of ignorance. Not my finest hour.). Of course, at least part of my reluctance was because of ambient cultural memes about penetration: surely any guy that wanted that had to be submissive.

Yet it was also because of the simple mechanics of the acts as they had been presented to me by the culture: as far as I could tell, the penetrating partner controlled the action. He or she was generally in an upright, dominant position, with the penetrated partner in a vulnerable, inviting position, ass high in the air or on his or her back. While this is what the culture tells us what penetration should look like, it doesn't have to be so. When I gave Socrates that flippant answer, I'm not sure I could have even conceived of a picture like the one above. As Maymay said,

I like fucking. I like it when I’m getting fucked on my penis. Yes, that’s perfectly possible. When I’m talking about getting fucked, I’m not necessarily talking about getting penetrated. A man with an erect penis can actually get fucked—fucking or getting fucked does not have a one-to-one relationship with one’s anatomical genitalia. That said, I don’t see why men who top shouldn’t be able to get it up the ass if they want to. Again, topping or bottoming does not have a one-to-one correlation with whether you are the “active” or “receptive” partner in a sexual encounter. So, it follows, that I also like getting fucked in my asshole.

While I've still got a bit of weird and totally irrational pride about never having penetrated anyone else, I'm interested in starting to experiment with this.

All of this leads back to the fact that I have no idea what to make of the trend I've seen in the furry gay communities. If the change in terminology makes pictures and acts like the one above easier to imagine, I'm all for it. At the same time, I'm more than a smidge leery of dubbing all penetrators as doms and all penetrated people as subs. I suppose it depends on whether it retains more of its meaning from the kinky context or the vanilla context.

Now I've just got to figure out how to last more than two seconds while on an orgasm denial regimine.

On Punishment and Self-Esteem

I think that for me there is a huge distinction between feeling like Murre is upset with me, and feeling like Murre is objectifying me or belittling me. They are both humiliating, of course. But if she is upset, she wants me to change my behavior: the humiliation is supposed to have a corrective result. If I am her toy, though, the humiliation is just something she wants me to feel, and perhaps internalize as part of my status. But I'm not supposed to do anything about it.

The latter is almost always sexy, and when it isn't sexy, it's only because it's too scary, or I am too tired or stubborn to surrender. It's humiliation-as-correction that I have trouble with, and even then I only have trouble with it sometimes. Murre routinely corrects me for things that both of us perceive to be “real” faults. For instance, I was caned in the middle of one of the aforementioned arguments for my tone of voice. And that was lovely and useful and really cleared the air...it was also humiliating, as punishments always are for me.

http://inscarletink.blogspot.com/search?zx=aee3b2b357cdd00f

I'm reminded of of an experience I had this summer. Those three months were groundbreaking in a lot of ways for me: somehow I had snagged a pretty prestigious (paid!) internship in one of the coolest cities in the country, when before I hadn't even held a minimum wage job. Of course, the internship in a different city than my parents' home, so I took the housing stipend given by my employers and had to start a new life for myself for three months. In a sink or swim situation, I mostly swam, but of course I made mistakes in my first time paying my own rent, finding my own place to stay, navigating mass transit for the first time to get to work on time, cooking my own food, etc, without having a support network in the huge city. While in retrospect, I think I did a pretty good job seeing how little experience I'd had with such things, it was a sore point for me at the time, and the few mistakes I made galled me.

At the time I was also dating a wonderful dominant guy, and while we hadn't gone as deep into the dom/sub dynamic as I had in the previous relationship, it was there. And he seemed to really enjoy disciplining me for those mistakes of simple competency: being late because I had misread the train schedule or things of that nature. And my thought throughout all that was, "man, I get enough of that shit in my everyday life." The punishment wasn't making me more motivated to improve at such things; it just made me feel bad about myself and reinforced my doubts about being able to hack it as a competent adult. So eventually we talked about it, and it mostly stopped.

