No.
Alright, alright, I guess I could elaborate. First of all, by feminist, I mean in the sense of Rebecca West’s quote that “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” Actually identifying as a feminist is entirely unnecessary, particularly given the many problems with mainstream feminism such as racism, transphobia, and whorephobia (which I’m calling whorephobia because that’s what sex workers themselves call it). Second, it should be blindingly obvious that a man cannot in any meaningful way submit to a woman without believing she’s a person.
Here’s an example: recently on fetlife a disgusting sack of shit who obviously hates women started a discussion called Rawlsian Ethics and BDSM: Should femdoms be required to be kink dispensing machines? The title pretty much says it all, but here’s an excerpt in case you still had any hope for the human race.
How (from this viewpoint) would you feel about a law requiring dominant females to spend, say, an hour a week dispensing kink to random sub males?
For example, you may be thinking: well, if I turn out F, it may be a little creepy to be whipping random guys’ butts or having them lick my boots, but I guess I could live with that. And if I turn out to be m, maybe I couldn’t find a kink partner at all, and being allowed to lick a femdom’s boots once in a while would be at least something and would vastly improve my happiness.
The question again: from this perspective, knowing that you might be m after birth, if you could vote, would you vote to enact a law requiring femdoms to dispense kink? Would total world happiness, in a Rawlsian sense, be greater with such a law?
Wow. Where the fuck does this asshole get off calling himself submissive when he thinks women ought to be enslaved for the greater good (of his boner). Literally enslaved! Oh, but don’t worry, this monument to entitlement acknowledges that it “may be a little creepy” to be forced to do things you don’t like to people you would never share a room with if you had a choice. Or, you know, go to jail, which is obviously where those heartless bitches belong. What kind of black-hearted hag thinks her rights matter when there are neglected penises in the world?
Believing that women should be enslaved for your pleasure is not only reprehensible, it’s the exact opposite of submission to them. People, this is not complicated. The word submit means “To yield or surrender (oneself) to the will or authority of another.” There is no bizarre parallel universe in which forcing people to do things for you even vaguely resembles surrendering yourself to their will. Just admit you’re a dominant bottom and a terrible human being, then go home and never interact with the outside world again. It’s better off without you.
There are subtler forms of this hateful bullshit as well. The expectation that of course a “real” dominant woman is going to dress in the exact kind of outfits that get your dick hard is also the opposite of submission, it’s just not quite as disgusting. If you want a woman who gets off on being told what to wear, you need to find yourself a submissive woman. Oh, I’m supposed to conveniently happen to really enjoy dressing up in whatever fetish gear most does it for you? Well that’s completely different! You know, if you’re a complete fucking moron. If you’re too stupid to see how dehumanizing it is to assume that I only have needs that conveniently dovetail with yours, there’s just no hope for you.
And there’s the expectation that a “real” dominant woman just happens to like whatever kind of play the so-called submissive man does. If you expect to be told to do only things that turn you on and only when it’s convenient, you’re not submitting to anyone. At best you’re going through the motions of submission to a fantasy I’m acting out for you. Stop kidding yourself that any of that bullshit is about submitting to anyone at all or to me personally and we’ll both be a lot happier.
Guys, you can have the belief that the world revolves around your dick, or you can have meaningful submission to another person, but you can’t have both without deluding yourself. It is very simply not possible to be submissive to women in any meaningful way without believing that we’re people.
hmmm-I don’t think you can really have ANY meaningful relationship with anyone unless you can see that other person as an individual, with wants and needs of their own. I’d also throw out that a fair amount of empathy is required. In a D/s relationship, this is doubly so for both parties. For the sub, it’s only when the wants and needs of their dominant becomes their priority does the power exchange actually start to happen.
It won’t last long, however, if there’s not some flow coming back down from the dom as well. That’s why there has to be real communication on both sides, or it’s doomed from the start. The male parroting what he heard from his trusty internet ready Porn-o-tron as his ‘words of devotion’ and needs are just random noise. Of course, I’ve got it lucky, her wants and needs ARE the most important things to me, and the Lady Pagan also has an excellent BS detector as backup!
You’d think that would be obvious, but sadly there are a lot of people out there who really seem to think it’s okay to act like women get to have whatever wants and needs they like, just so long as they remember that those wants and needs will never matter as much as a man’s casual whims.
I’ve actually had a pathetic, snivelling, manchild tell me that he thought political correctness had gone too far, and that it was easier these days to be a woman than a man. I’m sure he believes that he loves his wife and his daughter, but he does not for a second think that we are actually people who might possibly be right about the oppression we’re complaining about.
“Guys, you can have the belief that the world revolves around your dick, or you can have meaningful submission to another person, but you can’t have both without deluding yourself.”
Spot on.
A couple of points, if I may.
1. Phallocentrism is one of the principle myths of patriarchy. The fact that the phallus is unavailable most of the time unless one is in the middle of a pubertal testosterone spurt, and that pride in the phallus (as distinct from the penis) represents a massive investment in a depreciating asset, is a dirty secret that escapes an awful lot of men, but helps to explain a good deal of the moronic spectrum of male behaviour.
Full disclosure: I’m in the middle of a project that attempts to argue that genuine male submission can be seen as subersively involving implicit or explicit opposition to patriarchy.
2. It really does help if one gets to know potential kink partners firstly as people with whom one has enormous intellectual and cultural commonalities plus a large does of empathy, before getting down to the nitty-gritty of negociating who shall do what and to whom.
The trouble is that many people (mostly men is has to be said) go out there looking for the kink on the false assumption that if the kink’s ok for them everything else will follow. A clear case of the cart before the horse.
