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aromanholiday -> RE: Rip-Roaring Feminist Jane Fonda Admits She's Been a Sucker for Alpha Males (5/15/2011 11:30:53 AM)
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ORIGINAL: OwnedFemaleFlesh
I don't get this connection between being a submissive and supposedly fancying 'alpha males' whatever that means.
I don't want my Dom to be an alpha male, I like that he's quiet and thoughtful. I like that he doesn't feel the need to shout down other people's talk or opinions. I've had show-off boyfriends who tried to be the centre of attention, I hated it, and I generally avoid anyone who considers themself 'alpha' anything. (For alpha read: loud, annoying, self centered, narcissistic, overconfident about their intellectual abilities and their appeal in general.) I want a man who is sadistic and controlling of me. I see no correlation between being that and being 'alpha'.
I don't really know anything about Jane Fonda, but from the excerpts posted in the original post, I can only say that anyone who obsesses about being thin and staying with the wrong men isn't feminist enough. I'm a rabid feminist, always have been and always will be, which is why I have the courage and the stubborness to ensure I have relationships that I find deeply, utterly satisfying on a personal, romantic and sexual level. When I compare this to women of my parent's generation, who called themselves feminists yet were obsessed about looking feminine and 'keeping a man' I feel nothing but pity. I barely consider them to be proper feminists really. Feminist-lite maybe. It's because I'm a feminist that I feel so confident to explore my own desires, not in spite of it.
On a different yet related note - the US scene seems so different to the UK scene. I love that I am surrounded here by trannies, cross dressers and dykes, and I am proud to call myself queer. Has anyone in the US even heard of queer theory? No offence to the writers of some great posts I have read on here, but there seems to be an awful lot of 'alpha men', evolutionary bullshit, gender stereotyping, anti-feminism and rejection of anything but M/f as the 'natural' state of affairs between men and women.
It's threads like this that really make me see why some feminists have such a problem with BDSM.
owned xxx
I'd like to address a few pieces of the above. I'm leaving the full post in place to provide context.
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I don't get this connection between being a submissive and supposedly fancying 'alpha males' whatever that means.
I've never quite understood the alpha concept either. It seems a bit unscientific to me: I can't quite make it correlate with dominant and submissive human beings. So let's talk about dominance instead. I certainly recognize someone capable of controlling me when I meet him. Sometimes such men are quiet and understated, as you described your master; but one was a blazing extrovert and he was quite...loud. To put it mildly. Not to mention funny and fascinating, if you enjoy being the audience, which I thoroughly did. He used his understanding of power and control well as an entertainer. His ability to project emotion and to make an audience feel precisely what he wanted them to feel was superb. Watching a dominant actor skillfully control his audience is an exhilarating experience if you know what to look for and understand the skills and talents involved. Needless to say, there are many ways to act and many types of audiences. I do know the sort of overconfident individual you are describing but sometimes a person's confidence in their abilities is firmly rooted in substance: experience, talent, and skill. That was the case with the extroverted master I knew. I think neither quietness nor its lack is a sign of dominant tendencies or abilities, it's an unrelated personality style.
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I want a man who is sadistic and controlling of me.
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I'm a rabid feminist, always have been and always will be...
I am curious about how you reconcile being owned, a sort of relationship that most consider to be on the extreme edge of bdsm, with feminism. How can a feminist desire to be (or actually exist as) owned property of a man who is sadistic and controlling of her? I heard what you said earlier, that you attribute your "courage and the stubborness to ensure I have relationships that I find deeply, utterly satisfying on a personal, romantic and sexual level" to the fact that you are a feminist, but doesn't it strike you as a bit anti-feminist to desire to serve and please and to be controlled by a man? Where do those core desires come from? I see nothing of this mentioned in feminist literature, past or present, except maybe for one or two isolated polemics written by the occasional "outspoken" submissive woman. These articles, promoting the "feminism is choice--however extreme or anti-feminist that choice may seem" concept are, for the most part, derided and hated by the group you identify so strongly with--the feminists. These articles, while inspiring to the feminists within the BDSM communities, left a very important question unaddressed, the one I am now directing toward you: from whence come these desires to submit to the will of a man? While the feminist movement and the freedoms it has gained for women made such choices easier to accept and reconcile, it doesn't follow that a female's urge to be completely controlled, even owned as property, by a male is the least bit "feminist."
