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xssve -> RE: Vanilla people and FemDom (9/12/2011 6:44:30 AM)
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All pretty good reasoning (including the visual interest of women in Black Latex - Emma Peel anybody?), imagery is symbolic, and maledom is symbolic of paternalism, femdom symbolic of maternalism - you'd have to examine the demographics of each shows particular audience, but there remains a few binary complexities in mens symbolic relationships with their mothers - they are women, dominant women for the most part, and we are supposed to be attracted to women, but not to our mothers, which makes it all a bit complicated.
Women don't seem to suffer from quite the same symbolic conundrum, and it is a symbolic one, very similar to the gay debate, and similarly, it's more intense for men: "momma's boy" is distinctly pejorative, "Daddy's girl" is more along the lines of good natured ribbing at worst, i.e., a woman in a subordinate role is non-threatening, and reifies masculinity, whereas a woman in a dominant role, threatens to turn the man back into a child, and "real" men in general tend to be uncomfortable surrounded by anything but reflections of their own masculinity.
All the same there is a fascination for the Domina - perhaps because she is overtly sexual, it distances her somewhat from the mother image, closer to it's opposite, the Femme Fatale, a more mysterious symbol, who promises to fulfill your deepest sexual needs at the price of your soul.
But, it's nothing new, there is no shortage of examples of this character in history and mythology from Lilith to Morgan LeFey and in some sense she represents the power of woman, social and seductive, rather than good, clean, physical violence, she represents the complexities of the subconscious itself, and she was never more popular than during the 50's, the ostensible peak of paternalistic dominance as a cultural value - the underlying fear that accompanies that is women as vapid, smiling automatons, Stepford wives, symbolic of sterility - masculinity, ultimately, has to strive against something, and the match between man against woman has always really been between brawn and brains.
The current cultural narrative will not allow for submissive women, as some have noted, it's a problem in literature, revenge fantasies are acceptable, i.e., the girl who escapes from her captors (Natascha Kampusch has her own website and fan club), the Avenger symbol, but the titillating details are left tot he imagination, and it is something she is assumed to have endured, not enjoyed.
And not to call Natascha a liar, clearly, shouldn't happen to anybody, and that these things happen to women is nothing to make light of - the point is that these sort of negative associations are currently the only acceptable form of depicting female submission, thus they tend to recur in fiction as well, including movies and television.
Probably just has to do with the direction the pendulum is currently swinging, it's assumed that mens egos can sustain a challenge, could probably use it in fact, while women's collective ego is still too fragile (though it doesn't seem to caused much of a strain in underground pop culture, who seem to have embraced both dominance and submission in the feminine with equal fervor) social equality between the genders is after all, still a relatively new phenomena, and as they say in the ad biz, "yeah, but will it sell in Peoria"?
Any sort of sexual desire in women at all is still pretty much an issue wrought with some fairly intense anxiety in many circles, and the symbolism here is, as I grazed on, complex.
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