From this link: http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/domism-role-essentialism-and-sexism-intersectionality-in-the-bdsm-scene/
Domism: Role Essentialism and Sexism Intersectionality in the BDSM Scene
Archimedes said that if he had a lever long enough, he could move the world. But where would he stand? It would be nice if some subculture sat outside every negative social dynamic, every kyriarchal oppressive dynamic, in pristine isolation, free of taint. It would be nice, but none can. And so the things that are wrong with the world are wrong with the BDSM community, and more specifically, with the formal community, the organizations and public parties: the Scene.
This is study in intersection. Among this relatively small group who are non-mainstream in one very specific respect, there are repetitions of and reactions to the oppressive patterns of the larger culture, but they’re not entirely straightforward. Partiarchal and heterosexist pattern manifest in some ways, power dynamics reorient themselves along BDSM role lines in other ways, and those things interact in ways that are completely unique to the BDSM community. There are other interactions, of course. I can’t encompass them all, partly for length and partly because, frankly, my grasp of some things is not good enough to try to write about them — so, for example, on the intersection of race and other dynamics with BDSM, or cisnormativity and cissexism, I can only refer to the writing of others.* I want to focus on a fairly tight set of issues here, which center on what I’ll call “domism” and how it interacts with patriarchy in the pansexual scene (I’ll explain the scope of the term below).
I’m focusing on the Scene for a number of reasons, but foremost because I have material about it that isn’t just my say-so. There have been two major academic ethnographies of the formal BDSM communities, by two different researchers, in two different cities, in the last decade. In a thinly-veiled New York she calls Caeden, Dr. Stacy Newmahr did participant fieldwork in the clubs from 2002 to 2006, work she published as Playing On The Edge, recently out from Indiana Universtiy Press. The other is unpublished. Dr. Margot D. Weiss did fieldwork with the Society of Janus and the attendant public scene in San Francisco in the years leading up to 2005, when she completed her dissertation, Techniques of Pleasure, Scenes of Play: SM In The San Francisco Bay Area. Though unpublished, it is available here, but unfortunately not free.
I’ll be blunt about what I mean by the “pansexual BDSM scene,” which I’ll call The Scene, and I don’t expect that either author would subscribe to this definition — though I’m not saying they wouldn’t. The Scene is the community of BDSMers in major cities oriented around heterosexual men, and heterosexual, heteroflexible and bisexual women. Overlap, particularly in play environments, between gay men’s and lesbian scenes and The Scene is limited, and while queer men and lesbian women are not excluded, they’re marginal within these spaces. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.
Domism
All the things I want to talk about intersect — this post is about how they’re not entirely separable — so it’s easiest to start at the conclusion. In The Scene, it’s often the case that the social spaces — I’m not talking about the BDSM play itself, but the social interaction of the participants outside the bounds of play — privilege dominants and devalue submissives. As I’ll discuss below, part but only part of this is that more of the dominants are men and more of the submissives are women; the way men who bottom are treated sheds a lot of light but also adds a lot of complexity to how we should understand these dynamics.
I’m borrowing the term “domism”, which as far as I know was coined by one of Weiss’s informants:
My definition is a bit broader. When I say “domism” I mean social structures within a sexual community that privilege dominants and devalue submissives outside of explicitly negotiated power exchanges. This takes a lot of forms, among them the pathologizing of bottoms and subs; and non-play role-policing and presumption.
Since I’ve started using the terms “submissive” and “dominant”, now is as good a time as any to talk about terminology. In most posts and in life I use “top” and “bottom” as the umbrella terms, to encompass but extend beyond the respective included concepts of “dominant” and “submissive.” If I’m defining the terms, I’ll use Lee Harrington’s definitions (from the glossary of this book):
Some people use “dominant” and “submissive” to include “top” and “bottom” because they’re more intuitive for new readers, which is a choice I understand but bristle at. Some people use “dominant” and “submissive” to include or replace “top” and “bottom” because they think that dominance and submission are better or more real, and what I really think is that these ideas should die in a fire and be buried under a headstone that reads “Total Power Exchange.” These prejudices towards power exchange are part of the problematic dynamics I’m describing, but since I’m talking about belief systems that operate around dominance and submission and prefer to ignore or devalue “mere” topping and bottoming, I’ll frequently use dominant and submissive as my operative terms below. I’ll add that for myself, I don’t use the term “submissive” as a noun, but sometimes as an adjective to describe my bottoming style. In practice I switch something close to 50-50.
Weiss writes about the pathologizing:
Weiss at 249 (internal citation omitted, bold mine).
It’s worth noting that claiming that there’s something broken in submissives — or in submissive men — amounts to an argument for etiology, yet there’s no consensus on why we have the kinks we do in the BDSM community, and no answer at all from the research, what little there is. There’s a plain inconsistency between sometimes very smart and well-informed people knowing and saying that there’s no available answer to why we do what it is that we do, and then saying (usually among our own) that we know why subs are subs.