This isn't to say that punishment as correction is always negative for me. Later in the summer I had orgasmed without his permission during one of our scenes, and punishment came soon after. And it was amazingly hot. Of course, there are a few reasons why this might appeal more than the former: the tie to sexuality is obvious, it involves a controlling of something far more intimate than my schedule, and we had not explicitly established an orgasm control regimen, so it was hot to think of it as an arbitrary imposition of authority. Most importantly, though, it didn't prey on any of my insecurities. I generally don't beat myself up for not being able to control my sex drive, so rather than punishing me for something I despair of improving at, it was easy to take it as a goad to improvement. And it left me feeling incredibly humble, without feeling self-denigrating, which is basically the point of humiliation.

On Male Submissive Role Models, Part One

"I have, in the back of my mind, always clung to this idea that I might be a switch. Not that it mattered much since Belle’s unlikely to ever let me top her and she’ll never let me top anyone else, but I clung to it. Like a blanket. Like a thing that made me feel better but was actually totally worthless. Now I know, thanks to Rika and what she wrote and how it finally knocked the final pieces into place, that I’m not ever going to be a switch. I am, in fact, always going to be on the bottom. And that freaks me the fuck out.

First of all, I admit to carrying around a prejudice against submissive males. Submissives in general kinda creep me out. It makes no sense, I know, but that’s what it is. It’s like I’m the white supremacist who just discovered the black grandmother he never knew about or the uber-masculine father of 12 who suddenly figured out he was gay. This is all horrible and all nasty and sad and not anything I’m happy about, but I see now that I’ve never fully embraced my submissive nature because I don’t especially like the archetype as it exists in our culture. In fact, there is no archetype. No role model. Nothing positive to look towards. Just layer after layer of stereotype and ridicule and cultural indifference. And now I know I’m one of them."

http://denyingthumper.com/2010/01/04/the-nose-on-my-face/

It's not difficult to see why Thumper and Maymay internalized negative stereotypes about male submissives. With even pornography directed us demeaning us, and our sole representations in the mainstream being targets of ridicule, it's a wonder any of us are comfortable enough in our own skin to write these blogs.

And yet, I find myself completely unable to sympathize with Maymay and Thumper on this score. If anything, I've been a bit peeved that I don't live up to the romantic ideal of the submissive more. I surely imbibed the same memes about submission as these guys, and I definitely watched much of the porn they watched, but I remained mostly unaffected. I was bewildered by this at first, since I couldn't figure out who my role models were, if not submissives in porn.

Jesus came readily to mind after perusing my blog for inspiration. My father came to mind as well (hopefully, more on that in a future post). I wracked my brain for portrayals of submission in the media remembered from my youth, and I was surprised with the results.

Yeah, believe it or not, I found my submissive role models in Digimon. Back in elementary school I was obsessed with this show; I took HTML classes over the summer after it came on the air to make a better Digimon fansite with my best friend.

A digimon was everything a submissive should strive to be: they obeyed orders, directed their every effort to making their partner (they called them partners, ferchrissakes!) happy and making sure they were protected, and were generally lower on the social ladder than their tamer. But their submission was neither simpering nor pathetic; their devotion was noble, born out of love for their partners. It was clear that they weren't where they were because they were inferior, nor would they take the other role if they were only strong enough to do it: they had their purpose and fulfilled it. Their role was sanctioned by the cosmos, foretold in prophecy, and had a mission of civilization changing proportions.

And they were cool. An anthropomorphic fox that could summon daggers at will or a T-Rex that could fire nuclear missiles could not be called wimps. While their doms were little more than damsels in distress or cheerleaders when the shit hit the fan, they were kicking ass. And yet every bit of their earth shattering power was placed in the service of their partner.

And they came in every archetype and gender imaginable, their personalities largely reflecting their dominants: you had the tomboy, the computer whiz, the hot head, the loner, and others. Perfect for finding someone to identify with no matter your personality- and to find someone to crush on no matter your fancy (I'll let you figure out my crush from the pictures).

If I wound up feeling fairly positive about my submissive identity, it's probably because I spent at least as much time reading erotic Digimon fanfiction as I did watching grainy femdom clips.

On Labels and the Right of Self Determination

I'm a boy who finds both men and women's bodies sexually and aesthetically attractive. I tend to be attracted to people dominant both in bed and out of it, which given the way we socialize the sexes makes me more attracted to men on average. My main sex act outside of BDSM play is receptive anal sex, but I enjoy being taken with a strap on or its biological equivalent equally. I find myself profoundly uncomfortable with the hegemonic heterosexual male gender role in relationships, and as such tend to gravitate towards alternative and genderqueer women, and am far more at ease in a queer social setting than a straight one.

