Why spanking has never seemed like that big of a “kink.”

It makes sense that we’d get pleasure out of that kind of rhythmic contact.

That said it also suggests that spanking as non-kink punishment is really, really fucked up!

From time to time folks point out, somewhat correctly, that so much of power kink involves sexualizing traditional gender and especially patriarchal oppression.

I’d like to turn that on its head.  Impact play on the buttocks, kneeling, nudity, bondage, ass play, hair pulling, oral sex, and all the other activities and positions we associate with dominant and submissive sex are actually just normal things human beings enjoy when we’re in heat.  Sort of like deer or goats clash their antlers when they’re (literally!!!!!) horny and mostly just eat plants and avoid predators the rest of the year.

Looking at it this way what’s really fucked up isn’t that we sexualize patriarchy and oppression, it’s that we’ve patriarchalized sex!

Forcing a child to present their buttocks for striking is painful and humiliating precisely because the ass is an erogenous zone, because impact on the buttocks is stimulating, and because presenting buttocks is one of the ways humans invite their partners to penetrate their vaginas and anuses.  And yet the child is coercively subjected to this sexualized experience by individuals who are neither wanted nor appropriate.

Forcing a vassal or prisoner to prostrate themselves or to kneel is humiliating because that’s perverting the sensible position one must be in if one wishes to take their lover’s genitals in their mouth.  

Let’s not even start with the subversion of deference behind calling non-sexual partners “sir” or “mam!”

And so on.

The point isn’t really that BDSM is a perversion of patriarchal behavior.  Instead patriarchy has perverted so many normal erotic behaviors by turning them into non-sexualized, non-consenting secular forms of oppression.

I’m dead serious about this by the way.  The early, truly radical feminists who radicalized me argued persuasively that we literally couldn’t recognize and literally couldn’t imagine what our relationships would be like once patriarchy was smashed.  They also argued, correctly, that patriarchy is so deeply ingrained that it may be impossible to completely untangle ourselves from it.  So when I raise crazy-sounding challenges like this – that rather than D/S playing off of patriarchy that patriarchy instead perverts and subverts normal human sexuality I… I’m sorry but I don’t think I’m being all that crazy!


I’d just add that I’m trying to subvert the patriarchy when I argue, as I often do, that it’s weird that D/S is so gendered, or that it’s weird that we don’t see more women dominating men or men submitting to women (in non-”sissy” ways), or when I wonder why more Doms don’t demand that their subs erotically spank or choke them.  We’ve got maybe 90-95% of the same nerve endings, anatomy, and chromosomes, brain structures.  Odd then, isn’t it, that we choose to include or exclude how we stimulate each other based on gender?