instructor144:

Feminism

June 7, 2019

Dear Instructor144,

 As someone who self-identifies as a feminist and teaches Gender and Women’s Studies, I want to comment on the many posts I see on accounts such as yours that use feminism to support a woman’s desire to engage in such “anti-feminist” practices as submission, masochism, traditional gender roles, etc. This is a long response and I completely understand if you don’t post it as you may feel that I’m disrespectful/angry/too political and, well, too long.

As I understand them, these posters define feminism as a woman’s “freedom to make choices” that are right for her. Whether she heads a Fortune 500 company or stays at home with her children, her choices are empowering because she makes them of her own free will and for herself. This, many of your followers argue, is a central tenet of feminism. Yet, scholars and dictionaries define feminism as “the belief in social, political and economic equality between the sexes. In practice and in history, feminist social movements and academic theories have defined the relationship between the sexes in general and the liberation of women in particular. Feminist movements have attempted to influence politics and social policies through research, education, activism and legislation” (Issitt/Flynn 2016). Note that nowhere does this definition mention “choice.” First-wave feminists fought for the right to vote; second-wave for equal work/educational opportunities; and third-wave for political representation and on behalf of intersectionality (transgender, ethnic, and lesbian women).

While, globally, we’ve made many strides in gender parity, there’s still a long way to go. Statistically, for example, women are more likely to live in poverty than any group of men (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/14/women-poorer-and-hungrier-than-men-across-the-world-u-n-report-says/?utm_term=.f52f23c10adc). In the United States, even married African-American, Hispanic, and Native-American women proportionally experience more poverty than white women (https://nwlc.org/resources/nwlc-resources-on-poverty-income-and-health-insurance-in-2017/). All the “freedom to choose” in the world would not allow these women to stay home if they wished because neither they nor their partners have the economic resources to do so.

I say all this because I’m bothered that defenses of the lifestyle choices represented here describe feminism as synonymous with “choice” without acknowledging that only a select few have the means to make these choices. In fact, it’s not feminism that enables a woman to stay at home and/or cede financial control to her dominant partner; rather, it is her and her partner’s ethnicity and status (statistically, U.S. lifestyle communities are overwhelmingly white and middle-class; while I realize that not all of you self-identify as such, exceptions are not the norm; https://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/bdsm_its_less_transgressive_than_you_think/). For those who disagree, please understand that your definition of feminism rests on privilege that billions of economically disadvantaged women world-wide do not share. As you engage in your safe, sane, consensual, legal lifestyle choices, please be aware of some potential consequences (such as the dominant partner’s sudden inability to earn a living, for example) and please be aware of how lucky you are that your class and ethnicity allow you to do so.

This brings me to my next point: please stop making feminists – even a percentage of feminists – out to be the ones most critical of these choices. First of all, we’re not (though I concede that some feminists are anti-porn); secondly, you stereotype feminists as rigid, angry, combative, and man-hating; and, thirdly, you dismiss our very real accomplishments. Right now, feminists are fighting to keep Planned Parenthoods – often the only places low-income women can get mammograms, birth control, and STDs treatment – open in far too many states. We are fighting to correct the gender pay gap, which still means that women earn eighty cents for every dollar that men make (https://iwpr.org/issue/employment-education-economic-change/pay-equity-discrimination/). And, globally, we are fighting war-time sexual violence, which is an epidemic in Somalia and Uganda, to name only a few countries (https://www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/sexviol.htm). We are not, quite frankly, taking the time to fight against your lifestyle choices. If you want to resent anyone, resent those who believe they have a right to control your body (https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/09/opinions/the-important-issue-about-women-trump-has-raised-ben-ghiat/index.html). The leap from forced birth (and here, yes, feminism is about choice) to forced heteronormative lifestyles is not a big one given that both deny bodily autonomy.

So, if someone who self-identifies as feminist criticizes your lifestyle, I ask that you please engage with that person as an individual rather than using that exchange to attack feminism on the basis of this one or even relatively few encounters. You would not wish others to make reductive generalizations about your lifestyles based on a few extreme interactions; I ask that you grant feminists the same courtesy.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

Ffeminst3

I’m rehashing a previous response to this because I read it a little differently the second time.

Ffeminist3 has a 100% fair point. There’s a shit ton more to feminism than “freedom to make choices,” which in the grand scheme of things is actually pretty low on the overall hierarchy of needs anyway. And from a choice perspective being able to affect relationship dynamics imposed on ~99.981% of men AND women over at least the last 6,500 years and call it “freedom” or “choice” is about as obliviously privileged as Marie Antoinette and her buddies wearing silk brocade gowns and calling themselves milkmaids.

(And yeah I said men too because you know what kind of pressure and even violence men in some cultures face if they don’t police their daughters or beat their wives the way we make Domly/Subby play out of? Indoctrination plays both ways.)

If you bend things around you can construct things like the right to education, right to own property, right not to be used sexually in combat or police-custody situations, or to supervise or represent men in business or law as “choices” and “freedom.” But as the old timer said, with enough ifs you can also put Paris in a bottle.

I’m a big, happy, and proud kinkster.

And therefore “freedom to choose” is right around the bottom of my list of reasons for doing what I do.

Like most actual kinksters I do what I do because it’s intentionally transgressive. I mean it’s called kink because it’s the opposite of what I know is decent and honorable and right. I do it because I’m goddamned terrified of the capital-P Patriarchal capital-S System and I hate it worse than vipers.

And I do it with people who feel the same way about it. If we didn’t know it was weird to get off on the shit we do it wouldn’t be “kinky!”

I do it because it’s exactly perverted — a stress reaction to social expectations that treating equal, autonomous human peers like children or thrills or pets or objects is the right thing to do if they have somewhere a penis might get put into.

I do it because I’ve been goddamn kinked!

But here’s the deal: every way I’m “supposed” to treat my partners sexually is also inherited from patriarchal indoctrination — treating women with more deference than I would my male friends of similar weight, size, income, etc., for instance. Going down on her but never imagining she’d “demean” herself by going down on me. Choosing Harvey Kellogg’s “missionary” position to minimize the risk of arousing her “animal spirits,” etc.

It’s all perverted. My embrace of kink is an alienated stress reaction to that too.

So one and a half full-throated cheers for Ffeminist3 for calling bullshit on the “freedom to choose” justification for conformity to the (exaggerated) status quo. And for rightly calling out buttewhispers who accuse feminists of being anti-sex, anti-kink, or anti-fun.

But only one and a half cheers for Ffeminist3 because they’re straw-manning power-exchange kink as well. Not everyone in kink can hold forth on Shulamuth Firestone and Andrea Dworkin, and of those who do not all agree with Mary Daly or Susan Brownmiller. But a hell of a lot actually can and do. And quite a few more have the same deep, dark, and visceral love/hate relationships with their kinky (ie bent, twisted, out-of-true) sexualities I do. And they’re more often than not critically aware of the contradictions between their transgressive modes of sexual expression and their political, cultural, and economic aspirations for all of humanity.

Yeah, maybe some kinksters really think what they do is “feminist” strictly and exclusively because they think feminism means only “freedom to choose” frankly anti-feminist sexual ideologies. But, you know, most of us don’t.

Learn more about feminism before you knock it. But also learn more about power-exchange kink before you knock that too.

Kinksters and feminists have better uses of their time than stereotyping and straw-personing each other.

(Hope this makes more sense and has fewer typos than the last time.)

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