This gets personal for me. I can’t tell you why I have the kinks I do, but I can tell you what I get out of bottoming. The challenge, the difficulty, the trust, the violation of gender and social norms with a partner, all amount to one thing: a site of tremendous intimacy, a shared physical end emotional journey where I am vulnerable to and connected with my partner … like jumping off a cliff. So that’s my answer.
What these prejudices amount to is a normalizing and centering of the experience of the dominant in The Scene. One way this is apparent is by the overrepresentation of tops or dominants among presenters. Presentations tend to be about skills, often bondage and painplay skills, and there’s a perception that it’s easier for the top to teach these skills. I don’t entirely agree with that perception, but between the overrepresentation of men among tops in The Scene, and the tendency for tops to do the teaching, that means that male tops to most of the talking. As one of Weiss’s informants put it: “[Janus is a] het male dom group. Every single presentation I’ve ever been to, every class I’ve ever taken … across the board, het dom male.” (Weiss at p. 241 n. 14.)
Maymay tells a story about presenting with a partner somewhere: he’s a bottom, and his partner started out by singletailing his back. And then the audience expected her to stop and start explaining what she had shown. But instead, Maymay, the bottom, started explaining what she was doing, as a top, and what he was doing, as a bottom. It’s a paired activity. It makes perfect sense that the bottom can explain skills for a paired activity. Topping a singletail scene means knowing something about both how to top it and what to expect from the bottom, and vice versa, but the ingrained expectation that tops teach skills was so great that the audience kept looking at the top, expecting her to take over.
Lots of Dominant Men, Lots of Submissive Women
One of the reasons that it’s hard to separate out what is plain old sexism from what is domism is that men are overrepresented among tops in The Scene and women among bottoms. In Weiss’s sample:
Weiss pp. 239-41 (table and footnote 14 on historical makeup of Janus and the BDSM community omitted). She continues:
Weiss notes that this distribution might be particular to her informants and Janus as an organization. In truth, I know of no good gender breakdown of roles in the the pansexual BDSM community broadly, or in The Scene in any city, and those proportions seem like they might be more skewed than would be true of New York — Newmahr doesn’t give figures. One blog has summarized the research, but the demographics are guesswork. I’ll say this though: the “best guess” at Kinkresearch has both men and women more evenly distributed across the role spectrum than what Weiss observed. I suspect this has much to do with the culture of the organizations that dominate The Scene in various cities, and varies accordingly.
All The Sexism Of The Rest Of The World, Plus The Vulnerability …
The interaction of domism and sexism in an environment where most of the women are bottoms and most of the men tops makes it impossible to neatly separate the sexism and the domism. As one might expect, Weiss’s male informants were less conscious of these dynamics, but the women reported them consistently.
Role Essentialism: It Persists Most Among Those Who Most Should Know Better
We’ve got a model of sexual orientation — it fits some people and not others, but it’s entrenched and politically useful — that says that it’s inborn and, more to the point for my purposes, static; unchanging over the course of one’s adult life. It’s also politically useful for BDSMers to invoke the orientation model. I’ll just say that discussion of whether our kinks are innate is beyond the scope of this discussion. What seems to travel with that idea, though, is the idea that our BDSM role orientation is fixed and static. That idea seems to persist in the way people often talk about BDSM role orientation — top or bottom, submissive or dominant — even though the more we know about it the more evidence we have that it isn’t true. Newmahr takes this head-on:
Role Policing
What comes with role essentialism is role policing: folks in Scene social spaces acting as though one’s play role orientation is not only fixed but should manifest outside of play — acting as if being submissive should be constraining, and as though dominance is a status that can be lost (strongly echoing of performative femininity and masculinity, obviously). Newmahr writes:
One True Way-ism
One True Way-ism is the play equivalent to role policing in the social interactions of The Scene. It’s almost comical that in a community where any attempt to discuss the moral or social implications is immediately countered with “You’re saying your kink is not okay!” (it even has a common abbreviation, YKINOK), some of the same people will also tell others that they’re doing their kinks wrong. Some folks can seriously make statements that a “true dominant” this, a “true submissive” that … Fortunately, my experience is that these statements are frequently challenged, in the Scene and in online spaces, and sometimes (rightly) ridiculed. But there are still widely held prejudices that some kinds of kinks are more authentic or real or better than others. Newmahr writes:
Newmahr isn’t alone in shopping for a BDSM role that will cause her less grief in the social spaces of The Scene. One friend (I’ll call her Tigrerra because my kids watch a lot of Bakugan) who leans top but does switch, tells me that when she started playing in a major city public scene, she came out in “full domme armor” to ward off the sexist invasions and bullshit that switch- or bottom-identified women face. This issue isn’t new; in the early 1990s I remember Usenet group posts by top-identified women in The Scene complaining about the assumptions that they were submissives and the nonconsensual and invasive behavior that sometimes came with it.
On Fetlife, the BDSM social networking behemoth, there are groups such as Not Only D&S to counteract this and create spaces for people whose bottoming isn’t necessarily submission or whose topping isn’t necessarily dominance. But there are a lot of folks who still hold the stated or unstated opinion that submission ranks somehow above “mere” masochism and that there’s something unseemly or less authentic about “service topping.” One would think there’s no room for “should” in the sex-positive agenda, but in The Scene, “should” hangs on like stubborn mold.
