Gender and BDSM

A few weeks ago, Dev posted about gender and roles in BDSM, and then the blogger at “Let Them Eat Pro-SM Safe Spaces” followed up with just as insightful a post. I’m a little nervous following up on what they wrote, because they’re both about a billion times more eloquent than I am, but there’s been some thoughts rattling around in my head for a while, especially given my wife and I and our flirtation with switching.

When my wife is submitting, I think of her as a female submissive. I know that, on some level, she’s just a submissive. It shouldn’t be gendered. But it is. It’s gendered because we live in the world we live in, and I try to be an enlightened and relatively hangup and prejudice and sexism free person, and yet there I am, letting my wife lick my feet. Dress me. Giving her orders, making her debase herself, letting her praise me as her rightful owner. And there’s a voice in my head that’s telling me how awful this is, there’s decades of undergrad sociology ethics telling me that what we’re doing is wrong, and that it’s wrong because we live in the world we live in.

Let’s not even get into S&M with her as my sub. Spanking her, I can live with, and I don’t know why it doesn’t ping my guilt. Tit-smacking is something we both enjoy, and again, I don’t know why a blow to her breasts is arousing and not guilt-worthy. But when the whole thing turns to punishment, all of a sudden all of the abuse cases from my days doing social work come flooding back. When I smacked her once, after both of us negotiated it, I felt horrible specifically because I live in a world where men can do that, where men do do that, and it’s not negotiated.

That moment when I smacked her — even though it was consensual, even though it happened after negotiation — I was never more acutely aware of her gender. I don’t think I was that aware of her gender when I watched her give birth, because giving birth is raw biology, and I’m conditioned to think it’s natural, and smacking her was…anathema to me. It violated everything I had been raised to believe in, and a lot of self-constructed images I had about myself.

I didn’t like it. Precisely because of who we are, male and female.

It works both ways, mind. I know there’s something my wife gets off on when it comes to penetrating me — when it comes to being inside of me, whether it be with her hands or a strap-on. That I’m a male submissive, that we’re throwing out Christian household values and the normal power structure and we’re embracing a system where — if most of the people we know in our daytime lives found out about it — we’d be viewed as aberrant. That we’re not aiming for equality at all, not even giving lip service to the idea of helpmeets or equal partners, but inequality, and inequality rooted in abuse and power and sexual subservience.

I don’t know if I’m explaining this properly, since my modus operandi with the blog is to rant and not really plan or redraft, but rereading Dev’s post and the other I linked to, what I thought about was that slap, and how I was acutely aware of my maleness and my wife’s femaleness. And how she slaps me all of the time and neither of us minds, but the one time I raised my hand to her, I fell apart. And more than a little. Because of our genders. Because she was a female submissive.