I’m not totally sure I’m following the penis vs phallus distinction. In terms of a depreciating asset, I’m thinking that traditional masculinity is a) on its way out, which is absolutely terrifying for people who’ve hung all of their self worth on it, and b) a lie that emotionally cripples people. And that being oh-so-manly is a game strictly for the young, meaning that people who worship “manliness” are doomed to fail at performing masculinity sooner or later, because their bodies just can’t keep it up forever (pun not intended). Was any of that anywhere near what you were getting at?
Oooh, I would love to read that.
I can see why guys fresh out of a vanilla relationship that failed because they weren’t sexually compatible would overcompensate in the other direction, but you’d think they’d figure it out sooner or later.
“people who worship “manliness” are doomed to fail at performing masculinity sooner or later, because their bodies just can’t keep it up forever (pun not intended). Was any of that anywhere near what you were getting at?”
Yep that’s it. Plus the fact that the erect penis (i.e. the phallus) and its metaphoric proxies are a pervasive signifiers of power in a world still dominated by patriarchal ideology. Think Nelson’s column, or the Shard, or the CN Tower, or that abomination in Dubai. It’s all about “my cock is bigger than your cock, nah nah nah nah nah”.
If you think about it, a penis that can’t, for whatever reason achieve an erection, is not much good for anything other than pissing through. Hence my insistence on phallocentricity rather than penis-centricity in constructing ‘masculinity’.
Oh, now I get it. There’s something terribly ironic about using something as fickle as an erection as a symbol for power/strength/manliness.
Heh, yeah. And people are slowly becoming less and less impressed with stuff like that (or at least I like to think so). When I see someone driving a hummer, I certainly don’t think “Gee, he must be rich”. I think “Gee, wouldn’t it be a lot easier just to get a tshirt that says ‘I don’t think it’s big enough’?”
Of course, you wandered into a Fetlife group, so you pretty much deserve what you get.
I’ll show myself out now. 🙂
Heh 🙂 But this was in the Submissive Men and the Women Who Love Them group, which is usually so good.
I think a lot of these guys have their terminology confused, which is a big part of the problem. By our definition, they’re bottoms. By the definitions used by most of the BDSM community at large, they’re bottoms. Often, as you said, dominant bottoms as well. But when they identify as submissive, slave, or something similar, it’s false advertising. They want to bottom in a scene, cooked exactly to order, the dom’s desires be damned. That’s not submission. Likewise, trying to project one’s own preferences on other people as the “real” way of doing things has nothing to do with submission. Yet these asses continually call themselves submissive (which also makes the rest of us look bad and is another rant altogether.)
And it’s just so frustrating. I believe there are submissive tops out there who are convinced that they’ll never be good enough because they doesn’t want to take charge, they want to hurt someone exactly the way they like to be hurt, and if these guys would just be honest about what they want they’d have a much better chance of finding them. Given the glee I’ve seen submissive people take in playfully throwing their friends under the bus, I don’t know that having a little sadistic streak is even that unusual in submissives.
I went to my first kink event recently – a sort of play-partyish thing held at a swingers’ club.
While my date was off getting us drinks, some guy noticed me sitting alone, came up, said hello, kissed my hand and knelt in front of me. This was literally the exact sequence of events; I’m not leaving out a conversation where he asked if he could get to know me and I said “prostrate yourself before me, filthy worm!”
After he was kneeling, he suddenly seemed to remember that the event was not specifically an F/m thing; he was like “Oh, uh…are you a top?”
I said that I was, and was about to add “…But I’m not comfortable with your behaviour right now” when I saw, over his shoulder, that my date was heading back over. So I said “…and I’m here with someone,” instead, and made eye contact with my date over the interloper’s head.
The “sub” quickly got up and apologized a bunch of times…to my date. Not to me.
So here we have a “submissive” man who a) pushed his own kinks on me instead of asking what I wanted and b) clearly believed that I “belonged” to the man I was with – hence apologizing to him for trespassing on his “territory” instead of to me for infringing on my personal space. It made me want to beat the shit out of him, and not in the fun way.
I just wanna yell at guys like that, WANTING TO HAVE DEGRADING THINGS DONE TO YOU DOES NOT MAKE YOU SUBMISSIVE. STOP USING THAT WORD TO DESCRIBE YOURSELF.
Anyway. I was infuriated by that FetLife thread, too. Especially since the OP kept insisting that we were supposed to be looking at the choice in a totally unbiased way and that nobody was being neutral enough, when the question itself isn’t neutral. If I am truly a wise and unbiased pre-born entity, and I am asked whether I think half the population should be enslaved, I’m gonna say no – because the idea of doing that to anyone is fucking awful. Even knowing that I could be born onto the side of the equation that benefits from the awfulness, I really could not in good conscience allow awfulness to happen. So how is this question even up for debate?
Unless we’re assuming that wise, unbiased pre-born entities can also be selfish dicks, I guess. I mean, the parameters were never really specified.
That’s just creepy and weird. Hello total lack of boundaries. I’d really like to say that’s unusual at kink events, but it’s not exactly unheard of. I’ve never personally experienced anything quite that bad, but sadly that probably has more to do with how many parties I’ve skipped than it does with the quality of the local scene.
That’s just gross. Way to respect women there, jerkface.
Exactly! So frustrating!
Thank you! It’s absolutely amazing that anyone is dumb enough to ask a question that’s openly contemptuous of women and expect them to be neutral about it. And yes, there’s no way that the question of whether it’s okay to enslave people is even a question unless the people benefiting from the slavery are sociopaths.
I agree 100% My wife often jokes that I’m more a feminist than she is. People are people; some are great, and some are shitty. It’s sad that it takes a person who desires more than anything in their heart to submit to women for that to be the standard of a person we know for sure has the bare minimum respect for women.
Good grief men! Stop being such assholes!