Newmahr writes about the attitude that there’s a hierarchy of play styles, and I agree with her assessment, though certainly there is significant counterforce to these views:
Newmahr 115. My view, backed up by Weiss’s observations, is that this reaction to threats to the paradigm expresses itself perhaps most starkly as prejudice against and devaluation of men who bottom, particularly submissive men.
Gender Role Violation: Men Bottoming
“Tom explained that “there are party groups in which I’m marginally tolerated because I’m a sub.”" Weiss, p. 247. That’s not a reference to me, but my first contacts with The Scene (long before Newmahr’s New York fieldwork) ran into some of this. Being a young guy more interested in bottoming than topping was … a suboptimal experience. I sort of quickly became more interested in paying attention to the political projects of the BDSM community than looking for play partners in The Scene. Maymay, another bottom-identified guy, has said much the same thing, about much the same scene, at the time of Newmahr’s fieldwork.
The comfortable assumption (for some) that scene role hierarchy replicates gender-role hierarchy is one that goes unstated, but one that a lot of folks — particularly some het male doms — don’t want to see challenged:
Weiss, p. 248. It is the men, and their anxious masculinity, that police this, not women’s discomfort with submissive men. A man who bottoms is so discomfiting to some men that one of Weiss’s respondents said it cost him friendships:
These are not dynamics unique to The Scene, or to BDSM communities. They’re dynamics from outside our communities that manifest within them in ways that are unique. Men who bottom are an (to use Butlerian terminology, see here) abject identity, a specter that terrifies many men outside the BDSM community. When I’ve described things I do as a bottom, those descriptions have occasionally been picked up — with comic revulsion and summary dismissal — on “men’s rights activist” fora.
Weiss concludes:
(The limits of my analysis are glaring here. Because of both the limitations of my experience and of the source material I was working with, I have not attempted to extend any of this to the gay male leather community, though I’d say I have a better groundiing in that literature than most het readers do. I also don’t have a good handle on the ways that trans folks’ experiences intersect with the dynamics I’ve written about. I know anecdotes, but I can’t begin to analyze how transphobia plays into the reflexive discomfort people have with play dynamics that upset their settled assumptions. Suffice it to say that I know lots of kink spaces, online and real world, are deeply uncomfortable places for kinky trans folks, and if there’s an analysis of the interplay between scene role essentialism, sexism, and cissexism, transphobia, transmisogyny, etc., please somebody link it in comments.)
It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way
There is no point outside kyriarchal structures, not that any of us can access. But that’s a problem for every aspect of social justice work, and the answer to that is never, “well, maybe we should just give up.” We all believe that it is possible, in our imperfect ways, to own our shit and make the world around us better and less shitty. So I don’t say any of this to excoriate The Scene, but to exhort folks in BDSM communities to not replicate the injustices of the wider world unthinkingly, and instead to thing about them and push back.
I could end on a vague rhetorical note here, but I’d rather be practical. Here’s what I think folks ought to do:
Recognize and facilitate our diversity. It’s fine for men to want to top or women to want to bottom, but the assumption that that’s the case is self-replicating because it marginalizes and pushes out people who don’t fit that model. Folks need to stop assuming that women are bottoms or subs.
Stop The Role Policing. Jokes that take as their premise that bottoms should be subs, and should be submissive when they’re not playing and with people they’re not playing with are not funny. They’re toxic.
There Is No One True Way. Bottom != submissive. Pain play != power exchange. If you find someone explaining how something is more real or deep or true or important than how someone else does it, you can safely dismiss what they have to say.
Bottoms Are Not Broken. Where would tops be without them? Not having much fun. One side of the kink is no weirder or more in need of explanation than the other.
*Weiss has an entire chapter on The Scene and race, focusing not only on the relatively small proportion of People of Color in the Bay Area Scene, but also on the racialized images of BDSM. It’s Chapter 6 of her dissertation and it’s an engaging read. Neither Weiss nor Newmahr deal with cisnormativity in any direct way, but there are some good writers around who are both trans and kinky. I’ll recommend in particular Asher Bauer, who writes at Tranarchism.
**Though it’s beyond the scope of this already lengthy post, this is another intersection that can’t be neatly untangled. Bonnie’s experiences of sexism and role policing are informed by a fetishizing, racist narrative about Asian (stereotypically East Asian) women. The experiences of people of color in being caricatured into racialized narratives around a particular gender, race, role and sometimes sexual orientation stand at intersections of multiple kyriarchal equalities, and the choice to deal in thos post with role and gender primarily is, in that sense, an arbitrary one. Another writer might just as well address the intersection of race and BDSM role (and some have; I am thinking here of Tina Portillo and Mollena Williams, though I don’t have specific pieces handy to cite) and footnote gender as an additional factor.