Fuck if I know where that puts me on the gay-bi-straight axis or even on a 7-point Kinsey Scale. Is it proper to take into account the socialization that most men and women have undergone when figuring which one I favor, or are only intrinsically masculine or feminine qualities in bounds? Is it fair to take into account the greater difficulty of finding people of one sex over the other with common sexual interests? I tend to wash my hands of the matter, claiming a reasonably approximate, "bisexual," or slightly to the gay side of the Kinsey Scale only when pressed.

Here's what I do know- my sexuality involves at least a modicum of attraction to both sexes. Which is why I get so frustrated with the "bisexuals don't really exist," "male bisexuals are really gay, and are only saying that they're bi to placate their families," "bisexual women are just in it to get attention," memes.

(As an aside, I get the frustration lesbians feel when a girl leads them on, when they were only in it to turn on their boyfriends. Obviously such duplicity is immoral. But seriously, this "real lesbian" shit has got to stop. No one gets hegemony over sapphic love. Not one of us gets to define what it is for everyone else. Most of us like turning our partners on, and there's nothing wrong with self-aware adults putting on a show. Yeah, this particular manifestation can say troubling things about homophobia and power differentials in the sexes (why are women the only ones turning to same-sex encounters to turn their partners on?), and yeah, compulsory bisexuality sucks, but that doesn't mean that you can paper over someone else's life with your theory).

Fundamentally, this is about respect. It's about believing that your fellow human beings have the capabilities to assess and define themselves. It's about respecting the right everyone has to name their own experiences.

Really, espousing such opinions doesn't make you homophobic, or even biphobic. What they make you is an asshole. It betrays a chauvinistic self-centeredness that demands your experience be the normative one, at the center of the universe, and that everyone's experience fall into some constellation that agrees with the way you view the world. It betrays a hubris so strong even the objectivists would blush at to contend that you are better able to understand and define another better than they are able to.

Just as important, we should be asking ourselves why we feel that these stereotypes even matter, or why we view them as negative. Why should it matter that many gay men at one point were or identified as bisexual? Why is it so negative that someone had to go through a process of self-discovery before finally figuring things out and accepting themselves? Were you born fully formed with an identity? Did you never go through a process of exploration? Were you immediately comfortable the first time you had a gay desire? Likewise, why is it so negative if a woman likes turning on her partner with a show?

I am reminded of the tired cliches of watermelon and fried chicken eating blacks. They are not particularly important differences, or even necessarily negative ones once divorced from their context, but they serve to marginalize the stereotyped class. Above all, the fact that they are even notable betrays at least a minor level of uncomfortableness about the stereotyped classes, serving a need to make them truly other.

One cannot ignore the negative effect that this can have on bisexual people. It's generally viewed a negative if, say, a bisexual person's sexualitiy changes over time, and they find themselves inclining more and more to the gay end of the spectrum. It makes certain progressively minded women feel guilty about tresspassing when enjoying a perfectly kosher kink. And it balkanizes the queer and alternative sexuality communities, when what we need above all is unity.

Eristic Virtue

I have had a pathetically easy life.

A Marxist might retort, privileged. A bourgeois, fortunate.

In any case, it is true: there has been no more fortunate time, no more fortunate nation, and no more fortunate class than the ones I was born into. My birth coincied nearly exactly with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and for all of my childhood, with that brief blip on 9/11 and the following months as an exception, my country was reaping one of the greatest peace dividends in world history. I was born into an age of unparalelled technological progress and economic prosperity, in a nation so flush that it could afford to make charity compulsory and guarantee every man, woman, and child 3 meals a day and a roof over their heads. I was born into a prosperous enough family to not have a dollar of debt coming out of college, and was far enough up Maslow's heirarchy that I could spend it on an enormously personally fulfilling but ultimately comercially dubious degree focusing on philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, I had a stable family who softened the sharp edges of the world and never showed me anything but love.

This is not the kind of life one writes songs about.

