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venusdiva429 -> RE: Handling Feminist Friends (2/13/2007 3:49:03 PM)
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FR-
I wrote a blog about this. I'm just going to put a piece of it, though:
The revulsion, I believe, comes from a fear that acceptance is a rejection of all of the advances that feminism has won for women. It doesn’t compute that a woman would choose to give up her hard-won power, or that a woman would take punishment and spanking as part of the day-to-day and like it. We forget that the dominant man is NOTHING without the gift of submission that the woman chooses to give him. What is a single dom man going to do by himself? Absolutely nothing. What about the sub female? Same. One needs the other, and there’s no shame in a woman making that choice. It’s not that it’s an abject rejection of feminism’s higher, liberal ideals; in fact, I would call it one of the ultimate embraces of them. What is more glorious than realizing and knowing that you hold so much power that you can be part of a team- a very, very equal team- without losing yourself?
[snip]
I think that many people are soured against Taken In Hand relationships because they get lost in the agendas of political and social conservatism. We see a woman’s submission as being a key attribute in fundie relationships the world over, and become uncomfortable with a free-thinking, feminist woman’s choice to partake in that lifestyle. When Taken In Hand is seen not as a choice, but as a supposed and necessary social truth that is being flouted by the evil feminists, it becomes tainted by inflexibility and restrictive dogma.
(If you're not familiar with Taken In Hand, go here.)
I think, also, that the choice to put yourself into the service of a dominant male is not one of regression, but one of progression. It's not history repeating itself to the detriment of yourself and others. Rather, it's adding the necessary dimension of consent and choice- two core values of the feminist movement.
I find that feminism seems to come apart at the seams when sexuality is involved, strangely enough. I would think that feminism would work to free it, not take it in the direction of Catherine McKinnon and her ilk. She attempted to get this ordinance passed with Andrea Dworkin in Indiana in 1983. It refers to pornography, but I have to wonder if she would have applied it to the BDSM activites that so many of us enjoy (the bolds are mine):
the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words, that also includes one or more of the following: (1) Women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (2) Women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (3) Women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt, or as dismembered or truncated or fragmented or severed into body parts; or (4) Women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (5) Women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, abasement, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual; or (6) Women are presented as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation, exploitation, possession, or use, or through postures or positions of servility or submission or display. The use of men, children, or transsexuals in the place of women in paragraphs (1) through (6) above shall also constitute pornography under this section.[7]
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