This is study in intersection. Among this relatively small group who are non-mainstream in one very specific respect, there are repetitions of and reactions to the oppressive patterns of the larger culture, but they’re not entirely straightforward. Partiarchal and heterosexist pattern manifest in some ways, power dynamics reorient themselves along BDSM role lines in other ways, and those things interact in ways that are completely unique to the BDSM community. There are other interactions, of course. I can’t encompass them all, partly for length and partly because, frankly, my grasp of some things is not good enough to try to write about them — so, for example, on the intersection of race and other dynamics with BDSM, or cisnormativity and cissexism, I can only refer to the writing of others.* I want to focus on a fairly tight set of issues here, which center on what I’ll call “domism” and how it interacts with patriarchy in the pansexual scene (I’ll explain the scope of the term below).
I’m focusing on the Scene for a number of reasons, but foremost because I have material about it that isn’t just my say-so. There have been two major academic ethnographies of the formal BDSM communities, by two different researchers, in two different cities, in the last decade. In a thinly-veiled New York she calls Caeden, Dr. Stacy Newmahr did participant fieldwork in the clubs from 2002 to 2006, work she published as Playing On The Edge, recently out from Indiana Universtiy Press. The other is unpublished. Dr. Margot D. Weiss did fieldwork with the Society of Janus and the attendant public scene in San Francisco in the years leading up to 2005, when she completed her dissertation, Techniques of Pleasure, Scenes of Play: SM In The San Francisco Bay Area. Though unpublished, it is available here, but unfortunately not free.
I’ll be blunt about what I mean by the “pansexual BDSM scene,” which I’ll call The Scene, and I don’t expect that either author would subscribe to this definition — though I’m not saying they wouldn’t. The Scene is the community of BDSMers in major cities oriented around heterosexual men, and heterosexual, heteroflexible and bisexual women. Overlap, particularly in play environments, between gay men’s and lesbian scenes and The Scene is limited, and while queer men and lesbian women are not excluded, they’re marginal within these spaces. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.
Domism
All the things I want to talk about intersect — this post is about how they’re not entirely separable — so it’s easiest to start at the conclusion. In The Scene, it’s often the case that the social spaces — I’m not talking about the BDSM play itself, but the social interaction of the participants outside the bounds of play — privilege dominants and devalue submissives. As I’ll discuss below, part but only part of this is that more of the dominants are men and more of the submissives are women; the way men who bottom are treated sheds a lot of light but also adds a lot of complexity to how we should understand these dynamics.
I’m borrowing the term “domism”, which as far as I know was coined by one of Weiss’s informants:
There is overlap here between sexism and what Gretchen calls “domism”: the sense that “dominants are somehow more valid people than submissives.” Teramis agreed, noting that it was sometimes unclear if someone was being sexist or “D/s presumptive”: do “you think you can order me to get you a drink” because I am submissive “or is it cause you’re a sexist pig anyway and you would do it to any women who was standing there?”Weiss p. 246 at n.16.
My definition is a bit broader. When I say “domism” I mean social structures within a sexual community that privilege dominants and devalue submissives outside of explicitly negotiated power exchanges. This takes a lot of forms, among them the pathologizing of bottoms and subs; and non-play role-policing and presumption.
Since I’ve started using the terms “submissive” and “dominant”, now is as good a time as any to talk about terminology. In most posts and in life I use “top” and “bottom” as the umbrella terms, to encompass but extend beyond the respective included concepts of “dominant” and “submissive.” If I’m defining the terms, I’ll use Lee Harrington’s definitions (from the glossary of this book):
Bottom: The giving or receiving partner in a dynamic, the person experiencing the sensations, actions, or activities; in gay male culture, the sexually penetrated partner
Dominant: The willful partner in a dynamic, the person whose ideas and desires are being followed. AKA: Dom, Dominant Partner
Submissive: The submitting or yielding partner in a dynamic, the person who follows the ideas and desires of another individual. AKA: Sub, Submissive Partner
Top: The giving partner in a dynamic, the person doing or applying the sensations, actions, or activities. In gay male culture, the sexually penetrating partner.
Some people use “dominant” and “submissive” to include “top” and “bottom” because they’re more intuitive for new readers, which is a choice I understand but bristle at. Some people use “dominant” and “submissive” to include or replace “top” and “bottom” because they think that dominance and submission are better or more real, and what I really think is that these ideas should die in a fire and be buried under a headstone that reads “Total Power Exchange.” These prejudices towards power exchange are part of the problematic dynamics I’m describing, but since I’m talking about belief systems that operate around dominance and submission and prefer to ignore or devalue “mere” topping and bottoming, I’ll frequently use dominant and submissive as my operative terms below. I’ll add that for myself, I don’t use the term “submissive” as a noun, but sometimes as an adjective to describe my bottoming style. In practice I switch something close to 50-50.
Weiss writes about the pathologizing:
Stephanie and Anthony, both bisexual dominants, discuss prejudice toward submissives; Stephanie argues that being submissive is “equated with weakness.” Unlike the assumptions made about dominants (or in contrast to the lack of pathologizing assumptions made about dominants), there must be “some reason” for being submissive, reasons Anthony elaborates as “you’re fat or you were abused as a child … or there’s something missing or there’s something that’s not quite right … or that you can’t say no.” While Stephanie and Anthony mean their comments to refer to both men and women, as Stephanie continues, her example is of a male submissive: “there are all sorts of — you’re right — this pathologizing thing, ‘well, why would he want to do that sort of thing?’” The implicit answer here, of course, is that the kind of man who might be submissive isn’t a real man, isn’t a masculine man. There is nothing “wrong” with a woman who enjoys submission. As Homi Bhabha argues, this masculinity is anxious, caught between dual imperatives (father/mother, fort/da) and mired in what he describes as “compulsion and doubt.”
