Yes, You Can Be a Leather Feminist!

Yes, You Can Be a Leather Feminist,
Or “So, what’s a nice grrrl like you doing bound to a spanking bench like this?”

Life is rich for me as a devout feminist, bisexual swinger, and Switch with serious sub tendencies. Add to that a professional career in the hallowed halls of academia, marriage to a pro-feminist, Dom-leaning husband, and parenthood, and life is not only rich but full to overbrimming. And I love it that way.

Can you be all these things at once? I am sometimes asked. Well, that’s easiest to answer by saying “Honey, I am all these things as once, and a good many more.” We’re all rich with multiple identities, including some that may seem in conflict or even mutually exclusive.

While I’m in glib mode, let me add my favorite quotation to this discussion. (Feel free to use this when your friends and loved ones dump their inability to understand your complexity on you.) From Walt Whitman’s 1855 poem “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

First lesson for this feminist who enjoys kissing her Dom boyfriend’s boots, let’s her husband make her squeal when he binds her to the cross and engages in knifeplay on her helpless naked body, and is looking forward to a lovely caning session in the coming weeks with a superb Domme with a penchant for condescension scenes: Don’t let others tell you that you cannot “contain multitudes.” This is especially true for those of us who enjoy D/s with heavy doses of roleplay (from Daddy’s little girl to Queen Salome and her personal guard)!

(While you work with those “multitudes” inside you, however, do not mistake “Domme” for “feminist.” I hear this all too often and it is a misconception. Beating someone or calling him/her “slave” is not what feminism is about. Nor, for the sexist BDSMers out there, is the assumption correct that either feminists or Dommes “just want to be men.” With that myth cleared up, let us move to female submissives.)

Certainly, I am far from the only woman who is ready with answers on the subject of feminism and kink or feminism and submission, for that matter. “I’m a sub, not a doormat,” one slogan goes. And another reads, “I’m Dominant all day long; when I get home from work, I want someone else to take the responsibility.” I can relate to that one. Much of my love of D/s centers in relinquishing control, in the pleasure of giving myself over wholly to someone else’s command. I can “rest,” if you will, enjoying a total release from responsibility.

This lets you know that I’m not a 24/7 slave type. Honestly, I can’t relate to that kind of energy flow, but I could analyze it as an extreme form of what I engage in when I submit to a Dom and surrender my body, mind, heart, and soul for whatever duration we both need or have to offer each other.

This is not to say that I don’t have serious concerns about the degree to which the relationship between a Dom and sub, particularly in male Master/female slave form, can resemble the very worst aspects of a traditional patriarchal marriage. (Of course, you can do patriarchal nastiness in other gendered pairings; this one is just the most glaring.) When a “Master” barks “Get me a beer” at the half-nude female slave at his feet, then from the outside he looks just like that asshole I refused to date in high school. Why would D/s make that any more palatable? Worse, and far more seriously, when Master uses D/s to isolate his slave, to give her 100% housework and child-rearing responsibilities while she’s working full-time, for example, then I say: this isn’t about D/s, it’s about an abusive guy. It just happens that this macho asshole likes kink with his abuse—or uses kink as an excuse/rationalization for it. Quick on the heels of this example, of course, is the question you may be asking: why is this woman with this “Master”?! That complex issue is about socialization, self-esteem, education, and many other factors beyond the bounds of an article on how a woman can be feminist and enjoy submission.

I’m not going to go from this to giving you an argument about “choice.” If you know anything about feminism from the inside (from feminists themselves and not the mainstream media or right-wing pundits, for example), you know that feminism is about choice for women, about creating a more equal and just world that increases women’s choices—and men’s, too. I do agree that BDSM is about making a choice, so a woman in the U.S. in 2003 who seeks out a good spanking (giving or getting), pony play, or corset training is certainly exercising her freedoms in this incredibly problematic but well-intentioned democracy. Yet, making good choices that will increase one’s personal happiness and—should one be interested in such stuff—make the world a better place, is about making informed choices. That takes education and an analytical mind. We may get an education (especially if we’re middle-class or higher), but we don’t get much encouragement for critical thinking about our daily-life choices, especially from the media, where most folks in the U.S. get most of their information.

If you do make the choice to play as a female sub, there are feminist ways to explain it. One way is to discuss what you do as satiric critique. Feminist film critic Mary Ann Doane discusses the concept of feminine “masquerade,” a performance of traditional gender roles intended as parody, as subversion of them, as indicator that gender truly is just a performance. I love that argument, and it works superbly for Madonna videos and drag queens. But when I do D/s, I do it straight (if you will): no satire, no complex postmodern irony. I want to be that unnamed mortal supplicant, honoring the great god Zeus by yielding up her will and her body to His mighty whims, letting her moans, whimpers, and screams of terror bring deep pleasure and a triumphant smile to His immortal lips.

Such unbridled pleasure is a primary criterion for Carol Queen’s choice-oriented concept of “sex-positive” feminism. In the short narrative “Knife,” from M. Christian’s anthology Best S/M Erotica (Black Books, 2003), Queen articulates how she addresses her anxiety over feminism while engaged with her man in a form of edge play:

This is the litmus: that every shred of me wants him to take me, and the shame that wells up in me over breaking feminist commandments is only making me hotter. In these moments if I could not trust that the wisdom of my cunt transcends all political cant, I would fly helplessly insane.

There is definitely something to be said for breaking taboos and “commandments.” Yet, here and elsewhere, Queen relies most on a bodily wisdom: she trusts that the “wisdom of [her] cunt” will not let her down. This is, to my mind, a dangerous argument. While I basically trust Queen’s avowed feminism, I have serious concerns about the rhetoric she chooses. By her logic, we should feel equally comfortable with men being led by their dicks. I’ll skip the easy joke about this being how the country is already run and just say: Is this truly a useful guideline?

That said, there are ways in which Queen does begin to get at a distinction that is my personal “litmus” test. Feminism is about what I am; BDSM is about what I do. Feminism is about a perspective on the world, about living in ways that challenge the status quo as far as gender relations (and many other related issues) are concerned. I see the world as a feminist; I live as a feminist. It doesn’t matter whether I’m going to the movies or getting lashed with a singletail: the experience is filtered through a feminist consciousness. I don’t “trust my cunt”; I rely on a worldview that I have developed through years of thoughtful study and ongoing lived experience from pre-adolescence through middle age. This means I do spend a lot of time analyzing, and I don’t and won’t apologize for that. Developing a critical eye and enhancing self-awareness is much of what feminism and, in my opinion, life is all about.

Yes, I am a feminist and I enjoy submission. And I revel in getting to know all the diverse parts of myself from the feminist perspective through which I see self and world. I invite everyone to keep learning, to work for equality and justice in the world (and know that feminism is never and has never been about anything but this), and to actively avoid shutting off the brain as an excuse for doing stupid things.