Hmm. This is going to be interesting. And opinionated, and possibly loud. And this is the kind of post where I feel the need to say beforehand that this is my personal opinion, and this is how I live my personal life. If I could make “whatever floats your boat” into a life motto, I would.
Also? This is essay length. I was going to split it, but I’ve decided against doing so. Read at your leisure.
Strap-ons.
On one of the first posts I made there was some commentary about gendered play. A nice man commented about the nature of his relationship with his dominant female partner, emphasizing his own masculinity, and writing in parentheses: no strap-on dildos here! I added the exclamation point, but you get my drift.
And at the time, that surprised me, but I hadn’t really registered yet that such a comment is totally in line with much of the blogosphere. Hey, whatever works.
But sorry. I’m not a card-carrying member of the No-Strap Ons Club. In fact, I’m a card-carrying member of the Strap-Ons Rock My Socks Off Club. We’ve got jackets.
I love strap-ons. Love them. Love them like I love singletail. I use a strap-on on a man, and I get to glory in every reaction I elicit from him, moans and little fragile cries and all. I enjoy this the way I enjoy whipping a man until he falls to his knees. I want to see what he does. I will push him just to see how he pushes back, or whether he does at all. If he’s never done it before I want to see what happens to his mind once it’s over. I am a reation top; I get off on the reations I inspire in others. Not all tops are like this; lots of doms get off on having their pleasure sated. I do that too. Reactions are my pleasure.
For female dominants who deal strictly in their own pleasure, strap-ons seriously stink. It’s true; I don’t feel anything. It’s detached, like any other toy is detached. It’s not arousing in any kind of physical way. It does not work for everyone, and I wholeheartedly agree with Bitchy when she says it should not be the cum shot of femdom, and we shouldn’t all have to rush out and buy one. It’s all about getting what you want. To get what you want, first you have to understand what you want. Then you can go finding a set of tools that work for you, be it handcuffs or rubber gloves or strap-ons or paddles. Whatever.
Like, what? I can’t be a powerful woman with a strap-on? I can be whatever I want with a strap-on! Pull out of this the only part of the sentence that is actually worth a damn to me: I can be whatever I want.
A lot of femdom throws out the strap-on emphatically because emphatic gestures, even when overly simplistic, are often the easiest way to deal with complex problems. I don’t believe that femdom needs to eradicate the use of the strap-on in order to stop the perpetuation of equating masculinity with power. I think we actually need to restructure our thoughts on a very different, more fundamental level.
We’ve got these two sets of binary ideas: male & female and power & weakness. We have them all wrapped up with each other, entirely interdependent in so many ways. I want to erase this connection. I want to separate the idea of the male & female from the idea of power & weakness.
I’m amazed you’re still reading, by the way.
Male phallus worship has been around for thousands of years. Female power worship has also been around for thousands of years. And you know, I’d call myself a feminist, but that’s not right. I’m more of an equalist, if such a thing existed. I think many equalists become feminists because it seems to be the best way to approach the current situation. The thing is, the current situation is fucked and will not benefit from tinkering. It should be defenestrated. I wish to throw it out the metaphorical window.
We want to change the kink world for the better, yea? The way to change the world is by thinking differently. Step back, take a breath, and redefine. Reexamine your accepted truths.
Culture tells us that penetration equals power, penetration is masculine and therefore masculinity and power are forever linked. Because we’re dealing with two halves of two binary ideas, culture automatically links the other halves together; femininity is weak.
In order to combat this fuckupery we have decided to embrace being penetrated as strong, in order to cause the inevitable chain reaction which concludes by stating that the female gender is the one with the power.
The problem with deciding to turn the idea on its head is that we’ve already demonstrated that the logic behind the idea is faulty; culture came to the conclusion that women are weak, and we disagree. So we take the exact same logical treatment of ideas and arrive at the conclusion that women are strong, which suits us infinitely better but in no way fixes the problem of the faulty logic. This isn’t trying to fix the culture. This is trying to reaarange it to our convenience.
Rather than rehash an old process with new ideas, it serves us better to examine the process itself to figure out what the hell’s going wrong.