Weiss at 249 (internal citation omitted, bold mine).
It’s worth noting that claiming that there’s something broken in submissives — or in submissive men — amounts to an argument for etiology, yet there’s no consensus on why we have the kinks we do in the BDSM community, and no answer at all from the research, what little there is. There’s a plain inconsistency between sometimes very smart and well-informed people knowing and saying that there’s no available answer to why we do what it is that we do, and then saying (usually among our own) that we know why subs are subs.
This gets personal for me. I can’t tell you why I have the kinks I do, but I can tell you what I get out of bottoming. The challenge, the difficulty, the trust, the violation of gender and social norms with a partner, all amount to one thing: a site of tremendous intimacy, a shared physical end emotional journey where I am vulnerable to and connected with my partner … like jumping off a cliff. So that’s my answer.
What these prejudices amount to is a normalizing and centering of the experience of the dominant in The Scene. One way this is apparent is by the overrepresentation of tops or dominants among presenters. Presentations tend to be about skills, often bondage and painplay skills, and there’s a perception that it’s easier for the top to teach these skills. I don’t entirely agree with that perception, but between the overrepresentation of men among tops in The Scene, and the tendency for tops to do the teaching, that means that male tops to most of the talking. As one of Weiss’s informants put it: “[Janus is a] het male dom group. Every single presentation I’ve ever been to, every class I’ve ever taken … across the board, het dom male.” (Weiss at p. 241 n. 14.)
Maymay tells a story about presenting with a partner somewhere: he’s a bottom, and his partner started out by singletailing his back. And then the audience expected her to stop and start explaining what she had shown. But instead, Maymay, the bottom, started explaining what she was doing, as a top, and what he was doing, as a bottom. It’s a paired activity. It makes perfect sense that the bottom can explain skills for a paired activity. Topping a singletail scene means knowing something about both how to top it and what to expect from the bottom, and vice versa, but the ingrained expectation that tops teach skills was so great that the audience kept looking at the top, expecting her to take over.
Lots of Dominant Men, Lots of Submissive Women
One of the reasons that it’s hard to separate out what is plain old sexism from what is domism is that men are overrepresented among tops in The Scene and women among bottoms. In Weiss’s sample:
Among my interviewees, for example, the majority of heterosexual women identified as bottom/submissive (71%), while the majority of heterosexual men identified as top/dominant (75%). Further, only 14% of the heterosexual women were top/dominant; 6% of the heterosexual men identified as bottom/submissive (see Table 1). Although most everyone will immediately point out that so-and-so is a female dominant, or so-and-so a male submissive, my observation in the pansexual SM scene supported this general trend: most heterosexual couples are male dominant, female submissive.
Weiss pp. 239-41 (table and footnote 14 on historical makeup of Janus and the BDSM community omitted). She continues:
One critical way the real intrudes uncomfortably into the scene is though gender stereotypes. While some of my interviewees argued that here there was less sexism in the scene than in real life, most interviewees described sexist and heterosexist assumptions around gender. The most common for this took is the assumption that women were (naturally) submissive and men were (naturally) dominant. Donald, simultaneously distancing himself from and endorsing this assumption, told me:Weiss, p. 246.
If you walk into Castlebar on the night of a party and you stripped everybody naked so nobody had collars on or wore their floggers … the vast majority of the people there would assume that men are tops and women are bottoms. It’s just the way it usually plays out. There are notable exceptions on both sides, lots of beautiful bottom boys, lots of really interesting top women. But you know, stereotypes and generalizations exist for some purpose. So the sexism itself might come where if a woman walked in clothed but not wearing a collar and a stereotypical heterosexual dominant male were to notice her, he would probably assume she was submissive because she was female.
Weiss notes that this distribution might be particular to her informants and Janus as an organization. In truth, I know of no good gender breakdown of roles in the the pansexual BDSM community broadly, or in The Scene in any city, and those proportions seem like they might be more skewed than would be true of New York — Newmahr doesn’t give figures. One blog has summarized the research, but the demographics are guesswork. I’ll say this though: the “best guess” at Kinkresearch has both men and women more evenly distributed across the role spectrum than what Weiss observed. I suspect this has much to do with the culture of the organizations that dominate The Scene in various cities, and varies accordingly.
All The Sexism Of The Rest Of The World, Plus The Vulnerability …
The interaction of domism and sexism in an environment where most of the women are bottoms and most of the men tops makes it impossible to neatly separate the sexism and the domism. As one might expect, Weiss’s male informants were less conscious of these dynamics, but the women reported them consistently.
