Recently, a lady from the church I grew up in was updating me about church gossip. Long story short, an old man took his wife out of the hospital against the advice of the doctor because he wanted her home to run the house. As a result, her condition became far worse. The lady accurately labelled this behavior as abusive, and I was impressed that she made it a point not to blame the victim in the situation. Until I heard her reasoning. “She’s obeying her husband, so in God’s eyes, she is blameless.”
Wait… WHAT?!
A woman is considered righteous as long as she’s obeying her husband, even when he’s being an abusive ass?!? So she would be wrong to stand up for herself?!!!! In what fucking world is that even –
And then I remembered.
This is the church that took “Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands as unto the Lord” very seriously. They held serious discussions as to whether a woman should even bother going to college, because “she’s just going to be a wife and mother, right?” Women weren’t allowed to preach in mixed groups; they could teach women and children, but not men. The man was like God. Women were to be obedient to husbands, submissive to all men, diminutive, ladylike…. I was lucky enough to have highly educated parents who made sure I went to college, but most of the girls I grew up with have degrees from unaccredited Bible schools, if they have a degree at all. If their husbands die or, worse, turn out to be abusive, they will have very few ways to support or even protect themselves.
This is why I need feminism.
I escaped. I got multiple college degrees and started thinking for myself. I wear leather and studs, swear like a sailor, live with my boyfriend, support gay marriage, claim feminism like a badge of honor, and am a kinky fucking freak. Take THAT, backwards upbringing!
But it took years to get here. Years spent unravelling the lies I’d been trained to believe, particularly about my sexuality. I struggled to take possession of what was already mine, to accept it and be proud of it. It took time, but I began to feel some sense of agency for the first time in my life.
Imagine, then, my frustration when I discover that I have a submissive streak (or “s-type,” to include both the term “submissive” and “slave”; these terms are slightly different, but that’s another post). I’d just gotten away from abuse disguised as religion. And here I was walking myself right back into it, or something like it? Was I just irreparably broken? Could I never get away from it?
Unlike dealing with my sadist side, though (post pending), this question was actually well addressed by talking to other kinky people, particularly straight male Masters who were hardline feminists.
“She wears a leash and kneels at my feet because we think it’s hot,” one of them said. “If we happened to think it was hot for me to wear the leash, I’d be on the floor.”
The key there was that a) they were both consenting adults and fully enjoying themselves, and b) they didn’t think power roles were automatically assigned by genitalia. But beyond consent, there was still the nagging question in the back of my mind – what if I’d been brainwashed? “Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands.” How could I be sure that this was really me? How did I know that this desire wasn’t some leftover fragment of the bullshit I’d been raised with? What if I’d so internalized my own oppression that I now eroticized it?
The conclusion I came to probably won’t satisfy everyone, but I have found it very empowering. It’s simply this.
So what?
What does it matter where your kink or fetish comes from? There’s no solid, scientific way to prove the origin of sexual preference, for all Freud’s efforts, so there’s no way to say without a shadow of a doubt that my s-type side came from my history. But even if it did, why does that matter? This is what I enjoy, here and now. This makes me wet. This makes me cum harder than anything else.
Some members of the kink community who are survivors of sexual abuse have found rape play to be therapeutic and empowering. For some, it forces them to build trust that is so hard to find in the aftermath of abuse. For others, it gives them the chance to endure a difficult situation, knowing they can safeword out if needed, but proving their own strength (to themselves, if no one else) by choosing to remain. Perhaps eroticizing the thing that disempowered you is not meekly submitting to the system, but is instead a way for a person to reclaim control.
Ultimately, the goal of feminism is not to make goddesses of women, but to allow women to be what they want to be. If a woman wants to be a housewife, she should be able to be a housewife without censure. If she wants to be a CEO, she should be able to do that without hitting a glass ceiling. If a woman feels most loved in her romantic partnerships when the other person kneels and worships at her feet, she should be allowed to make herself happy. If a woman feels that the deepest, most true way for her to express love is through giving the gift of herself, her time, her service, and her effort to the person who has earned her trust, love, and respect, she should be allowed to make herself whole.
I still can’t quite bring myself to claim the term submissive. I’ll elaborate more in a later post, but it is, simply put, a poisoned well for me. It harkens back too much to the past that I tried so hard to escape. But I can claim the other “s” title. I am slave, and proud of it.
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