Point one: Penetration equals power. Not true. Penetration is a tool to be used in the process of power exchange. Being the giver or taker of a penetrative act in no way necessitates a certain kind of power, as all the lovely women who can top while being fucked have proven. Scratch it. It’s a false assumption. We knew that already; that’s the basic premise of the No Strap-Ons Clubs’ argument.
Point two: Penetration is masculine. Well hey, guess what. I don’t think that’s true either. And I fully realize I’m going against literally hundreds of thousands of years of biology here, with men having penises and women not. But doesn’t it seem that the very invention of the strap on has pretty much made this whole argument bullshit? Not only that, it’s not just a penis one can penetrate with. I can penetrate you with a knife, a needle, my fist, my finger, my teeth. I can penetrate your personal space. I can penetrate you emotionally with my mind. I get as much pleasure out of penetrating you with a strap-on as I do from penetrating you with a needle. I’m a woman with full control over the ability to penetrate people. I’m not taking on a masculine trait. This does not need to be gendered. Seriously, stop gendering things. Really.
With point one and point two pretty much gone, the conclusion just doesn’t hold up now, does it? Masculinity does not equal power. It’s not because masculinity equals powers’ opposite, weakness. It’s because, guess what, you don’t actually need to gender your power exchange in any one particular way. You can if you want to. But you don’t have to.
Especially not when stuck within this rigid bullshit idea that gender and power are binary concepts. Gender and power are fluid concepts. The two scales can play off one another with or without being intertwined. You can treat them any way you’d like.
I believe gender is necessarily fluid, because we’ve stuck ourselves into a binary idea and then have to embrace fluidity in order to account for all of the people, ideas and actions that don’t fit the binary model. I include myself in this fluidity. And I believe that power is fluid for exactly the same reason. I wear boys clothes, I kiss girls, and I don’t always think of myself as totally feminine. And I don’t hold every single solitary kind of ultimate power in my relationships, and don’t want to.
We insist on gendering power exchange because we choose the genders of our partners. It makes so much sense if you’re a submissive man to connect women with power. You want a woman with power. It’s not a far jump from there to wanting women to be powerful, even if they don’t want to be. And from there, to deciding that womankind is powerful. We are so insistent on gendering everything! Look how we name our interests: fem dom, male dom, fem sub, male sub.
If you’re not heterosexual this whole insistence on a binary equation of gender and power just up and fades away. Seriously, the heterosexual scene needs some prolonged exposure from the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans) scenes. Most of them figured out what I’m about to say a long time ago.
They’re *people,* people. We’re humans in the end. Embrace the idea that you are powerful because you are you. You demand power, you work for it, you get it. Embrace the idea that you are vulnerable because you choose to be, not because of how your sexual organs happen to be arranged.
It’s not me being a man, or being masculine. It’s me with a strap-on. It’s all about me. My gender identity informs rather than defines my identity as a whole. I claim power, because I am me. It’s so more elemental than gender.
A strap-on is a tool. Penetration is a tool. Power exchange is mental; power exchange is not about the tools you use but how you how you use them. It’s not about what you do; it’s about how you do it.
This is bad news for every annoyingly clueless femdom who’s ever walked into a play party and demanded that strange men bow down to her. It’s bad news for every male dom who argues that women are naturally the weaker sex. It’s bad news for every male sub who insists he’s worthless, and blissfully perpertuates the idea that all women are to be worshipped. It’s bad news for every man who wants to be fucked up the ass to make himself feel like a weak woman.
Nope. Sorry. Here in my corner of the Internet, I’m going to make you work for it. I will not accord you a place on any power scale according to your gender or a gendered idea of how you want to play. It’s going to be much harder than that, and it’s going to involve understanding the exchange of power as something you have to deal with consciously. Something you have to earn because of who you are as a whole person. What you think, and how you play. I have power because I use the tools I have available in order to gain power.
I’m not saying people can’t go out and gender their power exchange if they want to. Gender is fascinating, and an incredible tool to have available. I’m saying do it consciously. Have strap-on sex, or don’t! Whatever! Give and take as whole people, not arrangements of sexual organs.
But don’t come looking to me for femdom. I’m not a femdom. I’m a dom. Straight up. And I penetrate.