Most of the women I interviewed agreed that many men, particularly heterosexual newcomers, made certain gendered assumptions: all women are submissive, there is one way to be a good submissive, and submissives have “issues” that dominants don’t have. Bonnie explained that, as an Asian-American, “I get a lot of men talking to me as if I’m supposed to be quiet and submissive, and I’m not necessarily quiet nor submissive; that can be really frustrating. Or people brushing me off because I happen to be female, even. Lenora and Gretchen, both submissives, complained that others have accused them of not being “real submissives,” or have expressed surprise over their SM orientations because they have strong opinions, are articulate, socially assertive or, as Lenora put it, “basically because I’m not a doormat.“**Weiss pp. 245-46. Footnote 16, quoted above, omitted here. Weiss’s informants sometimes differentiate between roles in BDSM play iteself, and in Scene social spaces which are not themselves BDSM play:
In [one] exchange, Stephanie is arguing that within a play scene, sexism is mitigated through the enforcement of rules of consent, negotiation, safewording and other forms of regulation and control. However, she differentiates this scene/play from the scene as a social space; there, she argues, men are likely to assume that women are submissive, and further, to create a (one-way) relationship of dominance (through inappropriate touching, or through language) with these women. Although Anthony doesn’t see this form of sexism, most female interviewees (and some male interviewees) agreed that there was a persistent assumption that women in the scene were submissive.Weiss p. 247 (bold mine).
Role Essentialism: It Persists Most Among Those Who Most Should Know Better
We’ve got a model of sexual orientation — it fits some people and not others, but it’s entrenched and politically useful — that says that it’s inborn and, more to the point for my purposes, static; unchanging over the course of one’s adult life. It’s also politically useful for BDSMers to invoke the orientation model. I’ll just say that discussion of whether our kinks are innate is beyond the scope of this discussion. What seems to travel with that idea, though, is the idea that our BDSM role orientation is fixed and static. That idea seems to persist in the way people often talk about BDSM role orientation — top or bottom, submissive or dominant — even though the more we know about it the more evidence we have that it isn’t true. Newmahr takes this head-on:
[A]lthough it is common for people to top when they had previously only bottomed or vice versa, the typical response highlights essentialist views of identity: “I knew you were really a switch!” References to fixed SM identities waiting to be discovered are also typical, such as “a submissive and doesn’t know it yet,” or a “top who can’t admit it.”Newmahr, p. 49 (internal citation omitted, bold mine).
Despite these essentialist beliefs, SM identities are also understood as changing over time… Stories about identity in the scene very often include change, and identification shifts are both recognized and encouraged, even as members adhere to essentialist ideas about identities. The essentialism shifts from particular SM identifications to more profound identities as SM and not-SM (kinky versus vanilla) and allows for flexibility in the particular SM roled. The fluidity of identity is not an implicit contradiction in the analytical construct of identity, but an indicator of the importance of the possibilities for meaningful change in selfhood throughout the life course.”
Role Policing
What comes with role essentialism is role policing: folks in Scene social spaces acting as though one’s play role orientation is not only fixed but should manifest outside of play — acting as if being submissive should be constraining, and as though dominance is a status that can be lost (strongly echoing of performative femininity and masculinity, obviously). Newmahr writes:
When I began my fieldwork, I intended to bottom rather than top. My options for play were thus limited to people who topped, and I therefore needed to identify as something in order to play. because the question int he community was most commonly phrased, “Are you a dominant or a submissive?” I identified myself as the latter (and as a researcher). While I was so identified, I observed several instances of policing submissive identity, a practice that I interpreted (and continue to interpret) as profoundly misogynistic, particularly since they have been most often initiated by dominant-identified men.Newmahr pp. 78-79 (bold mine). She continues:
The most ubiquitous example posits assertiveness as inconsistent with submission. Once, when I articulated a point in a heated conceptual debate, a member of the group asked me whether I was sure I was a submissive. Another time I asked a companion (a top-identified man) to order my coffee while I went to the restroom, prompting another person at the table to exclaim, “Hey, I thought you were a sub!“
On still another occasion, I went to retrieve my coat from a booth at the club. Catherine was sitting between it and me. When I asked her to let me by so that I could reach it, Hugh (a dominant-identified man) suggested that I crawl under the table for it.
In some circles, there are different protocols for speaking to submissives than to dominants, and it is common for dominants to ask one another’s permission to speak to “their” submissives. Other lines are drawn less formally, but jokes intended to humiliate, objectify or silence submissives are normative.Newmahr p. 79. She’s talking about things that happen outside of play, which really amount to an attempt to impose the dynamics of play outside the negotiated boundaries. I’m not going to sugar-coat this: It’s unethical.
One True Way-ism
One True Way-ism is the play equivalent to role policing in the social interactions of The Scene. It’s almost comical that in a community where any attempt to discuss the moral or social implications is immediately countered with “You’re saying your kink is not okay!” (it even has a common abbreviation, YKINOK), some of the same people will also tell others that they’re doing their kinks wrong. Some folks can seriously make statements that a “true dominant” this, a “true submissive” that … Fortunately, my experience is that these statements are frequently challenged, in the Scene and in online spaces, and sometimes (rightly) ridiculed. But there are still widely held prejudices that some kinds of kinks are more authentic or real or better than others. Newmahr writes:
While discussing a scene I had done, both Russ (dominant-identified) and Elliot (switch-identified) were baffled by my approach to play. Russ asked me, “Don’t you want to please your top?” Elliot was surprised when he realised that my objective in playing with him was not to make him “happy.”Newmahr pp. 78-79 (bold mine).
