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.