Of course, there is little more inimical to the values of my homeland, or that of my Dutch ancestors, nations of shopkeepers both, than that lust for glory and eternity that most often lodges itself in hope of military success. I have no desire to be written about in a modern-day Iliad.

Yet even this burgher can admire their struggle. Not their courage, not their prowess in battle, certainly not their vainglorious attitude and posturing for position that seems at once simian, puerile, and a sad parody of masculinity. Their struggle. The fact that they were thrown into the fire and, at least some of them, emerged unscathed, or at least not broken.

I've been thinking about this in light of Orlando's posts about slumming and BDSM. We're coming at the same issue from two very different traditions, I think, and that produces some notable differences. Most importantly, I don't conceive of their life of struggle as any more real than the "sheltered" one that I've led. This isn't so much a quest for truth as it is a quest for virtue. It isn't knowledge I seek, but the ability to look myself in the mirror at the end of the day.

Of course, this competitive, eristic virtue can manifest itself even in completely safe settings. I imagine the philosophy Phd who triumphs over his interlocutors when defending his dissertation feels something of the triumph that Achilles did when dragging the body of Hector around Troy. So too does the loving parent who braves everything for the good of his or her child, or the service submissive devoting all to the care of their dom, if in very different ways.

The fact that such diverse manifestations of virtue are lumped together in my mind is illuminating. What unites them is not triumphing over a rival or the nobility of service, it's the fact that they had an obstacle to overcome, and they succeeded. This is somewhat troubling, since seeking obstacles for the sake of obstacles is self-destructive, masochistic in the legitimately negative sense. Moreover, struggle for its own sake, with no aim to speak of- is simply nihilism. And perhaps owing to my easy life, I haven't found something worth fighting for yet.

I should probably find it.

Seeking a third option

I have often heard it said that the asshole-doormat dichotomy is the male equivalent of the virgin-whore dichotomy. Condescending or altogether unattractive nice guys are fond of spouting the wisdom that women go for jerks; the few aggressive men who find that their strategy works are fond of mocking those who fall into the former ctegory. Both sides, in any case, seem to deny that there might be a middle ground between treating their partners poorly and refusing to stand up for themselves.

In ethics, too, this divide persists. All too often it seems that Christian love is at odds with Aristotelian virtue. Eristic Aristotelian virtue demands a purpose to life, one that it is capable to succeed or fail at. It gives one something to strive for, but it opens the possibility of failure- and since, whether it be in military ventures, commercial conquests, or something similar, that goal is most often satisfied in a competitive mileu, there are winners and losers.

And of course, it is impossible to love a loser. If one so buys the philosophy that one is unable to look onself in the mirror should one fail to live up to its tenets, one would be incapable of loving someone that also fails to live out that philosophy. Even in non-zero sum competition, where it is possible in theory for everyone to succeed, not everyone will.

Love, on the other hand, seems to urge esteem for everyone, no matter what their accomplishments or virtues. But if dignity is something that is given gratis, a reward for mere existence or the preciousness of human life, there does not seem to be much to strive for.

So I suppose my question is, is it impossible to hold myself to a high standard while still refusing to accept the lack of the divine spark in every person I meet?

Rant time

I'm tired of being an existential threat.

I'm tired of my life being used as a political football by people with privilege coming out of their ears.

I'm tired of having to read every work of political philosophy with a view to justifying my existence.

I'm tired of every halfway decent of political philosophy shouting from the mountaintops that my life is a subject unworthy of their attention.

I'm tired of constantly being on the defensive.

I'm tired of not being able to cross post this on facebook for fear of losing my anonymity.

Normally, it's water off a duck's back. Haters gonna hate. Aquinas had ideological blinders, Aristotle was a douche. None of them were cool enough to understand me. None could destroy my insistence that my life is my own, or shake my faith in the liberationist consensus of personal autonomy uber alles. My life was my own, firmly ensconced within the realm of self-regarding behavior. The haters could fuck off.

This year the curriculum presented a unique challenge, and a steadily growing discontent waiting to burst a dam with self doubt. Hobbes was a fascist prick, no bones about it, but Spinoza, Rousseau, hell, even Locke afforded a far too broad scope for social coercion. More than social coercion: a social unity that [i]must[/i] be preserved at all costs, whose malcontents pissed on the gift they were given in being delivered from the chaos of a state of nature, whose malefactors, selfishly asserting their right to defy the collective, committed the cardinal sin of undermining our incredibly fragile peace.