Realizing that “submissive” carried with it a slew of meanings and messages I had not intended, I abandoned “submissive” identification within three weeks. By then, I was angry about my interactions with many dominant-identified men and deeply troubled by the misogynistic overtones. Interestingly, I was also impatient to begin topping, for the sole purpose of claiming an identification as a switch, thereby ending these particular frustrations.
Newmahr isn’t alone in shopping for a BDSM role that will cause her less grief in the social spaces of The Scene. One friend (I’ll call her Tigrerra because my kids watch a lot of Bakugan) who leans top but does switch, tells me that when she started playing in a major city public scene, she came out in “full domme armor” to ward off the sexist invasions and bullshit that switch- or bottom-identified women face. This issue isn’t new; in the early 1990s I remember Usenet group posts by top-identified women in The Scene complaining about the assumptions that they were submissives and the nonconsensual and invasive behavior that sometimes came with it.
On Fetlife, the BDSM social networking behemoth, there are groups such as Not Only D&S to counteract this and create spaces for people whose bottoming isn’t necessarily submission or whose topping isn’t necessarily dominance. But there are a lot of folks who still hold the stated or unstated opinion that submission ranks somehow above “mere” masochism and that there’s something unseemly or less authentic about “service topping.” One would think there’s no room for “should” in the sex-positive agenda, but in The Scene, “should” hangs on like stubborn mold.
Newmahr writes about the attitude that there’s a hierarchy of play styles, and I agree with her assessment, though certainly there is significant counterforce to these views:
Much like service topping, badass bottoms occupy the lowest status among bottoms; terms like “do-me bottom” and “just a masochist” illustrate the perspective that without claims to powerlessness, SM play is less meaningful. As with service topping among tops, badass bottoms are also more likely than other bottoms to be switches. The lower relative status of switches in the scene, then, is not, as is commonly understood, simply about switching itself, but about the challenges that switches pose to the top/bottom-man/woman paradigm that underlies much of SM play.
There is truth in the argument that topping symbolizes (male) dominance and bottoming (female) submission. Most simply understood, topping and bottoming are ways of doing masculinity and femininity, respectively. Even as they symbolically recreate a gendered system, however, the complexity within SM play, and play across genders, problematizes the understanding of SM as a categorical reinforcement of gender inequality.
Newmahr 115. My view, backed up by Weiss’s observations, is that this reaction to threats to the paradigm expresses itself perhaps most starkly as prejudice against and devaluation of men who bottom, particularly submissive men.
Gender Role Violation: Men Bottoming
“Tom explained that “there are party groups in which I’m marginally tolerated because I’m a sub.”" Weiss, p. 247. That’s not a reference to me, but my first contacts with The Scene (long before Newmahr’s New York fieldwork) ran into some of this. Being a young guy more interested in bottoming than topping was … a suboptimal experience. I sort of quickly became more interested in paying attention to the political projects of the BDSM community than looking for play partners in The Scene. Maymay, another bottom-identified guy, has said much the same thing, about much the same scene, at the time of Newmahr’s fieldwork.
The comfortable assumption (for some) that scene role hierarchy replicates gender-role hierarchy is one that goes unstated, but one that a lot of folks — particularly some het male doms — don’t want to see challenged:
Carrie told me that her husband (and other men) enjoyed being in a group of all male dominants and female submissives because “they feel uncomfortable” and “would rather not be around” couples that play differently. By this, she means “he would not want to be next to a woman topping a guy or a gay male couple,” both “styles” of play that challenge the parallel construction of gender/sexuality. The homophobia of some of the heterosexual men in the pansexual scene reflects anxiety about maintaining appropriate masculinity; it is the community expression of what many have theorized about masculinity. If proper masculinity is fundamentally about heterosexuality and the disavowal of homosexuality, then it makes sense that for some men (in a scene and in everyday life), gay male sexuality or female dominant sexuality are two related scenes of horror.
Weiss, p. 248. It is the men, and their anxious masculinity, that police this, not women’s discomfort with submissive men. A man who bottoms is so discomfiting to some men that one of Weiss’s respondents said it cost him friendships:
Understanding other men as the enforcers and arbiters of masculinity/access to power, Phil, a heterosexual switch, told me:Weiss pp. 249-50 (internal citation omitted; editorial marks and elisions within the transcribed quote Weiss’s, except bold, which is mine).
