La Phalene

There’s a lot in this kink business to make the feminist in me froth at the mouth. And no, I’m not talking about the images of pretty girls tied up, or the way that rape is dressed up as a perfect fantasy or that rad-fem line about how many sex acts are degrading to women. Rather it’s things like the two opposing camps, the female supremacists and the people who announce women are inherently submissive, and little things about how gender in constructed in the scene and in the archetypes. This is not a different world than vanilla, it’s all the baggage of the rest of my life seen through a somewhat tasteless spooky-goth lense that dresses people up in shiny black and involves a lot of smacking.

Bitchy Jones and Maymay both did beautifully calling kink to task for this sort of thing, for me, the very striking way that this makes me feel uncomfortable is that my sexuality is still treated like a commodity.

I spent a fantastic few days at the Montreal fetish weekend, awash in a sea of pretty peacocks and charming images. I’m going to be going glassy eyed over several public performances of F/m with good chemistry for weeks after this and there were truly pretty men in imaginative costumes. If you looked at the official pictures from the events though (taken by a swarm of pushy men with expensive cameras), you’d think I attended a lesbian separatist fetish weekend in which a scant few men snuck in. Hundreds of snaps of pretty girls; face shots, provocative poses. Couple portraits, with pictures of men the exception, not the rule.

Similarly the entertainment at events suffered from the fact that if you blinked it would slip back into burlesque. Often the shows depending on an interest in seeing a woman take her clothes off or writhe sensually around. The trapeze artist and the woman who danced in the Spanish web at the ball Rococo took great effort to make sure you knew they were lovely women. That’s fantastic, but where are the lovely men?

Women dom’d women, and topped men, and men topped women, but the stage was strangely missing M/m. I know there were many gay male couples floating around, so how must they feel?

The fetish fashion show drove this home. While I’d happily mug the ladies for their outfits and skip around in them shocking the grocery store clerk and the more naive exchange students from the Midwest, there were loads of pretty clothes for me and not a stitch being shown in the lineups for men.

And it’s not like it’s hard to make masculine costumes. Hell, there were plenty on display, a black latex ram, punkish spinney creations (very popular), demon suits with wing blades operated by fishing line and historical costumes with tight breaches to match the corseted women… And so on. If I could sew well enough I’d be putting out the line right now of pretty things for men that were stylish and non-cross dressing.

But back to my point about being something to consume: Both sides of the gender superiority thing construct a very narrow definition of womanhood. For a subculture where having breasts is no proof of your genetic gender, people are pretty quick to either thrust me up onto a pedestal for qualities I might not possess or put me down as a sheep in need of a firm hand. This can be pretty awkward in either respect because it’s a narrow box to shove slightly more than half the human population into.

Classically the people who believe in gynarchy say it’s because women are warm, empathetic and emotionally intelligent, bringing wisdom that will end wars. Men who say women are submissive point to their classic social position and need for protection, talking about evolutionary biology or theology, or maybe gorean psychology. They generally phrase things in terms of a yin/yang, with female deference not as an explicit proof of male superiority but part of the natural order of things, like plug into socket.

I’m a young woman, who sort of conforms to the physical proportions desired of women in my era, fresh faced, vivacious and vicious in my interests. If you talk to vanilla people, the image ‘dominatrix’ is the closest to what I am, though not a label I embrace personally, and this symbol is what people perceive about kink. I’m bossy, aggressive and I like violence. According to the gynarchists, either I fail as a woman because I raid from the masculine side of things or my superiority is so unsupported as to be a point of religious faith. According to the man-as-patriarch, this is the flapping around of an unsatisfied woman who needs a Real Man ™ or I’m a unicorn who can be satisfied with a nice fluffy ‘female’ man. Both sides are very quick to write from the perspective of how females fit into this, either above or below. I really would like to see some f-sub writing on the perspective of gender-as-orientation, because while it seems like men write in generalizations (as do the female tops who believe their own hype enough to call their gender the best) the f-subs are all writing about personal service and the closest I’ve seen to them talking about belonging at the feet of men in general is waxing poetic about service making them feel fulfilled.

So where do I, the visual spokesperson for my kink, fit into all of this? I want a master like I want another hole in my head, but I don’t want to top someone because they believe in extreme sexual dimorphism, I want it to be submission gently coaxed (or brutally conquered) because of who I personally am, with mutual respect. And not the yin/yang separate but equal role bullshit, either. Subs aren’t subbing because this is mystical; it’s a fetish where, unlike the people who love inanimate objects, luckily the object of my desire can love me back. They might be the bolt to my nut, but to work we’ll both need to be made of the same material and my perfect opposite would probably find me dreadfully tedious and overbearing. They might get off on that, but being healthy we’d end up compromising.

Am I comfortable that this subculture, just like the mainstream culture, objectifies my body and treats it like a point of extreme interest? Well, I like being looked at. I like nice looking men too though and I’d appreciate it if men were treated like sexual acquisitions as well. I want equality in a world where people are furiously masturbating to the idea of enslavement.