I, of course, instinctively knew that there was no place in such a world for me, doomed by my nature to forever exist on the fringe until some benefactor to the public weal ended my threat for good. Which is why my normally aloof inquiry began to be quite introspective, and my political became my personal.

So of course, when my vague apprehensions about the role of those who approach the world on a slant crystallized into something definite, when it ceased being an academic question and these defenders of the status quo made their prescriptions specific and personal, when, in short, Tocqueville decided to unmask his bigotry toward nonbelievers, I snapped.

My sophistry didn't skip a beat, of course, and I avoided the cardinal sins of bringing personal baggage into the discussion and excoriating ancient authors for retrograde mores. Yet I am sure my building rage and increasing skepticism was apparent every time I endeavored to defend de Tocqueville, that really, since for him it is necessary for religious consensus to exist in order to protect a commonwealth, it's not actually the tyranny of the majority he spent 5 chapters railing against, really, it's no more intrusive and tyrannical than prohibitions against theft, also necessary for stability, as I prostituted my identity and dignity within it in the interests of fairness and honest inquiry.

So I sprinted for 30 minutes to blow off some steam, unsuccessfully attempted to procure alcohol, spent two hours in bed seething and composing this post, and now that I've gotten this off my chest I'm gonna see if sleep is at all possible tonight.

The English language sucks- meditations on love

You'd think a substantially Christian nation would have taken better care with the language used to express its fundamental truth. Alas, it ain't so.

The notion of an all-encompassing love has been dragged through the dialectic, sullied so many times by a false dichotomy between hard-nosed realists and starry-eyed romantics, used as a plot device in sappy romance novels and hackneyed children's fare so many times that I can't but evoke a million cliches when speaking of one of my fundamental spiritual truths.

The foremost culprit: the very word love. While its linguistic history is a fascinating look into how we view these concepts as related, the Greeks had it right when they subdivided the concept in their language. Our word can be used for Eros, erotic love, Philia, the love of friendship, Agape, romantic love, and finally, from the Latin, Caritas, the root word of charity, denoting that all-encompassing love for mankind.

It is the last one I'm concerned with here.

I'm not abandoning my materialist bona fides (at least, not yet). I'm not positing a metaphysical conception of love that has the power to affect the world and change things apart from the self-moved actions of individuals who feel this love. My outlook is still fundamentally secular, at least for now.

Mind over matter, it really don't matter
If the street's idle chatter turns your heart strings to tatters
Flatter hopes don't flatter and soul batter won't congeal to mend
a life that is shattered into shards
Was it in the cards?

--Bad Religion, Materialist

This is a sentiment I still largely believe, at least as far as practical matters go. Love does not exist independently of humanity, and if we wish to create a loving world, we must turn to our own devices, not a phantasmal spirit.


For me, philosophy has always been an expression of love. Love requires understanding; its foremost expression in the thinker has always been the interest in understanding another's point of view. The love of ideas is the love of people, for people are nothing more than the ideas through which they experience the world. By far the most satisfying part of my education has been, when studying an author for months at a time, the subjunctive tense is dropped. When the thought becomes not, This is how Plato would view it, but when your understanding of an author becomes so complete that your natural affections cannot but be influenced by what you have read, when you have internalized that person's philosophy into your own.

This is love. This is sex, for exactly the same reason that eros and caritas can be encompassed under the same word. This is sex, because it is a meeting of two souls, separated perhaps by centuries and millenia but no less profound for the separation.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

--Galatians, 3:28

This is the love that the Christians used to smash Aristotelian aristocracy. This is the love that refused to buy the dichotomy between virtue and caring for our fellow man, the love that found virtue in the weak. This is the love that refused to accept that dignity belonged perforce only to the great, that virtue is a competition, that only the refined and powerful deserved the title of good.

For someone living after the transformation, this fact seems unremarkable, and it is difficult for us moderns to know just how different it was before Christ. It was in fact the greatest shift in thought Western Civilization ever underwent. One need only see what contempt Aristotle held the merely good-natured man in, and the contempt with which most pagans greeted humility, to see that it is so.