I was a 24/7 bottom to [his wife]: we had a monogamous relationship for three years, I was her slave and she was my mistress, and we had very formal things going on, like contracts … I enjoyed it a lot — that intensity of 24/7 … After I became known as a submissive, a lot of my male friends that were switches or tops didn’t like me now. There’s a lot of prejudice of male tops — even gay male tops – against submissives. You don’t see it unless it’s right there in front of you … It was funny, I lost a lot of apparent respect as soon as they found out I was a male bottom. I still find that … I still find it a lot with the newbies, especially the het male tops, they can’t even conceive of a women being dominant …The prejudice Phil faced as a male bottom is related to the ways that, although the scene is a special, bracketed place, desire is formed through and around our social experiences of power and gender. ”Desire,” as Anne Allison notes, “is both of and beyond the everyday.”
MW: I wondered about that.
Phil: Well, it’s true! Some of the closest people would suddenly walk right off from me. I lost some very good male friends. I tried to help them, “I’m not any different than I was a month ago” …
MW: Do you think it’s a gender thing”
Phil: … Yeah, in a way, it’s something that men seem to have trouble with it, but I think it’s because of the social station that society puts men at.
These are not dynamics unique to The Scene, or to BDSM communities. They’re dynamics from outside our communities that manifest within them in ways that are unique. Men who bottom are an (to use Butlerian terminology, see here) abject identity, a specter that terrifies many men outside the BDSM community. When I’ve described things I do as a bottom, those descriptions have occasionally been picked up — with comic revulsion and summary dismissal — on “men’s rights activist” fora.
Weiss concludes:
Further, the tendency for SM orientation to echo polarized gender is stronger for men than for women, and differences between sexual orientation make a difference as well. In my interviews, heterosexual male bottoms felt, and were seen as, a little off, funny or queer. In part, this assumption is based on the linking of the abject position – submissive – with women, although it also reflects the fear/disavowal of homosexuality at [sic] the basis of dominant masculinity.”Weiss p. 249 (bold mine). Weiss, a lesbian, is not using the word “queer” accidentally here. I read her to consciously parallel the reaction to het men who bottom with gay men. The particularized sexist domism male bottoms face shares common dynamics with homophobic fixation on gay men’s sexual practices. That fixation including especially the fascination with the receptive or enveloping partner in insertive sex acts. It is not at all coincidental that the term “bottom” is used both in the BDSM community and by vanilla gay men.
(The limits of my analysis are glaring here. Because of both the limitations of my experience and of the source material I was working with, I have not attempted to extend any of this to the gay male leather community, though I’d say I have a better groundiing in that literature than most het readers do. I also don’t have a good handle on the ways that trans folks’ experiences intersect with the dynamics I’ve written about. I know anecdotes, but I can’t begin to analyze how transphobia plays into the reflexive discomfort people have with play dynamics that upset their settled assumptions. Suffice it to say that I know lots of kink spaces, online and real world, are deeply uncomfortable places for kinky trans folks, and if there’s an analysis of the interplay between scene role essentialism, sexism, and cissexism, transphobia, transmisogyny, etc., please somebody link it in comments.)
It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way
There is no point outside kyriarchal structures, not that any of us can access. But that’s a problem for every aspect of social justice work, and the answer to that is never, “well, maybe we should just give up.” We all believe that it is possible, in our imperfect ways, to own our shit and make the world around us better and less shitty. So I don’t say any of this to excoriate The Scene, but to exhort folks in BDSM communities to not replicate the injustices of the wider world unthinkingly, and instead to thing about them and push back.
I could end on a vague rhetorical note here, but I’d rather be practical. Here’s what I think folks ought to do:
Recognize and facilitate our diversity. It’s fine for men to want to top or women to want to bottom, but the assumption that that’s the case is self-replicating because it marginalizes and pushes out people who don’t fit that model. Folks need to stop assuming that women are bottoms or subs.
Stop The Role Policing. Jokes that take as their premise that bottoms should be subs, and should be submissive when they’re not playing and with people they’re not playing with are not funny. They’re toxic.
There Is No One True Way. Bottom != submissive. Pain play != power exchange. If you find someone explaining how something is more real or deep or true or important than how someone else does it, you can safely dismiss what they have to say.
Bottoms Are Not Broken. Where would tops be without them? Not having much fun. One side of the kink is no weirder or more in need of explanation than the other.
*Weiss has an entire chapter on The Scene and race, focusing not only on the relatively small proportion of People of Color in the Bay Area Scene, but also on the racialized images of BDSM. It’s Chapter 6 of her dissertation and it’s an engaging read. Neither Weiss nor Newmahr deal with cisnormativity in any direct way, but there are some good writers around who are both trans and kinky. I’ll recommend in particular Asher Bauer, who writes at Tranarchism.
**Though it’s beyond the scope of this already lengthy post, this is another intersection that can’t be neatly untangled. Bonnie’s experiences of sexism and role policing are informed by a fetishizing, racist narrative about Asian (stereotypically East Asian) women. The experiences of people of color in being caricatured into racialized narratives around a particular gender, race, role and sometimes sexual orientation stand at intersections of multiple kyriarchal equalities, and the choice to deal in thos post with role and gender primarily is, in that sense, an arbitrary one. Another writer might just as well address the intersection of race and BDSM role (and some have; I am thinking here of Tina Portillo and Mollena Williams, though I don’t have specific pieces handy to cite) and footnote gender as an additional factor.
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