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When I compare this to women of my parent's generation, who called themselves feminists yet were obsessed about looking feminine and 'keeping a man' I feel nothing but pity. I barely consider them to be proper feminists really.
Well, to be fair to that generation, there was very little perceived contradiction between these things in the followers of feminism of a few decades ago. The majority of women who identified themselves as feminists in late-60s through 1970s were primarily interested in economic equality, due to larger pressures put upon them to work outside the home (this was the time, remember, when the post-war boom started to deflate, terrifying economic recessions became common, a single-income household no longer was a very prosperous one, and in addition to that, divorce rates were soaring, leaving women with a need to earn more than just a pittance in order to support their children). These earlier feminists were perfectly happy with being what they were born to be in all other ways: they enjoyed their femininity and its differences from masculinity and, being heterosexual, of course they craved a long-term mate of the opposite sex. They simply wanted equal pay for equal work, since they now had to go out into the workplace and support themselves, and often children dependent upon them.
While the popular stereotypes like to say otherwise, many men also crave to "keep a woman." Long-term mating was a successful survival strategy in human animals. It resulted in better survival rates for the young. This tendency has been passed down in our genes due to the fact that those who had it tended, overall, to survive and raise offspring more successfully than those who didn't have this tendency. It affects us in some primary ways that we are not always aware of and that are certainly not always in sync with popular beliefs about male and female natures.
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...the US scene seems so different to the UK scene. I love that I am surrounded here by trannies, cross dressers and dykes, and I am proud to call myself queer. Has anyone in the US even heard of queer theory?
The queer/transgender/dyke is cool thing was extremely popular in the US in the 80s and early 90s; and in many places today you will still find thriving pockets of it--but this specific message board isn't the right place to look for it. We don't even have gay/lesbian/trans sections here, and often gay people (with a few noted exceptions) prefer a more exclusive sort of forum, one designed for them, to discuss their specific interests and issues on. I imagine that the overwhelming effect of being surrounded by all the heterosexuality which one cannot relate to could get to be tedious. It wouldn't be hard to locate such gay-only BDSM forums if that is what makes you feel most comfortable.
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...there seems to be an awful lot of 'alpha men', evolutionary bullshit, gender stereotyping, anti-feminism and rejection of anything but M/f as the 'natural' state of affairs between men and women.
We all notice most that which rubs us the wrong way or makes us feel irritated. That's the way our brains have evolved to work: they pay sharp attention to changes in the environment as those changes, at least during the millions of years humans lived without a lot of protection from predators or environmental dangers, could signal a threat that needed an immediate response. To this day, we still do this, even when it is not needed. Due to our brain's wiring, we are compelled to notice differences that threaten us. On this forum, I personally notice an awful lot of the opposite of what you describe, what I call the "egalitarian bullshit," because it is what irks me the most. The ideas that we agree with are easy not to notice, as they are not "changes"; they are the status quo. Therefore, they seem far less prominent or pervasive than the things that we perceive, however abstractly, as "threats." But, in fact, what we agree with may, in some cases, actually be the majority position.
"Natural order" is, from what I have seen, a fairly unpopular minority view in BDSM, practiced by a small subclass of individuals. They are a minority even if you only count male dominants and female submissives in the larger BDSM group. Less than a handful of more vocal posters have been writing on this topic recently. You do not agree with that sort of concept so it trips your brain's "threat meter" which makes you more alert to it, and so you see it more often and so it begins to seem like "it is everywhere." But if you go on a "hundreds of subgroups" place like F e t l i f e and actually count the number of groups dedicated to this interest, then compare that to the number of m-dominant/f-submissive groups that clearly aren't interested in the idea you will see that the the natural order people are, in reality, vastly outnumbered by those who hold other opinions.
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