Finally, and most to the point, this is the love of feminism and queer theory, of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, of this blog and my companion blogs. Progressiveness is nothing more than applying that all-encompassing caritas to ever widening swathes of the population, who had heretofore been denied the dignity that is the birthright of everyone with a human soul.

Here I will do my damnedest to express myself and make myself understood, and will seek to understand others. For it is only in this way that me and my fellow BDSMers can be loved, and be welcomed back into the fold of that caritas that ought to be all-encompassing.

Don't call me a sissy

I've written about crossdressing here and here before this. Relevant quote:

Ultimately, crossdressing in a BDSM context says that feminine traits in a male are shameful, and should be mocked, and that the only natural order is a dominant male and submissive female.

So I've changed my mind from those earlier posts, right? For the most part

It's clear to me now that those posts were based on faulty premises, but their logic is sound. Most egregiously, I assumed anything being taken on as a submissive to enhance the practice of BDSM necessarily degraded both the submissive and the trait taken on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and were it so, there would be nothing redeeming about the lifestyle.

There is certainly a spirit in which feminine traits could be degrading within the context of BDSM, where one could play upon a man's insecurities and the contempt with which our society views the feminine. For my part, to the extent that I buy into this narrative I find it unfortunate, and do my best not to bring it up in my sex life.

Yet this is not the only way to incorporate transgender or crossdressing themes into a BDSM scenario. In the first place, it seems absurd on its face to claim that any transgender person participating in BDSM necessarily degrades whatever sex they've transitioned into, especially since presumably many of them are perfectly happy and secure about their transitioned gender. Nor ought I be concerned that this reflects society's larger mores that may be destructive, if I am confident that this results from an authentic expression of the self rather than internalized misogyny or pressure to conform, as this would indicate a wholly unhealthy level of attention to the dialectic. Housewives who have thought through their options and ultimately decided that a life of child rearing and domestic duties are the best way for them to be fulfilled ought not be worried that their authentic choice coincides with a choice many are forced into, and likewise I shouldn't be concerned that, the way my sexuality works out, I end up mimicking male dominant female submission tropes.

In the end, it doesn't need much more justification than this: I look fantastic in a corset, and I'll be damned if I prevent myself from looking my best for my Master.

Huh

Will Wilkinson, one of my favorite libertarian bloggers, on masculinity in America.

To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality. Since I was a teenager, I’ve found old-school machismo pathetic and somehow irrelevant to the problem of becoming a man. Without even knowing what or why it was, I was heavily influenced by gay culture, which provided me, and many other straight young men, a wide variety of templates for manhood that are at once unmistakably masculine, playfully ironic, aesthetic, emotionally open, and happily sexual. You can be manly and care about shoes!!! I’ll confess that I used to periodically regret my heterosexuality because there seemed to be greater scope for constructing a distinctive and satisfying male identity within gay culture. I think that’s telling. And the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with.

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/08/28/the-menaissance-and-its-dickscontents/

Intriguing. I've certainly found the process of constructing an identity greatly aided by not buying into heterosexist culture (when reading the article linked in Wilkinson's post, I thought more than once- "I'm so glad I'm not normal), but I've never heard it expressed in quite this way. Fascinating stuff.

Intellectual Ammunition

Try bringing up this study to anyone who buys into the hackeneyed pop psychology explanations of BDSM: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24238131-2,00.html

AN unusual sex survey has found that Australians who enjoy bondage and discipline are not damaged or dangerous, and might even be happier than those who practise "normal" sex.

The research showed 2 per cent of adult Australians regularly partake in sadomasochism and dominance and submission-type sexual role play.

And contrary to commonly-held stereotypes, they are not doing so in reaction to sexual abuse or because they are "sexually deficient" in some way, according the study of 20,000 Australians by public health researchers at the University of New South Wales.

"Our findings support the idea that bondage and discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) is simply a sexual interest or subculture attractive to a minority," Associate Professor Juliet Richters and her colleagues wrote in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The findings showed that it was more common among gay, lesbian and bisexual people, and that participants were more likely to have been more sexually adventurous in other ways.

"However, they were no more likely to have been coerced into sexual activity and were not significantly more likely to be unhappy or anxious," said Prof Richters, author of the book Doing It Down Under.

In fact, men who take part may be happier, with results showing they score significantly lower on a scale of psychological distress than other men.

The researchers did not study why this was, but suspect it might simply be that they're more in harmony with themselves because they're into something unusual and are comfortable with that.

Prof Richters says the findings go against professional views of BDSM.

"People with these sexual interests have long been seen by medicine and the law as, at best, damaged and in need of therapy and, at worst, dangerous and in need of legal regulation," she said.

There was also an assumption, mostly among the general public, that people involved in BDSM were sexually deficient in some way, "and need particularly strong stimuli such as being beaten or tied up to become aroused".

She said she hoped the results would help change these stereotypes.

Apparently Tim Tebow is a virgin

There are many possible angles to attack this story from, but I'm not interested here in the hero worship of athletes, the appropriateness of asking such a prying question, or our fascination with the sex lives of athletes. I do want to talk about how this fits into the mythic Tebow: thanking Jesus for winning the Heisman trophy, his ministry in prisons, his overseas proselyting, helping with circumcision, and generally his status as percieved upstanding guy, the sort of guy who is faithful and immune to the pleasures of the flesh, the sort of guy that chose to stay in his room playing a party game isntead of hitting the town when he had a night in Atlantic City.

I will be honest: when I heard the news, I felt a little threatened and defensive in a completely irrational way. Here's me, a philosopher instead of an athlete, a heathen, queer, perverted, a dire existential threat to traditional values- and someone whose prowess on the field I admired greatly, who seems to have the respect of everyone but opposing SEC teams- showing yet again that he is not me, or anywhere close to me in conceptual space. I could not help but hear, in the effusive praise of the media (when they weren't excoriating the reporter who asked the question), that he is a virgin and I should be too.

But why should I feel that way? Tebow never condemned people who make different choices than he does, and he doesn't seem the sort to judge. I have to own that the response consistent with my values would be admiration, not because chastity is inherently valuable, but because undergoing such privations for the sake of your values is admirable; much like vegetarians, I can respect his dedication even as I disagree with his values.

I hate to leave it on a hackeneyed note, but I suppose we've all got to learn, myself included, that everyone has different forms of flourishing, and we ought not interpret respect for someone else's lifestyle as derision for our own. Certainly there are those who wish to remain celibate before marriage, or whose natural instincts incline them toward intimacy only in certain contexts; if Tebow gives these people a better way to live up to their values, or makes them feel more comfortably acting in the way that feels most in tune with their selves, he's doing good for the world.

Dear BDSM organizers who make their events aged 21+

Fuck you with a rusty shovel.

Sincerely,
A hot 20-year old

BDSM and Christianity

Found this picture of a tattoo of St. Teresa of Avila from Trinity the other day, and it reminded me that medieval Christianity produced a whole lot of writers and thinkers that, looking at it from my perspective, articulated and understood the masochistic experience in ways far more eloquent than anywhere else I've seen it. St. Theresa. John Donne. It's no accident that the BDSM community has glommed on to a lot of the symbolism and implements of the period, most notably from the flagellants.

And while the masochistic and submissive experiences may be different, I don't think Christianity's kinship to kink is accidental. There's a lot of places you can take Far from it: I don't believe that I would be submissive if I had not been raised Catholic. Fundamentally, Christ made submission noble, and made the submissive a hero.

My supreme role model bore his love in tribulation and his purity in agony, his suffering was virtue and the ultimate expression of his all encompassing love was to die on the cross. If the height of my romantic ideal became one who was willing to suffer for the good of their beloved, it has much to do with this narrative. If we English speakers correctly group together so many different concepts under "love," it should not surprise us that caritas can morph into philia can morph into eros.

My savior preached the nobility of service and the excellence of humility. Despite being the stainless man, who embodied all the virtues and having the essence of the divine within him, despite being the perfect human being, Christ was not too proud to get on his knees and wash his disciples' feet.

More importantly than that, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The world is turned upside down by the divine revelation; the wisdom of the mighty is the folly of God. The downtrodden can take the mantle of righteousness.